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101
Received 18 January 2016; accepted 4 April 2016.
© 2017 Moravian Museum, Anthropos Institute, Brno. All rights reserved.
•LV/1–2 •pp. 101–117 •2017
ROBERT G. BEDNARIK
PAREIDOLIA AND ROCK ART INTERPRETATION
ABSTRACT: Visual pareidolia occurs when meaningful patterns representing familiar objects are seen in what are in
reality random or meaningless data. It is of significance to anthropology for two reasons: as a psychological
phenomenon of the human visual system; and because of its important role in rock art interpretation. Once the brain
has been conditioned to anticipate specific patterns, it tends to discover them with minimal stimulation, because most
of the information processed by the human visual centre derives from within the brain. The creative pattern detection
that constitutes rock art "interpretation" is effectively a projection of invented meaning onto mute marks on rock. The
modern beholder's perception searches the motif for details resonating with his/her visual system, in the same way as
pareidolia operates. It decides arbitrarily which aspects are naturalistic and which are not, and it adjudicates which
of an image's aspects are diagnostic. Yet the brain of the modern beholder of rock art differs significantly from that of
its creator, and the notion that rock art connoisseurs can somehow conjure up the emic meanings of rock art motifs
from their own brains' past experiences is mistaken. This paper illustrates the involvement of pareidolia in rock art
appreciation through a series of examples and attempts to explain these observations.
KEY WORDS: Pareidolia – Apophenia – Visual system – Picture rocks – Rock art – Petroglyph – Iconographic
interpretation
INTRODUCTION
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which the
human visual system perceives a figurative pattern
where no image actually exists. The term is also applied
to sounds, for instance when hidden messages are
perceived in sound recordings (Vokey, Read 1985,
Zusne, Jones 1989). The subject of pareidolic
interpretation of rock art has been considered before
(e.g. Bednarik 2013a) but, despite its great importance
to the discipline of rock art science, has not been
examined in any detail. A recent experience in Inner
Mongolia has prompted this exploration of the issue.
Pareidolia is a form of apophenia (or patternicity;
Shermer 2008), the human tendency to perceive
meaningful patterns within random data (Brugger
2001). The "abnormal meaningfulness" defining
apophenia is neurologically rooted in the ability of the
brain to sift through the mass of sensory information
received to detect significant signals, be they visual or
ANTHROPOLOGIE
auditory. In the mental priming effect the brain and
senses are prepared to interpret stimuli according to
an expected model. This process, called "association
learning", is fundamental to all animal behaviour, but
in the case of the highly evolved human brain it "lacks
an error-detection governor to modulate the pattern-
recognition engine" (Shermer 2008). This has no
negative effect on natural selection, because the cost
of seeing a false pattern as real is significantly less than
the cost of not detecting a real pattern; hence natural
selection will favour patternicity. The deception of
visual perception is "paradoxically an ambiguity of
perception that would have had value during the
Pleistocene" (Bednarik 1986, 202). It makes sense for
natural selection to favour strategies that make
incorrect causal associations in order to establish those
that are essential for survival and reproduction. This is
the basis of explaining apophenia and, more
specifically, pareidolia: in the Pleistocene it made sense
to switch to a flight response even when the perceived
cave bear turned out to be just a rock shaped like
a bear. Our visual system is very slow: no-one has ever
seen the present, it takes hundreds of milliseconds to
process its data in the brain, therefore time is of the
essence and what the thalamus sends to the cortex is
in effect a hastily drawn approximation. Veracity of the
information was not necessarily of primary
importance, just as the creation of human constructs
of reality has little basis in truth:
Provided that the internally consistent logical
framework is not challenged by it, there is no reason
to assume that an entirely false, cultural cosmology
or epistemological model could not be formed and
maintained indefinitely by an intelligent species …
evolutionary success is irrelevant to the objective
merits or validity of such models (Bednarik 2011,
6–7).
Similarly, both apophenia and pareidolia have been
advantageous in human evolution, despite being
entirely erroneous beliefs, and have no doubt
contributed to the formation of the false construct of
reality we subscribe to today. Therefore they are not
useful tools in rock art research, where the issue of
veracity is of paramount importance and cause and
effect reasoning needs to be applied instead of
associative thinking. Their effects need to be examined
closely and such a review may benefit from a systematic
design. First, a number of examples need to be
described and analysed, i.e. the elements or structure
of the phenomenon need to be subjected to detailed
examination. This will help in better appreciating the
range of the effects of pareidolia, how they are
manifested in practical experience in relation to
palaeoart, and it will lead to the identification of the
underlying factors. That process should then facilitate
the formulation of a general synthesis of the impact of
pareidolia on rock art recorders.
PICTURE ROCKS
As the editor of the journal Rock Art Research since
its founding in 1984, we have received many dozens of
submissions concerning rocks of iconic properties of
one form or another, and witnessed numerous
examples of fervent belief in pareidolic phenomena.
Some of these experiences seemed quite bizarre.
Awoman reported that she found images within
pebbles when she broke them apart, and she claimed
that these pictures had been placed there deliberately
by Aborigines. On another occasion we examined
Cedar-by-the-Sea, a petroglyph site on Vancouver
Island, on Canada's west coast (Hill, Hill 1974: 99).
The owner tried very hard to convince us that in
addition to the site's several excellent petroglyphs,
there is also very intricate decoration on the
intervening rock surface. We simply could not see what
she meant and it took some time to realise that she
perceived the general, sub-millimetre-scale weathering
patterns on the rock pavement as having been created
by humans. Explanation of the phenomenon as natural
mineral accretions and their modifications was met
with incredulity.
