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Chapter 7In a Child’s Eyes: Human Origins and

Paleolithic Life in Children’s Book Illustrations

Nena Galanidou

1. Pictures to catch children’s imaginations

In June 2005 the pop star Madonna launched the fifth and last of her series of picture books for children, inspired by Hebrew Kabbalah texts. Her books have been translated into 30 languages and are on sale in 100 countries, with print runs of anything between a few hundred and many hundreds of thousands (BBC news online). Amongst professional producers and distributors of children’s books, reactions to her work have been mixed. Madonna is not the only high-profile member of an entirely different profession to have set up a sideline in children’s literature. The modern western world could be said to regard writing a children’s book as a ‘rite of passage’ conferring greater moral respectability upon the writer: by writing for an audience regarded as innocent and pure, he or she lays claim to a personal association with these qualities. Zelizer (1985) describes this view as ‘romanticized and sacralized’. Madonna’s literary rivals have included politicians, football players, media figures and even mobsters (MacPherson 2004). There is also, of course, money to be made. Within what is now a globalized and highly commercial market, publish-ers will accept any children’s book that will sell. It is upon this same market that children’s books written (or supposedly written) principally in order to educate must be launched. In this chapter I shall be discussing children’s books that belong to the edu-cational genre consisting of visual and textual narratives about human origins and life during the Paleolithic. Inspired by palaeoanthropological findings, these books are meant to educate children by introducing them informally to various aspects of early human prehistory. Their power lies in the fact that their vivid verbal and pictorial renditions of the history of early humanity lend flesh and color to what are to many perhaps the most distant and least attractive of archaeological finds: the lithic artifacts, bones and human fossils found in Pliocene and Pleistocene strata. A strong publishing house will translate and release such texts to many countries, making them, like Madonna’s books, part of a global culture; throughout

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Europe and on both sides of the Atlantic, parents or teachers in search of a book of this sort are bound to come across some of the same titles. It is the books they buy that will guide their children on their mental voyage through the Paleolithic and cultivate their ideas about a heritage shared by all modern humans, irrespective of race, nationality or religion. My criti-cal examination of the portrayal of early prehistoric life and the history of human evolution offered by these texts will focus upon that inordinately powerful component of a children’s book: the illustrations. During the 1990s historians of science came increasingly to exam-ine the visual imagery of geology and paleontology and to challenge the role of illustrations in shaping their discourse (e.g. Baigrie 1996; Gould 1993, 1997; Haraway 1989; Rudwick 1992). Within the same vein, Stepha-nie Moser’s pioneering research into the history of visual representations of the archaeological ‘deep past’ and ‘otherness’ has shown that a large part of the repertoire of attributes depicted can be traced back to classi-cal and medieval times (1992, 1998). Her work has had a radical effect upon the ways in which we now approach the visual imagery produced and consumed in contexts as disparate as museum dioramas, archaeology textbooks, advertising and mass culture. Diane Gifford-Gonzalez (1993), Clive Gamble (1998) and V. Stoczkowski (1994, 1997) have also offered incisive critical insights into the content of ‘scientific’ illustrations and their effect in shaping views about human origins and the Early Stone Age. Gamble observes that visual representations can restrict the development of multiple alternative views about the past:

These are powerful, arresting images that shoulder aside alternative visions. Their power is such that the scenes which are commonly reconstructed become the only ones we will see of human origins. So, our experience of the remote past is controlled neither by the evidence we can dig up nor by the scientific analyses we can perform on it, but instead by what we already expect to see of it. (Gamble 1998: x)

Gifford-Gonzalez has called for a reflective collaboration between scientists and artists in order radically to expand the range of possible pasts represented in scenes of prehistoric life, incorporating alternative views about social roles and about the assignment of activities according to gender and age (1993: 38). The methodological and interpretive repercussions of the work that I have mentioned are profound. It can no longer be regarded as ac-ceptable automatically to view any visual imagery of the ‘deep past’ as neutral or objective. The illustrators of children’s books often draw upon a ‘pool’ of visual sources created in connection with institutions whose status appears to validate these images: museums, cultural heritage sites and textbooks, for example. Other sources may well be pictures downloaded from the web, or other children’s books. I believe it to be important at this point that we should expand the work described above to take in visual

Human Origins and Paleolithic Life in Children’s Book Illustrations

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imagery designed for children. My subject will be the stories that this imagery tells children about the Paleolithic and the ideas with which it makes them familiar. The many illustrations that I have examined in this connection share, as will be seen, a limited number of themes. I shall be examining and comparing the illustrations that have become the ‘canoni-cal’ icons (sensu Gould 1997) of the Paleolithic and those alternative visual representations that have sought to establish new possibilities.

2. The sample of books examined

The sample studied consists of 31 books published between 1979 and 2005 (Table 1). Classified as ‘educational books’, they were distributed worldwide through museum shops and bookshops. They target various age groups from preschool to adolescence. Their contents include text, il-lustrations, glossaries, instructions to parents and teachers, cards to cut out, adhesives, games and other proposed activities intended to allow the embedded information to be assimilated in a creative and entertaining way. The illustrations variously consist of photographs of archaeological or ethnographic material, color drawings and sketches. I have chosen here to deal with ‘illustrated’ books; in other words, those whose visual images are intended to illustrate the text, but are not supposed to be mutually connected (Cianciolo 1997; see also section on picture books in Egoff et al. 1996).1 In terms of content, the sample examined may be divided into two categories. The first of these contains 27 titles (1–27, Table 1). Some are parts of series dealing with natural or cultural history; some are stand-alone publications by specialists (25–27, Table 1) or non-specialists. The idea with which these books deal is anatomical and cultural change over the course of time. Most of them organize their material in historical order, the earlier stages of evolution being followed by later periods. According to the weight, scope and priorities of their authors and publishers, the departure point of these historical accounts may be the Big Bang, the dinosaurs, the earliest primates, the australopithecines, the genus Homo or the beginning of the modern human adventure. In a few instances thematic organization takes the place of a strictly historical account (18, Table 1). Most treatments of this sort aim to make children’s encounter with the past more interesting to them by answering the questions that they are supposed to be most likely to ask (did Paleolithic people really live in caves? did they eat chocolate? did they go to the doctor?) In such cases illustrations representing separate periods of prehistory (8, 9, Table 1) are

