Signs of humanity: a testimony from the Upper Paleolithic

This chapter aims to strengthen the current movement to open up semiotics to anthropology and history by formulating some hypotheses on the double origin, artistic and semiotic, of symbolic inscriptions in the distant past (figurative paintings, ideograms and positive and negative handprints). In the process, an assumption generally shared in semiotics, regarding the transversality of meaning or, as some prefer, the unity of the phenomena of signification can only be reinforced.