Publish at January 10 2023 Updated January 12 2023
Engraved Megacore Sword - Bansky Neanderthal - 51,000 years ago
"Symbol" is a vague polysemous term floating between a thing and an idea. This can be explained by its heterogeneous usage, sometimes referring to allegories, emblems, signals and sometimes to mottos, images, symptoms or even archetypes.
For the French dictionary "Le Robert", one of the definitions of symbol is as follows:
A perceptible, identifiable being, object, or fact which, by its form or nature, spontaneously evokes (in a given social group) something abstract or absent. ➙ sign
A sign can correspond to a thing, a mark, an element or even a character allowing one to conclude, recognize, distinguish or refer by convention to a meaning, or information, such as a complex reality, a person, an object or even a phenomenon.The term "symbol" is used to refer to the physical or visual materialization of a symbol, as well as to the transmission or reception of the symbol by an individual. It is easy to say that symbols have existed for as long as Man has been Man...
The earliest traces of symbolic material culture of the human race date back more than 500,000 years and are not limited to carved tools, but also to ornaments, body paintings or even non-figurative engravings.These practices appeared long before our species all around the globe and seem to be linked to the evolution of brain regions or networks as factors in the emergence, development and transmission of symbolic cultures of the homo genus.
The brain of a human being is the seat of cognitive functions. A cognitive function is a brain process that enables a subject to perform a task. These functions are numerous and include the perception and recognition of objects (gnosias), the ability to intentionally perform actions intended to achieve a specific goal (praxias), but also attention, memory or language.This set of cognitive functions is essential to our interactions with the world around us by allowing active processes of reception, selection, transformation, storage, elaboration and retrieval of information.
What might be the brain structures necessary for this practice? How does the brain perceive and discriminate these symbols? Does this relate to a form of social cognition in prehistoric humans?
This is what neuroarchaeologist Mathilde Salagnon proposes to discover in her thesis "Birth of symbolic thought in humans: a study of the neural bases of the perception of abstract Paleolithic engravings and culturized faces in functional neuroimaging".
Like a brain frozen in amber, Mathilde Salagnon's work invites us to search in our cranial box for the origins of cognitive functions of the human race. Using magnetic resonance imaging like a paintbrush, the author transforms herself, line after line, into a cerebral archaeologist. An introspection of our prehistoric nervous system of hundreds of thousands of years; breathtaking!"
Following in the footsteps of Paul Broca's work in neurology and anthropology, the author reveals an interdisciplinary collaboration that is as atypical as it is intriguing: neuroarcheology. Neuroarchaeology proposes the use of neuroscience techniques on contemporary subjects with the aim of making hypotheses relating to the cerebral functioning and cognitive processes in connection with the behaviors of prehistoric subjects whose traces are studied by archaeology.
The world in which Mathilde Salagnon invites us offers a feeling close to amazement. By discovering engraving after engraving and neuron after neuron, our past as well as present links to the "hominid" genus that is ours, this thesis makes our little species look like family.
Prehistoric material culture is not limited to lithic industries (stone tool cutting). Other elements, having emerged well after the cutting of tools, could give us additional clues on the evolution of human cognition. These are potentially symbolic cultural innovations, namely ornaments, body paintings, non-figurative engravings.
While the earliest evidence of stone tool cutting is dated at 3.3 million years, potentially symbolic material culture appears to have emerged more recently in the course of Hominin history. It was long taken for granted that this followed a sudden revolution, dated at 40 ka, concomitant with the arrival of Homo Sapiens in Europe.
Discoveries have come to question this hypothesis, since the ornamentation of the body with a symbolic aim is probably already attested in Africa 300 ka ago through traces of pigments and objects of adornment, the first of which date back to 140 ka. As for abstract engravings, the oldest to date would date from about 540 ka to 430 ka before the present. Traces of this potentially symbolic material culture are found on different continents and in different periods of the Paleolithic.
These productions could reflect the cognitive abilities of their creators, so it seems interesting to us to study them from a neuroarchaeological point of view.
