The Dawn of Metaphor: From Protolanguage to Prehistoric Art: 3 The First Images — From Gesture to Representation

The first images were not illustrations of reality; they were externalised metaphors, material gestures through which the newly stratified symbolic system extended itself into the world. Just as a word could simultaneously realise a congruent meaning and a metaphorical meaning, a painted bison, a hand stencil, or a spiral engraving could function as a token standing for a relational value — an experiential, cultural, or conceptual significance that exceeded the act of its making.

Gesture became form. Movement became trace. The act of pressing pigment to stone, carving lines into bone, or arranging sand patterns was a junctional act, bridging the internal semantic potential with a public, externalised representation. The image simultaneously held multiple layers of significance: immediate, referential, and metaphorical. Like linguistic metaphor, these early marks folded experience upon itself, making perceptible what was otherwise intangible: relations of agency, environment, ritual, and imagination.

Consider the bison of Lascaux. It is not simply an animal; it is the hunt, the vitality of prey, the human engagement with survival, and the human capacity to abstract these relations into symbolic form. The spiral at Newgrange is not merely a decoration; it is time, motion, and cosmological ordering, rendered legible through the materiality of the design. These are the first metaphoric inscriptions, the early materialisations of the junctional principle that language had internalised.

In this sense, prehistoric art does not emerge independently of language but in parallel with it, expressing the same stratified and reflexive architecture in a different modality. Gesture, pigment, and engraving become extensions of semantic potential, allowing humans to project the newly possible reflexivity of meaning into space and time. Through these acts, internal experience became collectively inhabitable, and the symbolic field expanded beyond speech into durable, shared artefacts.

The first images are therefore neither decorative nor merely functional; they are semiotic gestures, embodiments of a mind newly capable of recursive meaning. Each mark is both act and sign, gesture and token, congruent and metaphorical. In creating the first art, humans performed the junctional operation of metaphor in matter itself, opening the world to symbolic inhabitation and setting the stage for myth, ritual, and culture.