Sticks, stars, sickness: How early charts plotted the way we were
From dots and dashes on cave walls to maps of ocean tides and then the earliest graphs, see how we’ve been visualising data since the start of collective living
If you wanted to know when the bison were returning, and when to expect the next hearty steak, you likely checked the latest cave update, in Ancient Lascaux, France.
For nearly a century, ever since the caves were discovered in 1940, anthropologists have struggled to decode the lines, dots and Y-shaped marks carved into the rock here.
Now, in a study published last year, researchers from Durham University and University College London, analysed 800 such sequences and found that they contained 13 types of marks (sets of lines, dots and Y symbols), in patterns consistent with the 13 months in a lunar year.
Suddenly, the message of the marks became clearer: they could represent the mating, migration and birthing patterns of the deer, bison and horses drawn alongside.
No one likely lived in the Lascaux caves; they were more of an art and information centre. And so these marks, made 17,000 to 20,000 years ago, could represent the earliest public data charts in the world.
Go further back, as much as 50,000 years ago, and bones have been found across Africa and parts of Eastern Europe, with notches in them that coincide with the phases of the moon. These bones would have acted as a sort of early calendar.
These systems, of knots, notches and dashes, would endure for tens of thousands of years.
As recently as the 15th century, in South America — in the vast but largely isolated Inca civilisation that operated without money and without a script — a system of knotted ropes called quipu were used to track transactions and debt; record census data; and track stocks of royal grain reserves.
We have been visualising data in one way or another, then, since more or less the start of collective living.
Charts came before language. Before trade. Before poetry. Because, before tales of love and heroism, we had to tackle the question of how to track: the new sheep added to a flock, the days left before the wildebeest moved south, the number of people in a kingdom or the number of soldiers lost at war.
What would come later was the qualitative and quantitative analysis, says Venkatesh Rajamanickam, a professor of information graphics and data visualisation at the Industrial Design Centre of the Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay (IIT-B).
“How do festivals make us ‘feel’? What is it like to work in the office versus at home? That came later. But it is only when you record that you can analyse,” he says.
What were some of the earliest charts like? Take a look.
Stick sea charts; Marshall Islands
For thousands of years, the cluster of about 34 islands and atolls that make up the Marshall Islands used a sort of nautical map to visualise the complex math of tides, currents and ocean swells.
Curved bamboo or pandanus root sticks represented ocean swells; straight twigs stood in for currents and waves; seashells were the islands themselves.
“In a coastal environment, these sticks and shells were a practical choice,” says Rajamanickam. “They could weather rain and seawater, and were easy to carry. The Marshallese would study the charts on land before venturing into the sea.”
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Star maps; China
In Ancient China, star maps were painted and etched onto the ceilings of tombs, onto stone tablets and onto scrolls, in what were likely attempts to help the dead navigate the heavens.
These charts were also used to create calendars, predict celestial events such as eclipses and make astrological divinations. They helped in early attempts at astronomy.
A particularly interesting such map is a tomb painting dating to 1116 CE. It shows the Great Bear or Ursa Major constellation, depicted as seven red dots connected by lines. At a distance are nine small discs of varying sizes, believed to indicate the sun, moon and five naked-eye and two invisible planets.
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Line graph; Scotland
Our modern charts and graphs were born of the great collisions of the 17th and 18th centuries.
In this Age of Enlightenment, in Europe, England’s Isaac Newton presented his theories on gravity; the Scotsman Adam Smith laid down his economic theory; and the Frenchman Rene Descartes championed curiosity and the act of questioning with the rallying cry: “I think, therefore I am.”
Science, math, philosophy and logical reasoning crashed into each other and took great leaps forward. Amid it all, the foundations of modern graphical representation were laid by William Playfair.
The Scottish engineer and political economist is credited with introducing the line and bar charts to the world.
It makes sense that these took off as they did, amid the excesses of colonialism, when the wealth of nations began to be talked about and compared.
Back to the early line graph, in 1786, aged just 27, Playfair published what is considered the first such visual representation of a relationship between two or more variables.
The chart represented the balance of trade between England and Other Nations, using customs data. A wiggly line in orange showed the imports; another in red depicted exports.
The area between them was coloured, to indicate how the balance of trade swung in England’s favour.
In the same year, Playfair published the first bar chart, representing Scotland’s imports and exports to and from 17 countries in 1781. Scotland apparently did brisk trade with Ireland, Russia, America and the West Indies at this time. It exported more than it imported; its biggest customer was Russia.
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Cholera map; London
By the 19th century, data visualisation had emerged as a tool for analysis and advocacy, says Rajamanickam.
In 1854, physician Dr John Snow mapped the cholera outbreak in London’s Soho area, for instance, to prove the disease wasn’t airborne. Instead, it was traced to that notorious handpump on Broad Street. When the handle of the handpump was removed, the cycle of infection finally broke — and the municipality of London could get down to addressing the root cause: the polluted drinking-water supply at the well..
Causes of mortality in the army, 1858
We don’t think of nurse and social reformer Florence Nightingale as a statistician, but that was, in fact, a big part of how she drove change.
In 1858, for instance, she created the Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East, which was published as part of a book encapsulating her statistical research.
Using a three-part coxcomb chart (above), she highlighted how poor sanitary conditions in military hospitals had claimed the lives of more British soldiers than the battles of the Crimean War (1853-56).
A lack of medical supplies and staff support was costing lives too, raising the number of preventable deaths, she argued.
The government accepted and adopted her recommendations on sanitation and war medicine and used her chart, in fact, as the inspiration for the Army Medical Statistics Department, which was set up in the 1860s.
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As new charts helped us understand our increasingly complex world, “there emerged a growing trust in numbers. And diagrams, maps and charts became an easy way to make sense of the numbers,” Rajamanickam says.
Visuals, he adds, play on a trait that humans have worked to evolve for millions of years: the ability to spot patterns. “Our species survived because of our ability to spot patterns, and hence, also spot the outlier. It told us: here, something’s amiss. Beware.”
From Covid-19 to economic bubbles, charts now help us do that better, he adds.
