© Stock image of a cave painting in South AfricaWhile the worldโs best-known cave art exists in France and Spain, examples of it abound throughout the world.
When and where did humans develop language? To find out, look deep inside caves, suggests an MIT professor.
More precisely, some specific features of
cave art may provide clues about how our symbolic, multifaceted language capabilities evolved, according to a new paper co-authored by MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa.
A key to this idea is that cave art is often located in acoustic "hot spots," where sound echoes strongly, as some scholars have observed. Those drawings are located in deeper, harder-to-access parts of caves, indicating that acoustics was a principal reason for the placement of drawings within caves. The drawings, in turn, may represent the sounds that early humans generated in those spots.
In the new paper, this convergence of sound and drawing is what the authors call a "cross-modality information transfer," a convergence of auditory information and visual art that, the authors write, "allowed early humans to enhance their ability to convey symbolic thinking." The combination of sounds and images is one of the things that characterizes human language today, along with its symbolic aspect and its ability to generate infinite new sentences.
"Cave art was part of the package deal in terms of how
homo sapiens came to have this very high-level cognitive processing," says Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics and the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. "You have this very concrete cognitive process that converts an acoustic signal into some mental representation and externalizes it as a visual."
Cave artists were thus not just early-day Monets, drawing impressions of the outdoors at their leisure. Rather, they may have been engaged in a process of communication.
"I think it's very clear that these artists were talking to one another," Miyagawa says. "It's a communal effort."
The paper, "Cross-modality information transfer: A hypothesis about the relationship among prehistoric cave paintings, symbolic thinking, and the emergence of language," is being published in the journal
Frontiers in Psychology. The authors are Miyagawa; Cora Lesure, a PhD student in MIT's Department of Linguistics; and Vitor A. Nobrega, a PhD student in linguistics at the University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil.
Re-enactments and rituals?The advent of language in human history is unclear. Our species is estimated to be about 200,000 years old. Human language is often considered to be at least 100,000 years old.
"It's very difficult to try to understand how human language itself appeared in evolution," Miyagawa says, noting that "we don't know 99.9999 percent of what was going on back then." However, he adds, "There's this idea that language doesn't fossilize, and it's true, but maybe in these artifacts [cave drawings], we can see some of the beginnings of
homo sapiens as symbolic beings."
While the world's best-known cave art exists in France and Spain, examples of it abound throughout the world. One form of cave art suggestive of symbolic thinking - geometric engravings on pieces of ochre, from the Blombos Cave in southern Africa - has been estimated to be at least 70,000 years old. Such symbolic art indicates a cognitive capacity that humans took with them to the rest of the world.
"Cave art is everywhere," Miyagawa says. "Every major continent inhabited by
homo sapiens has cave art. ... You find it in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, everywhere, just like human language." In recent years, for instance, scholars have catalogued Indonesian cave art they believe to be roughly 40,000 years old, older than the best-known examples of European cave art.
But what exactly was going on in caves where people made noise and rendered things on walls? Some scholars have suggested that acoustic "hot spots" in caves were used to make noises that replicate hoofbeats, for instance; some 90 percent of cave drawings involve hoofed animals. These drawings could represent stories or the accumulation of knowledge, or they could have been part of rituals.
In any of these scenarios, Miyagawa suggests, cave art displays properties of language in that "you have action, objects, and modification." This parallels some of the universal features of human language - verbs, nouns, and adjectives - and Miyagawa suggests that "acoustically based cave art must have had a hand in forming our cognitive symbolic mind."
Future research: More decoding neededTo be sure, the ideas proposed by Miyagawa, Lesure, and Nobrega merely outline a working hypothesis, which is intended to spur additional thinking about language's origins and point toward new research questions.
Regarding the cave art itself, that could mean further scrutiny of the syntax of the visual representations, as it were. "We've got to look at the content" more thoroughly, says Miyagawa. In his view, as a linguist who has looked at images of the famous Lascaux cave art from France, "you see a lot of language in it." But it remains an open question how much a re-interpretation of cave art images would yield in linguistics terms.
The long-term timeline of cave art is also subject to re-evaluation on the basis of any future discoveries. If cave art is implicated in the development of human language, finding and properly dating the oldest known such drawings would help us place the orgins of language in human history - which may have happened fairly early on in our development.
"What we need is for someone to go and find in Africa cave art that is 120,000 years old," Miyagawa quips.
