Mr Bouabré has recorded an oral history of his Bété tribe with hundreds of small, colourful pictograms in ballpoint, ink and pencil on cardboard, interpreting everything from world history to the movement of the heavens.
The visionary drawings of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, from Côte d'Ivoire, lay out the history of the world in a pan-African language of pictograms that show the continent to have been far less isolated than history usually recounts.
Adhesives, arrows, sewing needles, ochre-decorated pictograms and jewellery made from shells are all contemporary with Dr Wadley's finds.
And the abstraction of natural forms into rudimentary symbols, characteristic of modern painting, is echoed in the "pin-men" conventions of Magdalenian caves, in Aztec pictograms, and Indian and Tibetan cosmic-diagram paintings.
The earlier failure to recognize these levels of structure in language led some scholars to believe that some writing systems, so-called ideograms and pictograms, had been invented to express thought directly, bypassing language altogether.
These pictograms, known today as cuneiform, were the first writing.
Ten-year-old Sarah deciphered pictograms on a clay disc: "There's a cookie, a fish, a guy with a mohawk …" And Ben was amazed by a pair of "epic" axes.
They were like pictograms or icons to me.
Click here to guess the films from their pictograms But Milesi rejects the idea that such reductions in any way dumb content down.
A breakthrough year for the pictograms first spread by texting teens has been marked by the Oxford Dictionaries' recognition for a word or expression that "captures the ethos, mood, or preoccupations of that particular year".
To the left, the symbol for "snake" mutates into a stylised sign for "slaughter", while, below, the hieroglyphs in which the various spells are written – names in red and rules in black – have evolved, over time, from pictograms.