1 These are distinguished from ‘picture books’, defined as books in which illustrations visually weave the fabric of the story on a canvas provided by the author (Marantz 1983). Picture books about the Paleolithic are treated in Galanidou (forthcoming).


148

Tab

le 1

. Th

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lG

. Sm

ith

, B. H

erse

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cCai

g, K

. Tom

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ood

1998

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orn

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ish

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ath

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. Ran

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ols,

C

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ou, M

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-la

rd, D

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nt,

R.

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arm

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1989

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.N.R

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. L

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1994

(1

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1992

)

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149

8S

tep

into

th

e S

ton

e A

geC

. Hu

rdm

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Car

ter,

J. B

aker

1998

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kL

oren

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ooks

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nes

s P

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ish

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. Cor

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hom

pson

1994

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chu

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ooks

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ood

1994

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don

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ish

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k M

erri

man

&

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imes

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et, A

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cBri

de, P

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ll, J

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ayso

m, J

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D

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ariy

a

1995

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don

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2001

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Tab

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. Hoo

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. Ja

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, S. L

affo

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. M

arsh

, T. R

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, M.

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, P. S

arso

n,

R. S

hef

fiel

d, S

. S

titt

, M. W

hit

e, J

. W

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2000

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don

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pre

his

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Z-L

. Cre

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. P

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B. G

arel

, C.

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els

I. C

ham

berl

ain

, J.

Fis

her

, C. F

orse

y, D

. G

uer

rier

, C. H

ook,

R.

Lin

dsay

, P. W

ern

er

1998

(1

997)

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ens

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akis

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ath

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nch

20T

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lect

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1998

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don

, B

osto

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atu

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22H

omo

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anta

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ann

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C. R

anzi

C. R

anzi

1986

(1

982)

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izzo

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151

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1998

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enek

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1996

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1998

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1995

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.-L

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. Rog

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B

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2002

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ch

Tab

le 1

con

tin

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…


152

sometimes presented as parts of a single topic. For example, the heading ‘Where did prehistoric people live?’ is illustrated with a Paleolithic cave, a Neolithic house and an Amerindian tepee. The second category contains 4 books that contain representations of Paleolithic life while also dealing with other topics (28–31, Table 1). Inherent in these books is a diachronic view of the past: they see the Pa-leolithic as the very starting point of human history. Amongst these books, however, only 30 (Table 1), attempts to divide the Paleolithic by reference to species, technology or geography, or in any other manner. In the other texts this period is treated only as a prelude to the core theme of the book and is given no more than a couple of pages or a handful of images. The visual reconstructions employed embody a fixed sense of ‘primitiveness’. They do so by reproducing the visual tradition of the Greek mythical hero Herakles (Moser 1998: 29–30) (28, Table 1), by indicating an amount of body hair that would not currently be regarded as usual, or by other means. For instance, The Mastered Fire (29, Table 1), a book that aims to describe human use of fire from its very early discovery (Fig. 1) to the use of electric power, evokes primitivity by depicting half-naked cave oc-

Fig. 1. A Paleolithic cave scene from ‘The Mastered Fire’, © Synchroni Epochi (reproduced with permission).


153

cupants (all males being bearded) dressed in animal skins and a cuisine consisting of wild animals (Fig. 1). Drawing upon the comic tradition and deliberately using anachronisms, the illustrator contrasts a modern fry-ing pan with elements of prehistoric hunter gatherer life (Fig. 2) in order visually to explain why natural fire was sought after and how its controlled use improved daily life in the ‘deep past’.

3. Images of power and the power of images

Illustrations have a central place in ‘educational books’, particular-ly those intended for a younger audience. In such books pictures typically take up far more space than text.2 In recent years both visual artists and researchers in psychology and education have asserted the many benefits of this balance. As well as supplying visual cues as to the content of the text, illustrations are seen as cultivating aesthetic education, emotional development, the ability to consider concepts theoretically and a sense of space. Let us now consider the function of such illustrations as a ‘visual context for learning’ (Kiefer 1995, 7) about our Paleolithic heritage. Whatever their size or number, illustrations are powerful media that mobilize a child’s visual sense and direct the mental connection between what is narrated and what is portrayed. The components of an illustration (its lines, its colors, its proportions, its perspective, the characters and activities depicted and their location in the foreground or the background of a scene) combine to constitute a visual language that transmits a specific message about the past. The artist attempts to make the vocabulary of this language, its visual images, clear and attractive in order deliberately to create a lasting effect (perhaps dramatic, perhaps humorous) that will familiarize young readers with evolutionary concepts such as anatomic differentiation and cultural strategies for survival. The text may thus be the recipe, but it is the illustration that transmits its flavor. Discussing Paleolithic imagery, Gifford-Gonzalez draws an analyti-cal distinction between ‘anatomic reconstructions’ (visual representations of early humans’ soft tissues based upon the fossil evidence) and ‘dioramic representations’ (scenes depicting early humans carrying out activities in natural settings) (1993: 26–27). An illustration whose representation of hominid anatomy is faithful to the existing evidence may nonetheless depict its subjects within anachronistic or ideologically biased scenes. Many

2 This is best exemplified by a series of books, all entitled ‘The Imagery of…’, the first component of whose titles expresses the aim of transmitting educational material in visual form. Originally published in French, this series has also been translated into other languages. Paleolithic images appear in two books in this series; one deals specifically with prehistoric life (16, Table 1), while the other includes images depicting inventions (31, Table 1).


