Genevieve Von Petzinger:
dates between 10 and 40,000 years ago.
What we often think of, of course, is the animals.
But there's this other enormous group called the
geometric signs that outnumber the animals and the humans
at most sites by a ratio of two to one or more.
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So, June, 2014, myself and my husband and project
photographer, Dillon, we were in Northern Spain.
We were at a site called Cullavera Cave and we were so
excited to finally be there.
Cullavera, the entrance is 30 meters up, it's 100 feet,
it's a cathedral entrance in a wooded hillside in the
foothills of the Pyrenees.
There's like a whole wreath of dangling green vines
coming down, it's inviting.
It wants you to come in.
And so I can understand why people might've decided
to go in there 14,000 years ago.
What's a little more difficult to understand is why
they decided to go so far in.
Because the very first art is 780 meters, half a mile,
into the cave.
You can probably just see some faint pigment markings on the
wall that is not modern graffiti.
These are not animals, but they're not writing either,
these are the geometric signs.
They came half a mile through the cave to make these.
If we enhance it, you can see a little bit more.
This is a very cool color enhancement program created
by American rock-art researcher, Jon Harman,
and suddenly you can see more.
But still no animals.
Nothing as far as the eye can see and this is very unusual.
Animals are normally found everywhere.
But don't worry, we've just got to keep going
a little farther.
So we keep going, three quarters of a mile in and there's
another little passageway here with two horses.
So the animals are represented, they're just in a completely
different section of the cave.
And as you can see they're very simple, but we also have
all this detail that kind of lets you know that there's
something going on.
There's a hint here that there's some artistic ability
that's underlying what they're doing here.
So we've got two horses, that's it.
You keep going a little farther and now there's a little
crevice off to the right this time.
And somebody went up there to make these little dots.
Let me enhance it for you.
But these little dots.
Somebody took their finger and dipped it in paint
and made those marks.
And as so often happens when I find myself in these places,
I'm like, "What were you doing here?"
Why did you come three quarters of a mile, or 1.2 kilometers
in a cave to make dots?
So let me introduce you to some of this Paleolithic,
or stone age, art that mostly dates between 10 and 40,000
years ago.
What we often think of, of course, is the animals.
The animals are by far the majority of what we call
figurative or representational art.
And a lot of it is hunting animals so we've already
seen a horse, here's a deer we have a fabulous purple bison.
It's the only one of it's kind because most of the art,
when it's painted, is either red or black.
And so this fabulous purple bison, I just love him,
he's like this unique little guy hanging out in
northern Spain.
So we've got him and then also we do have a few other
figurative images of humans.
And this is engraving, this is the other way that they
made the art.
But there's this other enormous group called the
geometric signs that outnumber the animals and the
humans at most sites by a ratio of two to one or more.
They can be simple things, like the circle.
They can be more complex things like this incredibly
complicated sign that was located in this panel in Spain,
which is a one-off.
It's the only one of it's kind in the world.
They can be dots, they can be lines, they can be triangles.
You'll see there's a full range, everything that's abstract
and that's kind of how they've been defined over the years.
Abstract characters that don't represent anything from
the mundane world.
So, let me tell you some of my fun results.
There are only 32 signs across an entire continent
and a 30,000 year time period.
My friends, these are not random doodles or decorations.
So, what I noticed was that this, each one of them has its
own distinct patterning, too.
These are not all doing the same things,
they're doing different things in different places.
So there were patterns across space and time.
And that's what's so intriguing and exciting.
So let me show you a couple of those patterns.
This is a child's hand.
This is 27,000 year old child's hand.
Now, hands are a fascinating one because they were at
their most popular at the very earliest time period.
So between 25 and 40,000 is when we find hands.
After that they start to fade out of popularity until
they vanish towards the end of the ice age,
they just go away, people stop making them.
So that's one pattern.
Another pattern that's very interesting is this is called
a tectiform.
So this is like a roof-shaped and these are only made
in the Dordogne region of France between 13,000 and
17,000 years ago.
It's where they're all located except for one site
250 miles to the south across the Pyrenees Mountains
in Spain.
And it is exactly the same. I've talked to the researcher
at that site, we've looked at pictures,
even down to the little dots
that you can see, the technique that was used,
it's the exact same thing.
How did it get there?
This is what's so fun about the signs is that we can
actually follow people and ideas at these incredible
time depths
and get a sense of how their culture was developing.
How were they learning about symbolism?
What was going on?
So, we've got these signs that were being used very
purposefully by people who obviously know what they meant.
The obvious question people always want to know is,
is it writing?
And I'm sorry, I'm here today to shatter that it's not
writing yet.
Though, this inscription as it's called, it's called the
inscription of La Pasiega.
This is a one-off.
And this is the thing, we don't have the consistency yet.
We don't have enough characters to represent spoken
language, we're not there yet.
But that doesn't mean that there's not very interesting
things going on.
It's really funny 'cause I just spent all this time
building my nice little list of 32 and now my next job
is probably going to be to smash it back apart.
Because there's some major omissions there.
Where's the landscape features?
Where's the weaponry? Where's the daily life?
Did nobody look up at the sky? You know?
And so I think that, personally, and this is what we're
starting to dig into now, I think a lot of these
geometric signs might actually be representational,
as well.
And it could give us some fascinating insight
into thematic categories
and how these people were understanding their world.
Quick example, the penniform.
So penniform means feather-shaped in Latin
and it's being treated as a geometric sign,
but there are contexts such
as this where people have muttered it kind of looks
like a tree.
So my response would be, maybe a tree sometimes is
just a tree.
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Maybe we don't have to over-complicate this.
And so this is the kind of thing we're looking at as well
as questions about clusters of dots potentially being
constellations or other things which would make
really good sense and we see in other rock art traditions.
What I've done so far is just the baseline.
This was the start, those were some really simple
questions.
There is so much left to be done.
In Europe, one big category that we're still missing here
is that my database does not have any of the portable
art in it yet.
And yet, the 16,000 year old necklace, for instance,
from a burial in France has 45 different geometric
configurations on it.
Think about how that can help me understand what I'm
seeing on a big panel on a wall.
They seem to be starting to group them up.
The line, the cross, the line, I've seen that on a cave
wall about 50 miles from there.
So, this is part of the story and there are dusty
artifacts loitering all over Europe in museums waiting
to be documented.
So this is very much the start.
And imagine if we can start expanding the work that
I'd been doing in western Europe to a global level.
Now those would be some very big patterns.
Thank you.
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