2Leroi-Gourhan and the Birth of the Symbolic Function

2.1. The image of man

André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986) was professor of prehistory at the Collège de France (1969–1982). “Prehistory” means what comes before history. Life on Earth began almost 4 billion years ago, and the evolutionary lineage that led to man has been separated from other primates for 7 million years: all this without man and before man. Our difficulty in thinking about such a space of time comes from the fact that it overflows our own human time, which has given meaning to what we understand by “origin” or “genealogy”. Thus, we not only make a genealogy from ourselves, but also from our own concepts of “Man” or “human nature”. Against such an approach, Leroi-Gourhan insists on the fact that prehistory confronts us with a very different time, namely a “geological time”. “Geological time” is that which follows the formation of mountains or the formation of species. In this sense, prehistory deals with “what is doubly buried in the earth and in the past” (Leroi-Gourhan 1964, p. 101). It is necessary to excavate, find, date and interpret, and here the singularity of the researcher is that he is at the same time an archaeologist, ethnologist and paleontologist.

Paleontology is the science of fossils. Dealing with the buried – the unknown – it is an empirical science that is not experimental but retrospective (like history). Fossils bear witness to the evolution of living beings and thus to their kinship. The ...

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