The Mimetic Wound
Chapter 1: ACT I. The Wound Opens
The Wound Opens
Act I.
The stone weighs 260 grams. Jasperite, waterworn, blood-red with a faint yellowish cast. It was found 4.8 kilometres from the nearest jasperite outcrop, lying among the bones of Australopithecus Africanus in the breccia of Makapansgat Valley, Limpopo, 2.85 to 3 million years ago.
No one made it. It shows no modifications, no shaping, cutting, grinding or deliberate marking. The animal that carried it had a brain not much larger than a chimpanzee’s and hands built for climbing as much as for grasping. It had not yet struck one stone against another in the fashion that produces an Oldowan chopper. Neither had it strung beads, ground ochre or scratched a pattern into a surface. All of that awaited, millions of years away.
But in the Makapansgat Valley, histories first souvenir was carried 4.8 kilometres home.
The stone has two shallow depressions near one end and a raised ridge below. In the light and at the right angle, it looks like a face, and in particular the face of Australopithecus Africanus. Held in the palm a presence looks back from a tumbled, water worn piece of red stone. The nose is not quite centred. The eyes suggest something watching, the gestalt fires. Eyes oriented across a midline, a mouth-zone and the overall inference of a head. Something returns the gaze. It is the first mask no one made and no one wore.
In that looking, the animal registered a face-shape, paused and choose not to leave the stone behind. This is the oldest datable evidence of the ‘Mimetic Wound’, the birth of our symbolic world. Not the hand axe that would come 1.3 million years later, nor the first ochred shell bead or the first geometric mark. An aeon earlier there was an animal that could not put down an object that resembled a face. Carrying it from where the stone was formed, in a time when no other hominid we know of left evidence of this kind of carrying.
In this manuport rests the first artist compulsion of the species. The externalisation of something uncanny that could not be put to rest. Through this wound over millions of years would pour the entire font of our world.
Australopithecus Africanus had a brain volume of approximately 450 cubic centimetres, comparable to a modern chimpanzee, and was a prey species as much as a predator: the Taung Child’s skull bears evidence of eagle predation, and the Makapansgat assemblage holds the remains of multiple individuals, suggesting a site used recurrently, probably a shelter. Moving through that terrain, carrying anything non-functional was a cost. Non-human primates carry objects (capuchin monkeys carry stones as proto-hammers; corvids cache and transport novel objects in apparent play or proto-tool behaviour) but those carryings stay within functional or exploratory parameters. The Makapansgat stone fails every functional test: not a hammer, not food, nor cached for retrieval. It ends up among the hominid’s bones in the cave, which means it was not used and not abandoned. It was kept. The only account that fits the non-utility, distance and retention, is that the stone held live signal the organism’s cognitive architecture should have discharged and did not. The face that was not there, continued to haunt the hominids brain who could not shake the impression of being looked back at.
What it felt like to carry the stone is not recoverable. What it looks like, from a sufficient distance, is something that had never happened before: an organism that perceived what was not there, and was unable to stop doing so. The urge to make is preceded by millions of years in our species by the primitive act of collecting. Australopithecus Africanus like any child, long before they can build, discovered that the first act of creativity is to notice a treasure.