The outsider

In the course of reading the book by the late Zoltan Torey at reference 3, I digressed to matters pre-historic, landing a few days ago on reference 1, the chapter of a book by one Robert Bednarik, in which an exogram is an external version of the internal endogram developed by Torey. More or less anything made or collected for no very good reason. With exograms both reflecting and being evidence of human cognitive activity: you would not make them without something going on inside. And externalising that something amounted to communication then – and a window onto that cognitive activity now.

Furthermore, Bednarik claims that non-human animals do not do exograms: that it is one of the last distinguishing features left standing. With the exograms of present interest being the ones which survive, which make the archaeological record. With things made of flint making an important part of that record, particularly the early record, by virtue of being extremely durable.

Bednarik, as described at reference 5, an Australian who emigrated from Austria as a young man, is something of an outsider, outside the regular academic world, although he is a professor at the International Centre of Rock Art Dating and Conservation (ICRAD), based at Hubei University, for which see references 6 and 7. He also looks to go to some trouble to make himself visible to the Internet and its search engines.

A chapter which started life as a presentation at the NeanderART 2018 conference at Borgosesia, a town a little to the northwest of Milan and a little less to the west of Lake Maggiore. Not so much of an outsider then!

But which may go some way to explaining why the author is a bit free with what seem to be his many dislikes. I wonder if he has a regularly updated hate list pinned to his kitchen door in the way of my late younger brother?

• Excess and unhelpful use of the terms ‘art’ and ‘symbolic’. He prefers to concentrate on the material and technical side of things

• Excess consideration of and consideration for the cave paintings of southwestern Europe. A lot of which are probably the work of children. And what about Australia, where there are lots of them?

• Sloppy dating of said cave paintings – with a lot of them turning out not to be very old at all

• The people at UNESCO who make lists of such things. ‘The World Heritage List … simply manifests cultural values held by European researchers’

• The Palaeolithic art lobby. ‘The obsession with Palaeolithic ‘art’ is … Eurocentric, misguided and scientifically flawed’

• The ‘African Eve’ hoax. The hoax according to which nothing really got going before she arrived on the scene. While the rather older male version does not get a look in

• Academic archaeologists and geologists who do not understand about cupules at all. Not in the way that someone who lives with them or works with them does.

Controversies apart, the story seems to be that there are plenty of exograms to be found around the world, not just from the wider Mediterranean basin, and not just from the past 50,000 years. Plenty of evidence of human cognitive activity, the sort which goes beyond simple stimulus and response, learned or otherwise. He offers the timeline snapped above.

Another timeline

There is one lot of names for geological eras, another for the most recent round of ice ages and yet more for human times. The first covering billions of years, the last a small number of millions. With eras defined by the sort of life present, periods and epochs by the sort of rocks being made. And with there being a climate aspect to epochs. Notwithstanding which, dates, terms and terminology seem to come and go in a rather confusing way.

I have attempted a summary of all this in the snap above, to be contrasted with that at the top of reference 11. With Microsoft, as ever, fussing about my spelling.

For the Quaternary period we also have around 100 Marine Isotopes Stages (MIS), working back from MIS 1, which is now. This data, derived from deep sea sedimentary cores, tells us of the regular temperature oscillations – and the corresponding glaciations – aka ice ages – aka stadials and interstadials of reference 20 – over that period. All mixed up with the Milankovitch cycles which were introduced at reference 14.

There is a theoretical problem here, in that it is OK to map periods and epochs onto dates because they can be considered to be global phenomena. But this is not so obviously the case with ages and lithic modes: might not the dates vary from place to place, from culture to culture? Might different cultures fall more naturally into a different sequence of lithic modes? These matters are addressed at reference 12 – but not in what follows.

Modes of stone working

Following on from reference 4 (of which I happen to have a copy), Clark went on to formalise five modes of working with stones, starting more than two million years ago, a formalisation which appears to have stood the test of time, with the snap above taken from reference 12. Usually called technology modes, sometimes lithic modes.

The famous Acheulean hand axes count as mode 2. And some of them appear to be more ornamental than functional. Almost art!

A snap of an unusually large, late Acheulean hand axe, recently discovered at Frindsbury in Kent, near the mouth of the Medway, is included above. Around 300mm in length: if nothing else, a very lethal weapon! Taken from reference 12.

Manuports

Turning now to exograms, manuports are found objects carried back to a living place. They need to be significant in some way and to have clearly been moved to a place where they would not have been in the ordinary cause of events. Animal, probably human, agency has to be involved.

Manuports include unusual rocks, pebbles, crystals and fossils. Some may resemble faces, bodies or even sexual parts. Some have been dated to more than two million years ago.

