The Prehistory of Nuuksio

It was cold and bright as I walked on the thick ice which had formed on Nuuksion Pitkäjärvi[1] over the last couple of weeks of -20°C temperatures, the sun just above the trees on the horizon. The sky was as a beautiful blue, the kind of blue you only see in Finland on a cold, bright and cloudless late-February afternoon.

A thick layer of knee-deep snow covered the ice, which would have been a problem if I had been walking only in my boots.

And I wasn’t.

I was on my snowshoes.

The last couple of years there hadn’t been enough proper snow for them, climate change has been most notable in Finland over the last twenty years, and the snow on the ice was so deep today that it would have made walking difficult without them. As I wanted proper, more traditional snowshoes, not the designer ones in the local shops meant only for short Instagram-photo-perfect walks, I had these snowshoes imported from Canada (my home country), they’re the same as the ones I used in the army when we had to travel long distances, when traversing mountain passes, and the Subarctic taiga, especially at the edge of the Arctic tree line.  

Over the last hour I had been counting my steps, looking at my map occasionally, hoping to pinpoint the spot I was looking for: I was looking for an anthropological artifact. Of course I could have used my phone like everyone else did, Google Maps specifically, to see my destination and the suggested route, and then followed a little dot on the screen.

In the city such a service was useful. However today, because I wanted to locate an anthropological artifact thousands of years old, it seemed a bit too industrially spoon-fed for my purposes. I wanted to rough it a little, for a couple of hours feel like an explorer.

I had learned map and compass navigation when I was a teenager, which came in handy in the Canadian Arctic when then were very few landmarks. So it seemed only appropriate to search for an anthropological artifact thousands of years old using a map with grid lines, developed from our ancestral observations of the planets and stars.

The anthropological artifact I was looking for was a rock motif, called scientifically a pictograph, a rock painting of a moose (purportedly), drawn to look like it was moving or looking left (from the artist’s perspective), theoretically the earliest it was painted was c. 6750 BCE. It couldn’t have been painted any earlier simply because its location was under water, a result of the melting of the Weichselian glacial icesheet which began c. 11500 BCE. It took until c. 6750BCE, almost 5000 years of ice melting and glacial isostatic rebound to get to the spot of the pictograph above water. From c. 6750BCE to c. 4750BCE, Nuuksion Pitkäjärvi wasn’t a lake at all, it was a fjord of the Littorina Sea (c. 6550 BCE to c. 2050 BCE), the last fully fresh water stage of the Baltic basin. One theory suggests that it was during this time the Baltic basin was named by a Proto-Indo-European (c. 4500 BCE to c. 2500 BCE), the “Baltic” to mean “white” or “fair,” and this corresponds with the Comb Ceramic Culture (c. 4200 BCE to c. 2000 BCE) who were Proto-Indo-Europeans living in the Baltic basin who subsisted on seal and fish.[2]

After snowshoeing another thirty minutes, I realised I had walked too far. I had walked past the spot of the pictograph while I was busy with my thoughts, enjoying such a beautiful day.

The reason: A few moments ago, I just finished a nice chat with a man who was fishing through holes he had drilled in the ice, relocating every thirty minutes or so to drill new holes to fish. On one of his relocations I accompanied him, and we walked on a portion of the lake which had soft ice, and we both began to sink. Fortunately, I had my snowshoes on so I didn’t sink far as my weight was more evenly distributed, and yet he was wearing rubber boots and had to hurry a bit ahead of me to firmer ice, which wasn’t an easy task in deep snow. Neither of us were in danger, we both had a great laugh when we realised we both overreacted.

When I left him, I realised I had walked too far and had to reorientate myself on the map.

I got my map out, looked at the drawn shoreline where the pictograph should be, located it on the map, and looked up at the shoreline which was four hundred metres away.

It wasn’t hard to see where the pictograph was located.

There, about four hundred metres ahead of me was a dark patch of barren rock, at this distance it looked like a black speck in a sea of white. All the rock faces on the shoreline were covered in snow, and this one was not, so that must be where the pictograph was located. Of course, that might not be the case, I was just assuming. There could have been many reasons why that rock face was barren, having nothing to do with a pictograph. There were many snowmobile and ski tracks all over this lake, anyone could have gone there and cleared away the snow just for the entertainment.

