Le geste et la parole (1964), the philosophical magnum opus of the French paleontologist André Leroi-Gourhan, offers an astonishing observation of theoretical relevance for the debate on the origin of images: at the very beginning of pictorial figuration lies the abstract gesture of the homo pictor. Leroi-Gourhan reconstructed the origin of the images thus from an emergent »Birth of graphism«. His implicit image theory in Gesture and Speech thereby preludes important approaches in the current debate on the origin of visualization, like the deconstruction of the drawing act (Derrida/Nancy), the anthropology of communicative action (Tomasello) and the philosophy of technology and exteriorization (Stiegler).