On the assumption that human agency is involved, evidence here for cognitive activity straying beyond immediate needs and activities. An activity which might well evolve into collecting – bearing in mind that finding several useless objects of the same sort in an excavation does not necessarily amount to collecting. All being nice and tidy in a box would be much better evidence!

Pigment

Pigment is documented around the world for around a million years. In pots or blocks. On bodies, on artefacts and on rock walls, often in caves – with elaborate paintings on these last being relatively recent, say in the last 50,000 years. The one snapped above is in South America: not like the sort of thing we get in southwestern Europe at all. Estimated to be around 12,500 years old, that is to say, from just before the start of the Holocene era. I have yet to find out how what appear be paintings out in the open survived.

The pigment, as here, is often red ochre, an iron oxide pigment derived from one of the haematites.

Cupules

Cupules are small, round depressions hammered (not ground) into the faces of rocks or rock, maybe as much as 1cm deep and usually rather wider than deep, roughly hemispherical. Sometimes in lines or patterns, sometimes singly, sometimes scattered about. Found all over the world, but particularly in the southern hemisphere, with some of them dating back near half a million years. While the chart suggested a million and a half, so I thought I had better turn up reference 15 – where I was rather confused to find that lots of such depressions are actually naturally occurring. Which took me back to the natural pitting of granite, which cropped up in a previous outing and which can be seen in kerbstones here in Epsom.

It turns out that Bednarik describes the various naturally occurring cupules at some length and seems to be satisfied that at least a lot of the time he can tell which is which. He also excludes the depressions made in slabs in the course of grinding food grains, the idea being that cupules are not useful. But he includes the many cupules made on what he calls lithophones and which Wikipedia (at reference 17) calls ringing rocks, that is to say rocks which sound a bit like a bell when struck. Bednarik does not appear to be aware of the scientific work that has been done on the ringing rocks of the US, the principal subject of the Wikipedia entry. The Scandinavians seem to be quite interested in them too. And then there are the small ones collected into a musical instrument, in the way of a xylophone.

The example above is in the Sudan, complete with cupules. Google Image search knows where to find it!

Near contemporary cupules of this sort figure in various rituals, for example to do with influencing the weather or fertility. But I think Bednarik is attracted to the notion that these cupules are also made for their own sake, for the various satisfactions to be derived from the laborious and skilful hammering of deep, neat holes. The satisfactions of craft.

While I think of the curiosity about rocks that are alive, when most rocks are dead. They are memorable and one is going to think about them. They might even count as animate rather than as inanimate in the classification schemes used in Bantu languages – for which see reference 18.

In sum, it seems clear enough that there are a lot of cupules around the world, that some of them were in use until quite recently and that some of them are very old – although dating is difficult and I am not clear exactly how old. While dates of up to around 200,000 years ago seem to be well established.

Beads

Beads have been around for a long time. Beads which usually need to be shaped, pierced, strung together and then either worn directly, for example, as a necklace or sewn onto clothing. Beads which might be made of fossil shells, ivory or ostrich shells. In the case of this last, the makers often go to a lot of bother to make them small, neat and even. Quite a lot of cognitive activity involved here.

This Ostrich eggshell necklace is from the Isiko museum of South Africa. I have not been able to find out how old it is – and it may well be modern – but it does give the idea. However, at reference 8, he talks of Libyan eggshell beds which are of the order of 200,000 years old. The talk is of actual shell: it seems that you do get fossil eggshell but it is a good deal older.

According to Bednarik, it is difficult to make them any smaller – and in any event it takes practise and patience to do a neat job.

Acheulian stone beads from England and France, made from globular fossil casts of a sponge, snap taken from reference 1. Saint-Acheul being near Amiens in France and the Acheulian age running from 1.9 million years ago to 13,000 years ago, that is to say, to the end of the Old Stone Age, to the start of our own Holocene epoch.

My third example is the ivory beads which Bednarik mentions from the famous and extraordinary graves first excavated at Sunghir in the 1960’s, just outside Vladimir, roughly 200km east of Moscow. A place which would have been cold during glacial stages (concerning which archaeologists talk of stadials, interstadials and tricky measurements of oxygen isotopes taken from ice cores taken from Greenland). With these graves dating from one of the warmer periods around 30,000-35,000 years ago. They contain a variety of grave goods, described at reference 2, from which the snap above it taken, but for present purposes the interest is in the thousands of mammoth ivory beads, thought to have been sewn onto clothes rather than worn on strings as necklaces or bracelets.