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illustrators who take great care over anatomical details seem to lose all inhibition when they come to depict certain living scenes, discarding the primary evidence in favor of powerful visual traditions. During the early 1980s, for example, the scientific illustrator Carlo Ranzi produced a series of what were then credible anatomical reconstructions of the hominid line, based upon a lengthy and meticulous study of the paleontological record. Ranzi’s image of the creator of the parietal imagery at the Upper Paleo-lithic cave of Niaux in France (3, 22, Table 1), however, predictably depicts an old male. Despite its painstaking anatomical correctness, this image has given rise to considerable conflict, since it perpetuates a narrow and androcentric reading of the Paleolithic record (Conkey 1997, Conkey et al. 1997). Another example is the ‘ladder of human evolution’, which puts in an appearance in most of the children’s books in our sample. This image classically compresses many thousands of years of evolution and multiple genetic processes into the linear march of a male figure from ‘primitivity’ to ‘civilization’, the figure’s anatomical features and technological achieve-ments being shown as gradually evolving towards perfection in the form of a modern white male. Gould has dealt with this image extensively in his discussion of canonical icons of human evolution (1997). Here we need merely note that whereas its anatomical reconstruction of hominids may indeed in many respects be accurate, its message is a distorted one. Hu-man evolution was neither a linear event nor a men-only club and it is not helpful light-heartedly to represent it as such. Following a different analytical path, Costall and Richards (chap-ter 3) argue that illustrators tend to convey a sense of ‘pastness’ by using a few visual elements linked to the past as its icons in the present. Three types of illustration that may employ this approach are discussed: (a) the purely decorative use of ancient motifs around page borders to create an atmosphere of antiquity, (b) pictures that directly represent the content of the text step by step, and (c) illustrations that expand upon the author’s text to present their own version of the subject, in which case the visual and textual narratives may not coincide. The second and third types may be identified as Gifford-Gonzalez’s dioramic representations. Since in the ‘educational books’ that we are examining anatomical reconstructions almost always appear within such representations, we shall now examine the dioramic representations of five hominid groups (classified by genus or species) within our sample.3 My quantification of these in Table 2 takes the illustration as its basic analytical unit, bearing in mind that an il-lustration may consist of multiple smaller scenes.

3 Illustrations that are supposed to represent the Stone Age in general rather than any specific species, or that represent species long vanished from the literature (e.g. archanthropus, pithecanthropus, paranthropus), are not included in my discussion.


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4. The Paleolithic for children

4.1 Canonical icons

There is a striking similarity, both thematic and structural, be-tween the dioramic representations used in connection with each hominid species depicted by the books listed in Table 1. Several key themes appear repeatedly in the illustrators’ depictions of change (whether evolutionary or cultural) through time. At each new stage of human evolution a par-ticular combination of attributes appears, incorporating any spectacular archaeological findings (new anatomical traits, activities, living environ-ments, elements of architecture, clothing, equipment or other technological achievements). Australopithecines are portrayed in woodland or open savannah. They stand upright and have small hairy bodies and apelike faces (Fig. 3). Their tools consist of their hands, wooden sticks, large bones and un-worked stones. They walk, gather plants for food, crush fruit and nuts, catch small

Fig. 2. The discovery of fire scene from ‘The Mastered Fire’, © Synchroni Epochi (reproduced with permission).


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game, reptiles and ants, compete for carcasses with other large carnivores and are threatened by them. Australopithecine illustrations depicting other animals almost invariably show lions and other great cats in the foreground, zebras in the background and vultures sitting in trees. The great cats’ visually dominant position and size within the composition express their aggressive intentions and the threat that they pose to the australopithecines. Three of our illustrations depict the Laetoli footprints; unlike many other dioramic representations, these are cautious in their interpretation. Only one shows the prints in the process of being made, by an adult and a child (5, Table 1). Over 70% of the hominids portrayed are adult males. Of the remaining 30% half are females (denoted by larger breasts, less ventral hair and sometimes an infant in arms) and half are

Fig. 3. The australopithecine scene from ‘My first History Larousse’ (in Greek) (c) 2003, METAIHMIO publications (for the Greek language), title of the original French edition: ‘Mon Premier Larousse de l’Histoire’ © Larousse / VUEF 2002 for all over the world (reproduced with permission).