At a minimum, a further consideration of cave art as part of our cognitive development may reduce our tendency to regard art in terms of our own experience, in which it probably plays a more strictly decorative role for more people.
"If this is on the right track, it's quite possible that ... cross-modality transfer helped develop a symbolic mind," Miyagawa says. In that case, he adds, "art is not just something that is marginal to our culture, but central to the formation of our cognitive abilities."
Reader Comments
I like when the guy says "every continent", and then gives three examples which are parts of the same continent (i.e. Eurasia). Granted, you can say that Middle East is really on three plates, with the Arabian one quite distinction, but major part of it is on Eurasia too. Meaning no real geographic barriers...
The first act is of image or symbol of that which Moves All That Is. The image and symbol of Life is a consciousness held within Life - that is inherently a child-thought and not creator-mind.
Worship no image of Reality! Is a warning against assigning worth due to the whole unto an image that is not itself Alive - but now has all the life you give it, and are giving it - but only as a proxy or substitution for true worth-ship.
The a tempt of intent to subject reality to its image or model, is to open the experience of subjection. Where the model is worshipped as 'Real' and the sense of self-survival must adapt and conform and comply within definitions accepted true and presumed necessary or de facto 'reality'. The attempt to subject the elements or personae of such a state of conflicted experience to subjection is the will to power over experience as objection within subjection. The resulting projected and embodied conflict leads to further sacrifice to limitation as defence against 'power'. Such that subjection in powerlessness operates as if it is the power to protect. Howbeit we are deceived.
The cave art of naturalistic depictions disappears to the cave art of petraglyphs.
[Link] (Stickman on stone).
The catastrophism of a past our (amnesial) mind is the blanking of, is also the need-lack of a shattered mind in dissociation.
A broken communication is the condition in which private thinking substitutes - along with manual 'control' in replacement of a 'fallen nature'.
I have often used the metaphor of mud fish that are 'stranded' by the outgoing tide, but stop from drying out by mudding each other.
There is the communication within the Field of being - which is shared resonance within being, and there is the overlay of learned 'communications' of a manual 'control' mind invoked by loss of Field Signal. The nature of the latter is to protect a separateness from that which is feared, distrusted, hated, denied, rejected or judged against. And so into the 'gap' of a sense of separateness as a mask against power (and a masking of the emulation of such power), is all the self-justifications for lovelessness that operate under the 'wish' or attempt to seem otherwise. And to such a degree that honesty of being is then seen as lack of sympathy and support and therefore scapegoated, while manipulative intent is assigned 'love'.
Perhaps the private 'cave' we live such subjected lives in, has all the 'reality' of shadow thinking upon its walls.
But yes, vibrational resonance is the nature of communication, and not the forms that take assigned or fixed 'meanings', and thus become a manipulative private experience of model over terrain - that we presume to be power over Life and defend as our life.
The first power of the Word is definition. The recognition that we are defined truly within the Field of relation, is the release of the attempt to operate under the compulsive illusion of a central intelligence agency.
Genieve Von Petzinger has made and extensive study of abstract shapes found on the wall of cave art, in fact she states in a TED talk, that the abstract shapes are more prevalent than than the artwork (around 5min mark into to the talk).
[Link]
Here is a link discussing further her work, it has an image showing a worldwide distribution of the images and shapes.
To me to have so many similarities worldwide strikes me they must of had verbal communication to share a conceptual meaning of the shapes, maybe one could go even further...maybe a stretch and say that it was an early form of writing.
[Link]
At the end of the article, I found this interesting,
Diving for art
Some of the most stunning cave art in Europe was only discovered in 1985, when divers found the mouth of the Cosquer cave 37 metres below the Mediterranean coastline near Marseilles in southern France. Its entrance had been submerged as sea levels rose after the last ice age. Chances are, other similar caves are waiting to be discovered.So von Petzinger has teamed up with David Lang of OpenROV in Berkeley, California, which makes low-cost, underwater robots. Next year, they plan to use them to hunt for submerged cave entrances off Spainโs north coast. The region is rich in painted caves, many close to the shoreline, so it seems likely that others could be hiding below the waves.If they find any, the pair will send in the remote-controlled mini-submarines, armed with cameras, to safely explore the new sites.
Indications of a catastrophic event, the melting of the ice sheets and the submergence of the caves?
In the case of speech, there are books showing that speech may have been developed over 1,000,000 years ago. And no one mentioned anything about caves. instead, they traced the migration of shells and other similar objects.
Amazing!