From Cave Walls to Verification Badges
Ancient handprints, modern selfies: How humanity’s need to be seen connects cave walls to social media and why stone preserves stories better than silicon.
Groog dipped her hand into the ochre mix of a stone hollow deep in the cave, raised it and placed a final mark next to the other images. This was her hand. Her mark. She’d participated in one of the clan’s greatest hunts. Her reward, well earned. All would know.
Simon hit the send button. He’d worked hard on this clip. Getting to be such a huge influencer on social media had taken him a few years. This post was going to be awesome and signal his status a top influencer.
5,000 years later, exploring a cave, archeologists were delighted to find a new cave, which would be over 45,000 years old with a set of human handprints around an old beast. On the ground next to it was what they now knew to be some form of communications tool from the 21st century. But there was no way to know to whom it had belonged or what they’d done with it. Groog lived on, Simon was lost to time.
Here lies a paradox to our current digital age. Palaeolithic pigments, crudely made, seemingly last forever. While our sophisticated digital technologies leave nothing behind. Victims of technological obsolescence. Our apparently advanced civilisation may leave fewer endurable traces than our technologically simpler ancestors.
But more than the permanence, or lack thereof, these acts remain deeply rooted in aspects of what it means to be human. That our ancestors did things we still do today. It shows us that while we may wield astounding technologies, culture, through human behaviour, is quite ancient.
So how can we even compare our ancient ancestors with today’s influencers and social media content? While roles and titles may have evolved, the reasons behind them remain remarkably similar.
Cave paintings weren’t there as art. Perhaps some were, but we can never truly know. Most were to celebrate hunts, cosmological events, migrations. They served as a sort of visual database, or what we might today call a knowledge management system. An analog version of Wikipedia.
On Instagram, TikTok or YouTube Shorts, these videos serve a similar purpose. They transmit cultural facts such as dance routines, cooking, fitness routines, craft methods. Hand stencils and the myths on caves tell similar stories to today. And both systems operate without a central authority, yet hold to similar patterns and social conventions.
Just as communities online form around hashtags and visual aesthetics that may trend, cave art too served to build and strengthen communities and build cultural identities. But cave drawings weren’t just utilitarian. They incorporated elements of play and creativity along with social signalling.
It is likely that those who were the most “artistic” of cave dwelling creators may have held a fairly high status in their clans, much the same as a talented creator on Instagram or TikTok rise to prominence with their communities. Today’s version is a status or verification badge on a social media app.
Unlike Palaeolithic influencers however, today’s can become wealthy financially. Mind you, a Palaeolithic influencer would probably have preferred an extra Mastodon steak for payment.
The Shamans of those clans and tribes, who were talented with drawings also mediated between worlds; the spiritual and the real. Today’s influencers mediate between our ordinary lives and aspirational consumer realities.
Cave drawings, paleoanthropologists and archeologists suspect, may have incorporated experiences induced by hallucinogens (entheogens) or sensory deprivations, rhythmic sounds. While hallucinogens and drugs may be used by some influencers today, they can also use filters and editing tools to create similarly altered versions of reality.
There is even similarities with ritual performances. Shamanic rituals and influencer content creation both involve highly structured performances. Often including specific technical elements that may appear spontaneous but follow well established and practised patterns and rules.
Sadly, we are likely to lose much of todays influencer creations. Even books last longer than any current digital storage medium. And much of this digital content is stored at the whim of corporations. It’s not wrong, it’s just that we haven’t evolved a means of digital preservation to ensure the handing down of these sociocultural artefacts.
There are some organisations that are trying to preserve this history, such as the Memory of Mankind (MoM) project. And the Internet Archive. Some of what takes place of course, includes being published in analog books that include images, but can’t include videos or audio.
So we have this tension between our advancement of technologies and the preservation of what we create digitally. The unprecedented ability to create and share culture and the vulnerability of losing it completely. Wonder if I can go paint this article on a cave wall somewhere?