there's something about caves a shadowy
opening in a limestone cliff that draws
you in as you pass through the portal
between light and dark you enter a
subterranean world a place of perpetual
gloom of earthy smells of hushed silence
long ago in Europe ancient people also
entered these underground worlds as
witness to their passage they left
behind mysterious engravings and
paintings like this panel of humans
triangles and zigzags from Ojo edenia in
Spain you now walk the same path as
these early artists and in this real
otherworldly place it's almost possible
to imagine that you hear the muffled
footfall of skin boots on soft earth or
the 'i see the flickering of a torch
around the next bend when I'm in a cave
I often find myself wondering what drove
these people to go so deep - brave
dangerous and narrow passageways to
leave their mark in this video clip that
was shot half a kilometre or about a
third of a mile underground in the cave
of kuden in Spain we found a series of
red paintings on a ceiling in a
previously unexplored section of the
cave as we crawled forward military
style with the ceiling getting ever
lower we finally got to a point where
the ceiling was so low that my husband
and project photographer Dylan could no
longer it she focus on the ceiling with
his DSLR camera so while he filmed me I
kept following the trail of red paint
with a single light and a
point-and-shoot camera that we kept for
that type of occasion half a kilometer
underground ah seriously what was
somebody doing down there with a
torturous stone lamp I mean me it makes
sense right but you know this is the
kind of question that I'm trying to
answer with my research I
study some of the oldest art in the
world it was created by these early
artists in Europe between 10,000 and
40,000 years ago and the thing is is
that I'm not just studying it because
it's beautiful although some of it
certainly is but what I'm interested in
is the development of the modern mind of
the evolution of creativity of
imagination of abstract thought about
what it means to be human
while all species communicate in one way
or another only we humans have really
taken it to another level
our desire and ability to share and
collaborate has been a huge part of our
success story our modern world is based
on a global network of information
exchange made possible in large part by
our ability to communicate in particular
using graphic or written forms of
communication the thing is though that
we've been building on the mental
achievements of those who came before us
for so long
this is easy to forget that certain
abilities haven't already existed it's
one of the things I find most
fascinating about studying our deep
history those people didn't have the
shoulders of any giants to stand on they
were the original shoulders and while a
surprising number of important
inventions come out of that distant time
what I want to talk to you about today
is the invention of graphic
communication there are three main types
of communication spoken gestural so
things like sign language and graphic
communication spoken and gestural are by
their very nature ephemeral it requires
close contact for a message to be sent
and received and after the moment of
transmission is gone forever graphic
communication on the other hand
decouples that relationship and with its
invention it became possible for the
first time for a message to be
transmitted and preserved beyond a
single moment and place in time Europe
is one of the first places that we start
to see graphic marks regularly appearing
in caves rock shelters and even a few
surviving open-air sites but this is not
the Europe we know
today this was a world dominated by
towering ice sheets three to four
kilometers high with sweeping grass
Plains and frozen tundra this was the
Ice Age over the last century more than
350 Ice Age rock art sites have been
found across the continent decorated
with animals abstract shapes and even
the occasional human like these engraved
figures from grotto dello dura and
sicily they provide us with a rare
glimpse into the creative world and
imagination of these early artists since
their discovery it's been the animals
that have received majority of the study
like this black horse from qui aver and
Spain or this unusual purple bison from
La Paz yoga but for me it was the
abstract shapes what we call geometric
signs that drew me to study the art the
funny thing is that at most sites the
geometric signs far outnumber the animal
and human images but when I started on
this back in 2007 there wasn't even a
definitive list of how many different
shapes there was nor was there a strong
sense of whether the same ones appeared
across space or time before I could even
get started on my questions my first
step was to compile a database of all
known geometric signs from all of the
rocker sites
the problem was that while they were
well documented at some sites these are
the ones with the very nice animals
there was also a large number of them
where it was very vague there wasn't a
lot of description or detail some of
them hadn't been visited in half a
century or more these were the ones that
I targeted for my fieldwork over the
course of two years
my faithful husband Dylan and I each
spent over 300 hours underground hiking