When I began snowshoeing towards the dark patch, I remember reading an article a few weeks back that the oldest pictographs were painted c. 67800 BCE:

A hand stencil discovered on the wall of a cave in Indonesia has been identified as the oldest-known example of rock art anywhere in the world. The artwork predates the previous oldest discovery in the same region by at least 15,000 years.[3]

It’s quite amazing, really, that this practice of pictography is a part of us being human, and we’ve been human for c. 300,000 years. We’ve painted motifs on rocks millions of times and only the tiniest fraction of them have survived. In fact, the modern English alphabet is the result of pictures painted or carved on rocks: Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs (c. 3250 BCE) to Phoenician (c. 1050 BCE) to Old Italic (c. 700 BCE) to Latin (c. 75 BCE) to Old English (c. 700 CE). Yes, this timeline is simplified, there were many variables involved to get us from Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs to the Modern Business English alphabet, however I’m sure you’ll get my point.

Interestingly, the Ancient Greeks called the Egyptian hieroglyphs, “sacred carvings.”

Now, whether the practice of pictography on rocks in Finland is related to “sacred carvings” or simply art-for-art’s sake is a matter of intense debate in anthropology.

What may now be called the traditional theories of motivlltion of the artists are: I) The art had a purpose, to influence or control the object sympathetic magic theory. 2) The art for art’s sake that no further purpose need be sought than that of the pleasure of the artist in his work and in receiving the admiration of his community for his skill.[4]

And I agree with Wilcox (1978), that without clear evidence one cannot say which is true. For example, regarding the pictograph of the moose, the people who painted it disappeared from the fossil record in Finland at c. 2000 BCE. Therefore, there was no one to tell us why they painted the moose, therefore only our imagination and bias creates it.

That still doesn’t mean that wild speculation about pictography doesn’t exist. The Finns who call themselves “shaman” worship these pictographs, there are hundreds of pictographs throughout southern Finland, they have made their choice very clear.

As I got closer to the dark patch on the shoreline, I could see why this rock face didn’t collect snow: It was at such an angle that snow couldn’t collect on it.

The people who came by here and painted the moose on the wall knew it was in a protected location from the snow and rain. However, did they know that silicon dioxide would seep from the granite, cover their painting in a thin layer of minerals, and protect it for all these thousands of years?

Of course they didn’t.

They probably knew that some granite faces would protect their moose from the elements for a certain period: weeks, months, years even.

For seven millennia, though? No.

They must have painted thousands of these motifs as a people over thousands of years, and for many different reasons, and they knew the best granite faces, the best ones which would protect their work. It’s just coincidence that it’s here, that it survived, this motif is not divine.

Surely, I can speculate, they too must have found pictography from their ancestors, people they had never met, who left behind puzzling motifs.

As I got closer, I could see the painted image. Whether it was a moose was debateable however now wasn’t the time to debate.

All this theory, all this history, all this culture, it was now staring me right in the face.

As I stood where the artist stood, I could only whisper an interjection.

“… wow …”

Weak, true, however I am being honest, I was speechless.

I was standing in front of a mystery which could never be solved, as the people who painted it long ago have disappeared into the nothingness of time.

I hope they had a good life.

[1] Finnish: Nuuksion Pitkäjärvi (English: Nuuksio Long Lake) is forty-two kilometres (or twenty-six miles) northwest of Helsinki, the capital of Finland.

[2] Pääkkönen, Mirva, et al. RECONSTRUCTING FOOD PROCUREMENT and PROCESSING in EARLY COMB WARE PERIOD through ORGANIC RESIDUES in EARLY COMB and JÄKÄRLÄ WARE POTTERY. Fennoscandia archaeologica XXXIII, 2016.

[3] Ruse, Amy. “67,800 Years Old: World’s Oldest Rock Art Discovered in Indonesia.” SciTechDaily, 27 Feb. 2026.

[4] Willcox, A. R. An Analysis of the Function of Rock Art. South African Journal of Science Vol. 74 (59-64), Feb. 1978.