Signs Beyond the Mundane World
Hugo Obermaier - Breuil, Henri; Obermaier, Hugo y Alcalde Del Río, Hermilio (1913), La Pasiega à Puente Viesgo, Ed. A. Chêne. Mónaco.
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In The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols, Canadian paleoanthropologist and rock art researcher Genevieve von Petzinger takes us on a journey deep into the mysteries of Ice Age art’s most enigmatic feature— a series of perplexing abstract symbols that are scrawled across the walls of caves throughout Europe. The First Signs, von Petzinger’s debut, aggregates years of personal research about these symbols and condenses her findings into a hardback book (a softback version is out soon) some 300 pages long, complete with the kind of comprehensive notes that are to be expected from a confident academic. Cleaving the book in half is a six-page glossy insert comprising photos taken by her husband and photographer, Dillon, of spectacular cave art— indispensable to any book that deals primarily with a visual subject. The book is divided into sixteen independent, but overlapping chapters, each of which focuses on a specific area of interest. Far from being a sterile treatment of Ice Age art, von Petzinger deftly weaves together her own personal narrative with an astute analysis of her findings and their wider significance.
The book goes far beyond the remit of the title— using the elusive symbols as a jumping-off point for a wider exploration of the daily life of men and women in Ice Age Europe. In some ways, the book also serves as a great introduction to prehistoric anthropology in general— especially when it comes to understanding the cognitive development of our species. In this regard, it sits alongside other staples of the genre, namely What is Paleolithic Art? by Jean Clottes and The Mind in the Cave by David Lewis-Williams, which attempt to discern how our species became human, and created art in the process. The work also owes a debt to the ground-breaking work Origins by Richard Leakey, which examines the early development of our species. Von Petzinger’s narrative is deeply personal and sincere at times, with her introduction beginning by drawing a comparison between herself and her grandmother who was a codebreaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. What unites them both, she notes, is a shared talent for discovering patterns in places where there appeared to be none. Patterns, as she explains, allow us to make sense of partial data, helping us see the “bigger picture.”
It was this talent for finding patterns that first attracted von Petzinger to the prehistoric signs of Ice Age Europe. As an undergraduate student, her interest was piqued when she began to see the same symbols recurring in the photos that were being shown to her each week in class. Her interest was heightened further when an instructor mentioned that these signs had never been systematically studied before. Becoming aware of this, Genevieve made it her mission to visit as many cave art sites as possible across France to properly document the signs once and for all. The First Signs is the product of that endeavour.
After visiting these sites, von Petzinger was then able to create a database which could be used to search for hidden trends and patterns in the art. Her discoveries were extraordinary, and completely revised our understanding of some of the most fundamental questions faced in the field and beyond. What she had discovered is that, far from being unimportant decorations, these symbols were actually common across many of the Palaeolithic sites, and reducible to a repertoire of only 32 signs that repeated across space and time. Her evidence pointed to the revelation that these signs were not devoid of meaning, but must have held some sort of symbolic significance for our ancestors over a thousand generations ago.
Although these geometric symbols are aesthetically beautiful, their real importance lies in the opening that they offer us into the minds of our distant relatives— a subject she covers in great length early on in the chapter ‘Glimmers of a Modern Mind’. Two hundred thousand years ago, modern humans emerged in Africa— they shared with us not only an identical anatomy but also equally voluminous brains. However, the real question is whether or not these shared traits translated into modern human intelligence and behaviours. From around 120,000 years ago, or earlier, we see the first signs of homo sapiens making purposeful aesthetic choices: an engraved bone here, selective use of red ochre there. These findings are suggestive of “symbolic behaviour”, where real-world objects are manipulated for reasons beyond mere utility. The ability to think about the external world in symbolic terms is one of the hallmarks of our species, and culminated in the creation of writing proper (perhaps the greatest human invention) many millennia later. So, do these enigmatic signs anticipate the invention of writing?
To tackle this question, von Petzinger often finds herself navigating deep into the recesses of rather impenetrable caves. Stories of her and her husband crawling military-style for half a mile over hard calcite floor or else wading through water deep underground crop up regularly, punctuating some of the drier passages of the book. For some 30,000 years, between 10,000 BP and 40,000 BP in a period known as the Upper Palaeolithic, these caves were frequented by our ancestors who often left painted marks as testimony to their passage.
There is something otherworldly about caves— neither here nor there, they are often viewed as the portals to places beyond the mundane world. Sequestered and shadowy, they reach deep into the bowels of the earth; their walls are membranes between our tangible realm and another spiritual one. They are dark, foreboding, even dangerous places, making it hard to see their appeal from our modern perspective. Harder still to imagine why our distant relatives often went to such lengths to reach these inaccessible places to create their spectacular works of art in the first place.
