When we speak about the origin of human communication, discussion most often focuses on language: when it appeared, how syntax developed, and what biological changes enabled humans to speak. However, there is another way to approach the problem — by examining it from the perspective of signs and images, rather than words.
It is possible that before complex speech humans already possessed rather effective means of synchronising knowledge. And a key role in this process may have been played by iconic images — recognisable representations of important objects. But to understand why images became necessary, we must first look at how early human groups communicated without them.
The Triad of the Sign
One of the most influential models of the sign was proposed by the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce.
According to Peirce, any sign includes three elements:
object — that to which the sign refers
representamen — the form of the sign (image, word, symbol)
interpretant — the meaning that arises in the observer
Peirce also distinguished three types of signs:
icon — a sign resembling its object
index — a sign causally connected with its object
symbol — a conventional sign (for example, a word)
Icons are particularly important for our purposes. They are understandable even without a shared language because they preserve a resemblance to what they represent. This property becomes critical precisely when people from different groups — with different languages and different traditions — need to communicate.
Communication Within the Group: Why Language Was Not Needed
Within small, tightly organised groups, communication could function remarkably well without developed speech. The reason lies in two structural features of early societies: rigid hierarchy and shared practice.
In a group with a clear hierarchy, most coordination does not require verbal explanation. Roles are fixed, sequences of action are known, and authority is unambiguous. In such conditions, short signals — a gesture, a sound, a glance — are sufficient because the context is already shared by all participants. The situation resembles a special operations unit working in silence: each member knows their role, and communication is reduced to minimal, precise signals. Lengthy verbal explanation would not only be unnecessary but potentially dangerous.
This internal communication system relied on gesture and body language, guttural sounds and vocal signals, demonstration of actions, and joint practice. When people constantly participate in the same activity — hunting, for example — they do not need to explain every detail in words. The knowledge is embedded in the shared situation itself.
However, the situation changes fundamentally when groups encounter one another.
The Boundary Encounter: Where Language Begins
The most important — and most overlooked — trigger for the development of speech may not have been internal group complexity, but the encounter between strangers.
When members of two different groups meet, the entire internal system of communication breaks down. There is no shared hierarchy. There are no common signals. The instinctive response — fight or flee — resolves the encounter but creates no new social bond. Yet sometimes neither fighting nor fleeing was the optimal strategy. Resources could be shared. Knowledge could be exchanged. Alliances could be formed.
In this situation, something new was required: the spontaneous construction of a social bond with a stranger. And this is precisely where a shared visual reference point becomes invaluable. If both groups recognise the same animal — a bull, a bison — then pointing to an image of that animal creates an immediate common ground. It is not yet language. It is not yet negotiation. But it is the beginning of shared attention, which is the foundation on which communication can be built.
In this sense, language may have emerged not from within the group, but at its boundary — as a response to the challenge of creating social connection with the unknown.
The Cognitive Centre: the Animal
For many prehistoric societies the key objects were large animals: bulls, bison, boars, deer. They played a central role in economy, mythology, and ritual life. From a cognitive perspective such animals possess several important properties: they are visually recognisable, they are emotionally significant, and they are connected with vital practices. For this reason the image of an animal can become the centre of a cognitive network, around which different types of knowledge converge: appearance, characteristic sounds, danger, modes of interaction, ritual meanings.
But there is a further dimension. The same animal could occupy very different positions in different ontologies — different frameworks of understanding the world and one's place in it. For a hunter, the bull is prey: something to be tracked, ambushed, killed. For a herder, the bull is a managed resource — a source of labour and wealth. These are not merely different practices. They are different relationships to the world, with different values, different risks, and different knowledge systems.
Yet both groups are talking about the same animal.
This overlap — one object, two ontologies — is precisely what makes the iconic image of the bull so powerful as a point of synchronisation. It does not require either group to abandon its framework. It simply provides a shared visual anchor around which different types of knowledge can be brought into contact.
Knowledge and Experience
Here it is important to distinguish two types of knowledge.
Object knowledge is knowledge about the object itself: what the animal looks like, what sounds it produces, how dangerous it is. Such knowledge is primarily connected with recognition.
Procedural knowledge is knowledge about actions: how to hunt, how to approach, which tools to use, how to herd. It is formed through practice and experience.
Within a single community both types of knowledge usually develop together. People learn to recognise the animal while simultaneously mastering ways of interacting with it. However, in a situation of inter-group contact the order is necessarily different.
First comes shared knowledge of the object — the name, the image, the recognition. Only afterwards does the coordination of practices become possible.
This sequence is not arbitrary. Naming the object — or pointing to its image — creates a shared topic. It directs attention. It establishes the common ground from which exchange can begin. The procedural knowledge, which is far more complex and requires demonstration and practice, can only be transmitted once this common ground exists. In this sense, the image of the bull precedes the technique of hunting or herding it.