These are relatively unusual, rather extreme
manifestations of pareidolic vision, in which no regard
was given to logic or reason. By far the most common
form concerns stones in whose morphology the subject
perceives a likeness of an object. In the vast majority
of cases the stones are said to resemble animals or
faces. The stones may range from pebble sized to
boulder sized; they may be from alluvial deposits and
rounded or they may be fractured, in which case the
fractures are perceived as anthropogenic and
deliberate. Most if not all the claims in this category
are that the objects date from Lower or Middle
Palaeolithic periods (e.g. Matthes 1969, Benekendorff
2012). Several hundred people are engaged in
collecting such stones, and some of them are
connected to an international network. These
aficionados are found particularly in northern France,
Netherlands, England and northern Germany, often in
regions where flint deposits are common. Flint has the
Robert G. Bednarik
102
characteristic of being fractured easily by several
natural processes, which often results in unusually
shaped pieces that attract the attention of collectors.
However, the phenomenon is not entirely limited to
north-western Europe; it has also been noted in other
parts of the world, such as the United States and
Australia. We have met several of these gatherers of
stones, and been in contact with many others who have
sought to secure our support for their views. Many of
them possess quite good archaeological knowledge; the
majority are accessible to rational argument, but all
insist that early hominins were capable of detecting
iconic properties in stones and that what they are
finding merely meets that expectation.
The issue is complicated by the fact that at least
some Lower Palaeolithic hominins did indeed possess
the ability of seeing the resemblance between a natural
object and one it happens to resemble. Two naturally
shaped stones have been modified to emphasise their
figurative properties by people of the Acheulian. The
Tan-Tan proto-figurine from Morocco is from an
occupation deposit thought to be in the order of 400
ka (400,000 years) old (Bednarik 2003). It is
a quartzite piece that was shaped by natural processes,
but because it resembles a human body, that likeness
was accentuated by adding several grooves, and then
the object was coated in haematite. Another proto-
figurine, from Israel, is a tuff and scoria pebble with
the natural shape of a female head, neck, torso and
arms, excavated from an occupation deposit that is
older than 230 ka (Goren-Inbar 1986). It was found to
have been superficially modified by adding grooves and
abrading certain aspects, also highlighting the
resemblance to a female figure (Marshack 1996, 1997).
Athird example is a fossil cuttlefish cast found in
a dwelling site of the Late Acheulian at Erfoud Site A-
84-2, Morocco (Bednarik 2002). Such fossils do not
occur naturally in that region, and as a manuport this
fragment has such a strong resemblance to a human
penis that this was presumably also noticed by the
hominin who deposited it in the shelter structure.
Other relevant finds are fossil casts collected by Lower
and Middle Palaeolithic hominins, which suggests that
the resemblance between them and their living
referents was recognised. The earliest specimen
suggesting such recognition, however, is significantly
older. The Makapansgat cobble was carried over
agreat distance and deposited in a South African
dolomite cave 2.5 to 3 million years ago. It is
completely unmodified, but it consists of an unusual
and very hard red stone, jaspilite, and its resemblance
Pareidolia and rock art interpretation
103
FIGURE 1. The Makapansgat jaspilite cobble, a manuport
from South Africa; scale in cm.
of a head is so striking it is thought to have been
appreciated by a hominin at the time of the very dawn
of the human line (Bednarik 1998) (Figure 1).
Therefore the belief of the collectors of thousands
upon thousands of "stone figurines", that such
recognition of iconic properties in natural products
was possible for people of the Lower Palaeolithic, is
perfectly justified. However, the great majority of their
collected stones were not found in demonstrated
occupation sites; they are random finds, mostly from
gravel beds containing no stone tools. Without an
archaeological context there is no reason to attribute
them to hominins, because the fact that they may
faintly resemble biomorphs is simply attributable to
chance: a certain percentage of all river cobbles could
be construed as doing so, by people who have high
susceptibility to pareidolia. The same would apply to
naturally broken pieces of flint. This still does not mean
that such an object from a genuine archaeological
deposit, containing Palaeolithic stone tools and other
evidence, must necessarily be a palaeoart object. It may
be so, but the point needs to be demonstrated, and the
two factors of significance are the forensic presence of
work traces and the property of being of a material that
cannot occur at the site by purely natural transport.
None of the numerous items of this kind we have
examined seems to meet these requirements.
OF EXTINCT ANIMALS
These examples of pareidolia have merely been
presented to illustrate some pertinent effects of the
phenomenon, but the purpose of this paper is to
examine the effects of pareidolia in the interpretation
of rock art. One of the most consequential such effects
is when the age of rock art motifs is deduced from the
purported depiction of extinct animals. Some recent
and representative examples of this are listed here, but
many others could be given.
The Upper Sand Island rock art site near Bluff,
southern Utah, is a vertical sandstone cliff of several
hundred metres length, featuring thousands of
petroglyphs (Malotki, Wallace 2011). Among them are
zoomorphs, anthropomorphs and various repeated
symbols, such as double arcs and fully pounded circle
segments. Because of the density of the rock art, which
extends several metres above present human reach,
superimpositions are common among motifs. In
a location in the central part of the 20-m cliff, at
a height of about 5 m above the berm at its foot, occurs
a combination of several rock markings. The oldest is
a vertical fissure, one of many on the same panel that
has been subjected to accelerated granular erosion
attributable to emerging interstitial moisture. Near its
top is a petroglyph of an elongate outline with vertical
barring. This is a motif type well-known from the Glen
Canyon style of the general region (Turner 1963, 1971),
and it is one of about five such faintly zoomorphic
outlines arranged in a horizontal band. Superimposed
over this is a densely pounded circle segment of the
type occurring several times within a few metres of the
location. Finally, near the natural groove is one of the
several pairs of arcs found on this wall, but
unconnected to the solution groove.