Yet this is exactly what our ancestors did according to von Petzinger, and for a period of some 30,000 years. It is easy to overlook how astounding a phenomenon this cave art really is. What we are talking about, as National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Wade Davis remarks, is a period of time five times longer than the chronological distance that separates the present from the builders of the Pyramids at Giza. Their motivation for creating the art is likely lost to time, with explanations ranging from shamanic trances, to acts of sympathetic magic, all proving unverifiable. Leaps of imagination are often the only recourse in the face of uncertainty. But trying to grapple longstanding mysteries like these is what constitutes large swaths of the book.
If we take a moment to reflect on this, then what soon becomes apparent is the fact that we are still able to see the traces of an unbroken artistic tradition unlike any other that has come since. The most famous examples of Palaeolithic art are the parietal paintings of caves like Alta Mira in Spain and Lascaux in France, with their sophisticated depictions of Ice Age fauna like Bison and Aurochs. The level of artistic skill employed in the creation of these paintings is undeniable, so much so that Picasso once remarked how little we have progressed artistically since these artists first committed red ochre to their rock canvasses so many millennia ago. Indeed, the first people to stumble upon these sites were often convinced that these were modern works, unable to believe that such masterpieces were possible ten-, twenty-, even thirty-thousand years ago.
But although these evocative depictions of extinct creatures understandably dominate the greater part of our interest in cave art, their intense attraction has for the better part of a century, diverted our attention away from another more enigmatic feature of these paintings: the geometric signs. These simple non-figurative paintings of lines, triangles, rectangles and spirals had largely been ignored by archaeologists until recently— customarily dismissed as absent-minded scribbles or decorative embellishments. Yet these assumptions slowly changed through the intervention of figures like Graziosi, Forbes, and Crowder, and Leroi-Gourhan, who once dubbed these abstract signs the “most fascinating area of Paleolithic art.”[1] These enigmatic signs, overlooked for so long, would finally begin to command the attention that they deserved.
Von Petzinger’s prose soars the highest when she uses concrete artefacts to illustrate her sometimes lofty arguments. One of the strongest chapters, ‘The Lady of St. Germain-la-Rivière and Her Mysterious Necklace’, is an amalgam of archaeological detective work, lively fiction and precise scholarly analysis. The chapter combines artefactual evidence with ample imagination to discern the life-story of a young woman who died 16,000 years ago and who was buried with what may have been a necklace made of seventy-one deer teeth. The clincher: the presence of markings which eerily resemble our geometric signs.
From here on out, von Petzinger really comes into her stride, reeling off chapter after chapter of riveting storytelling. Indeed, she has already proven herself a seasoned orator and confident science-communicator in her two Ted talks that have amassed over 500,000 views on social media. She belongs to a rare bread of academic who feels just as comfortable on a stage in front of several thousand people as she does working alone in an isolated passage deep underground. There is something truly admirable about the lengths that she has gone through for the sake of her research: “Gustavo is apologetic that we have just spent almost three hours sliding through mud for the sake of a couple of red dots, but I assure him it was time well spent […] When doing research, even negative results are important.”
Von Petzinger’s storytelling impulse is especially strong in the chapter ‘Through the Eyes of the Ancestors: A Rock Art Epiphany’. In this chapter, von Petzinger is in full-swing, displaying her ability to effortlessly juggle scientific insight with a vibrant prose, which often reads like a travel diary, or else a deeper tale of exploration:
“As I wind my way deeper into this secret world, the last of the light of the day fading behind me, I feel like I’ve crossed into a different realm, one governed by stone and silence and an all-pervasive sense of the great age of the earth.”
Having said this, I cannot help but feel that the book has a few too many of these lengthy digressions and would read far smoother if edited. Perhaps the book’s weakest aspect therefore, is its undue length in places, a criticism echoed by other reviews. The book also suffers for its appeal to a somewhat ambiguous target audience. It feels both too meandering for an academic reader, and yet too dry in places to make for a casual read. In short, the book sometimes finds it difficult to toe the fine line that it needs to as a work of popular science.
All in all, The First Signs makes for a fascinating and edifying book, which leaves the reader with not only a deeper appreciation of Ice Age culture, but also with a sense of awe for what the human mind is able to achieve. For a book that deals with such a seemingly esoteric subject matter, The First Signs can be, at times, a truly captivating read for both the lay and initiated reader alike. In the final chapter, ‘Conclusion’, Genevieve alludes to future research agenda while hinting at a possible follow-up to her fascinating journey sometime in the future. Who knows, perhaps her next installment might offer even more tantalizing tales?
[1] Leroi-Gourhan was among the first researchers to grasp the true significance of the geometric signs in ‘Les animaux et les signes’. Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1979). ‘Les animaux et les signes’. In Lascaux inconnu, A. Leroi-Gourham & J. Allain (eds), 343-66. Paris: CNRS.
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