Evidence of manufacture of large numbers of quite small beads, analysed at reference 10 into four sets of beads of similar size and appearance. Organised into strings, mostly sewn onto clothes, mostly at elbows, wrists, waists, knees and ankles – and some with complicated rhythms.

The rectangular beads.

The round beads. For square see below.

The basket beads.

 The square beads.

Manufacture which is evidence of an abundance of leisure time – time which is not taken up with basic subsistence activities – and of some considerable drive to make these beads – and to make them properly – and them to organise them into strings. All of which is suggestive to me of more or less modern cognitive capabilities.

Engravings

There are also lots of old engravings on rocks, often no more than a group of straight grooves, sometimes more or less parallel, sometimes something more complicated. Again, easily confused with markings which have arisen naturally.

Bednarik is satisfied that these incised lines are indeed the deliberate work of early humans. They may be no more than doodles, something to while away a quiet evening, but they are deliberate and involve both care and time. Once again, something cognitive was going on a long time ago.

Animal exograms

A lot of birds make elaborate nests. A lot of birds sing elaborate songs, as do whales. Magpies do not collect, but some birds and animals do collecting of a sort. Some of this collecting is described at reference 24 – collections which are only rather weak exograms in the present sense. But maybe the bald statement that animals do not do exograms is a bit strong. Like the other binary dichotomies between humans and other animals, it breaks down at the margins – which may make difficulties for the argument that all these exograms are the product of some special adaptation of the human brain.

Not something that Bednarik goes into in the present paper.

Other matters

Bednarik does not talk about (controlled) fire, another activity which leaves its mark in the archaeological record. He might argue that fire does not qualify as an exogram partly because it is so obviously useful, perhaps more because while making a fire might be thought of as a craft activity, that craft does not leave much of a record, perhaps just the hearth or container, which is not quite the same thing – although it seems likely that fire was made and was appreciated for more decorative, artistic reasons. Certainly for ritual reasons.

I associate to the book at reference 21, acquired many years ago from I forget where, an imaginary account of a band of early humans which loses its fire, and which struggled to get it back. Humans who have fire and keep fire, but who have not yet learned how to relight it if they lose it. I have only just started to take another look at this book, but I seem to remember that the band carried its fires about in its wanderings in little containers cunningly contrived out of stone. 

Set around 100,000 years ago, when humans had crude weapons and language, knew about bride prices and sometimes ate each other. This band ordinarily had three fires, that is to say small fires which functioned as match boxes, kept in aforementioned containers, maintained and guarded by four women and two warriors. I suppose the former did the maintaining, the latter the guarding. But in this story, this had all gone wrong and the band were in cold turkey for the duration. Which is all well and good as a story, but the evidence now, a hundred years later, is that humans had and controlled fire as long ago as 500,000 years ago.

I think burials, with their being plenty of elaborate ancient burials in the record, are excluded by virtue of being both functional and heavily endowed with ritual and meaning.

I have learned of rock varnish. Rock varnish is a dark coating which you can get on exposed rock surfaces and it is probably the world's slowest-accumulating sedimentary deposit, growing at only a few to tens of microns per thousand years – with a micron aka ‘µm’ being a thousandth part of a millimetre. Its thickness ranges from <5 µm to 600 µm, with a typical thickness of about 100 µm. Despite the thinness of the varnish, it is layered, with each layer reflecting the climate over a period of the order of a thousand years, in something of the way of the tree rings that one can count on the cut ends of tree trunks. These layers can be correlated with other laminated sources which have already been dated, for example cores from the bottom of lakes or through ice sheets. One can then use that correlation to provide a first exposure date for the object in question. A technique which particularly useful for the rocks of alluvial fans in what are now deserts. Good for up to 70,000 years ago. VML – varnish microlamination dating – is just one of a number of exotic dating tools now available to archaeologists and geologists. There is an accessible description of VML at reference 19.

Ringing rocks sound like a very striking phenomenon (hmmm), the sort of thing that might well give rise to thought or ritual. The only thing of the same sort that I can come up with today is lunar and solar eclipses. More things which are strange and unusual, but ultimately without significance as far as subsistence is concerned. One has to have moved beyond that, or at least to a point where one has room for other stuff.

I associate the fact that in some cultures the ruler is in some sense assimilated to the sun and one is supposed to turn away or prostrate oneself when he passes, rather as one turns one’s gaze away from the sun. While, contrariwise, in others, one is supposed to fix one’s respectful gaze on the ruler when he is in one’s vicinity.

In the past, I have failed to find a good image of the sort of scale (and colour) marker that archaeologists often include in their photographs. On this occasion I found one, so it is included here for future reference.

This one is personalised, as it were, for IFRAO, the International Federation of Rock Art Organisations, a federation of which Bednarik is a prominent member. To be found at reference 23.