If this group of rock markings, three of them
artificial and one natural, are seen as a deliberate
composition, they appear to form the outline of
a mammoth. However, they are of distinctly separate
antiquities, which render it unlikely that they constitute
a single arrangement. While it is theoretically possible
that the original Glen Canyon zoomorph was modified
deliberately by later adding the "topknot" and the
"tusks", this is unlikely because both features occur
elsewhere on the wall, without being connected to any
other petroglyph. Nor are the "tusks" connected to the
"trunkline", which is itself not an artefact. Moreover,
there is another impediment to the pareidolic
mammoth interpretation: the Glen Canyon style
features are about four times the age of a nearby
anthropomorph that is safely attributable to the
Puebloan period, and thought to be around 800 years
old (Bostwick 2001: 428, Malotki, Weaver 2002: Fig.
3). On that basis, an age of any of the ‘mammoth’
components, except the ‘trunkline’, of more than 4000
years BP can be safely excluded from consideration
(Bednarik 2013b, 2015). This is confirmed by the
estimate of the probable age of the Glen Canyon style,
of being somewhere between 2400 and 5000 BP (Cole
2009: 45). Moreover, the Columbian mammoth
(Mammuthus columbi) is thought to have become
extinct by 12,500 years BP, and any dates younger than
11,000 are not viewed as credible (Meltzer, Mead 1983,
Haynes 1987, 1991, Fisher 1996, Fiedel 1999, 2009,
Barnosky et al. 2004, Martin 2005, Waters, Stafford
2007, Haynes 2008, Faith, Surovell 2009, Surovell,
Grund 2012, Louguet-Lefebvre 2013). Not only is it
geologically impossible for the surface of the friable
and rather porous Navajo sandstone of the site to have
survived from Pleistocene times; the geological setting
of the site renders such great age of the rock panel
highly unlikely (Gillam, Wakeley 2013). The valley of
the San Juan River features a complex succession of
river terraces related to previous river levels, some of
which are preliminarily dated, rendering it impossible
for the petroglyph site to be reached at certain times.
The determination of the meaning of this
arrangement of rock markings rests on fortuitous
positions of randomly arranged markings in close
proximity, on a rock panel densely covered with both
petroglyphs and natural markings. Until they were
closely examined in May 2014, when Ekkehart Malotki
managed to have a scaffold erected on the remote site,
they were only seen from ladders and on photographs
taken with pole-mounted cameras. This inadequate
access (Malotki, Wallace 2011: Fig. 8) led to the view
that the unrelated markings formed a single figure
(Figure 2). Subsequently, during the examination of
photographs, a second "mammoth" figure was
discovered a few metres to the left of the first; and since
then enthusiasts have found more potential mammoth
Robert G. Bednarik
104
images on the cliff. This is of interest because it shows
how, once the visual system of the searchers is
conditioned to find mammoths, it is much more likely
to succeed than without such prompting. It is also
relevant to note that Malotki and Wallace were well
aware of the danger of pareidolia, because they
attribute several previous mammoth reports in the rock
art of other parts of the United States quite correctly
to pareidolia.
In an effort to better understand that phenomenon,
another example will be examined, this time from
Australia. Gunn et al. (2011) reported two aviform rock
paintings from the side of a huge block of sandstone at
the headwaters of the Katherine River, western
Arnhem Land. One of them they thought depicts
a magpie goose, a very common species in the region.
The second, larger but in many ways similar image they
suggested represents Genyornis newtoni, a large
flightless bird that became extinct about 50 ka ago. In
this they were guided by a number of features
pareidolia suggested to be diagnostic of the ancient
species, although there was no supporting evidence
and such attribution would establish several world
records. It would make the image not only the earliest
known in Australia, but indeed the oldest known
graphic depiction of an object in the world (except,
perhaps, a possible stickman on a bone fragment from
the German Eastern Micoquian; see Bednarik 2006);
indeed, it would be the oldest known painting. In
contrast to the presumed extinction dates of other
Pleistocene species, that of Genyornis is particularly
well established, because it derives not from a few
chronologically scattered fossil remains of the creature
in question, but it has been secured from a series of
505 eggshell fragments of this species, distributed in
time. They coincide in their distribution with those of
the extant species Dromaius (the emu), from 130 ka
onwards and are still common between 60 ka and 50
ka ago, but those of Genyornis then stop occurring
rather abruptly (Miller et al. 1999; cf. Gillespie 2004).
Eggshells of the emu continue right through the last 50
ka. Bearing further in mind that there is no evidence
that Genyornis ever occupied northern regions such as
Arnhem Land, being a native only of southwestern
Australia, the interpretation lacked a credible base.
Moreover, the painting is poorly protected from
precipitation and shows extensive rain damage as well
as weathering by water seeping from the sandstone's
bedding planes. Such exposed rock paintings are
unknown to have survived from the Pleistocene or even
from the early Holocene, anywhere in the world. The
panel on which the bird-like motif occurs was formed
when part of the block fractured and fell to the ground,
and in fact the producer of the painting stood on this
large rock fragment as he or she executed the
pictogram. We suggested to Gunn that the painting
would be only one or two thousand years old, and that
a relatively easy way to determine its possible terminus
Pareidolia and rock art interpretation
105
FIGURE 2. One natural groove (1) and unrelated petroglyphs (2, 3 and 4, in that
sequence) forming a fortuitous arrangement giving the pareidolic impression of
a mammoth image, Upper Sand Island, Utah. The individual peck marks are shown.
post quem date would be to establish when the fragment
fell from the block, by excavating the sediment beneath
it.