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children (Table 2). Even those illustrations that fall within the comic tradition (Moser and Gamble 1997), as does that in Fig. 3, insist upon the hardship of australopithecine life, aggressive scenes of conflict between members of the species or between them and other large carnivores being popular. Homo habilis generally appears in open valleys whose background of high mountains or steep slopes calls to mind the Oldowai gorge and other present-day East African landscapes. Illustrators of these hominids are not in agreement regarding their anatomy: some draw them with apelike facial traits and hairy bodies, whilst others imagine them with little body hair (5, Table 1) or more ‘human’ faces (12, 17, Table 1). Inter-estingly, these differences show no temporal progression indicative of a trend in received opinion; regardless of the date of the illustration, the choice between these types appears to depend solely upon the illustrator’s preconceptions. Habilines are, however, always shown naked. They make stone tools, build huts out of branches and stones, gather food, scavenge, track and kill game of various sizes, butcher carcasses and contest the ownership of food with other primates. The archetypal theme that invari-ably appears is tool–making, or, as some authors prefer to describe it, tool-inventing. Illustrations belonging to the comic tradition (Moser and Gamble 1997) may resort to anachronism, depicting Homo habilis, for example, as a workman carrying a modern toolbox and a stone tool (14, Table 1). Those that adhere to the archaeological tradition (ibid.) depict a male adult knapping stone (1, 2, 5, 16, 17, 18, 22, Table 1) or teaching younger hominids to do so (1, Table 1). The habiline tool inventory is de-picted as containing not only stone tools, but bone hammers, sharpened sticks and large pieces of unworked wood used as walking sticks. The illustrations in our sample depict a total of 88 individuals, 75% of whom are male. Images of females (again identified by their less abundant body hair, larger breasts and association with infants) are conspicuously rare (9.1%). Typically pictured in or near huts, reinforcing the view that women belong at home and men outdoors, they are never shown making tools. Children (15.9%) are depicted as smaller adults, but without attributes designed to identify gender. Shown in close proximity to females and thus to huts, they help adults and consume food. Images of Homo erectus may or may not depict hairy bodies and apelike faces. Illustrators differentiate these hominids from others not by anatomical but by cultural traits: living in caves and discovering and using fire. Visual narratives often explain how their subjects observed naturally produced fire, mastered it and used it to protect themselves from wild beasts and to improve the ways in which they ate and lived. The great cats make an occasional appearance, but the animals vital to erectus imagery are big pachyderms, depicted as the quarry of choice in communal hunting scenes set in the shallow waters of a wetland land-scape. Caves, open or stone-lined hearths, hand axes, wooden spears and


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the occasional leather skin worn on some part of the body appear as the emblems of a species more culturally advanced than its predecessors. Erectus life overall is depicted as less precarious and dramatic than that of the earlier hominids. Despite these changes in the visual vocabulary, the male erectus is obviously still in charge. 78.8% of the individuals por-trayed are male, and it is they who achieve technological advances and ensure the survival of the group. Males collect raw stone and transform it into tools, train their young in their methods, discover and use fire and go out together to hunt large game. Meanwhile their females (9.6%), distinguished by curvy bodies, larger breasts and long hair, carry babies and maintain hearths. Children are a little more numerous than females (11.6%). As with the earlier groups, they are identifiable as children by their smaller stature, but no visual cues establish their sex. Two of our erectus scenes belong to the comic tradition (14, 29, Table 1), but most follow the archaeological tradition, within which a single image has proved paramount. Maurice Wilson’s painting of Homo erectus in the Choukoutien cave, commissioned in 1950 by the British Museum of Natural History (Moser 1998, Fig. 6.8), is clearly the source of the erectus scenes in books 3, 7, 17, 18, 22 and 25 (Table 1). Although the illustrators in our sample have variously reshuffled roles and activities, changed the number of individuals depicted, shown different prey species being carried to the cave and moved the interior of the cave into the foreground, all have fallen back upon the comfort and safety of this iconic view of erectus life. More than half a century after Wilson decided upon the core composition and main themes of his interpretation, they remain dynamically present in the visual material through which our children learn about this period. Illustrations of Homo neanderthalensis emphasize the distinctive anatomical and physiognomic characteristics of this species along with its technology, adoption of clothing and habit of living in caves. Depictions of the first composite tools (wooden spears onto which stone points have been hafted) convey the message that Neanderthals were more advanced than earlier species. H. neanderthalensis is shown engaged in a variety of activities: everyday tasks (almost invariably depicted as taking place in caves), hunting and trapping game, fighting and participating in rituals. Portrayed as a competitor for the same habitat, as a cult object and as the quarry in hunting scenes, the animal integral to Neanderthal imagery is the bear. It is in the Neanderthal scenes that depictions of elderly individu-als, distinguished by their white hair (and, in the case of the men, beards), first appear (12, 17, 25, Table 1). Despite this expansion, the demographic composition of these pictures remains unnaturally skewed: 9.8% of the individuals pictured are female and 13.7% are children, while 76.5% are male (Table 2). Clearly superior in more than number, men are shown taking the initiative in every activity depicted, watched by females whose only function appears to be childcare. The prevalence of images of this


