Language and Art (use of symbols)

Notes by Mary Prevo, Hampden-Sydney College, 2002

As an art historian, this is an issue very close to my heart.  The relationship between language (symbolic thought) and image making is very close.  Below are my notes from Alan Walker, The Wisdom of the Bones, NY: Knopf, 1996, p. 280 ff.

Language - speech reflects certain mental abilities.  These include the ability to map, categorize, and analyze the world in a complex fashion.  Language also requires the use and understanding of symbols (or displaced referents), the capacity to create novel symbols (i.e. to be linguistically productive), and the habitual practice of using both lexical and grammatical symbols. 

Developed through social interaction, and its vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of any particular language is culturally transmitted. 

Homo Erectus is speechless or, at best, proto-linguate (equivalent of a toddler's speech). 

1. Not enough room in the spinal column for nerves to control both upright carriage and speech. 
2. Hyoid, a small, fragile bone that anchors the tongue muscles, is rarely preserved and is unknown in the fossil hominid record until Neanderthals (archaic homo sapiens) appear 300,000 years ago.
3. Historically, anthropologists have linked tool development to a proposed development of speech.  Before 1.4 million years ago, stone tools were made, but their shapes are inconsistent and highly variable.  This coincides with the appearance of homo erectus.  It is now suggested that the "tool kit" reflects available materials, not cultural transmission of tool types and technology (considered evidence of language).
4. Finally, the question must be posed: If tool making indicates the possession of the cognitive faculties necessary for language, how is it that chimps can and do make and use tools and yet never master full language?

Homo Sapiens Sapiens - Language is a comparatively late acquisition and probably the characteristic that separates homo erectus from homo sapiens and from homo sapiens sapiens.  Anthropologists (William Noble and Iain Davidson) emphasized the symbolic nature of language as its most readily visible and perhaps most important attribute. 

1. The evidence for repeated use of symbols occurs at different times in different parts of the world reflecting the spread of modern humans.
2. Earliest 125,00 years ago, when anatomically modern humans first evolved
3. Much of the world use of symbols dates to 30,000 to 50,000 years ago.
4. Most abundant evidence comes from the Upper Paleolithic, around 35,000 years ago in Europe and coincident with the appearance of humans in Europe.  
5. Stone carvings from Vogelherd, Germany (32,000 years ago)
6. Cave paintings of Chauvet (32,000 years ago); Lascaux 19,000 years ago.

Archaic human symbolic behavior (Neanderthal):  Systematic burial of dead with red ocher, tools, crouch burials.  Is the burial of the dead a symbolic act?

Upper Paleolithic burials have all this and more:  caps, cloaks, beadwork, bracelets, tools, tattoos.  Walker suggests that this is the difference between proto-language and language.

Geography of settlements change in Upper Paleolithic with the arrival of modern humans in Eurasia (Olga Soffer, archaeologist).  Comparison of Middle and Upper Paleolithic sites shows:  

1. Middle Paleolithic (Neanderthal) sites are smaller with peoples relying on local resources, smaller social units.  They are geographically restricted, occurring and recurring in the same areas.  Skeletons show more physical stress than modern humans and they died younger.
2. Upper Paleolithic (modern humans):  larger, settlements contain items derived from widely scattered sources, located in more diverse habitats.  They lived longer than their predecessors and survived weaning and childhood in greater numbers, enjoyed better health.

Soffer concludes that, "a dramatic change in economic and social relationships" that coincided with the appearance of anatomically modern humans. To Walker, this change appears to be the aftermath of the development of true language, with its consequent improvement in planning and the sharing of information.  

What is language for?  Bickerton, 1990

1. implies the existence of two individuals
2. about social interaction and the exchange of information, which implies that the speaker and the listener do not share all knowledge in common.  

When in the fossil record does it become clear that groups of hominids begin to encounter other groups of hominids who are sufficiently foreign to make the exchange of information and important adaptive mechanism.  

Upper Paleolithic:  objects of personal adornment, symbolizing personal identity or status or allegiance to a larger group.

Upper Paleolithic people traveled to congregate in larger groups for special occasions or ritual sharing of hunting and other responsibilities (choosing mates, trading, etc.).  Suddenly there was a need to demonstrate visually that you were part of this group and distinct from that -- lines were drawn between us and them; ethnicity was born.

Margaret Conkey (Berkeley anthropologist) argues that the symbolic art of the Upper Paleolithic was a means of encoding information.  Art was an aide-mémoire, needed because new, richer and more diverse information was now available through communication with others.  Art and ceremony created occasions, experiences that evokes strong memories that would embed the information firmly in the minds of the participants.

Bibliography and further reading

Walker, Alan and Shipman, Pat.  The Wisdom of the Bones: in search of human origins. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1996.

Bickerton, Derek. Language and Species. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1990.

Conkey, Margaret.  "On the origins of Paleolithic art: A review and some critical thoughts."  In The Mousterian Legacy: Human Biocultural Change in the upper Pleistocene, edited by E. Trinkaus, pp. 201-27. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. S164, 1983.

Noble, William and Davidson, Iain. "The evolutionary emergence of modern human behavior: Language and its archaeology."  Man. 26(1991): 223-54.

Soffer, Olga.  "Before Beringia: Late Pleistocene bio-social transformation and the colonization of northern Eurasia."  In Chronostratigraphy of the Paleolithic in North, Central, East Asia and America. Novosibirsk: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1990.