crawling and wriggling around 52 sites
in France Spain Portugal and Sicily and
it was totally worth it we found new
undocumented geometric signs at 75% of
the sites we visited this is a level of
accuracy I knew I was going to need if I
wanted to start answering those larger
questions so
let's get to those answers barring a
handful of outliers there are only 32
geometric signs only 32 signs across the
30,000 year time span and the entire
continent of Europe that is a very small
number now
if these were random doodles or
decorations we would expect to see a lot
more variation but instead what we find
are the same signs repeating across both
space and time some signs start out
strong before losing popularity and
vanishing while other signs are later
inventions but 65% of those signs stayed
in use during that entire time period
things like lines rectangles triangles
ovals and circles like we see here from
the end of the Ice Age and a ten
thousand year old site high in the
Pyrenees Mountains and while certain
signs span thousands of kilometers other
signs had much more restricted
distribution patterns with some being
limited to a single territory like we
see here with these divided rectangles
that are only found in northern Spain
and which some researchers have
speculated could be some sort of family
or clan signs on a side note there is a
surprising degree of similarity in the
earliest rock art found all the way from
France and Spain to Indonesia and
Australia with many of the same signs
appearing in such far-flung places
especially in that 30,000 to 40,000 year
range it's starting to seem increasingly
likely that this invention actually
traces back to a comic point of origin
in Africa but that I'm afraid is a
subject for a future talk so back to the
matter at hand there could be no doubt
that these signs were meaningful to
their creators like these 25 thousand
year old bar lef sculptures from rock
today Zack and France we might not know
what they meant but the people of that
time certainly did the repetition of the
same signs for so long and at so many
sites tells us that the artists were
making intentional choices if we're
talking about geometric shapes was
specific culturally recognized
agreed-upon meanings then we could very
well be looking at one of the oldest
systems of
communication in the world I'm not
talking about writing yet there's just
not enough characters at this point to
have represented all of the words in the
spoken language something which is a
requirement for a full writing system
nor do we see the signs repeating
regularly enough to suggest that they
were some sort of alphabet but what we
do have are some intriguing one-offs
like this panel from La Paz Diego in
Spain known as the inscription with its
symmetrical markings on the left
possible stylized representations of
hands in the middle and what looks a bit
like a bracket on the right the oldest
systems are graphic communication in the
world sumerian Kanaya form egyptian
hieroglyphs the earliest Chinese script
all emerged between 4,000 and 5,000
years ago with each coming into
existence from an earlier proptosis tum'
made up of counting marks and
pictographic representations where the
meaning and the image were the same so a
picture of bird would really represented
that animal it's only later that we
start to see these pictographs become
more stylized until they almost become
unrecognizable and that we also start to
see more symbols being invented to
represent all those other missing words
in the language things like pronouns
adverbs adjectives so knowing all this
it seems highly unlikely the de
geometric signs from ice age Europe were
truly abstract written characters
instead what's much more likely is that
these early artists were also making
counting marks maybe like this row of
lines from napadas America and Sicily as
well as creating stylized
representations of things from the world
around them could some of the signs be
weaponry or housing or what about
celestial objects like star
constellations or maybe even rivers
mountains trees landscape features
possibly like this black Penna form
surrounded by strange bell-shaped signs
from the site of El Castillo in Spain
the term Penna form means feather shaped
in Latin but could this actually be a
depiction of a plant or a tree some
researchers have begun to ask these
questions about certain signs at
specific sites but I believe the time
has come to revisit this
as a whole the irony in all this of
course is that having just carefully
classified all of the signs into a
single category I have a feeling that my
next step will involve breaking it back
apart as different types of imagery are
identified and separated off now don't
get me wrong the later creation of fully
developed writing was an impressive feat
in its own right but it's important to
remember that those early writing
systems didn't come out of a vacuum and
that even 5000 years ago people were
already building on something much older
with its origin stretching back tens of
thousands of years to the geometric
signs of Ice Age Europe and far beyond
to that point deep in our collective
history when someone first came up with
the idea of making a graphic mark and
forever change the nature of how we
communicate thank you