From Aztecs to AI: The Timeless Evolution of Emoji and Human Expression

Emoji, those tiny digital glyphs that populate our messages and social media feeds, may seem like a thoroughly modern invention. Yet their roots stretch deep into human history, entwined with ancient pictorial languages, scientific curiosity, and our evolving relationship with embodiment—from the Aztecs and Inca to Humboldt and Darwin, and now, artificial intelligence[3]. This post explores how the concept and function of emoji have been (re)invented across centuries, reflecting changing understandings of emotion, communication, and what it means to be human.

Ancient Pictograms: The Original Emoji

Long before Unicode or Japanese schoolgirls doodling “kaomoji” in the 1970s[5], cultures like the Aztecs and Inca developed visual alphabets composed of faces, bodies, gestures, and actions. Their hieroglyphics were not just records—they were tools for expressing emotion and interaction, what we might now call the “OG emoji”[3]. Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics, which functioned as symbolic logic, these American pictograms were rich in affect. They captured the movements of the features and the body, illustrating that emotion is not merely a cerebral phenomenon but a lived, embodied experience.

Humboldt: Nature as a Web of Relations

In 1810, the Prussian explorer and polymath Alexander von Humboldt published Vues des Cordillères, a lavish record of his travels through Latin America[3]. Amid the engravings of mountains and artifacts, Humboldt included fragments of Incan and Aztec pictorial languages, devoting nearly half the book’s illustrations to these emotional visual alphabets. He understood their significance, seeing them as evidence of a sophisticated system of communication—one that challenged European notions of “primitive” societies and instead highlighted a complex, embodied wisdom. Humboldt’s approach was holistic: he sought to “establish the unity and harmony of this stupendous mass of force and matter,” refusing to isolate facts from their interrelations. For him, ancient emoji were part of the web of life, bridging nature, culture, and feeling[3].

Darwin: The Science of Emotion

A young Charles Darwin was captivated by Humboldt’s work, paging through its visual dictionaries of ancient emotion[3]. Decades later, Darwin would make his own contribution: The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), one of the first scientific treatises illustrated with photography. Here, Darwin depicted basic emotions—fear, anger, joy, sorrow, disgust—as “movements of the features and gestures,” mapping affect onto the whole human being, head to toe. Like the Incan pictograms, Darwin’s dictionary emphasized that emotion is fundamentally embodied. As psychologist William James would later argue, “A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity”—feeling is physiological, not just psychological[3].

From Embodiment to Disembodiment: The Digital Turn

Fast-forward to the present, and our emoji have become increasingly abstracted from the body. As digital communication replaces physical encounters, we meet each other as faces on screens—often as stylized symbols rather than living, breathing presences[3]. Emojis, once rooted in the full-body experience of emotion, now reflect a “willing amputation of the body, this cult of the head.” This shift echoes a broader trend: outsourcing our experience of the world to the “disembodied pseudo-minds of AI,” we risk losing touch with our creaturely aliveness, our embodied humanity.

AI and Emoji: Reinventing Expression

Artificial intelligence now plays a central role in the evolution of emoji, from generating new symbols to interpreting emotional intent in digital messages[1][3]. But as AI learns from our data, it inherits the biases and limitations of current emoji sets—often reinforcing a narrowed, head-centric view of emotion. The danger is that we mistakenly equate these digital symbols with the totality of human feeling, forgetting that real emotion is lived in the body and shaped by context, culture, and interaction.

Reclaiming Embodiment in Visual Language

If our symbols influence our ideas about what it means to be human, then the (re)invention of emoji is more than a technical challenge—it’s an existential one[3]. Humboldt argued that “[the imagination] influences ideas and language.” Our visual lexicon shapes our imagination, and in turn, our understanding of ourselves. To reclaim our embodied aliveness, we may need to reimagine emoji, inventing a new alphabet that reconnects head and body, symbol and sensation.

From Pictogram to AI: The Thread of Embodiment

Across centuries, the story of emoji is a story of embodiment—of how humans have sought to represent not just thoughts but feelings, not just minds but living bodies. The Aztecs and Inca crafted pictograms that captured the fullness of emotion. Humboldt recognized their sophistication and introduced these visual languages to the modern world. Darwin mapped emotion onto muscle and gesture, pioneering the science of affect. Today, AI is reshaping emoji, but the risk is that we lose sight of the body in favor of the symbol.

To move forward, we must remember that “no single fact can be considered in isolation.” The history of emoji reminds us that communication is always embodied, always relational. If we wish to invent new forms of expression—whether in pixels or code—we must root them in the lived reality of the human experience[3].

In the end, the (re)invention of emoji is not just about technology—it’s about the ongoing dance between body and mind, nature and culture, image and imagination. If we are to create a language fit for the future, let us ensure it is as rich in embodiment as it is in possibility.

Original source: The Marginalian – Embodiment and the (Re)invention of Emoji, from the Aztecs to Humboldt and Darwin to AI