WEBVTT

00:00:01.067 --> 00:00:03.319
There's something about caves.

00:00:04.805 --> 00:00:08.822
A shadowy opening in a limestone
cliff that draws you in.

00:00:10.006 --> 00:00:13.568
As you pass through the portal
between light and dark,

00:00:13.568 --> 00:00:15.982
you enter a subterranean world.

00:00:16.229 --> 00:00:21.701
A place of perpetual gloom,
of earthy smells, of hushed silence.

NOTE Paragraph

00:00:22.793 --> 00:00:24.491
Long ago in Europe,

00:00:24.491 --> 00:00:27.388
ancient people also entered
these underground worlds.

00:00:27.901 --> 00:00:29.374
As witness to their passage,

00:00:29.374 --> 00:00:32.415
they left behind mysterious
engravings and paintings.

00:00:32.986 --> 00:00:39.324
Like this panel of humans, triangles
and zig-zags from Ojo Guareña in Spain.

00:00:40.184 --> 00:00:43.156
You now walk the same path
as these early artists.

00:00:44.038 --> 00:00:46.926
And in this surreal, other-worldly place,

00:00:46.926 --> 00:00:49.220
it's almost possible to imagine

00:00:49.220 --> 00:00:53.573
that you hear the muffled foot-fall
of skin boots on soft earth,

00:00:53.573 --> 00:00:56.762
or that you see the flickering of a torch
around the next bend.

00:00:57.946 --> 00:00:59.456
When I'm in a cave,

00:00:59.456 --> 00:01:05.299
I often find myself wondering,
what drove these people to go so deep?

00:01:05.299 --> 00:01:08.882
To brave dangerous and narrow
passageways to leave their mark?

00:01:09.420 --> 00:01:10.441
In this video clip,

00:01:10.674 --> 00:01:13.692
that was shot half a kilometer,
or about a third of a mile underground,

00:01:13.924 --> 00:01:15.898
in the cave of Curon in Spain,

00:01:16.200 --> 00:01:18.150
we found a series
of red paintings on a ceiling

00:01:18.429 --> 00:01:20.913
in a previously unexplored
section of the cave.

00:01:21.378 --> 00:01:25.487
As we crawled forward, military-style,
with the ceiling getting ever-lower,

00:01:25.766 --> 00:01:28.552
we finally got to a point
where the ceiling was so low,

00:01:28.947 --> 00:01:31.269
that my husband and project
photographer, Dylan,

00:01:31.524 --> 00:01:35.193
could no longer achieve focus
on the ceiling with his DSLR camera.

00:01:35.727 --> 00:01:37.004
So while he filmed me,

00:01:37.329 --> 00:01:40.533
I kept following the trail of red paint
with a single light,

00:01:40.835 --> 00:01:44.434
and a point-and-shoot camera
that we kept for that type of occasion.

00:01:45.920 --> 00:01:47.870
Half a kilometer underground.

00:01:48.288 --> 00:01:49.681
Seriously.

00:01:50.192 --> 00:01:53.095
What was somebody doing down there
with a torturous stone lamp?

00:01:53.373 --> 00:01:54.395
(Laugher)

00:01:54.627 --> 00:01:56.392
I mean --me, it makes sense, right?

00:01:56.694 --> 00:01:57.924
But you know,

00:01:58.133 --> 00:02:00.896
this is the kind of question that
I'm trying to answer with my research.

00:02:01.361 --> 00:02:03.775
I study some of
the oldest art in the world.

00:02:04.751 --> 00:02:06.933
It was created by these
early artists in Europe,

00:02:07.305 --> 00:02:09.603
between 10 thousand
and 40 thousand years ago.

00:02:11.864 --> 00:02:12.932
And the thing is,

00:02:12.932 --> 00:02:15.094
is that I'm not just studying it
because it's beautiful,

00:02:15.327 --> 00:02:17.230
though some of it certainly is.

00:02:17.834 --> 00:02:21.410
But what I'm interested in
is the development of the modern mind,

00:02:21.735 --> 00:02:26.332
of the evolution of creativity,
of imagination, of abstract thought.