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sort cannot but convey a lasting impression of the overriding importance of the Paleolithic male. Of the many ubiquitous Neanderthal images, perhaps the most iconic is the burial scene. Within our sample, the superficial details at-tached to this image vary according to the artist. The burial is shown taking place at different seasons and is drawn from different perspectives; the grave, which may be oval, rectangular or circular, may be depicted inside a cave or outdoors, and is attended by anything from two to sixteen people whose sex and age vary. The core elements of this composition are, how-ever, invariable and transmitted with strict care. The deceased is always male. Buried in a foetal position with tools and animal bones around it, his body is adorned with flowers or ochre. More recent images add a goat’s horn to these offerings (e.g. 18, Table 1). The faces of those attending the burial express sorrow and pain at the loss of a companion, conveying the message that Neanderthals shared close emotional ties. Three other im-ages (18, 22, 25, Table 1) illustrate these ties by depicting members of a Neanderthal group caring for an older and less able person. Both groups of images reveal the significant impact of the Shanidar cave findings upon the Neanderthal imagery purveyed to children. The iconography of Homo sapiens overwhelmingly refers to cultur al traits and activities that may be divided into three key areas: everyday life in camps, big game hunting and cave paintings. Caves are no longer the exclusive setting for everyday activities; more often than not these are shown taking place in open-air camps consisting of shelters made of wood, bone and hides. Here the illustrators have clearly based their ideas upon Amerindian tepees, the Upper Paleolithic mammoth-bone dwellings whose remains were found on the Russian plains and the Leroi-Gourhan reconstructions of the structures at Pincevent. Although the ‘architectural’ background to our illustrations has changed, the division of labor by gender has not. Men (almost always bearded) manufacture tools, return from the hunt carrying game, butcher carcasses and build shelters. Women (with long hair) carry babies, collect firewood, keep hearths alight, cut or cook meat and stitch hides. The same division applies to children, who are generally seen watching or helping with the activities carried on by adults of their own sex, holding small animals or greeting male hunters on their return from a successful hunt (for instance see Dommasnes, chapter 13, Fig. 2). Visual representations of big game hunting show all-male parties either in action or immediately after the hunt; their prey is a mammoth, an elephant or a bear. Most images produced during the 1990s show Up-per Paleolithic men and women wearing clothes inspired by ethnographic records of more recent hunter-gatherer attire: skin or fur loincloths, dresses or trousers. Some of the Upper Paleolithic women appear to have acquired an unmistakable erotic charge. With long, sexy legs and perky breasts, they could clearly be supposed to excite male desire (e.g. 19, Table 1). Typical divisions by gender may be observed in the dioramic rep-


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resentation of Pincevent published under the heading ‘Summer on the banks of the river Seine’ (7, Table 1). The 20 individuals portrayed here include five boys, 11 men, one person whose sex is uncertain and only three women, none of whom is in the foreground. One woman is brushing her hair while she watches a party of men engaged in various crafts; another is working a hide with a stone tool, while the third, who is surrounded by children as she puts a hot stone into a container full of some liquid, is presumably cooking. In this illustration the women are distinguished by their long hair and dresses. All but one of the men, who are bearded and wear trousers, are either making or carrying some sort of tool. This image is reminiscent of the reconstruction of Pincevent at Le Thot, the Cro-Magnon theme park 5km from Lascaux II in SW France, although it depicts a greater range of individuals and activities. Two of our examples depict Upper Paleolithic cave images in the context of male ceremonial activity (18, 23, Table 1). In every other case they are represented during the process of creation. The iconography of this theme is monotonous and repetitive, insistently purveying an an-drocentric interpretation of what many consider to have been the dawn of human artistic expression. Cave paintings or engravings are seen as the creations of one or more bearded men (e.g. Fig. 4). The male ‘artist’, assisted either by another man or by a figure of uncertain sex, stands on the cave floor or on a wooden platform or stepladder. The primacy of the male is reinforced by the positioning of these male creators at the centre or in the foreground of these scenes. Children, if present, are depicted in ancillary roles: watching the adults, playing or leaving hand stencils on the cave walls. The role of women, where present, is standard and unchang-ing: they are there to crush ochre for paint or to light the cave by holding a lamp or firebrand. Within our sample, women do not only appear to make up a strangely small proportion of the Upper Paleolithic population, 16.19%, compared to 67.45% for men (Table 2), but are also seen to be of very little importance to the immediate survival of the group, being of use only where babies, children and domestic activities are concerned. Apparently innocent scenes depicting the life of modern humans during the Paleolithic thus impart an arbitrary (given the evidence) and yet extremely powerful sense of gender roles and the hierarchies of social relationships at this time. Men are invariably seen as of prime importance, at the top of these hierarchies. By far the largest figure in the cover illustration of book 4 (Table 1) is a male hunter who dominates the picture’s foreground at centre stage. He is preparing his spear while teaching a young boy his hafting technique. Over towards the left-hand corner of this picture a secondary male actor is returning from hunting with his prize, a young deer, while to the left of the central male figure another hunter (male, to judge by his attire) bearing a spear carries another dead animal on his back. Women, half naked and far smaller than the men, appear only in the background


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of this illustration, under a sheltering rock, where they cook, knap stones and work a hide. It is interesting to note the way in which illustrations such as this use the presence or absence of body and facial hair to signify degrees of evolution and, by extension, of cultural development. In scenes depicting early hominids greater amounts of hair would appear to signify an earlier stage of evolution. Representations of Upper Paleolithic hom-inids, however, appear to suggest that a male fashion for beards marked the heyday of Paleolithic cultural achievement. These, then, are the principal differences common to our illustra-tors’ visual reconstructions of the evolution of hominids through time. We may note that even though our illustrations attribute different cultural traits, environmental backgrounds and anatomical details to different

Fig. 4. The Upper Paleolithic cave painting scene from ‘My first History Larousse’ (in Greek) © 2003, METAIHMIO publications (for the Greek language), title of the original French edition: ‘Mon Premier Larousse de l’Histoire’ © Larousse / VUEF 2002 for all over the world (reproduced with permission).


