The evolution of natural language provided humans with a shared representational system, enabling them to acquire information from anyone who used that system. It was never a perfect representational system, because its evolutionary impetus had been provided by cooperative communication, which leaves room for the immediate checking and correction of intended meaning, without relying on absolute precision in the message received. Nor is it a limitless system: its capacity is restricted by users' cognitive abilities as well as by the length of time available to them for learning the system. Yet the result of natural language evolution was, despite the system's limitations, an explosion in the amount of information that early humans were able to trade. And although a lot of human culture does not depend on anything other than verbal and imitative abilities to be passed on to the next generation, there is only so much information that we can hold and manage in our brains alone; even in our collective brains. Eventually there came a point at which there was too much cultural information available for individuals to manage reliably using memory and speech alone. In this chapter and the next I explore how, when cultural information had expanded beyond the point that the brain could manage independently, humans began to develop artefactual symbols in order to represent – that is, to store and manipulate – the excess cultural information.