Paleoanthropologists track human ancestry to a common root in Africa about 2 million years ago, with the earliest remains of homo erectus migrations into the Near East, Asia, and Europe between 1.8 and 1.2 million years ago. [See: Smithsonian] In other words, hominids who were different from other primates appeared more than a million years ago, but much more recently than some other very old species. Human beings we would recognize as similar to ourselves are far more recent. Neanderthals (homo neanderthalensis), our closest extinct relatives, flourished from about 250,000 years ago until about 40,000 years ago, after contact and interbreeding with the more recently arrived waves of more modern homo sapiens. As these ancestors dispersed, various populations were separated by time and geography, each with their own rate of development. Common origins in combination with cultural and developmental diversity produced considerable variation. The anatomically and intellectually modern humans known as Homo sapiens sapiens are considered to be only about 200,000 years old. They are distinguished from earlier predecessors by certain physical features that suggest changes in brain size and other evolutionary advantages, but also by their capacities to make tools, think in abstract terms, develop the language essential for complex social behaviors, and other qualities. By the late 19th century, the fields of anthropology and paleo-anthropology, were engaged in the recovery and systematic analysis of tools and other remains of early human culture. The pioneering work of the 19th century anthropologist Emile Cartailhac paved the way for the study of artifacts and their makers, but the first finds of identified Paleolithic human remains only occurred in the early 20th century. [Figure 8]

        When, where, and even why these modern humans began to make marks, symbols, and then images is unclear. The evidence we have is partial, fragmented, and incomplete. The oldest securely dated piece of worked material, an ochre block with a distinct geometric pattern incised into its surface, was found recently in Bomblos, South Africa. Approximately 70,000 years old, it is older by tens of thousands of years than any other surviving artifact exhibiting apparently deliberate design markings. [See: Anthropology] Piecing together the processes by which human ymbol making emerged will always be a speculative activity, but within the last century and a half, the materials for study and methods of scholarship have expanded our understanding exponentially.

        Red ochre geometric patterns were marked on the animal bones used to support the shelters built by upper Paleolithic peoples. Bones were carved in the shapes of animals, rocks and clay molded into the shape of human figures, chiefly female with physical characteristics that suggest they were symbols of fertility. One such figure, the famous Venus of Willendorf, is dated to about 28,000-25,000 BCE. The statuette shows signs of also having been tinted with red ochre, a common pigment used in cave paintings, along with charcoal, chalk, and other earth-based pigments carefully processed by practiced techniques. These finds are relatively recent, and constantly being reassessed. However, because these are recent developments, the material does not have a large presence in rare book libraries focused on older imprints and manuscripts.

        The discovery of drawings and paintings in the caves of southern France and northern Spain, including that of Marcelino Sanz de Sautoula and his young daughter, Maria in 1879 (she looked up at the ceilings, and history changed!), introduced a radical shift in the knowledge of prehistory. The ‘primitiveness’ of early human culture could not be reconciled with these skilled drawings. The caves at Altamira are dated to about 15,000 BCE, but skepticism about their age and authenticity kept them from being taken seriously until the 20th century. Such sophisticated work, it was thought, could not have been made that long ago—before the pyramids, the palace at Nineveh, the walls of Jericho, or the monuments at Macchu Picchu or Chichan Itza. Their documentation, by Sautoula and Juan Vilanova y Piera met with skepticism. Eventually, in 1902 Emile Cartailhac, who had dismissed the cave drawings as a hoax, admitted to their validity in a famous ‘mea culpa’ paper, apologizing to the then-deceased Sautoula. Later anthropologists, particularly Henri Breuil, argued that such work, with its conceptual, technical, and stylistic accomplishments, was indeed the work of prehistoric humans. This led to other reflections and questions. What were the precedents for this work, which had clearly been produced by people skilled in drawing and painting? Why did they make the work?

       Explanations abound. Some are rooted in theories of hunting magic, totemism, shamanistic rituals and puberty rites, conflict resolution and theories of Paleolithic class struggles. These succeeded each other as anthropological fashions shifted. The discovery of Lascaux in 1940 and then a whole series of other finds, including the most recent and in some ways most dramatic, Chauvet, pushed dates of these image-making activities back to nearly 32,000-30,000 years BCE. At the same, theories of social interaction and breeding between modern humans and Neanderthals allowed for speculation that both species may have been engaged in the creation of these works, given dates and locations. Meanwhile, interest in symbols and signs among other populations, not necessarily within the direct lineage of western Culture, fostered attention to and moves for preservation of the petroglyphs of Southern California and Nevada, Australia, and other sites. [Figure 9] While considerably younger than the Paleolithic sites in southern France and northern Spain (which remain the oldest extant sites of human activity preserved into contemporary times yet discovered). But these inscriptions provide their own insight into the ways marks and symbols emerge as signs. These works have been inventoried, recorded, studied, reproduced, and analyzed with considerable care and scrupulous scholarly attention, though this does not protect them from vandalism or destruction by the elements.