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species, the gender roles portrayed remain constant. The Paleolithic im-agery with which children are made familiar currently represents their male ancestors as responsible not only for ritual but for the technological innovations and subsistence activities vital to the immediate and long-term survival of their group; female ancestors, meanwhile, are associated solely with their reproductive functions and with subsidiary subsistence activities. This association is strengthened by the fact that illustrations of big-game hunting are given pride of place, while the gathering of plant foods is an extremely unusual subject. Men in their prime are portrayed as strong, active defenders, food providers and innovators who behave cou-rageously outside the confines of the campsite, while women are generally seen as clinging to the safety of the camp. Children do little to contribute to the welfare of the group, but receive valuable teaching for the future from male adults. Rarely shown playing, children are, like women, invari-ably excluded from ritual scenes, which of course imply some degree of sophistication and spirituality. Division of labor by gender, a concept that is not given any particular emphasis in scenes of early hominid life, is an immutable feature of Upper Paleolithic scenes, so that these illustrations perpetuate an association between men and culture and between women and biology (Conkey 1997). It is thus that we may purvey to our children a false statement that echoes and serves androcentric Western 19th and 20th century stereotypes.

4.2 The seeds of change

From the late 1980s onwards the reverberations from palaeoan-thropological debates as to the contributions of various social groups to the history of human evolution started to have some effect upon the imagery of ‘educational books’. Illustrations began to include women participating in big-game hunting (6, Table 1) and in ritual (18, Table 1), making baskets from reeds, hunting seabirds with slings (both in 18, Table 1) and gathering plants for food (10, 14, Table 1). Men were shown collecting shellfish and exchanging blades for seashells (10 and 18 respectively, Table 1). These images give some grounds for optimism. This is not, however, so much because they express any genuine alternative to received ideas regarding gender roles during this period as because they have expanded the range of activities conventionally depicted. The visual vocabulary of these images conveys contradictory and confusing messages to children. Women continue to constitute a ridiculously small proportion of the figures in any scene, and although their activities are now seen as more diverse, any figure seen to express ingenuity or to take a principal role in safeguarding a group’s short- and long-term survival is still invariably male. The cover illustra-tion of a British Museum activity book (6, Table 1) eloquently expresses these contradictions. It depicts a deer-hunting scene that includes a female hunter. Despite her inclusion in this scene, the rhythm and arrangement


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of this hunting party are immediately expressive of gender difference. The men, already efficiently prepared to shoot, have dynamically approached the quarry, while the woman stands behind them beginning to take aim. The message that this image conveys to a child must inevitably be that the men are leading and protecting their female companion. Sometimes contradictions between the visual and the textual nar-rative suggest that an attempt at reform has been made by the author, but not by the illustrator. The best examples of this are seen in book 10 (Table 1), which is remarkable for its thoughtful approach to the minor details of everyday life. Its illustrations show children playing, swimming, making tools and asking for food, men washing animal blood off their clothes in a river and women gathering fruit. One is tempted to suspect, however, that this approach derived rather from the author than from the illus-trator. Two examples will clarify this point. On page 6, the caption ‘This girl will go hunting with her parents when she is older’ (a statement that immediately expands the perceived range of female activities is applied to a less than innovative picture of a girl cutting up animal skins to make clothes. A few pages later, on page 13, the caption ‘This man is pretending to make a bone tool. He is really about to have a nap’, a statement that humorously plays down the respect conventionally accorded to the image of the male Paleolithic craftsman, accompanies a picture of a bearded male figure who is clearly performing hard and serious work upon a deer antler. These pictures are accompanied by the usual ladder of human evolution, a scene in which a male party hunts mammoths, Paleolithic parietal imagery incorporating the stereotype of the male artist and his female assistant and other canonical icons of the Paleolithic. This suggests that even where innovative ideas drive the author they may all too easily be neutralized by existing visual traditions in iconography that prove stronger than any force for change. An outstanding work that does not merely diverge from the canons of representation, but sets new standards in australopithecine imagery, is P. Picq’s ‘Lucy et son temps’ (27, Table 1). This book, written with the intention of explaining evolution in an attractive and creative manner, incorporates into its visual vocabulary alternative and entirely new ideas about australopithecine life. Its illustrations, by P. Verrechia, do not be-long to the mass-culture approach to popularizing prehistoric archaeology amongst children seen in the last section. These pictures include eight dioramic representations of peaceful everyday activities (such as breast-feeding, resting, bathing, grooming and cleaning up after babies) whose impression upon the viewer has little to do with the conventional idea of the aggressive, dangerous and generally miserable life supposedly led by this species. This vision of australopithecine social life follows the develop-ing trend that has modeled its ideas upon the sociobiology of chimpanzees rather than upon that of other aggressive non-human primates such as baboons (Tanner 1981; Hagger 1997), an approach whose visual language


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gives ‘an overall impression of a kinder, gentler hominid history’ (Zihlman 1997: 106). While we must gratefully acknowledge the few brave attempts made by illustrators between the early 1980s and the late 1990s to repre-sent the Paleolithic to children in a new and more responsible manner, we must also admit that little has changed. It would appear that the visual vocabulary currently associated with this period is so powerful and so deeply ingrained as to be able to throw off even conscious determination for change. The nature of the Paleolithic record is such that this is perhaps the only period of human prehistory whose textbooks must continuously, rather than merely continually, be revised and updated. It is vital that the visual imagery used to accompany these updates should keep pace with them. Where illustration and Paleolithic archaeology meet, the former would currently appear to be the dominant partner.

