Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

One of the most important examples of early notation has recently been re-evaluated in a potentially significant way. This is the ‘La Marche antler’. Discovered in the cave of La Marche, in the Vienne department of western France, in 1938, this shows an engraving of two horses, with several rows of marks above them. The antler first came to prominence in 1972 when it was analysed by Alexander Marshack, who concluded that it was a record of lunar notation, accumulated over seven-and-a-half months.⁵⁸ In the 1990s, it was re-examined by Francesco d’Errico, referred to earlier in connection with the Berekhat Ram figurine and the so-called Slovenian flute. D’Errico examined the notches on the La Marche antler under a powerful microscope. He concluded that the marks had all been made at the same time, not accumulated over months, and that they had nothing to do with a lunar cycle. He wasn’t sure what, exactly, the notches represented, or measured, but he noted that they were not dissimilar from the notches used in cuneiform writing. Since, as we shall see in Chapter 4, cuneiform began as a way to record commercial transactions (counting bales of hay, or pitchers of wine, for example), d’Errico suggests that perhaps the La Marche antler may be understood in a similar fashion, as proto-writing.⁵⁹

Paul Bahn goes further. He has suggested that there appears to be a link between the decorated caves of the Pyrenees and eastern Cantabria and the many thermal and mineral springs in the vicinity of these sites. Perhaps, he says, these centres played a role in the mythology of Palaeolithic times. The widespread occurrence of serpentine and zig-zag lines, almost invariably associated with water, is no accident and, he speculates, may be associated with a mother-goddess cult. The zig-zag is a common motif, often associated with fish, and a human-like figure at Les Eyzies in France, a site dating back 30,000 years, shows a zig-zag inscribed on the figure’s torso.⁶⁰ A bone fragment discovered in 1970 at Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria suggests this sign may go back to the time of the Neanderthals. The same applies to M-shaped and V-shaped carvings, which recall feminine symbols, such as the uterus and vulva. These symbols were repeated well into the Bronze Age on water vessels.

Many specialists claim that carved or notched bones are tallies of hunters, others say that the signs can be divided into male (lines and dots) and female (ovals and triangles) and that Ice Age humans really were on the brink of an alphabet. This may be going too far but what does seem clear is that, in covering bones with carved images alongside a series of dots, in rows and columns, early humans were constructing what anthropologists call Artificial Memory Systems – and that, after all, is what writing is. Embryonic writing is perhaps the best description. The essential similarity of these signs is particularly intriguing, so much so that some archaeologists now believe that ‘a considerable number of the deliberate marks found on both parietal and mobile art from the Franco-Cantabrian region are remarkably similar to numerous characters in ancient written languages, extending from the Mediterranean to China’.⁶¹ (See Figure 2.) In rebuttal, it might be said that there are only so many signs the human mind can invent. But even if this is true, the similarities would still amount to something, implying that there is perhaps a genetically determined limit to our imagination in this field. At present we just do not know, although in 2005 a study of 115 different alphabets found that most languages average three strokes a character. This is no coincidence, says Mark Changizi, the researcher concerned. ‘Three happens to be the biggest number our brains can recognise without having to count.’⁶²

Figure 2: Similar signs among early forms of writing and proto-writing

[Source: Richard Rudgley, The Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, New York: The Free Press, 1999, page 78]

For archaeologists, the term ‘civilisation’ generally implies four characteristics – writing, cities with monumental architecture, organised religion and specialised occupations. We cannot say that Palaeolithic humans got there fully – cities, for example, lay some way in the future. But the study of language, and writing, in civilisation – advanced though it now is – may still have some way to go. Merlin Donald, for example, has highlighted certain important stages in language development, in particular rhetoric, logic (dialectic) and grammar.⁶³ As he also points out, these comprised the medieval trivium in Christendom, which separated these basic skills, these rules of thinking, from the quadrivium – mathematics, astronomy, geometry and music, which were specific subjects.