Face representation linked with literacy level in colonial American tombstone engravings and Third World preliterates' drawnings. Toward a cultural-evolutional neurology.

Among colonial North-American artisans, subgroups of South-Americans, Indonesians and New Guineans, a close correspondence exists between illiteracy rates and specifically spatially inaccurate representations of the upper face configuration, a characteristic also seen in the pre-literate period of 'neolithic' art, in early individual development, and in certain pathological regressions. Common to the configuration both of lexical signs and of the face is a specific spatial-relational ratio and orientation. Accurate representation of both configurations appear to be neuro-developmentally linked, within a cultural context, and consistent with a novel position that the 'ontogeny' of such cognitive functions recapitulates their prevailingly culturally determined 'phylogeny'.