Iconic Images and Göbekli Tepe
Archaeology offers remarkable evidence for this model. One of the most significant examples is Göbekli Tepe, a monumental complex in southeastern Anatolia dating to approximately the 10th–9th millennia BCE. The site consists of circles of massive T-shaped stone pillars bearing detailed reliefs of animals: bulls, boars, foxes, snakes, birds. The images are carefully executed and easily recognisable — semiotically, they are icons, functioning through their resemblance to their objects.
The standard interpretations — ritual centre, astronomical observatory, early temple — are not wrong, but they may be incomplete.
Consider the historical moment. Göbekli Tepe was constructed at precisely the period of transition from hunting to early herding and agriculture in the Fertile Crescent. This was a period of contact between groups with fundamentally different ontologies: those who hunted wild animals and those who were beginning to manage them.
The bull appears repeatedly across the site. For a hunter arriving at this place, the image of the bull represents a prey animal — a source of food and danger. For an early herder, the same image represents a managed resource — a source of labour and wealth. The image does not resolve this difference. But it creates a shared point of focus around which both groups can orient themselves, exchange knowledge, and begin to coordinate.
In this reading, Göbekli Tepe is not simply a ritual centre. It is a node of ontological synchronisation — a place where different ways of knowing and interacting with the world were brought into contact through shared iconic images.
Ritual as a Mechanism of Synchronisation
An image alone, however, is not sufficient. For a sign to become part of social practice it must be interpreted collectively. At this point ritual appears.
Ritual performs several functions: it fixes the meaning of the sign, it synchronises the actions of participants, it establishes shared rules, and it creates emotional investment in the shared reference point. The sequence can be described as follows:
image → collective attention → ritual → coordination of practices
In this sense the image of an animal is not merely a decorative element but a point of concentration for collective knowledge — the fixed centre around which different practitioners can gather, compare their understanding, and begin the process of coordination.
Cave Paintings as Pedagogy, Not Art
As groups grew in size, a new problem emerged: how to transmit knowledge to those who did not participate in the event directly.
Joint practice remains the most important method of learning. Yet it has an inherent limitation: not everyone can be present. A hunt involves a limited number of participants. Complex strategies cannot be rehearsed in real time with the full group. Young members, those recovering from injury, and those with other roles cannot always learn by direct participation.
This is where images perform a function that has been systematically underestimated in archaeological interpretation.
Cave paintings and rock art should not be understood primarily as artistic expression or as evidence of symbolic consciousness in the abstract. They are more precisely understood as representational tools for the discussion and transmission of collective experience — diagrams of shared action, made for those who were not present.
Consider the characteristics of many prehistoric cave images: animals in motion, multiple figures in relation to one another, repeated standardised scenes. These are not portraits. They are scenarios. They show what happened, who did what, and in what sequence. They are, in essence, the earliest known form of instructional representation.
Around such images, a group could gather and reconstruct an event: discuss what went well, explain the roles of different participants, train newcomers in the logic of collective action. The image becomes a tool for the collective processing and transmission of experience.
The Elders: The First Institution of Verbal Knowledge Transfer
The model of learning through joint practice has one further limitation that is rarely discussed in the context of language origins.
Adult members of a group — the hunters, the herders, the craftspeople — are occupied. Their knowledge is embedded in action. They transmit it through demonstration, through presence, through shared work. This system is highly effective, but it depends on co-presence and physical capacity.
The emergence of care for elderly and disabled members of the group — itself a significant marker of social development — created an unexpected cognitive resource. Individuals who could no longer participate directly in hunting or herding were nevertheless repositories of accumulated knowledge. They had participated in more events, observed more outcomes, and accumulated a broader picture of what worked and what did not. Freed from the demands of physical activity, they could concentrate on the transmission of knowledge through a different channel: verbal description, narrative, and the use of images as aids to explanation.
This institutional role — the elder as teacher — may have been one of the primary drivers of the rapid development of verbal language. The capacity for verbal transmission that began as a supplement to demonstration gradually became an independent channel, capable of conveying complex knowledge to those who had never participated in the relevant practice at all.
Children, in particular, began to acquire knowledge verbally at an increasingly early age — knowledge of animals, dangers, techniques, and social rules — long before they were capable of participating in the activities themselves. The image of the bull, explained verbally by an elder, became the child's first cognitive map of a world they had not yet encountered directly.
Images as Nodes of Synchronisation
Bringing all these elements together, the following model can be proposed.
Key objects of the surrounding world — large animals above all — become cognitive centres around which knowledge is organised. Iconic images of these objects perform several interconnected functions:
Within the group: they serve as stable reference points for the transmission of experience to those who did not participate directly — through discussion, narrative, and ritual rehearsal.
At the boundary between groups: they provide a shared visual anchor that allows strangers to establish common ground without a shared language — the first step toward communication and coordination.