00:02:26.890 --> 00:02:29.838
About what it means to be human.

00:02:31.417 --> 00:02:34.389
While all species communicate
in one way or another,

00:02:34.738 --> 00:02:37.802
only we humans have really taken it
to another level.

00:02:38.197 --> 00:02:40.589
Our desire and ability
to share and collaborate,

00:02:40.960 --> 00:02:43.305
has been a huge part of out success story.

00:02:43.584 --> 00:02:47.856
Our modern world is based on a global
network of information exchange.

00:02:48.251 --> 00:02:51.896
Made possible, in large part,
by our ability to communicate.

00:02:52.361 --> 00:02:56.076
In particular, using graphic
or written forms of communication.

00:02:56.772 --> 00:02:58.142
The thing is though,

00:02:58.421 --> 00:03:00.441
that we've been building
on the mental achievements

00:03:00.766 --> 00:03:03.042
of those that came before us for so long,

00:03:03.645 --> 00:03:07.848
that it's easy to forget that certain
abilities haven't already existed.

00:03:08.870 --> 00:03:10.866
It's one of the things
I find most fascinating

00:03:11.308 --> 00:03:13.931
about studying our deep history.

00:03:14.210 --> 00:03:18.064
Those people didn't have the shoulders
of any giants to stand on,

00:03:18.320 --> 00:03:20.177
they were the original shoulders.

00:03:20.781 --> 00:03:23.289
And while a surprising number
of important inventions

00:03:23.590 --> 00:03:25.309
come out of that distant time,

00:03:25.727 --> 00:03:30.254
what I want to talk to you about today
is the invention of graphic communication.

00:03:31.020 --> 00:03:33.180
There are three
main types of communication,

00:03:33.458 --> 00:03:36.314
spoken, gestural -- 
so things like sign language,

00:03:36.639 --> 00:03:38.892
and graphic communication.

00:03:39.217 --> 00:03:42.235
Spoken and gestural are,
by their very nature, ephemeral.

00:03:42.607 --> 00:03:45.997
It requires close contact for a message
to be sent and received.

00:03:46.484 --> 00:03:50.292
And after the moment of transmission,
it's gone forever.

00:03:50.571 --> 00:03:53.729
Graphic communication, on the other hand,
decouples that relationship,

00:03:54.402 --> 00:03:57.838
and with its invention, it became possible
for the first time,

00:03:58.396 --> 00:04:01.043
for a message to be
transmitted and preserved,

00:04:01.461 --> 00:04:04.200
beyond a single moment in place and time.

00:04:05.059 --> 00:04:06.685
Europe is one of the first places

00:04:06.917 --> 00:04:09.564
that we start to see graphic marks
regularly appearing

00:04:09.866 --> 00:04:13.697
in caves, rock shelters, and even
a few surviving open air sites.

00:04:14.533 --> 00:04:16.948
But this is not the Europe we know today.

00:04:17.296 --> 00:04:19.920
This was a world dominated
by towering ice sheets

00:04:20.175 --> 00:04:22.195
by towering ice sheets, three to four
kilometers high,

00:04:22.497 --> 00:04:25.214
with sweeping grass plains
and frozen tundra.

00:04:25.492 --> 00:04:27.535
This was the Ice Age.

00:04:28.325 --> 00:04:29.509
Over the last century,

00:04:29.765 --> 00:04:33.990
more than 350 Ice Age rock art sites
have been found across the continent.

00:04:34.942 --> 00:04:39.261
Decorated with animals, abstract shapes,
and even the occasional human.

00:04:39.516 --> 00:04:42.605
Like these engraved figures
from Grotta dell'Addaura in Sicily.

00:04:43.092 --> 00:04:46.064
They provide us with a rare glimpse

00:04:46.320 --> 00:04:50.081
into the creative world and imagination
of these early artists.

00:04:50.332 --> 00:04:51.539
Since their discovery,

00:04:51.818 --> 00:04:54.999
it's been the animals that have received
the majority of the study.

00:04:55.556 --> 00:04:58.458
Like this black horse
from ( TBD ), Spain.