Lastly an irrelevance arising from Christmas chocolates – it occurring to me for the first time that chocolates are icons of themselves, taking in their shape in general and the pattern on their tops in particular. The chocolates have to be different enough from each other that it is easy enough to locate the chocolate in hand on the printed menu – which one needs to do if one wants to know what is inside before biting into it.

With the people who produced the menu offered above giving themselves more of a challenge by having them all the same shape.

Something of the same sort is involved in the visual menus provided by self-checkouts in the big supermarkets for items sold in bulk or are which otherwise inconvenient to bar code – like red grapefruit at Waitrose. Menus which will perhaps soon be made by redundant by self-checkouts which can tell their apples and oranges apart?

No doubt something that can be worked into my occasional musings about the different sorts of pictograms and alphabets.

Conclusions

There seems to be some drive for perfection in the form of artefacts; perfection which goes beyond the use to which the artefact is put. Perhaps an artefact which has no use. However this drive came to be, it seems to be very old, perhaps as old as 500,000 years old, well before the explosion in technology which set in after the end of the last ice age, say 12,000 years ago. Quite possibly before the invention of language.

Examples from our own times include the ladies who put a lot of effort into the red polish on their front doorsteps and the gentlemen who put a lot of effort into making their lines of cabbages exactly straight. Competition is one part of both activities, but perfection is another – another which probably came first.

A stake in the ground in the argument about for which activities language is necessary rather than just helpful.

And having been reminded of ‘La Guerre du Feu’ (reference 21), I shall ponder about the role of this sort of thing in the real work: with the present thought being that there is one, that imaginary reconstruction of the world of early humans is both a useful and an entertaining exercise.

PS: I believe this particular one made the author a great deal of money.

References

Reference 1: Book chapter: The dawn of exograms – Robert G. Bednarik – 2020. 

Reference 2: Diversity and differential disposal of the dead at Sunghir – Erik Trinkaus, Alexandra P. Buzhilova – 2017’. 

Reference 3: The crucible of consciousness – Zoltan Torey – 2009.

Reference 4: Pre-Historic Societies – Graham Clark and Stuart Piggott – 1965.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_G._Bednarik. 

Reference 6: https://en.hbnu.edu.cn/. 

Reference 7: The International Centre of Rock Art Dating and Conservation (ICRAD) – Robert G. Bednarik – 2016.

Reference 8: Middle Pleistocene Beads and Symbolism – Robert G. Bednarik – 2005. Quite a lot of overlap with reference 1. 

Reference 8: https://www.homoneanderthalensis.org/. 

Reference 9: The age of the Sunghir Upper Paleolithic human burials – Erik Trinkaus, A. P. Buzhilova, M. B. Mednikova, Maria Dobrovolskaya – 2015. Useful background on dating. 

Reference 10: Ivory beads of the Sungir Paleolithic site: Shapes and features of their alternation in set decorations - G.A. Khlopachev, L.O. Bazilevich – 2023. Mostly in Russian, but with English provided for the summary and the captions to the figures.

Reference 11: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/mithen.html. 

Reference 12: On Stony Ground: Lithic Technology, Human Evolution, and the Emergence of Culture – Robert Foley, Marta Mirazón Lahr – 2003. 

Reference 13: On the Discovery of a Late Acheulean 'Giant' Handaxe from the Maritime Academy, Frindsbury, Kent – Letty Ingrey, Sarah M. Duffy, Martin Bates, Andrew Shaw, Matt Pope – 2023. 

Reference 14: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/lisiecki-and-raymo-2005-used.html. 

Reference 15: Cupules - Robert G. Bednarik – 2008. 

Reference 16: Preliminary results of the EIP Project – Robert G. Bednarik, Giriraj Kumar, Alan Watchman, Richard G. Roberts – 2005. EIP for ‘Early Indian Petroglyphs Project’, particularly cupules. 

Reference 17: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringing_rocks. ‘… The sound can be duplicated on a small scale by tapping the handle of a ceramic coffee cup…’.

Reference 18: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/bantu.html. 

Reference 19: Millennial-scale varnish microlamination dating of late Pleistocene geomorphic features in the drylands of western USA – Tanzhuo Liu, Wallace S. Broecker – 2013.

Reference 20: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadial_and_interstadial. 

Reference 21: La Guerre du Feu – J. H. Rosny aîné – 1911. 

Reference 22: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Guerre_du_feu. A substantial article, albeit in French. The source of the two cave men snaps above.

Reference 23: https://www.ifrao.com/ifrao/. 

Reference 24: https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/collectors-and-hoarders-of-the-animal-world.html.