Summary
Highlights
The speaker describes the experience of entering caves and reflects on the early humans who left engravings and paintings. She discusses a personal experience of discovering red paintings in a previously unexplored section of a cave in Spain and questions the motivations of these early artists.
The speaker explains her research focuses on the oldest art in the world to understand the development of the modern mind, creativity, and abstract thought. She highlights the importance of communication in human success and the foundation laid by early humans.
The speaker describes the three main types of communication: spoken, gestural, and graphic. Graphic communication is unique because it allows messages to be preserved beyond a single moment in time. The speaker discusses the discovery of graphic marks in Europe during the Ice Age and the prevalence of geometric signs.
The speaker explains her research on geometric signs, which outnumber animal and human images in Ice Age rock art. Compiling a database of these signs required extensive fieldwork across Europe, during which many new signs were discovered.
The speaker details her findings: there are only 32 geometric signs across a 30,000-year period in Europe, suggesting they were not random doodles but meaningful symbols. Some signs were persistent while others had limited distribution, potentially representing family or clan affiliations.
The repetition of geometric signs suggests the artists were making intentional choices, indicating one of the oldest systems of graphic communication. The speaker clarifies that this is not writing, but a protosystem using counting marks and stylized representations, similar to precursors of Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The speaker suggests the signs were more than abstract written characters, but stylized representations of weaponry, housing, celestial objects, or landscape features. She proposes revisiting the classification of these signs to identify different types of imagery.
The speaker acknowledges the later creation of fully developed writing as an impressive achievement, but emphasizes it built upon the foundations laid by earlier systems of graphic communication. She concludes by highlighting the significance of the moment when someone first created a graphic mark, forever changing communication.