AR06_Proposal: 22 April 2003.
Copyright © 2003 by Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder. All rights reserved.
In process.

Proposal for a Book

OUR ANCESTORS TOUCH US:

THE Writing OF EARLY HUMANS

by

Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder

A recent article in the journal Science describes bones marked with lines by our ancestors from a South African cave and dating to 77,000 years ago. From further back than this and up until the recent past, we scored lines onto bones and stones, and drew them with fingers onto soft cave walls.

What do line markings mean?

Were they a very early form of writing?

What do they say about us today?

Finger markings, dating to the Paleolithic, occur in both Europe and Australasia. Human beings and their ancestors marked walls of caves with their fingers, not to represent animals or symbols or geometric patterns, but just lines drawn across the soft surfaces. The markings are, unlike the representational art, similar in both continents and we call them severines. They are one of the earliest forms of deliberate, humanly made markings, and, as such, represent a beginning of graphical behavior.

Symbolic behavior goes beyond the functional, beyond what is necessary to survive. It is evidence for an advanced mind – one able to grasp the abstract concepts of symbol and iconography, belief and death. From these abilities, complex culture can develop with its implications for behavior and ritual belief systems. Finger markings evidence the rudiments of early symbolic behavior – a behavior that began on two continents by people separated genetically and geographically by many thousands of years.

Why did people make finger markings and what did they mean? What of the minds of the line markers are still in ours? How did our human mind develop?

By looking at the finger markings and other evidence for early symbolic behavior, we can start to answer these questions.

Chapter One: Severines

This chapter describes severines, initially focusing on Koonalda Cave in the Nullarbor Plain, South Australia. We also review the markings present in other Australian sites such as Orchestra Shell Cave, Cutta Cutta Cave, Kintore Cave, and caves in the Mount Gambier region, spotlighting the controversy that surrounds the authenticity of some of these markings – that is, whether humans or animals made them.

Then we describe European severines – looking at the history of their discovery and, in research terms, their relative neglect. Representational images are easier for us moderns to understand and so these pictures have eclipsed severines in publications and research – which has lead to their ‘sub-status’ in European rock art studies.

Chapter Two: What Severines Don’t Mean

European archaeologists such as the Henri Breuil and André Leroi-Gourhan developed systems for understanding prehistoric art – which we can now see as rather inadequate. Leroi-Gourhan, for instance, saw severines as male sexual symbols and Breuil thought of severines as the most primitive form of expression out of which the drawing and painting of animals developed. Suggestions as to the meaning of severines abound – as water symbols, snakes, hunting tallies, for instance – but none of them apply to all severines. More recent interpretations by Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams see severines as attempts to enter the underworld; another highly unlikely suggestion.

If you think about it, how could we possibly know what severines mean? We can’t even decipher our own handwriting at times!

Chapter Three: A Better Approach to Severines

It makes more sense at this stage to drop the hunt for meaning and to focus on how the lines were made: what does this tell us about, not only the severines, but the people who made them? Alexander Marshack pioneered a technique called ‘internal analysis’ in which we look at the cross-sections of the lines to see what tool was used to make them, and at the intersections of lines to tell the order in which they were made. We can extend this approach and say a lot about the markings. We have also tried fluting in the laboratory and can say a lot about the fluters as a result.

Chapter Four: What We Learn about Severines

In this chapter, we describe the results of our internal analysis studies of severines found in Rouffignac Cave, France. Different forms of severines emerge from this approach and we learn about the people who fluted them. The Mirian Form, for instance, was mostly made by young children held aloft to run their fingers over the cave ceiling.

Chapter Five: Evolution of the Mind

This chapter covers the beginnings of human abstract behavior, according to the archaeological record. Many examples illustrate this phenomenon, the rudiments of which appear as far back as the Lower Paleolithic. Several theories for the evolution of mind compete for acceptance at present. One proposes that the mind comprises compartments, different compartments maturing and interacting with each other at different stages of human evolution, and thence producing different behaviors and capacities. What might these theories suggest about the nature of representations like the severines?

Chapter Six: Severines as Writing

We then turn to look into studies of human psychology, covering sensory deprivation, the effects of touch (some theories suggest that humans instinctively leave marks in soft surface), and other matters that might us understand the reason behind the production of severines. We discuss parallels to finger markings, particularly those in Australian Aboriginal societies – as body decoration, and sand and mud paintings, for instance.

Many severines, we conclude, are a form of writing, proto-writing if you will, in which the fluters could put down something whose meaning other members of their society could understand.

What this means for us moderns is something else interesting to explore: What implications can we draw for the modern mind?