Inventing Graphics on Cave Walls | Origins: The Journey of Humankind

Early humans communicated with pictures and markings painted on cave walls and began to gradually work out symbols. As these markings spread and were understood and accepted, then you had the widespread transmission of ideas. We can see the very early days of this communication in the Ice Age caves of El Castillo.

We live in this modern world that's hugely interconnected globally, based in large part on our ability to communicate graphically. Everything from binary code in computers to texting, and we take them for granted. But I think what's so easy to forget is that if you go back far enough in time, you will actually get to a point where there was no graphic communication, where somebody had to invent it for the very first time.

Think about that moment, that moment when somebody picked up probably a tool and made an engraved mark in some sort of object. With that simple little stroke of a tool, they completely changed our entire ability to communicate. So, is this, is actually a child's hand, and it's not just anywhere, it's in the depths of the cave.

This tells us that it wasn't just adults coming down here; they brought their kids with them, which really suggests that for them, these caves weren't scary places. In Laas Yaga cave, um, is one of those rare animals. We're looking at a bison, which if you look just at the actual detail – the horn, the eyes, even the perky little tail – um, it's simple in many ways, but so sophisticated in others. It dates to about probably about 25,000 years ago or so.

Communicating with others has been an important part of why people have scratched things on rocks and made drawings. You can look at these things and imagine very clearly what it must have been like to bend those people on these hunts. It's a kind of time travel that allows you to step into another period or another place.

If you've been in one of these caves, into one of the chambers, and the lights are turned off, the silence is really profound. They could play tricks with lights to make animals move and so on; it was all performance, but performance had a purpose. The purpose was to reinforce the relationship with the forces of the supernatural world, with the animals, and the world that surrounded you.

Laag has many things that make it very special cave, but to me, one of the most important is actually the series of signs right up here on this wall. It's known as the Laasa inscription, and it's literally one of the only places in the whole of Ice Age Europe that we have an entire row of geometric signs that are lined up and organized and that actually appear to be related to each other.

We're certainly not talking about writing yet; yes, this certainly has a writing-like look to it, but it's a one-off. This is the only place that we ever find this. This is them starting to experiment. They're starting to play around with organizing the signs, even if it's not truly writing. It's an incredibly important clue to understanding where and how graphic communication really started coming together.