Across ontological differences: a single image can serve as a point of contact between groups with fundamentally different practices and worldviews, creating the possibility of knowledge exchange without requiring either party to abandon its framework.
In the development of language itself: the naming of the iconic object — the bull — provides the first shared lexical item around which verbal communication between strangers can be organised, preceding and enabling the transmission of procedural knowledge.
In this sense, iconic images may function as nodes synchronising collective experience across the boundaries of group, practice, and ontology.
Hypothesis and Its Limitations
It is important to acknowledge what this model cannot prove.
Archaeology rarely allows communication processes to be observed directly. We see stone pillars, cave paintings, and tools — but not the conversations that surrounded them. The attribution of pedagogical or synchronising functions to specific images requires inference, and inference can be wrong.
Several elements of this model are particularly difficult to verify archaeologically: the internal communication dynamics of early groups, the specific role of elderly individuals in knowledge transmission, and the sequence in which object knowledge and procedural knowledge were transmitted.
Nevertheless, the model is not purely speculative. It makes predictions that can be tested against the archaeological and ethnographic record: the standardisation of animal imagery in places of inter-group contact; the presence of sequential or instructional scene compositions; the spatial organisation of sites in ways consistent with collective gathering and discussion; the correlation between evidence of inter-group exchange and the complexity of shared symbolic systems.
The Cathedral and the Book: A Recurring Pattern
The model proposed in this article is not confined to prehistory. It describes a pattern that recurs at every major turning point in the history of human communication.
In the nineteenth century, Victor Hugo articulated an intuition that reaches far beyond its immediate context. In Notre-Dame de Paris, he proposed that the printed book would kill the cathedral — ceci tuera cela. On the surface, this reads as a claim about competing media. But at a deeper level, Hugo was describing exactly the dynamic this article has traced.
The medieval cathedral was not simply a building, and not simply a religious institution. It was a material node of ontological synchronisation — a place where people arriving with fundamentally different frameworks of experience (the peasant, the knight, the merchant, the monk, the pilgrim from a distant region) encountered a shared system of iconic images. The portals, the stained glass, the sculptural programmes functioned precisely as Peirce's icons: recognisable, visually immediate, requiring no shared verbal language to begin the work of creating common ground. You did not need to be literate. You did not need to speak the same dialect. The image of the bull on the pillar at Göbekli Tepe and the image of Christ in the tympanum at Chartres are separated by ten thousand years, but they perform the same cognitive and social function: they are points where different ontologies can meet.
What Hugo sensed was that the printed book does not simply replace the cathedral as a carrier of information. It transforms the entire structure of synchronisation. The cathedral operates through collective, embodied, spatial experience — people gather in one place, interpret images together, participate in ritual that fixes shared meaning. The book operates through individual, verbal, abstract experience — it is portable, it can be read alone, it does not require co-presence. The gain in precision and reach is enormous. But something is lost: the specific power of the shared iconic image in shared space to bring different ontologies into contact without requiring them to first agree on words.
This is not a unique transition. It is a recurring one. The pattern this article has traced — from gesture and guttural signal, to iconic image, to ritual synchronisation, to verbal transmission, to institutionalised language — does not end in prehistory. It replays at every moment when a new medium emerges and the existing nodes of synchronisation are challenged:
cave → temple → cathedral → printed book → internet
Each transition shifts the balance between the iconic and the symbolic, between collective and individual interpretation, between presence and abstraction. Each time, the new medium offers greater reach and precision. Each time, something of the older synchronising function is lost and must be reconstructed in a new form.
We are living through such a transition now. The question of how different ontologies — different practices, different communities, different ways of understanding the world — find shared points of recognition is not an archaeological question. It is an urgent contemporary one.
Conclusion
Human communication probably developed not only through words. Before the emergence of complex linguistic systems, people used gestures, vocal signals, demonstration, ritual, and iconic images as a coordinated system for managing shared knowledge.
Within this system, images of important objects — above all large animals — could function as shared cognitive anchors. They served the transmission of experience within the group, the creation of common ground between groups, and the bridging of different ontological frameworks.
The development of language itself may have been driven not by internal group complexity alone, but by the encounter with the stranger — the moment when the familiar system of hierarchy and shared signal broke down, and a new kind of social bond had to be constructed from nothing, around a shared point of recognition.
The ancient images of animals — from cave paintings to the reliefs of Göbekli Tepe, from the portals of medieval cathedrals to the icons of the digital screen — were not the beginning of art. They were the beginning of the infrastructure through which human beings learned to think together across difference. That infrastructure has changed its form many times. The chain runs from the bull carved in stone ten thousand years ago to the cathedral Hugo mourned, and from there to every new medium that promises to connect us. Each link in that chain is built on the same foundation: a shared image, a moment of mutual recognition, and the possibility of a conversation that could not otherwise begin.
Top comments (0)