"He enlisted leading archaeologists from Durham University and the University College London to develop the idea and co-author the new study." Obviously not cr

"He enlisted leading archaeologists from Durham University and the University College London to develop the idea and co-author the new study." Obviously not crank but I suggest "annotation" rather than "writing". For example a physical deer is drawn on a wall as meaning "a deer" - well I hope that is the meaning! By looking at the context in the artworks, such as human figures etc we can infer quite a lot. This study seems to find that additional marks (previously ignored) have useful meaning too. They are obviously deliberate and seem to be consistent. Now, that is not writing. I'm writing now. I've studied the Rosetta stone as a civilian and can manage to transliterate a bit of old Egyption hieroglyphics etc. I fumble around English (quite well), German, Latin, French, and others. The experts are really quite good these days and we have managed to get to grips with some really old languages and writing systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform This looks like a great find but it is not writing with a script as such - it is annotation. It is a precursor to a writing system.