The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World's Oldest Symbols

Homo sapiens first appeared in Africa about 200,000 years ago, and there is evidence of symbolic thinking in hominid artifacts from 400,000 years ago. The First Signs is the first book by Genevieve von Petzinger, a groundbreaking researcher of geometric signs in Ice Age rock art, those famous paintings of wild animals, human hands and abstract patterns. Von Petzinger noticed these abstract geometric signs as a student, but her professors told her they had never been seriously studied. So she set out to do it herself.

For two years, she traveled across Europe, struggling through narrow muddy underground tunnels to document signs, sometimes finding as little as a pair of red dots, sometimes finding rooms full of them, apparently made by Ice Age peoples. She discovered that in 367 European rock art sites dating between 10,000 and 40,800 years ago, "there are 32 main sign types, each with its own distinct pattern of use." The earliest sites had such a well-established vocabulary to them, she argues, that they must have originated in Africa, well before human settlement of Europe. She sets her discoveries in the context of everything known about Ice Age peoples and earlier human development, competing interpretations of the mysterious evidence and the overlap of these signs with ones common to modern humans known as "entoptics--a series of geometric shapes generated from within the eye itself." Like any good scientist, von Petzinger is cautious not to speculate too much on the potential for interpreting their meanings. But she clearly plans to continue her work. "I have a feeling that the coming years are going to be particularly exciting ones in my field--prepare to be amazed and astonished!" --Sara Catterall

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