5. About illustrators

My skepticism regarding the existing canons of Paleolithic visual imagery as seen in ‘educational books’ implies no disrespect to the illustra-tor. Compressing millions of years of human prehistory and of biological and cultural processes into a drawing is no easy task. To the inherent talent and learned skills required to fulfill it (Shulevitz 1997; Salisbury 2004), much may be added by examining the existing ‘stock’ of images. Whether the illustrator seeks to imagine and depict soft body tissues that no longer exist, a scene of Neanderthal life or an abstract notion such as ‘evolution’, a review of the database of existing images is an essential first step. Just so must a scientist review the existing literature before attempting serious scientific research on any topic. So far, so good. The question is, however, why illustrators appear so reluctant to move beyond this initial stage by daring to produce images that do not conform to the existing canons. It is possible that compliance with standard visual images is seen as necessary because every vision of prehistory and especially of the ‘deep past’ is perforce imaginary. Remind-ing us of this, Gifford-Gonzalez points out the difference between images depicting this period and scenes based on data acquired from natural history or ethnography, in which the entities portrayed derive from some tangible model and thus ‘embody direct experience’ (1993: 25). Paleolithic scenes rely upon the illustrators’ own reading of the text and upon the esoteric process of imagining the past, upon which existing images, per-haps perceived long ago in childhood, must clearly have a great effect. As we saw in the introduction, the most controlling images are those whose inclusion in institutional publications endows them with the entire weight of the palaeoanthropological profession. Such images have perpetuated the powerful and unreconstructed visual language that is currently constantly recycled in children’s books, showing few signs of change. Perhaps it is


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time to cease to blame the illustrators for their conservatism. The time may have come to turn our headlights upon the specialists instead.

6. About palaeoanthropologists

The books in our sample reveal an interesting publishing trend. Only eight of them (21.62%) were written by professional archaeologists. 12 more (32.43%) acknowledge some degree of collaboration with archae-ologists or physical anthropologists, whose names, however, rarely make it onto the book’s cover. The extent of these specialists’ contributions thus remains unclear, as does the matter of whether or not they would be pre-pared to endorse the final product (including its visual imagery). However this may be, some form of scientific advice has been sought in just over half of the cases in our sample (54%). The remaining books acknowledge no such input. One side effect of this may be the occasional presence of inaccuracies or anachronisms. Most common amongst these are the ap-pearance of pottery in Paleolithic scenes (e.g. Fig. 1) and the presence of motifs borrowed from Upper Paleolithic rock ‘art’ in what is supposed to be the background to a Neolithic scene (e.g. 24, Table 1). Nothing in these scenes indicates that these anachronisms are deliberate (as in Fig. 2); they appear simply to reveal confusion regarding the technological advances proper to various hominids and periods in human prehistory. It may be no coincidence that all of the more thoughtful visual imagery discussed above appears in books that acknowledge some special-ist contribution (Table 1). Although it would clearly be desirable that all ‘educational books’ should be informed by professional advice, however, it would be a mistake to believe the lack of it to be responsible for the whole of our problem. Many of the canonical images that I have criticized were published in books that do lay claim to some specialist endorsement. We must thus assume either that the specialists concerned had no opportunity to inspect these images before publication, or that they did so inspect them and found nothing wrong with them, possibly because they were in no way discordant with the experts’ own interpretations of the Paleolithic. The first explanation raises the question of whether the publishing industry ought to rethink the mechanisms whereby specialists contribute to ‘edu-cational books’. The second reminds us that some of the many alternative readings of the past are far more powerful than others, not because of any outstanding interpretative value, but because their popularity and longevity have ingrained them in so many minds. Palaeoanthropologists concerned about social theory may well object to the form in which their findings reach a wider audience or the way in which they are mistreated by non-specialists (see, for example, Silverman chapter 5; Binant chapter 8; Dommasnes chapter 13), but their objections are unlikely to have much effect upon the massive children’s book industry. Perhaps such specialists are asking too much; perhaps they have naively failed to recognize the


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fact that this is an industry driven by profit. Where books are intended to educate children, however, should not quality be the most important criterion?

7. About children

Research in developmental psychology confirms that childhood, from earliest infancy onwards, is the period during which the capacity of the human brain to learn is at its peak. In the first section of this book, P. Bauer and R. Fivush explore the ways in which a child’s sense of the past and of history (initially his or her own; later that of others) is established (chapters 1 and 2 respectively). Historical context is also important in the process of ‘making sense’. Bruner and Haste describe this process as a social activity: “by interacting with parents and teachers, the child acquires a framework for interpreting experience and learns how to ne-gotiate meaning in a manner congruent with the requirements of its own culture, context and time” (1987: 1). Children’s perception of pictures intended to convey information about the past may be regarded as a similar process of ‘making sense’, and is likewise influenced by cultural and historical constraints, by the perceptual capacity of the individual child and by that child’s environment, mood and state when he or she is introduced to a picture (see Costall and Richards chapter 3). As visual aids to understanding, pictures are part of the social activity of learning by reading. As Costall and Richards stress,

[c]hildren develop a sense of the past not just by looking at pictures, but becoming engaged in conversations about them…. (chapter 3: p. 67, emphasis added)

This leads us to consider the effects upon children’s learning of interaction with adults as they read, a topic whose importance is stressed by R. Fivush in chapter 2. Anyone who has ever read books to preschool children will be well aware that with adult guidance they very rapidly develop a strong sense of the correspondence between text and image. Once a book has been read to a child a few times, he or she will expect, as each familiar picture is revealed, to hear exactly those words that accompanied the picture last time. Personal experience suggests that children of this age often ask to have their favorite stories repeated again and again in order to clarify the visual material that accompanies them. Repetition is an important key to the learning process. Any visual narrative of the ‘deep past’ contained in a children’s book that is seen, read and introduced more than once thus wields considerable power, since such books target an audience whose members learn fast and have neither the means nor the volition to challenge the validity of what they learn. Many have argued that the fairy tales, myths and religious legends that we tell to children during their formative years profoundly affect their characters and their