What do we know about the cerebral processing of these artifacts?
Many scientific works have focused on the characterization of the processes of production of these symbols, however a dark area covers the processes implemented with regard to their perception.The first part of Mathilde Salagnon's thesis aims to characterize the cerebral networks involved in the attribution of a human origin to prehistoric abstract motifs.
To do this, the method used is as simple as it is surprising. It consists in recording the variations of activity of regions of interest of the brain by MRI in subjects carrying out an exercise aiming at discriminating the human origin of scenes, objects and words being presented to them.
This method allowed the characterization of regions involved in visual recognition processes:
To further investigate this hypothesis, a variable is added to the experiment: knowledge. To do this, archaeologist subjects familiar with these Paleolithic engravings are subjected to the experiment.
There are differences in activity between expert and non-expert subjects at the levels of visual associative areas which tends to confirm their central role in the visual processing of these symbols.
This finding invalidates the hypothesis that the primary visual cortex alone played a crucial role in the emergence of the production of these symbols. It tends to show that the perceptual processing of ancient symbols is more complex than previously thought and requires both visual and associative brain regions.
Therefore, it is possible to conceive that these engraved patterns could have been used by human cultures of the past with the aim of preserving and transmitting coded information and thus fulfilling a symbolic function. And why not, to teach and transmit knowledge.
In the second part of her thesis, the author proposes to explore the associations between this capacity to perceive symbols and social cognition in a series of experiments in which she invites subjects to socially interpret a set of body adornments.In a contemporary context where the meaning of language is gradually dying out, and/or opposites are equal, the author invites us to rediscover it by identifying the nervous structures involved in the emergence in hominids of symbolism, meaning, poetry and aesthetics.
Communication is essential to the human race, in order to understand each other and to form a society through a semantic that is indispensable to the development of a cumulative and transmissible culture. We realize that a mutation of our biology has led to a disruptive mutation of our relationship to the world, making teaching possible.
This hunger of our ancestors to share, transmit, exchange information materializes today as environmental modifications and archaeological artifacts. Like a temporal and spatial synapse between us and our prehistoric relatives, Mathilde Salagnon's research constitutes a sort of cerebral bridge between archaeology and neuroscience.
This text offers us a revelation of a talent, vague and sympathetic allowing us to recognize the production of homo that has been for thousands of years not under, but behind our eyes.
Reading this thesis offers us an awareness of the human race, the world, time and in a context where many think we are nothing, we are in fact a whole...
What about you? What feelings does this common bond with the human race awaken in you?
Good reading
This work was defended on November 28, 2018 in Bordeaux at the doctoral school Life and Health Sciences : ED 154 of the University of Bordeaux in the Neurofunctional Imaging Group of the Institute of Neurodegenerative Diseases (Bordeaux - France)
The Life and Health Sciences doctoral school collaborates with some thirty Bordeaux biology-health research laboratories.
The program allows its doctoral students to study different areas of research according to their specialty: Biochemistry, Bioimaging, Bioinformatics, Cellular Biology and Physiopathology, Cancer Biology, Agronomic Sciences, Genetics, Chemistry-Biology Interface, Microbiology-Immunology, Neuroscience, Nutrition, Oenology.
In addition to organizing doctoral training, the school deploys a set of resources in order to best support its students in the realization of their research and professional projects through assistance devices or disciplinary and transverse training.
Mathilde Salagnon. Birth of symbolic thought in humans: a study of the neural bases of the perception of abstract Paleolithic engravings and culturized faces in functional neuroimaging. Neurosciences. University of Bordeaux, 2022. French. ⟨NNT: 2022BORD0246⟩. ⟨tel-03892814⟩
Thesis: https://theses.hal.science/tel-03892814
PDF: https://theses.hal.science/tel-03892814/document
English-language article: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03797386/document
Introductory illustration:Leder, D., Hermann, R., Hüls, M. _et al._ A 51,000-year-old engraved bone reveals Neanderthals' capacity for symbolic behavior. _Nat Ecol Evol_ 5, 1273-1282 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01487-z
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