Drawing, sign and thought
Homo sapiens sapiens has lived from about 250,000 years ago to the present.
In the beginning a man was not human enough: the rate of changes of the Palaeolithic mankind is comparable nor with the later human history, neither with natural evolution.
An average time of the existence of biological species is 1,5 million years; the duration of Upper Palaeolithic from the time of human origin is not less than 150 thousand years. It is something intermediate between natural evolution and human history.
First artifacts resembling modern ornaments were found in Blombos cave in South At most 12 thousand years have passed from the end of Palaeolithic to modern. During this time mankind assimilated agriculture and cattle-breeding as well as metallurgy, machines-making and space flights.
Africa. They are dated by the period of 120-100 thousand years ago.
Something has happened about 60 thousand years ago: humans left Africa and sprat all over the Earth.
First unquestionable images are found in Chauvet cave in Southern France. They are about 30 thousand years old.
But palaeolithic man could not picture a bison or a horse in general. Our ancestors were drawing specific animal ‘as such’, as they kept it in mind after shock of unsuccessful hunting.
Palaeolithic paintings were signified nothing: they were namely imaging, but not designating. There were direct emotional reactions on irritants of environment. As Ernst Cassirer put it, those oldest paintings as well as oldest speeches expressed only ‘feelings and affects’.
But everything has changed about 10 thousand years ago: the intelligent subject cropped up in rock paintings and engravings. These images turned into narrations about real events of primitive life. It was nearly pictography.
Subject is meaningful sequence of images. It is grown both out of language evolution and progress of linear thinking. Finally the subject replaced isolated affective images.
True pictograms are dated by the end of Neolithic and the beginning of Bronze Age. They can give to a spectator true idea of any event, how this rock ‘report’ on battue hunting from Mongolia (beginning of I ml. b.c.) does it.
First hieroglyphic systems of writing developed from pictographic in Ancient Egypt, Shumer and China.
Much later alphabetic systems developed – first that of Phoenicia. It has been the source for Greek, Latin and Arab alphabets.
Hieroglyphs have some advantages over any alphabet writing. To understand Chinese inscription Japanese should know only Chinese hieroglyphs, not language itself. Hieroglyph signifies a concept itself, so it is suitable for all existing languages.
But alphabetic systems also have the advantage over hieroglyphs: it is easier to remember 2-3 dozens of simple signs than hundreds of complex images.