00:04:58.876 --> 00:05:02.824
Or this unusual purple bison
from La Pasiega.

00:05:03.265 --> 00:05:07.560
But for me, it was the abstract shapes --
what we call geometric signs,

00:05:08.512 --> 00:05:10.137
that drew me to study the art.

00:05:11.693 --> 00:05:13.736
The funny this is, that at most sights,

00:05:14.015 --> 00:05:17.777
the geometric signs far outnumber
the animal and human images.

00:05:18.334 --> 00:05:21.050
But when I started on this back in 2007,

00:05:21.561 --> 00:05:25.021
there wasn't even a definitive list
of how many shapes there were,

00:05:25.439 --> 00:05:26.902
nor was there a strong sense

00:05:27.203 --> 00:05:29.665
of whether the same ones appeared
across space or time.

00:05:32.428 --> 00:05:34.796
Before I could even
get started on my questions,

00:05:35.191 --> 00:05:37.536
my first step was to compile a database

00:05:37.838 --> 00:05:41.088
of all known geographic signs
from all of the rock art sites.

00:05:41.576 --> 00:05:45.175
The problem was that while they were
well documented at some sites,

00:05:45.430 --> 00:05:47.056
usually the ones
with the very nice animals,

00:05:47.636 --> 00:05:51.096
there was also a large number of them
where it was very vague --

00:05:51.374 --> 00:05:53.023
there wasn't a lot
of description or detail.

00:05:53.433 --> 00:05:56.057
Some of them hadn't been visited
in half a century, or more.

00:05:56.777 --> 00:05:59.749
These were the ones
that I targeted for my field work.

00:06:00.236 --> 00:06:02.024
Over the course of two years,


00:06:02.628 --> 00:06:06.854
my faithful husband Dylan and I
each spent over 300 hours underground,

00:06:07.318 --> 00:06:10.917
hiking, crawling and wriggling
around 52 sites

00:06:11.312 --> 00:06:14.191
in France, Spain, Portugal and Sicily.

00:06:14.493 --> 00:06:15.770
And it was totally worth it.

00:06:16.304 --> 00:06:21.923
We found new, undocumented geometric signs
at 75 percent of the sites we visited.

00:06:22.782 --> 00:06:25.638
This is the level of accuracy
I knew I was going to need

00:06:25.917 --> 00:06:28.517
if I wanted to start answering
those larger questions.

00:06:28.982 --> 00:06:31.280
So let's get to those answers.

00:06:31.721 --> 00:06:36.087
Barring a handful of outliers,
there are only 32 geometric signs.

00:06:36.388 --> 00:06:40.777
Only 32 signs

00:06:41.125 --> 00:06:43.308
across a 30,000 year time span,
and the entire continent of Europe.

00:06:43.950 --> 00:06:46.457
That is a very small number.

00:06:46.759 --> 00:06:49.058
Now if these were random
doodles or decorations,

00:06:49.290 --> 00:06:51.380
we would expect to see
a lot more variation,

00:06:51.682 --> 00:06:53.887
but instead what we find
are the same signs,

00:06:54.143 --> 00:06:56.627
repeating across both space and time.

00:06:57.138 --> 00:07:00.969
Some signs start out strong,
before losing popularity and vanishing,

00:07:01.248 --> 00:07:03.616
while other signs are later inventions.

00:07:03.964 --> 00:07:08.446
But 65 percent of those signs stayed
in use during that entire time period.

00:07:08.980 --> 00:07:12.718
Thigns like lines, rectangles
triangles, ovals and circles.

00:07:13.433 --> 00:07:15.569
Like we see here,
from the end of the Ice Age,

00:07:15.778 --> 00:07:19.028
at a 10 thousand-year-old site,
high in Pyrenees Mountains.

00:07:19.586 --> 00:07:22.395
And while certain signs span
thousands of kilometers,

00:07:22.813 --> 00:07:25.367
other signs had much more
restricted distribution patterns,

00:07:25.474 --> 00:07:28.051
with some being limited
to a single territory,

00:07:28.376 --> 00:07:30.280
like we see here with these
divided rectangles

00:07:30.559 --> 00:07:32.626
that are only found in northern Spain,

00:07:32.927 --> 00:07:35.319
and what some researchers have speculated

00:07:35.667 --> 00:07:37.989
could be some sort
of family or clan signs.

