At times, I experience visions that feel like flashbacks—brief bursts, fragments that seem to exist outside of time, as if drawn from a deeper layer of memory. It raises a question: where do these images come from in someone born in the Soviet Union and living in the United States? The feeling is precise. I am at the beginning. I am sitting at the entrance of a cave, looking out over a savanna.

The sun burns intensely. The air trembles with heat, bending into mirage. Gnats drift slowly through the light. I am barefoot.

Inside the cave, the air is cooler. Shade holds the space. The walls are covered with petroglyphs—animals, antelope, human figures, hunting scenes, rituals, gestures that resemble shamanic acts. White, red, black—the primary palette of prehistoric artists.

At times, the image shifts. I am no longer alone. I am among others, seated near a fire. There is the sound of primitive drums, voices moving in rhythm. Above us, a sky filled with large, bright stars. Life is simple. No civilization, no excess structure. There is balance and belonging—to a group, to a circle, to a lineage. I am part of nature—raw, clean, direct, unforgiving. This is a world of stone, bone, wood, hide, sinew, fire. Everything is immediate. Everything is close.

The image carries both intensity and a strange clarity. It returns repeatedly—a world without borders, without systems, without imposed limits. It feels like a reminder of something fundamental: not identity as a person, but participation in a continuous field of awareness that existed long before individual history. This may be why prehistoric art holds such force. There is no ornament, no market, no calculation. Only direct expression. The act stands on its own. These are the roots of art and of human perception. The same impulse continues.

Around sixty-four thousand years ago, on the wall of a cave in what is now Indonesia, an image appears—a wild pig, a hunting scene. One of the earliest known figurative images made by a human. There may have been earlier ones, but they have not been found. The essential point is not authorship or exact date, but the act—the first mark placed onto a surface.

There is a hypothesis that the earliest images did not come from direct observation, but from visions experienced in altered states of consciousness—states reached through isolation, fasting, or psychoactive substances. In such states, images arise that are not tied to the external world: hybrid figures, anthropomorphic forms, presences, repeating geometric patterns—dots, zigzags, grids.

These patterns appear in rock art across distant regions of the world.

It is likely that prehistoric humans did not live deep inside caves. Daily life unfolded near the entrance. The deeper chambers served another function. They held images. In that sense, these images can be understood as records of experience.

There are other examples. In the Chauvet Cave, images dating back roughly thirty-seven thousand years show a different approach. The artist records the external world—movement, anatomy, behavior of animals. Humans are rarely depicted, and when they appear, they are reduced to minimal, almost abstract forms. It suggests a different orientation: the human not as the center, but as an observer within a larger field.

Human beings give form to both inner experience and the external world.

One of the oldest symbols is the handprint. It appears in caves across continents. A direct gesture of presence: a hand pressed against stone, leaving a mark that states, without language, “I am here.”

Another recurring form is the spiral. It appears in nature and in early image-making—a sign of movement, of unfolding.

There is also a hypothesis of a shared visual proto-language. Humans, separated by vast distances and without contact, created similar symbols—on stone, in deserts, near rivers, in forests. This repetition suggests a common structure of perception, a way of seeing that precedes culture. From this, writing and symbolic systems later emerge.

Experience can exist without symbol. Cult begins with image. Culture develops from cult.

Very little is known about the time before civilization. The meanings of these images remain uncertain. What remains are fragments—bones, traces, surfaces marked with form. The images may have had practical roles: ritual, signal, orientation. They may have been something else entirely.

What is clear is that art has always been intertwined with the emergence of spiritual and symbolic systems. Without image, they would not take shape. At the same time, the act may be simpler than any system that followed—a direct affirmation of existence. A mark left behind.

When I look at prehistoric art, I do not see the past. I see an active process. The same line continues. When I paint, I extend a gesture that began tens of thousands of years ago on cave walls. The medium changes, the impulse remains. To make a mark is to fix presence, to register that something was here.

This is why the role of the artist carries weight. It is not decoration. It is continuation. To create is to participate in a process larger than any individual—to leave a trace, like a handprint on stone, placed by someone whose name is lost but whose gesture remains.

In that sense, this book is also a mark—only formed through language instead of image.

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