Neuroimaging supports the representational nature of the earliest human engravings

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.

A SENtence Supramodal Areas AtlaS (SENSAAS) based on multiple task-induced activation mapping and graph analysis of intrinsic connectivity in 144 healthy right-handers

“…Furthermore, in her 2012 review, Price considered these areas to be involved in sentence processing depending on the task demand (Price 2012). FUS4 is a region of the ventral route that corresponds to the visual word form area (Mellet et al 2018). It is notable that this region was activated and leftward asymmetrical during the three tasks and segregated with the other visual regions at rest.…”

Aristotle's dream: Evolutionary and neural aspects of aesthetic communication in the arts

“…Before the first highlights of art around 35,000 years B.P., humans collected natural materials in the forms of faces, animals, or vulvas-what they later manufactured themselves (Herrmann & Ullrich, 1991). Some researchers have attempted to explain the productional outcome from the neural mechanism of perception (for instance, see a recent debate on the so-called neurovisual resonance theory by Hodgson, 2019aHodgson, , 2019bMellet, Salagnon, et al, 2019;and Mellet, Colagè, et al, 2019). However, one should be cautious in this approach, as the neural mechanisms of perception and action are not exactly the same (Goodale & Milner, 1992;Goodale & Westwood, 2004;Schenk & McIntosh, 2010).…”

What was the first “art”? How would we know?

“…Hodgson's theory, however, was met with swift disagreement in a 2019 paper by archaeologist Francesco d'Errico and collaborators (9). D'Errico pointed out that he'd used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in a prior study to identify the brain areas stimulated by a variety of images, including 540,000-to 30,000-year-old engravings, as well as landscapes, objects, words with no meaning in alphabetic writing, and fragments of Linear B ancient writing systems, as well as the scrambled versions of all these stimuli (10). D'Errico and coauthors found that the scrambled versions of all the stimuli were processed in participants' primary visual cortexes, indicating simple visual perception without further processing by the brain.…”