Gunn and colleagues, however, decided to proceed
with their sensational publication. Other archaeologists
then sought to clarify the matter by excavating under
the detached rock fragment and determined that the
collapse occurred only 13 ka ago, so the purported
Genyornis image had to be more recent than that
(Barker et al. in press). In addition, there is what
appears to be a barbed spear with the bird painting,
and Gunn et al. had assumed that it was added later,
and that an anthropomorph was also superimposed.
Detailed analysis showed that the anthropomorph
precedes the aviform zoomorph, and the "barbed
spear" is of the same age and pigment as the bird
(Chalmin et al. in press). The significance of this
finding is that if the object does depict such a weapon,
it demands a very recent antiquity for the purported
Genyornis.
The remaining question is, why would experienced
archaeologists attribute a relatively recent, rapidly
fading rock painting to a species that has been extinct
for 50 ka? Their visual perception of the paint traces
was apparently strong enough to abandon caution and
to propose an explanation that was extraordinary and
challenging (Figure 3). There are many such claims by
rock art interpreters, including a good number – mostly
from the USA – of dinosaur and pterosaur depictions
in rock art (Bednarik 2015). There is such a claim from
China of the depiction of giraffes, which became
extinct there in the Tertiary period. In such cases the
rock art would predate the human species.
Of particular relevance is the proposal of a young
Chinese archaeologist that an exfoliating patch of red
paint residues on rock depicts a very large bird "biting"
a deer. Its importance is that he explained in some
detail his pareidolic and derivative reasoning (Qiao H.
2014). He presented pigment patches that in reality
offer no prospects of identifying individual images. As
he saw in this arrangement a bird pecking a cervid, he
deduced that the bird must be very large, carnivorous
and aggressive. He then considered three potential
candidates of flightless birds, from Tertiary to
Pleistocene times (Phorusrhacos, Gastorni, Titanis), but
discounted them for various reasons and turned his
attention to another, the cassowary (Casuarius sp.).
The fact that this large bird of Australia and New
Guinea is part of the Sahulian fauna and cannot have
lived in China did not deter him; nor did another detail,
namely that the cassowary is a strict vegetarian. Instead
of bothering with such minor objections he proceeded
Robert G. Bednarik
106
FIGURE 3. Aviform pictogram in western Arnhem Land, Australia. Several aspects
imply that it is not a naturalistic rendering, and the iconographically diagnostic aspects
cannot be known.
to explore how the Australian bird could have reached
China. He reasoned that it might have crossed the sea
during the Pleistocene by travelling over glaciers then
covering the ocean, and he went as far as proposing
that the bird's remains were still to be found in China.
The last proposal is of course valid, because one day
even the remains of a unicorn may turn up in China.
However, Pleistocene glaciers did not exist in the
tropics, any more than the land-bridges imagined by
Australian archaeologists between the islands of Nusa
Tenggara, bridging Wallace's line.
THE FACES OF XIAOJINGGOU
Honder College of the Inner Mongolian Normal
University in Hohhot was founded in 2004 by its
President, Professor Zhou Yushu. It hosts the North
China Rock Art Research Institute (NCRARI). The
college's President is a keen rock art researcher himself,
and, having discovered a major rock art region near his
summerhouse at Xiaojinggou, in the Daqing mountains
north of Hohhot, has taken extraordinary steps to
preserve this rock art. He found much of it among the
rubble of road construction activity, or under threat in
some other way, so he decided to collect all petroglyph
blocks and deposit them in a large yard at his
summerhouse. These blocks were up to 20 tonnes in
weight, and he spent literally hundreds of thousands of
dollars of his own funds to secure the preservation of
the rock art. He can thus be defined as the most
dedicated rock art protector in the world.
At present, there are approximately 350 large blocks
of rock, almost entirely of granite, located in his
protected salvage yard (Figure 4). Up to October 2015,
some twenty students were engaged in deciphering and
recording the petroglyphs. Honder College hosts an
extensive exhibition of rubbings of the rock art, which
shows that the dominant motifs are face or mask-like
figures, often together with small motifs of unknown
meaning, or possibly depicting small animals. Based
on them, an elaborate interpretation of the Xiaojinggou
rock art has been developed: it relates to a cult of the
three emperors or three gods, which is in the order of
6,000 years old, i.e. of the Neolithic, and which is the
oldest known religion in the world.
In October 2015 Honder College invited the
foremost rock art scientists of China and India,
respectively, together with the author, to inspect this
discovery, to estimate the age of the petroglyphs, and
to advise concerning submission of the extraordinary
corpus to UNESCO's World Heritage List. First, the
three rock art specialists were treated to a day of
lectures on the interpretative hypotheses, and to
Pareidolia and rock art interpretation
107
FIGURE 4. Some of the c. 350 granite blocks stored in the salvage yard of Xiaojinggou, north of
Hohhot, Inner Mongolia.
detailed examination of hundreds of full-size rubbings
of the "face" petroglyphs. Their striking vibrancy and
stylistic integrity were astonishing, and it became
evident that a major discovery had been made (Figure
5). Despite obvious similarities with "face/mask"
petroglyphs across central Asia, including those of
Helanshan and eastern Inner Mongolia (Chifeng
region), this was a very distinctive regional corpus:
while each design differed in the details, the stylistic
integrity of the collection was overwhelming.