00:07:38.291 --> 00:07:39.614
On a side note,

00:07:39.893 --> 00:07:42.981
there is surprising degree similarity
in the earliest rock art

00:07:43.260 --> 00:07:46.975
found all the way from France and Spain
to Indonesia and Australia.

00:07:47.718 --> 00:07:51.154
With many of the same signs
appearing in such far-flung places,

00:07:51.828 --> 00:07:54.451
especially in the 30 thousand
to 40 thousand-year range,

00:07:54.791 --> 00:07:57.577
it's starting to seem increasingly likely

00:07:57.925 --> 00:08:02.081
that this invention actually traces back
to a common point of origin in Africa,

00:08:02.639 --> 00:08:04.984
but that I'm afraid,
is a subject for a future talk.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So back to the matter at hand.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
There could be no doubt that these signs
were meaningful to their creators,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
like these 25 thousand-year-old
___________ sculptures

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
from La Roque de Venasque in France.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
We might not know what they meant
but the people of the time certainly did.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The repetition of the same signs,
for so long, and at so many sites,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
tells us that the artists
were making intentional choices,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
If we're talking about geometric shapes,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
with specific, culturally recognized,
agreed upon meanings,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
than we could very well be looking

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
at one of the oldest systems of graphic
communication in the world.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I'm not talking about writing yet.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
There's just not enough
characters at this point,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to have represented all of the words
in the spoken language,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
something which is a requirement
for a full writing system.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Nor do we see the signs
repeating regularly enough

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to suggest that they were
some sort of alphabet.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But what we do have
are some intriguing one-offs

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
like this panel from La Pasiega in Spain
known as "The Inscription",

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
with its symmetrical markings on the left,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
possible stylized representations
of hands in the middle,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and what looks a bit like
a bracket on the right.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The oldest systems of graphic
communication in the world --

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs,
the earliest Chinese script,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
all emerged between four thousand
and five thousand years ago,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
with each coming into existence
from an earlier protosystem

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
made of counting marks
and pictographic representations,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
where the meaning
and the image were the same.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So a picture of a bird would really have
represented that animal.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It's only later that we start to see
these pictographs become more stylized,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
until they almost become unrecognizable.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And that we also start to see

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
more symbols being invented to represent
all those missing words in the language --

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
things like pronouns, adverbs, adjectives.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So knowing all this,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it seems highly unlikely the geometrics
signs from Ice Age Europe

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
were truly abstract written characters.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Instead what's much more likely

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is that these early artists
were also making counting marks,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
maybe like this row lines
from Reparo de Za Minica in Sicily,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
as well as creating stylized
representations

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
of things from the world around them.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Could some of the signs
be weaponry or housing?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Or what about celestial objects
like star constellations?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Or maybe even rivers, mountains,
trees-- landscape features.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Possibly like this black peniform
surrounded by strange bell-shaped signs

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
from the site of El Castillo, in Spain.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The term peniform means
"feather-shaped" in Latin,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but could this actually be
a depiction of a plant or a tree?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Some researchers have begun

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to ask these questions
about certain signs at specific sites,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but I believe the time has come
to revisit this category as a whole.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
The irony in all of this, of course,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is that having just carefully classified
all the signs into a single category,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I have a feeling that my next step
will involve breaking it back apart

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
as different types of imagery
are identified and separated off.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Now don't get me wrong,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the later creation
of fully-developed writing

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
was an impressive feat in its own right,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but it's important to remember

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that those early writing systems
didn't come out of a vacuum.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And that even five thousand years ago,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
people were already building
on something much older,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
with its origins stretching back
tens of thousands of years --

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to the geometric signs
of Ice Age Europe and far beyond,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to that point, deep in our
collective history,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
when someone first came up with the idea
of making a graphic mark,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and forever changed the nature
of how we communicate.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Thank you.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Applause)