Stone Age jottings. The writing on the cave wall by Kate Ravilious | New Scientist

French caves are known for their prehistoric rock art. But also marked on the walls around the paintings are 25 symbols that have appeared again and again in French sites across 25,000 years of prehistory. Early signs suggest that many of these symbols crop up in other parts of the world too, leading some to wonder if symbolic communication arose with early humans.

To von Petzinger and Nowell, it demonstrated that our ancestors were indeed considering how to represent ideas symbolically rather than realistically, eventually leading to the abstract symbols that were the basis of the original study. (…)

Does this suggest that these symbols travelled with prehistoric tribes as they migrated from Africa? Von Petzinger and Nowell think so. Davidson, on the other hand, who has identified 18 of these symbols in Australia, is unconvinced that they have a common origin, maintaining that the creative explosion occurred independently in different parts of the globe around 40,000 years ago. Instead, he thinks the symbols reveal something about a change in the way people thought and viewed their world, which may have emerged around this time. “I believe that there was a cognitive change, which suddenly put art into people’s heads,” he says. (…)

That suggests we might need to rethink our ideas about prehistoric people, von Petzinger says. “This incredible diversity and continuity of use suggests that the symbolic revolution may have occurred before the arrival of the first modern humans in Europe.” If she is right, it would push back the date of the creative explosion by tens of thousands of years.”