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There's something about caves --

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a shadowy opening in a limestone
cliff that draws you in.

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As you pass through the portal
between light and dark,

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you enter a subterranean world --

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a place of perpetual gloom,
of earthy smells, of hushed silence.

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Long ago in Europe,

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ancient people also entered
these underground worlds.

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As witness to their passage,

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they left behind mysterious
engravings and paintings,

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like this panel of humans, triangles
and zigzags from Ojo Guareña in Spain.

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You now walk the same path
as these early artists.

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And in this surreal, otherworldly place,

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it's almost possible to imagine

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that you hear the muffled footfall
of skin boots on soft earth,

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or that you see the flickering of a torch
around the next bend.

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When I'm in a cave,

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I often find myself wondering
what drove these people to go so deep

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to brave dangerous and narrow
passageways to leave their mark?

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In this video clip,

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that was shot half a kilometer,
or about a third of a mile, underground,

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in the cave of Cudon in Spain,

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we found a series
of red paintings on a ceiling

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in a previously unexplored
section of the cave.

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As we crawled forward, military-style,
with the ceiling getting ever lower,

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we finally got to a point
where the ceiling was so low

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that my husband
and project photographer, Dylan,

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could no longer achieve focus
on the ceiling with his DSLR camera.

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So while he filmed me,

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I kept following the trail of red paint
with a single light

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and a point-and-shoot camera
that we kept for that type of occasion.

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Half a kilometer underground.

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Seriously.

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What was somebody doing down there
with a torch or a stone lamp?

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(Laughter)

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I mean -- me, it makes sense, right?

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But you know,

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this is the kind of question that
I'm trying to answer with my research.

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I study some of the oldest
art in the world.

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It was created by these
early artists in Europe,

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between 10,000 and 40,000 years ago.

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And the thing is

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that I'm not just studying it
because it's beautiful,

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though some of it certainly is.

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But what I'm interested in
is the development of the modern mind,

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of the evolution of creativity,
of imagination, of abstract thought,

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about what it means to be human.

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While all species communicate
in one way or another,

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only we humans have really
taken it to another level.

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Our desire and ability
to share and collaborate

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has been a huge part of our success story.

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Our modern world is based on a global
network of information exchange

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made possible, in large part,
by our ability to communicate --

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in particular, using graphic
or written forms of communication.

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The thing is, though,

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that we've been building
on the mental achievements

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of those that came before us for so long

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that it's easy to forget that certain
abilities haven't already existed.

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It's one of the things
I find most fascinating

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about studying our deep history.

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Those people didn't have the shoulders
of any giants to stand on.

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They were the original shoulders.

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And while a surprising number
of important inventions

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come out of that distant time,

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what I want to talk to you about today
is the invention of graphic communication.

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There are three
main types of communication,

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spoken, gestural --
so things like sign language --

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and graphic communication.

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Spoken and gestural are
by their very nature ephemeral.

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It requires close contact
for a message to be sent and received.

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And after the moment
of transmission, it's gone forever.

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Graphic communication, on the other hand,
decouples that relationship.

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And with its invention,
it became possible for the first time

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for a message to be
transmitted and preserved

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beyond a single moment in place and time.

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Europe is one of the first places

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that we start to see graphic marks
regularly appearing

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in caves, rock shelters
and even a few surviving open-air sites.

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But this is not the Europe we know today.

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This was a world dominated
by towering ice sheets,

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three to four kilometers high,

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with sweeping grass plains
and frozen tundra.

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This was the Ice Age.

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Over the last century,

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more than 350 Ice Age rock art sites
have been found across the continent,

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decorated with animals, abstract shapes
and even the occasional human

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like these engraved figures
from Grotta dell'Addaura in Sicily.

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They provide us with a rare glimpse

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into the creative world and imagination
of these early artists.

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Since their discovery,

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it's been the animals that have received
the majority of the study

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like this black horse
from Cullalvera in Spain,

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or this unusual purple bison
from La Pasiega.

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But for me, it was the abstract shapes,
what we call geometric signs,

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that drew me to study the art.

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The funny this is that at most sites

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the geometric signs far outnumber
the animal and human images.

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But when I started on this back in 2007,

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there wasn't even a definitive list
of how many shapes there were,

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nor was there a strong sense

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of whether the same ones
appeared across space or time.

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Before I could even
get started on my questions,

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my first step was to compile a database

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of all known geometric signs
from all of the rock art sites.

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The problem was that while they were
well documented at some sites,

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usually the ones
with the very nice animals,

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there was also a large number of them
where it was very vague --

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there wasn't a lot
of description or detail.

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Some of them hadn't been visited
in half a century or more.

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These were the ones
that I targeted for my field work.