On the second day the three international rock art
specialists were taken to Yémá Gōu (Wild Horse
valley), a steep side valley to the east of Xiaojinggou in
which many similar petroglyphs had survived in situ.
Here, the first problems became apparent: the
specialists could not detect any of the petroglyphs
pointed out to them. This left the specialists with
a quandary: why was it that what everyone else in the
large accompanying group saw remained invisible to
them? In the late afternoon they began examining the
Robert G. Bednarik
108
FIGURE 5. Some of the hundreds of stampings of "face" or "mask" petroglyphs recorded at
Xiaojinggou, suggestive of a distinctive regional style of rock art.
salvage yard. On most of the boulders, the petroglyphs
had been marked out in black colour (Figure 6), but
the further these were examined, the more it became
evident that there were no depressions and no
fractured grains present, except that all blocks had
been subjected to extensive taphonomic damage,
especially impact from other boulders. This is not
surprising because all the granite blocks in the main
valley and side valleys have been transported from
elsewhere and most of these blocks have travelled many
kilometres by fluvial or glacial transport.
Next, the author placed the recording of a large
"face" petroglyph immediately next to the boulder on
which is was said to occur, demonstrating that none of
the details of the rubbing were visible on the rock
surface. For instance there was a double-turn spiral
recorded, in a place where there were absolutely no
impact marks, and the surround of the large "face" or
its "eyes" or "hair" simply did not exist (Figure 7).
This left the specialists with the dilemma of having
to explain how rubbings, supposedly an objective way
of recording petroglyphs (but a method now eschewed
almost worldwide because it is damaging), could
possibly detect rock art where there was none. Tang
Huisheng then suggested that he wanted to see how the
rubbings were made. Two of the students who had been
conducting recording work obliged immediately, and it
soon became evident that they were not making
rubbings in the traditional sense of the term, but
stampings. They placed a papery membrane over the
entire panel, sprayed it lightly with water and covered
it with a thick cloth, before stamping the paper maché
into position with stiff brushes (Figure 8). Once the
paper was snugly pressed into the crevices of the rock,
the cloth was removed and the paper allowed to dry for
one or two hours. Clearly it had taken on the shape of
the rock and was a faithful cast of its details.
The next stage was crucial. Stiff smaller brushes
were sparsely coated with black paint, and stamped
over the paper maché. In this the operators began by
searching for depressions in the rock, and then working
from them to determine where a perceived groove was
leading. In doing so they stamped where they expected
rises in the rock surface, and avoided depressions
where they expected them. The three specialists
examined the result and agreed that it was not a faithful
recording of raised or depressed surface aspects. It
appeared that the operators had imposed their
expectations and subconsciously stamped areas
according to their expectations. Giriraj Kumar then
asked the recorders to show him how they coloured in
the perceived petroglyphs in black colour and
discovered that they were not tracing any petroglyphs,
but were projecting mental templates onto the rock
Pareidolia and rock art interpretation
109
FIGURE 6. Granite block with five perceived "face/mask" petroglyphs marked in black
colour; there are in fact no petroglyphs on the boulder. Xiaojinggou salvage yard.
Robert G. Bednarik
110
FIGURE 7. Undecorated granite block in Xiaojinggou salvage yard (on left), and the petroglyph
"recorded" on this surface by stamping.
FIGURE 8. First stage of the stamping method as demonstrated by the students who have created hundreds
of these "faces" by "strategic" stamping.
instead and traced these. The author then experienced
a strange phenomenon: when he looked at traced
"motifs" of "faces" from about 2 m distance, he seemed
to see grooves where the black marks occurred (cf.
Figure 6), but when he examined them closely the
grooves disappeared. This suggests that after two days
of being subjected to the strenuous need of detecting
"faces" on the rocks, a fixation had developed to try
and see petroglyphs where there were none.
On the third day, the Director, whose principal
defence of the "rock art motifs" was that their number
and stylistic consistency was simply too great to be
ignored, had begun to concede that many of his
examples were perhaps not what he had thought, but
he kept on introducing more and more examples. He
was then asked to take the group to the best three or
four specimens he had encountered, and two slopes of
schist exposures were then examined near his base.
Each and every example turned out to be an entirely
unmodified boulder, with the exception of a modern
inscription on top of a large granite block. Ignoring the
finding that there was not a single petroglyph on his
collection of 350 salvaged granite blocks, Zhou then
requested that some of his "petroglyphs" be dated.
Three microerosion age estimates were extracted from
natural or transport-caused impact damage on three
boulders, and although they were clearly random
numbers, he rejoiced that one of them indicated to him
that the imaginary petroglyph was in the order of
21,000 years old. In short, although he admitted that
many of his petroglyphs did not exist, he continued to
insist that others were authentic.
It is emphasised that this account is in no way
intended to disparage him or his certainly most
dedicated work; rather, it is meant to provide the basis
of a much needed explanation of what happened here.
