At the simplest level, he said, the depiction of fabric provides evidence that Paleolithic people were familiar with cloth, which would suggest that weaving had been developing for hundreds of thousands of years before the figurines were carved or molded. "This has been my argument for more than a quarter of a century," said Alexander Marshack, an image analyst for Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. "The capacity was there. It is the human capacity. The basic skills are human and found all over the world. "Weaving was just a way of problem solving," he continued. "They had no metal, but they used everything available in their ecology. They were just like us. We have become more technically advanced, not smarter." His argument was based only on this rationale, rather than archaeological evidence, so many scientists dismissed it. Now that Soffer and Adovasio are finding textile artifacts, "I feel, perhaps, a little vindicated," he said. But when trying to determine what these figurines meant to Paleolithic people, "you have to be careful about what you deduce from the evidence," he cautioned.
The first of these was Alexander Marshack's The Roots of Civilization, a study suggesting a completely unsuspected interpretation of a certain class of Ice Age artifacts. The story of the evolution of Marshack's book is, in its own way, as instructive as its discoveries.
A science writer, Marshack had been hired by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to produce an account of how humankind had come to the threshold of a lunar landing. Marshack found several pages of the first chapter, in which he proposed to trace the origin of humanity's interest in the moon, impossible to write because of, as he put it, all the "suddenlies" concerning the appearance in the archaeological record--from Sumer, Egypt, and India--of sophisticated solar-lunar-stellar calendars related to agriculture. To his way of thinking, these achievements implied millennia of preparation. The only generalization Marshack was able to extract from his survey of the literature was that behind all these calendric systems lay an earlier calendric tradition based on lunar cycles.
Under the pressure of a deadline, and unable to write a satisfactory first chapter, Marshack picked up at random an article from Scientific American about a bone with incised scratches from Ishango, at the headwaters of the Nile, dating from about 6500 B.C. The author of the article concluded that the scratches probably represented "an arithmetical game," perhaps having to do with multiplying by two. Finding this explanation unsatisfactory, because it implied no purpose for the markings, Marshack was struck by the thought that these scratches must represent some sort of notation, some sort of "storied meaning." Following this line of thought, he pushed the NASA moon manuscript to one side, and decided to see if the pattern of scratches bore any resemblance to lunar periods. Within fifteen minutes he came to see that it was possible that his hypothesis was correct, and that it was impossible to rule it out.
Years of research in museums all over Europe into incised Ice Age bones were required before Marshack could publish his results, which confirmed his initial flash of insight. The Roots of Civilization demonstrates that since the arising of our genotype, Homo sapiens sapiens, some forty millennia ago, attention to the measurement of periods of time as manifested by celestial bodies and motions has been an activity as persistently and widely pursued by people as the getting of food or the making of tools.
The second activity to be addressed defines procedure, and comes to me by way of, if we permit the pun, Alexander Marshack's groundbreaking work, The Roots of Civilization: The Cognitive Beginnings of Man's First Art, Symbol and Notation. In this book, Marshack, a professor of Paleolithic Archaeology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum, defines, by looking at Paleolithic cave paintings and Cro-Magnon bone inscriptions, a system of writing based on the employment of previous marks to generate, on the same object, secondary and tertiary markings. Marshack calls this multilayered writing system "the concept of variable image use and reuse."