Almost everybody looking at rock art goes hunting for the pictures — the sheep, the hunters, the spirals with a story attached. Malotki and Dissanayake point out that the oldest marks aren’t pictures at all. They’re dots, lines, grids, circles, cupules hammered into boulders, and that pattern holds on every continent. Malotki spent decades photographing this stuff across Arizona, Nevada, California, Idaho, and 200 of his photographs run through the book. Dissanayake brings the theory: She calls the impulse artification, the human urge to take something ordinary and make it special, and argues it comes before symbols and before language does much of anything. They spend a good stretch dismantling the popular idea that shamans made these marks in trance states. Watch a kid with a crayon instead.