After all, this is not about one person's vision: many
others had shared this belief, and what needs to be
explained is how the autosuggestion could have been
shared by so many, to the extent of inventing well over
one thousand "face" and thousands of other
petroglyphs. It needs to be elucidated how numerous
rock art recorders shared Zhou's conviction, and also
discovered the petroglyphs he saw on blank rocks. It is
our impression that they had tried hard to see the
imagery that others purported to see, and
subconsciously traced what they thought was on the
blocks, genuinely believing their own creations. In
a form of mass hysteria they managed to convince
themselves that the rock art must be present, and when
requested to trace it they discovered elaborate patterns
Pareidolia and rock art interpretation
111
FIGURE 9. Among the most readily detectable aspects of
a complex petroglyph are subparallel grooves, such as those
forming the "hair" of this "face" petroglyph at Xiaojinggou
salvage yard. The upper image shows an undecorated surface
lacking any indication of subparallel grooving or circular
"eyes" shown in the corresponding imagined petroglyph in
the lower image, created by stamping this panel.
on rocks that bore nothing other than random impact
occasioned by transport (Figure 9).
This is one of the most dramatic examples of
pareidolia in rock art interpretation, resulting in
a proposal for World Heritage listing of a large corpus
of fictitious rock markings. The problem with it is that
it could all too easily be explained away as an extreme
example; but there is no reason to assume that it is
unique, and the real obstruction to understanding is
that many will explain it away as an idiosyncrasy
attributable to a charismatic individual, as an
exceptional occurrence without parallel. This would be
a grave mistake: the involvement of pareidolia is an
important subject in rock art interpretation that
deserves better than such convenient explaining away
of its consequences.
DISCUSSION
The susceptibility of humans to visual pareidolia is
of course not limited to markings on rock; it can be
detected in respect of numerous types of objects,
including large granite tors, whole cliff faces or
mountain shapes, even including aspects of heavenly
bodies such as Moon or Mars, down to much smaller
examples, ranging from burnt toast bearing the face of
Jesus, to odd shapes on tree bark, vegetables of various
types, buildings representing faces, and a great variety
of other perfectly random shapes in the visible world.
It has been commented upon by William Shakespeare
in the dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius in
Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 2).
Pareidolia, as noted, is a form of apophenia, which
occurs when meaningful patterns are seen in what are
in reality random or meaningless data, such as in
clustering illusion or confirmation bias. In visual
pareidolia, familiar objects are recognised in stimuli
that are generally vague and sometimes random. This
occurs because the visual system is conditioned for
rapid disambiguation of the incoming information, to
form a "first impression" in case swift response should
be required. The misapprehension prompted by
pareidolia tends to be clarified quite rapidly, but as it
wears off the brain may dwell on its image, prolonging
the apophenic illusion and consciously registering that
there is indeed a meaningful pattern in what should be
a random arrangement of visual clues. This is the
phenomenon that needs to be examined here.
The perhaps most common forms detected by
pareidolia are faces, especially human faces. Facial
recognition is of obvious importance in social animals
and well developed in humans, unless they suffer from
the cognitive impairment prosopagnosia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia).
Associated with the fusiform gyrus (in the lowest part
of the brain), this condition may affect a much larger
segment of the population than once thought, perhaps
as much as 2%. Individual susceptibility to pareidolia
varies considerably among people, and tends to be
notably greater in subjects with religious convictions
(cf. acheiropoieta). Interestingly, in Christian subjects
the pareidolic illusions are often of Jesus or the Virgin
Mary, while Muslims tend to detect the Arabic word
of Allah or Koranic verses in random arrangements. In
other words, the cultural conditioning determines
pareidolia's course. A magnetoencephalographic study
found that objects resembling faces evoke a 165 ms
activation in the ventral fusiform gyrus, which actual
faces do slightly earlier (i.e. after 130 ms), whereas
other common objects fail to evoke such an activation
altogether (Hadjikhani et al. 2009). This suggests that
face perception of face-like objects is not a later
cognitive reinterpretation phenomenon of ambiguous
stimuli. The processing speed of face-like data suggests
that both subconscious and conscious processes are
involved (Dehaene et al. 2006, van Gaal, Lamme 2012)
and the threshold of subconsciousness and
consciousness may be modulated by the amygdala
(deep within the temporal lobes of the brain in
complex vertebrates) (Mitchell, Greening 2012). This
interplay is suggested by the rapid rate of face detection
and scene perception (Peelen et al. 2009, Rieth et al.
2011).
Of particular interest is the reaction of those
subjects who do detect the illusion of their pareidolic
vision, but then are so fascinated by the apparent
meaningfulness of the random pattern that they
manage to convince themselves that it is not random
after all. This phenomenon is well known in the study
of rock art and therefore requires examination here.
The conviction is often developed into passionate
belief that defies all opposition to it. An example is
provided by the humanoid face some see on Mars, in
mountains and their shadows in the Cydonia region
(Brandenburg et al. 1991) of that planet (which,
conversely, is not the only face some see on Mars; there
is also a face of Gandhi, a smiley face and even
a Kermit the Frog). First photographed in 1976 by the
Viking 1 spacecraft, it was shown by the better-
resolution images of 1998 to be a purely geological
feature, yet some of the "believers" insisted that this
was a cover-up by a conspiracy, and still in recent years
defend their belief steadfastly (Van Flandern 2015).
The hundreds of collectors who have found thousands
upon thousands of stone figurines of the Lower
Palaeolithic experience the same conviction: once they
see a face or animal shape in the stone, they are
convinced that the effect of their pareidolic vision is
not accidental, and that therefore the object must have
been shaped by human hand.