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Over the course of two years,

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my faithful husband Dylan and I
each spent over 300 hours underground,

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hiking, crawling and wriggling
around 52 sites

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in France, Spain, Portugal and Sicily.

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And it was totally worth it.

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We found new, undocumented geometric signs
at 75 percent of the sites we visited.

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This is the level of accuracy
I knew I was going to need

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if I wanted to start answering
those larger questions.

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So let's get to those answers.

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Barring a handful of outliers,
there are only 32 geometric signs.

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Only 32 signs

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across a 30,000-year time span
and the entire continent of Europe.

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That is a very small number.

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Now, if these were random
doodles or decorations,

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we would expect to see
a lot more variation,

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but instead what we find
are the same signs

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repeating across both space and time.

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Some signs start out strong,
before losing popularity and vanishing,

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while other signs are later inventions.

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But 65 percent of those signs stayed
in use during that entire time period --

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things like lines, rectangles
triangles, ovals and circles

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like we see here
from the end of the Ice Age,

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at a 10,000-year-old site
high in the Pyrenees Mountains.

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And while certain signs
span thousands of kilometers,

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other signs had much more
restricted distribution patterns,

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with some being limited
to a single territory,

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like we see here
with these divided rectangles

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that are only found in northern Spain,

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and which some researchers have speculated

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could be some sort
of family or clan signs.

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On a side note,

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there is surprising degree
of similarity in the earliest rock art

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found all the way from France and Spain
to Indonesia and Australia.

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With many of the same signs
appearing in such far-flung places,

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especially in that 30,000
to 40,000-year range,

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it's starting to seem increasingly likely

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that this invention actually traces back
to a common point of origin in Africa.

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But that I'm afraid,
is a subject for a future talk.

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So back to the matter at hand.

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There could be no doubt that these signs
were meaningful to their creators,

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like these 25,000-year-old
bas-relief sculptures

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from La Roque de Venasque in France.

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We might not know what they meant,
but the people of the time certainly did.

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The repetition of the same signs,
for so long, and at so many sites

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tells us that the artists
were making intentional choices.

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If we're talking about geometric shapes,

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with specific, culturally recognized,
agreed-upon meanings,

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than we could very well be looking

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at one of the oldest systems
of graphic communication in the world.

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I'm not talking about writing yet.

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There's just not enough
characters at this point

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to have represented all of the words
in the spoken language,

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something which is a requirement
for a full writing system.

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Nor do we see the signs
repeating regularly enough

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to suggest that they were
some sort of alphabet.

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But what we do have
are some intriguing one-offs,

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like this panel from La Pasiega in Spain,
known as "The Inscription,"

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with its symmetrical markings on the left,

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possible stylized representations
of hands in the middle,

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and what looks a bit
like a bracket on the right.

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The oldest systems of graphic
communication in the world --

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Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs,
the earliest Chinese script,

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all emerged between 4,000
and 5,000 years ago,

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with each coming into existence
from an earlier protosystem

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made up of counting marks
and pictographic representations,

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where the meaning
and the image were the same.

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So a picture of a bird would really
have represented that animal.

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It's only later that we start to see
these pictographs become more stylized,

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until they almost become unrecognizable

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and that we also start to see
more symbols being invented

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to represent all those other
missing words in language --

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things like pronouns, adverbs, adjectives.

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So knowing all this,

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it seems highly unlikely that
the geometric signs from Ice Age Europe

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were truly abstract written characters.

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Instead, what's much more likely

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is that these early artists
were also making counting marks,

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maybe like this row of lines
from Riparo di Za Minic in Sicily,

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as well as creating
stylized representations

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of things from the world around them.

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Could some of the signs
be weaponry or housing?

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Or what about celestial objects
like star constellations?

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Or maybe even rivers, mountains,
trees -- landscape features,

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possibly like this black penniform
surrounded by strange bell-shaped signs

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from the site of El Castillo in Spain.

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The term penniform
means "feather-shaped" in Latin,

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but could this actually be
a depiction of a plant or a tree?

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Some researchers have begun
to ask these questions

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about certain signs at specific sites,

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but I believe the time has come
to revisit this category as a whole.

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The irony in all of this, of course,

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is that having just carefully classified
all of the signs into a single category,

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I have a feeling that my next step
will involve breaking it back apart

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as different types of imagery
are identified and separated off.

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Now don't get me wrong,

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the later creation
of fully developed writing

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was an impressive feat in its own right.

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But it's important to remember

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that those early writing systems
didn't come out of a vacuum.

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And that even 5,000 years ago,

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people were already building
on something much older,

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with its origins stretching back
tens of thousands of years --

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to the geometric signs
of Ice Age Europe and far beyond,

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to that point, deep
in our collective history,

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when someone first came up with the idea
of making a graphic mark,

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and forever changed the nature
of how we communicate.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)