Here's a quote from page 77:The Lost Civilization of the Stone Age"The proposition that Ice Age reindeer hunters invented writing fifteen thousand years ago or more is utterly inadmissible and unthinkable. All the data that archaeologists have amassed during the last one hundred years reinforce the assumption that Sumerians and Egyptians invented true writing during the second half of the fourth millennium. The Palaeolithic-Mesolithic-Neolithic progression to civilisation is almost as fundamental an article of contemporary scientific faith as heliocentrism. Writing is the diagnostic trait, the quintessential feature of civilisation. Writing, says I.J. Gelb, 'distinguishes civilised man from barbarian.' If Franco-Cantabrians [i.e. Ice Age inhabitants of parts of France and Spain] invented writing thousands of years before civilisation arose in the Near East, then our most cherished beliefs about the nature of society and the course of human development would be demolished."
by Richard Rudgley
"Forbes and Crowder's justification for reviving the idea that writing may perhaps be traced back to the Ice Age is based on the fact that a considerable number of the deliberate markes found on both parietal and mobile art from the Franco-Cantabrian region are remarkably similar to numerous characters in ancient written languages extending from the Mediterranean to China."The table Rudgley produces from Forbes and Crowder is much more extensive than the one found in Settegast, but the idea is the same. From pp 67-68:
"Petrie... made an extended study of Predynastic... and made it quite clear that... they were, in fact, a separate system that existed before and then later alongside the hieroglyphs. Petrie was also aware of the similiarities between the Egyptian signs and those found elsewhere in the Mediterranean... He also expressed the belief that because of their similarity of form with the signs that were later used in alphabetical scripts, these early signs may well have something to do with the origins of the alphabet... Winn could only bring himself to describe the Vinca signs as pre-writing, but for Gimbutas, and for others such as Harald Haarman... they are the real thing... most of those who had previously characterized the Tartaria tablets and analogous Vinca signs as genuine writing did so on the mistaken assumption that they were later than Sumerian and could always be neatly 'explained' as somewhat pale imitations of Near Eastern intellectual innovations. We have also seen how many scholars, on realising that the Vinca signs were simply too early to be derived from Mesopotamia, abruptly dropped the question... For others, who had tried and failed to bolster the traditional chronology for prehistoric southeastern Europe by invoking the Tartaria tablets as a refutation of radiocarbon dates, the tablets were simply dismissed as meaningless jumbles of signs."
The Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age
by Richard Rudgley
Plato Prehistorian
Mary Settegast