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ideas about the world. According to Bettelheim, input of this sort ‘feeds a child’s imagination and offers the material through which children form their views on world’s origins and destination and the social aspirations upon which future self-construction is founded’ (1997: 236). Every ‘reconstruction’ of antiquity simultaneously constructs a specific view about it (Silverman chapter 5; Economou chapter 6). The power of the image turns hypotheses into facts and presents them to chil-dren as truths. The repetition of a single icon (or of its essentials) in many contexts entrenches the ideas that it conveys and nurtures the unthinking acceptance that comes with long familiarity, leaving little room for alter-native ideas. Many theories concerning human origins and evolution are, of course, of biological origin, with the result that any representation of Paleolithic societies may easily be seen as based on powerful truths about biology and human nature. This potential confusion is not specific to visual material aimed at children, but it is children who are most likely to take such messages on board wholesale. Growing up with a fixed sense of ‘who was who’ and ‘who did what’ during early prehistory, these children will, when they become adults, proceed in turn to guide their own children or students according to their own ingrained sense of the ‘deep past’. A vi-cious circle will thus be perpetuated.

8. The way ahead

Children’s books about prehistory are only part of a far wider debate as to how archaeology (and indeed science in general) should or should not be popularized (see Dommasnes and Galanidou introduction; Binant chapter 8; Boulotis chapter 9). Like adults who know nothing about the subject, children are ill-equipped to question the validity of the representations of the past (whether textual or visual) offered to them. I would argue that the consumers of children’s prehistory books are par-ticularly poorly placed to recognize its visual components as ‘imaginative blends of scientific knowledge and artistic creativity’ (Gifford-Gonzalez 1993: 25). To the lay person (whether child, parent or teacher), the fact that a book is being sold in the ‘educational’ section may well be enough to make it appear to be a reliable source of information, whether or not it has undergone scientific editing for accuracy. At the same time there exist diverse ways of popularizing scien-tific findings about human origins. Archaeological and genetic research, for instance, has had a profound effect upon the ways in which the public experiences human evolution. It is now possible to trace the migration paths of your own early ancestors with the help of a user-friendly package on general sale online.4 Meanwhile, almost 150 years after the publica-

4 The Genographic Project, a joint venture by National Geographic and IBM, costs a little over a hundred dollars and uses a fairly simple sampling procedure


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tion of Darwin’s theory of evolution, creationists and evolutionists in the USA are still locked in bitter combat and extensive popular and political support for the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools frequently baffles and frustrates the scientific community. Darwin’s theory, though present in educational systems throughout the western world, is taught far less consistently than one might expect, Greek secondary education being a case in point. All this being so, the images that we have examined must at least be applauded for teaching the language of evolution rather than of lightly disguised religious fundamentalism and for helping children to visualize and understand the complex notions of evolution and change through time. It is obvious, however, that these positive points do not and should not render such images immune to critical scrutiny. The visions of the past constructed and reinforced by illustrations that belong to the canon of representation are highly debatable. These im-ages, avowedly intended to educate, employ a limited range of iconographic themes that confine interpretations of Paleolithic life to a few stereotypical associations. The way in which modern publishers operate (they tend to hold the copyright for their illustrators’ images, often release more than one title on the same topic and sometimes authorize translators to con-flate the contents of more than one book) often leads to the appearance in several publications of identical or minimally adapted illustrations. Far more significant than the repetition of a single image, however, is the ubiquitous appearance in various guises of the same icon, sensu Costall and Richards (chapter 3), and thus of the same stereotype. I have already argued that this phenomenon has mainly to do with the limited number of sources used by illustrators of the Paleolithic for children. The perceived meaning of a picture is not dictated entirely by the artist’s intentions. Every reading of an illustration must be seen within its context. According to their background, age and educational status, children may read and interpret images differently. It would therefore be simplistic to regard illustrators as the active and direct transmitters and children as the passive receptors of a single message. Further research to explore the interaction between children and illustrations is needed. The discrepancy between what we currently think we know about the Paleolithic and what our ‘educational books’ are telling children about it also derives partly from the power of the visual image. In illustrated chil-dren’s books the narrative is not simply interwoven with visual images; it is the visual images that largely determine the narrative and the message conveyed to children. So powerful has the limited pool of existing images become that alternative interpretations and their visual representations tend to fall by the wayside. Not all of this can be blamed on the illustrators; whether direct or

to derive information about the individual’s genetic history (https://www3.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/participate.html).


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indirect, the influence of specialists in prehistory is critical. If the publish-ers of children’s books are genuinely concerned about scientific accuracy, they must cease automatically to accept offerings drawn from the usual parochial Paleolithic image bank and insist upon consultation with special-ists at every stage of publication. Without this sort of collaboration, alter-native interpretations will continue to languish in obscurity. Meanwhile, those who specialize in the social archaeology of the Paleolithic should act upon the discomfort that they feel on passing a bookshop window filled with dubious images endorsed by their colleagues, insisting, next time they write a book themselves, upon commissioning new illustrations that accurately transmit their views. Where the long and painfully restrictive visual tradition in representing the Paleolithic is cast aside, it is entirely possible for alternative images of the deep past to experiment in both creativity and humor without losing a single ounce of scientific accuracy. ‘Lucy et son temps’ has proved that.

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