Return to Phi in the Acheulian

The critical point Marshack demonstrated was not his interpretation of the famous zigzag pattern on the Bacho Kiro engraving (he regarded it as an abstract symbol for water) but the simple fact that the engraving was made deliberately.

Marshack did this by pointing out that when the engraver created the zigzag pattern he/she did not lift the engraving tool but held the tool on the bone and twisted it while changing direction to create an angle. This proved that the pattern was not an accidental by-product of scraping the bone such as skeptics of Neanderthal intelligence tended to believe.

Although the tide is turning, just the simple idea that the Bacho Kiro engraving was made deliberately was not easy for the modern science community to accept because they had long taught that Neanderthals were mentally inferior to us, being a sort of “dead-end” in the story of

CALLOUT QUOTE

"For evolutionary reasons only, interpreters of Neanderthal art try to avoid the idea of representation."

Fig. 2. (left) No anthropologists question that the figure at the left in the famous “Well Scene” of Lascaux Cave, France, represents a modern Homo sapiens human being despite how obviously unlike Homo sapiens it appears (Wikimedia). The unnaturally elongated body, bird-like head, and stick-like arms and legs are not a deterrent because portraying people as stick figures is a very common ‘modern’ artistic technique. Another common technique is that of exaggerating parts of the body to help communicate an idea. The torso of the Lascaux figure, for instance, appears to have been very deliberately elongated though for some unknown reason. However, in the case of the Bacho Kiro engraving (right) one can easily understand how exaggerating the length of a person’s legs would help represent them as walking across a mountain range. If this interpretation is correct, then the image is quite sophisticated and is more evidence that the Neanderthals were highly intelligent and not in any way our inferiors.

The most popular recent interpretation of zigzags in Palaeolithic art grants even less to Neanderthals in that they are suggested to represent entoptic phenomena or phosphene patterns. These are visual sensations in the brain resembling hallucinations and are suggested to have influenced early artists without their having any idea what they were actually doing. Experienced artists, though, tend not to think in such terms because they know firsthand that the artist has great freedom of expression.

In conclusion, if instead of ‘not-quite-us’ interpretations of early people we adopt the idea that there has never been any change in human cognitive ability (e.g., Feliks 1998, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011), then we can begin to read the history that our early ancestors left for us. From this view, there is no reason at all that we should not be able to see the Bacho Kiro engraving as representing exactly what it appears to represent, a person hiking across the Balkan Mountains 47,000 years ago.

Kozlowksi, J. K. (ed.) 1982. Excavation in the Bacho Kiro Cave (Bulgaria): Final report. Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, Warsaw.

Kozlowski J. K. 1992. L’Art de la préhistoire en Europe Orientale. CNRS: Paris.

Bahn, P. G. and J. Vertut. 1997. Journey through the Ice Age. University of California Press, Berkeley. p.25.

Bahn, P. G. 2003. Origins of symbolism. Online in AccessScience. McGraw-Hill Companies.

Marshack, A. 1976. Implications of the Paleolithic symbolic evidence for the origin of language. American Scientist 64: 136-45.

Feliks, J. 1998. The impact of fossils on the development of visual representation. Rock Art Research 15: 109-34.

— 2006. Musings on the Palaeolithic fan motif. In P. Chenna Reddy (ed.), Exploring the mind of ancient man. New Delhi.

— 2008. Phi in the Acheulian. Pleistocene palaeoart of the world. XV UISPP World Congress (Lisbon, 2006). BAR 1804: 11-31. Oxford.

— 2010. Phi-based conceptual units: Pushing math origins back to the Acheulian age. SCIENAR website.

— 2011. The golden flute of Geissenklösterle: Mathematical evidence for a continuity of human intelligence as opposed to evolutionary change through time. Aplimat 2011. Bratislava.

John Feliks has specialized in the study of early human cognition for over 15 years. His work demonstrates through side-by-side comparisons, geometry and mathematics that early peoples such as Homo erectus and Neanderthals were just as intelligent as we are today.