Long before the first bison appeared on a cave wall, long before a hand pressed ochre against stone, there were sounds—patterned, expressive, relational. Our ancestors had a protolanguage: a semiotic system with a content plane and an expression plane, like many species do today. Its meanings were immediate, tied to context and behaviour, inseparable from the act of doing. But something happened that changed everything—not a biological leap, but a semiotic one. What made Homo into Homo sapiens was not the invention of communication, but the stratification of the content plane. With language, the content plane split into two strata—semantics and lexicogrammar. This internal differentiation created a new kind of reflexivity: meanings could now be construed as other meanings.
Halliday described metaphor as a “junctional” phenomenon, because a wording realises both its congruent meaning and a metaphorical meaning—a token standing for a value internal to the semantic system itself. This token–value relation multiplies the possibilities of meaning: one expression can point beyond itself, folding experience back into the system and opening vast new fields of construal. The stratification of meaning is thus the condition of possibility for symbolic life itself—for art, myth, and ultimately, consciousness. Prehistoric art is not the origin of symbolism; it is its flowering—the moment metaphor finds its first canvas.
With the stratification of the content plane, language became a system capable of internal reflexivity. The lexicogrammar provided the means to realise semantic potential; semantics, now differentiated from expression, provided the space in which meanings could stand for meanings. Through metaphor, humans could do something unprecedented: they could map one domain of experience onto another, construe the familiar as unfamiliar, the material as symbolic, and the present as reflective of deeper potentials. Meaning became recursive, and reflexive awareness became semiotically feasible.
The earliest cave markings, hand stencils, and abstract motifs are extensions of this junctional principle. A spiral scratched into stone, a bison painted on a wall, or a sand pattern in a ceremonial ground is not merely a representation of something external; it is a token of a value within human construal, a material instantiation of symbolic reflexivity. The handprint is simultaneously gesture, signature, and metaphor—a stand-in for the human agent, their relation to the environment, and the conceptual possibilities of both. This reflexive architecture allowed humans to externalise experience into durable, shareable forms, creating the first symbolic cosmos.
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. 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.
Language and image are not separate inventions; they are parallel expressions of the same symbolic reorganisation. Both arise from the stratification of the content plane and both operate through junctional metaphor. In speech, a word realises a congruent and a metaphorical meaning; in art, a line, shape, or gesture functions similarly, a token standing for a relational value within human experience. Both modalities fold the world back upon itself, making internal construal externally accessible. Through this parallelism, prehistoric art did not merely reflect language but amplified its capacity, exploring dimensions of experience less constrained by temporality or embodiment. Art is therefore a natural extension of linguistic reflexivity: both modalities instantiate the human ability to hold multiple layers of meaning simultaneously, both congruent and metaphorical.
If language and image constitute parallel pathways of symbolic reflexivity, myth arises as their synthesis, the orchestration of symbolic potential into coherent narrative. Myths are not mere stories; they are structured construals of human experience, abstracted from immediate enactment yet grounded in it, allowing communities to inhabit, remember, and transmit relations across generations. Through myth, the junctional principle of metaphor operates on a collective scale. A single narrative element can signify multiple layers simultaneously: literal, symbolic, cosmological, and moral. Myth, in effect, projects the stratified content plane of language and the reflexivity of image onto communal life, creating a symbolic cosmos that can be navigated, rehearsed, and extended.
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, allowing individuals to locate themselves in relation to communal experience, to participate in shared construals of space, time, and action. Memory became externalised; learning became participatory; imagination became collective.
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. Homo sapiens had become 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, 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. 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.
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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