An important factor in the effects of pareidolia in
rock art interpretation is how, once the brain has been
conditioned to anticipate specific patterns, such as
a mammoth figure or a stylised face, it will find it
increasingly easy to detect such a pattern, even to the
point of discovering it where no justification at all
exists. It is easy to "see" faces when expecting to see
them, and it is exceedingly difficult to see non-faces
when expecting faces. This phenomenon has
Robert G. Bednarik
112
a straightforward explanation: only about 10% of the
information processed by the human visual centre is
derived from the retina, i.e. is attributable to sensory
input; the rest originates within the brain itself (notably
the thalamus). This is again attributable to the shortcut
the system takes so as not to delay identification. It
means in effect that the brain sees what it expects to
see, until it is corrected by more information (cf. the
"error-detection governor"; Shermer 2008). But in
some subjects the false identification overrules any
correction, as for example in the believers of the face
on Mars who reject any clarification.
Face detection can occur with the most minimal
retinal sensory information, as shown by using
a holistic face detector and a facial expression classifier,
applying progressive reduction of detail from greyscale
to histogram equalised greyscale, and to Sobel and
Canny edge abstractions (Hong et al. 2013). In their
systematic work, Hong and colleagues discovered that
some candidate face detectors saw faces even in blank
black or white images, and decided that such subjects
"should be discarded from further processing". This
level of pareidolia that requires virtually no visual input
explains in part the Xiaojinggou observations, although
the group effect there needs to be elucidated further.
Another notable factor in this phenomenon is that
none of the Xiaojinggou "faces" are inverted, which is
attributable to the face-inversion effect (Rakover 2013):
effective face recognition requires upright orientation,
whereas in random positioning on boulders the sample
would be expected to include many inverted examples.
This case also illustrates that the anticipation of
seeing a specific design can be transferred to others. In
the case of rock art this is particularly easy because
many motifs are ambiguous or hard to detect in the first
place. For instance petroglyphs may be severely
weathered or patinated, to the point of being barely
detectable. Therefore if a researcher who is regarded
as more experienced in the field asks a less experienced
colleague, can he or she see the iconic arrangement,
the latter, not seeing it, is likely to oblige by making
a concerted effort to detect the details. The second
person’s visual system will summon the images seen of
such petroglyphs from within the brain, in an attempt
to spot similar details on the rock. This endeavour is
likely to result in imagining faint details, a prelude to
acceptance of the whole design. The Xiaojinggou
example shows that after being exposed to days of
anxiety about glimpsing what others "see", many will
readily succumb and begin to spot the faces they are
prompted to perceive.
In the case of the young Chinese archaeologist who
thought he observed a giant bird pecking a deer it was
noted that he fortunately explained the reasoning that
determined his beliefs. His chain of deductions
contained several crucial errors of fact or
interpretation, but it also shows how such erroneous
beliefs, initially derived from pareidolia, can easily be
rationalised by a structure of flawed arguments.
A similar pattern is evident in the Xiaojinggou case,
which led to elaborate hypotheses about the deeper
meanings of imagined rock art imagery.
While elevated pareidolia can be involved in
a number of psychiatric conditions (e.g. dementia with
Lewy bodies, Alzheimer's disease) and is reduced by
cholinergic enhancement (Yokoi et al. 2014, Sarter
2015), it needs to be emphasised that pareidolia is an
integral phenomenon of the visual systems of both
humans and non-human animals. It is not
a neurological aberration as such, but forms part of the
strategy by which the "normal" visual centre
disambiguates information it receives. Susceptibility,
as noted, varies widely among individuals, and is
clearly a function of various psychological
predispositions. Among the latter is the belief of
beholders of rock art that they can divine the meaning
of such arrangements on rock surfaces in the absence
of emic (original cultural) interpretation. Another such
predisposition is the belief of some archaeologists to
somehow possess an elevated level of such an ability,
which leads them to assume the authority of
interpretation (Bednarik 2014). This academic
appropriation of elements of traditional indigenous
belief systems, metaphysical or social constructs
through arbitrary construal is a form of cognitive
colonialism, i.e. a political act, as it has no scientific
justification. It does not only result in untestable
propositions, it is posed precisely because it cannot be
falsified, and hence it is deliberately unscientific.
Similarly, the opinions of zoologists and
palaeontologists about the nature of rock art
zoomorphs are offered by specialists who have been
trained to recognise species or genera of animal
specimens, but who possess no cultural knowledge of the
iconographic conventions of the producer of the rock art.
CONCLUSION
In summary, pareidolia in rock art interpretation is
far more pervasive than has been appreciated. It is so
fundamental to the process of "identification" that all
Pareidolia and rock art interpretation
113
such propositions not supported by ethnography need
to be questioned. Bearing in mind that all etic motif
interpretations are untestable (unfalsifiable)
propositions and are made outside of science, the
entire artifice needs to be reviewed. The only blind test
ever conducted of etic rock art interpretation
(Macintosh 1952, 1977) has shown that a distinguished
professor of anatomy failed in correctly identifying
most of the painted biomorphs of Beswick and
Tandandjal Caves, two sites in the Northern Territory
of Australia. His 10% success rate in identifying the
images correctly is no better than a random result,
suggesting that even the most "highly trained" cultural
outsider has little chance of interpreting the formal
attributes of rock art motifs correctly. This is no great
surprise to the neuroscientist, who knows that the
brains of a literate and a non-literate person differ
fundamentally (Helvenston 2013). How readily parts
of a brain can be "rewired" is illustrated by how rapidly
the inferior posterior parietal lobule "rewires" itself in
the rubber hand illusion (Botvinick, Cohen 1998, Peled
et al. 2003, Tsakiris, Haggard 2005, Costantini,
Haggard 2007, Marjolein et al. 2009). It is a tangible
demonstration of localised human neuroplasticity, and
it is now well known that ontogenic conditioning
modifies both the chemistry and the structure of the
brain significantly (Maguire et al. 2000, Draganski et al.