        Signs, mark-making, and other forms of drawing, inscribing, or even image-making, are global phenomena among human beings. They emerge, but not in every location, and not all at the same time. Petroglyphs of Southern California are not much more than 3000 years old, and new world cultures in general are much younger than those of the old, with the migration of human species into North and South America dated to about 10,000 BCE. Petroglyphs and rock carvings are concentrated in particular areas, such as North Africa, South Africa, and Northern Scandinavia (though these latter are of a later vintage). Of course, much of what we might know about human activity in Africa, South India and Asia, as well as Australia is lost due to climate and changes. But human cultures were also subject to changes in food supplies and climate variation and the remains we have from France and Spain are the result of occupation patterns within the landscape at time when an enormous ice shelf covered much of modern day Europe to the north. [Link] The cycles of ice ages, glaciation, vegetation, and animal variability all played their part in changing patterns of inhabitation and cultural exchange, as well as evolutionary developments in cognition and social organization.

        If we consider the history of literacy within a framework where the very capacity to understand that an image represents something else—an animal, for instance, or an event such as confrontation or conflict—the achievements of the upper Paleolithic period are fundamental to our own use of signs and symbols. Several elements of cave paintings demonstrate cultural and individual advances over earlier human capacity. The images are legible, and the relation of the figurative images to what they represent encodes ways of seeing that we can still comprehend. The use of color, line, shape, and other graphical features has a harmony that is perceptible. While some cave drawings are rough, many share stylistic and technical features that show they are part of a community practice, not the work of a single individual working alone. Conventions are established, and ways of seeing are encoded in the images in standardized ways—such as profile views, use of ground lines (occasionally), or changes in size and scale to show spatial relationships among grouped figures (less common, but present). In other words, the images are part of a system of graphical codes and methods of production. What they were for and how they were understood by our ancestors we may never know.

        The history of prehistory is now, at least, an established field with some parameters validated by techniques such as Carbon-14 dating (invented only in the middle of the 20th century and based on the decay of organic materials), or analysis of mineral deposits, reading of stratification within archeological sites, soil sciences, paleobiology, and DNA tracing (the oldest human remains from which a complete genome has been mapped was from a Siberian sample about 45,000 years old). But empirical science is only one framework of belief. Rudolf Steiner, the 20th-century theosophist and educational reformer, believed our ancestors were from Atlantis and that memory of this history is preserved in a shared human connection. [Figure 10] Other theories compete for attention, including visits by aliens (to explain large scale images of signs or figures made on the surface of the earth). The long-held traditional belief in Creation as a single divine act with Adam and Eve as the parents of human beings, taken literally by some, is also taken metaphorically by others who engage with tenets of scientific belief at the same time. Support for all of these beliefs can be found among many volumes in Special Collections, some in books that are committed to traditions of esoteric knowledge and occult practices as well as alternative thought, others in works aligned with the empirical sciences.

        The study of the history of the book, an artifact with a relatively recent lineage, might seem remote from these inscriptions in rock or symbols painted on surfaces and scratched into bones. But the communicative impulses and activities rely on some of the same conditions —language, consensual practices of symbol-making, understanding of principles of representation (that something is a picture of something else, or stands for something). These are conditions that require complex cognitive development. Other species have some kind of language, some even make tools, but none, that we know of, have developed an understanding of abstract symbolic language or of representation as a full system of communication. The acts of reading, of reproducing visual and verbal materials (as well as audio and three-dimensional renderings), are so deeply embedded in our cultural lives that we rarely pause to consider their long history. While the development of proto-writing, writing proper, various scripts and then alphabetic and character-based systems, happens later and apparently independently from the activities of those populations who produced cave drawings, Paleolithic carvings, or body decorations, the symbols we find on the tokens and seals of the ancient Near East beginning around 10,000-9,000 BCE are closer in time to the creation of the painted walls of Lascaux and the symbols on rocks in Mas d’Azil, France, than they are to the present day. Once writing becomes systematized and stabilized in the ancient world in the several millennia before the Common Era, it stays in continuous existence and use into the present, as will be clear in the next lessons.

        Why, then, begin with these ancient images, works whose purpose we cannot fully discern, only speculate about, but whose technical and conceptual sophistication is as resolved as that of any other period in human history? Perhaps because it is useful to think about literacy, communication, the social, cultural, and individual aspects of symbol making and representation outside of narratives of progress, to recognize that our understanding of who we are and what we do, make, think, and can say and show, is rooted in impulses of long-standing and persistent value. Literacy has no simple, or reductive, definition or standards, and the cultural contexts in which sign-making first appeared may not be so very different from our own, in which representations and images circulate with abundance, but perhaps, with less reflection upon their efficacy than in another era.