ArticleRoyal Society open science2019
Neuroimaging supports the representational nature of the earliest human engravings.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Traces of Intentionality: Balance, Complexity, and Organization in Artworks by Humans and Apes.Topics in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Humans 40,000 y ago developed a system of conventional signs.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Experimental insights into cognition, motor skills, and artistic expertise in Paleolithic art.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- A hole in a piece of cardboard and predictive brain: the incomprehension of modern art in the light of the predictive coding paradigm.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- From fossils to mind.Communications biology · 2023Review
- Neural correlates of perceiving and interpreting engraved prehistoric patterns as human production: Effect of archaeological expertise.PloS one · 2022Article
- News Feature: What was the first "art"? How would we know? Recently discovered cave paintings and bone carvings offer new perspectives on long-held questions about art's origins-not to mention the nature of art itself.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- What Early Sapiens Cognition Can Teach Us: Untangling Cultural Influences on Human Cognition Across Time.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Neuroimaging supports the representational nature of the earliest human engravings.Royal Society open science · 2019Article
- A SENtence Supramodal Areas AtlaS (SENSAAS) based on multiple task-induced activation mapping and graph analysis of intrinsic connectivity in 144 healthy right-handers.Brain structure & function · 2019Article
- Style of pictorial representation is shaped by intergroup contact.Evolutionary human sciences · 2019Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The earliest human graphic productions, consisting of abstract patterns engraved on a variety of media, date to the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic. They are associated with anatomically modern and archaic hominins. The nature and significance of these engravings are still under question. To address this issue, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activations triggered by the perception of engraved patterns dating between 540 000 and 30 000 years before the present with those elicited by the perception of scenes, objects, symbol-like characters and written words. The perception of the engravings bilaterally activated regions along the ventral route in a pattern similar to that activated by the perception of objects, suggesting that these graphic productions are processed as organized visual representations in the brain. Moreover, the perception of the engravings led to a leftward activation of the visual word form area. These results support the hypothesis that these engravings have the visual properties of meaningful representations in present-day humans, and could have served such purpose in early modern humans and archaic hominins.
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