2004, Smail 2007, Malafouris 2008). Thus the way the
brain of a producer of rock art processed visual
information can safely be assumed to have differed very
greatly from the way a modern literate Westerner
perceives (Helvenston 2013).
The tendency to seek patterns in random
information is fundamental to the ability of any species
in processing sensory input. High levels of dopamine
affect the propensity to find meaning, patterns and
significance, even when there is none, and this
proclivity is related to a tendency of receptivity for the
paranormal (Leonard, Brugger 1998). Alcock
emphasises how evidence that should be rejected on
a rational basis is instead accepted by default, and how
rationality is changed to fit the perceived evidence
(Alcock 1981, Alcock et al. 2005, Foster, Kokko 2009).
He also notes how this is reinforced when believers
listen to each other's reflections (consider the Inner
Mongolian case described above). Therefore the
creative pattern detection that constitutes rock art
"interpretation" is effectively a projection of newly
created meaning onto marks on rock that, in reality,
consist of pigment patches or anthropogenic surface
depressions. The point is well illustrated by di Maida's
(2016) dilemma in interpreting a zoomorph in Grotta
di Cala dei Genovesi, Sicily. This predisposition to
"abnormal meaningfulness" (Brugger 2001, Brugger,
Mohr 2008) offers some comparisons with the
Rorschach inkblot test (Exner 2002). In both cases,
the subject views graphic arrangements of marks, the
meaning of which is not available but must be divined
by examination. As implied by the Rorschach test, this
process is subjective in that it is influenced by
numerous factors, such as personality traits of the
subject and his/her life experiences. The comparison
should, however, not be stretched too far because the
marks rock art consists of are not random blots but
have been made deliberately by human hand.
Where the pareidolic reading of rock art fails is in
the belief that one can "communicate" with the rock
artist via the marks (Mithen 1998), particularly
concerning intent: which visual clues are deliberate
iconographic referents? The modern beholder's
perception searches the rock art motif for details
resonating with his/her visual system, in the same way
as pareidolia operates. When it detects such elements,
it locks onto them as if it knew that these are the clues
the rock artist wanted to convey as being
representational. For instance in the cited example of
the misinterpretation of an aviform rock painting as
Genyornis, Gunn et al. (2011: 6) locked onto "the head
shape (including blunt beak), long neck, stubby legs, tail-
less rump and large heavy feet", as if they knew that these
were the diagnostic aspects. This poses two issues: first,
the head shape of Genyornis is unknown (no undamaged
specimens are available, so what were available were
artists' impressions of what the species might have
looked like), and the remaining features are far from
diagnostic or are only assumptions. Second, the number
of visual characteristics in the figure that contradict their
"identification" is much greater and more decisive, and
include the long neck, the wing line or alimentary canal,
and the absence of tail feathers. But the most pivotal
factor is that aspects such as the attitude of the creature
(the horizontal displacement of the point of gravity
relative to the feet) or the "twisted perspective" treatment
of the feet show clearly that this is not a naturalistic
image. Therefore the basis on which an emically
uninformed beholder would decide which aspects are
naturalistic and which are not is entirely arbitrary. So
are his/her decisions of which of an image's aspects are
diagnostic; or even whether they were intended to be so.
At this point it becomes obvious that all such
"determinations" are scientifically misleading and
counter-productive. They discredit the discipline.
Robert G. Bednarik
114
As every experienced rock art researcher knows,
practically all rock art motifs in the world are non-
naturalistic. All rock art pictures are abstractions of
physical reality, and the two-dimensional abstractions
one finds in rock art are not "naturalistic" in the sense
that images in a zoological textbook are. Most comprise
a majority of elements that contradict a favoured
interpretation, and most are so coarse or stylised or
abstracted that it is imprudent to enunciate
identification at species level. Often a feature like
a "hump" on a bovid is deduced from a single impact
mark or paint smudge that may be fortuitous or have
no diagnostic strength. Rock art interpreters are
oblivious of the processes by which their own visual
system manages visual information, and how that
system "identifies" objects, in the same way as
synaesthesia patients cannot explain their unique
perception of reality. They are similarly ignorant about
the barriers preventing them from experiencing the rock
artists' visual reality, enabling them to invent meanings,
which when published burden the discipline with
a cacophony of unwarranted information. The number
of such unfounded claims is in the millions and grows
with every year. To call this hobby a legitimate field of
research is a caricature of the academic endeavour. In
this format of free-standing interpretation of rock art,
using nothing but the visual system of the interpreter,
the instant an opinion of the meaning is formed, all
disconfirming aspects are subconsciously or
subliminally suppressed. It is this tendency that most
disallows such "identifications" from scientific
consideration, because in science the disconfirming
evidence should be of particular weight. Therefore from
the perspective of neuroscience, the notion that rock
art connoisseurs can somehow conjure up the real
(emic) meanings of rock art motifs from their own
brains' past experiences is simply preposterous
(Bednarik 2011, 2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2015). The modern
human brain has no relevant past experiences to draw
on and no such ability should be presumed to exist. No
scientific access to the meaning is possible in the
absence of credible ethnography. All other modern
interpretation of rock art is via pareidolia.
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Robert G. Bednarik
International Federation of Rock Art
Organisations
P.O. Box 216
Caulfield South, Melbourne, VIC 3162
Australia
E-mail: robertbednarik@hotmail.com
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