The Dawn of Metaphor: From Protolanguage to Prehistoric Art: 6 The Human Threshold — What Symbolic Art Made Possible

Symbolic art did more than embellish existence; it expanded the horizons of human possibility. With the stratification of the content plane and the emergence of junctional metaphor, humans could hold meanings in relation to meanings. With images and myth, they externalised these relations, creating durable, collective extensions of the mind. The world was no longer merely inhabited; it could now be interpreted, rehearsed, and imagined in layers of symbolic potential.

Prehistoric art functioned as a cognitive and social scaffold. Hand stencils, animal paintings, and abstract designs allowed individuals to locate themselves in relation to communal experience, to participate in shared construals of space, time, and action. Through these artefacts, the symbolic capacity of language found material expression, and human thought acquired continuity beyond the fleeting moment. Memory became externalised; learning became participatory; imagination became collective.

By materialising metaphor, early humans could manipulate potentialities in ways that action alone could not achieve. A painted bison could teach hunting strategy, communicate cosmological understanding, or evoke spiritual reflection. A spiral motif could encode cycles of time, relational hierarchies, or sacred pathways. Symbolic art condensed complex relations into perceivable forms, enabling cognition and sociality to extend beyond the immediacy of embodied experience.

In this threshold moment, humanity achieved a new form of reflexive existence. Through language, metaphor, image, and myth, humans became agents not only of action but of meaning-making itself. They could create, inhabit, and transmit symbolic worlds, each act of representation opening a space for further construal and transformation. Symbolic art was not a supplement to life; it was the mechanism through which life itself became semiotically self-aware.

The human threshold is thus the point at which Homo sapiens emerges as Homo symbolicus: a being whose world is structured by layered, junctional meaning, whose cognition is extended through material forms, and whose imagination can navigate realms of potential as richly as immediate reality. Prehistoric art is the trace of that threshold, the first tangible evidence of humanity’s capacity to project reflexivity into the world and to co-inhabit symbolic fields that extend beyond the individual.