Prehistoric art, language, and myth are not isolated achievements; they are the first manifestations of a reflexive cosmos, a world capable of folding back upon itself. Each hand stencil, bison painting, spiral, and sand drawing is a mirror of meaning, reflecting the capacity of humans to perceive, construe, and extend relations across time and space. This mirror is infinite because the stratified content plane and junctional metaphor make each act of representation both singular and generative: a token standing for value, a new opening in the symbolic field.
In this mirror, humans first apprehended the possibility of worlds within worlds. Language allowed internal experience to be mapped onto expression; images made metaphor tangible; myth organised symbolic potential into coherent, shared narratives. Together, these modalities created a symbolic horizon in which experience, imagination, and sociality could be continuously expanded. The world could be seen as malleable, interpretable, and inhabitable through reflexive construal.
The infinite mirror is also a reminder of continuity: the junctional principle that enabled prehistoric humans to paint, carve, and narrate remains operative today. Every word, every image, every story participates in the same architecture of meaning, projecting reflexivity into space and time. Prehistoric art is therefore not only a historical phenomenon but a living insight into the human condition: that consciousness, culture, and creativity arise where meaning can stand for meaning, and where the world can see itself reflected in human symbolic action.
In the end, the dawn of metaphor was the dawn of symbolic possibility itself. Through stratified content, junctional metaphor, and the externalisation of reflexive meaning in art and myth, humans crossed the threshold into a new mode of being. The infinite mirror of prehistoric symbolic activity remains with us, a continuing invitation to inhabit, interpret, and extend the worlds we co-create.
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