Abstract: One of the key features of language is arbitrariness - linguistic forms are often related to their meanings in an apparently random way. However, early linguistic systems are unlikely to have been arbitrary, as learning arbitrary form-meaning mappings seems to require fairly complex cognitive capacities. Instead, iconic signs (particularly iconic gestures), whose forms 'resemble' their meanings (e.g. 'Kookaburra', gesture for 'want a drink?'), are supposed to help bootstrap early linguistic systems, which then become systems of arbitrary symbols via cultural and biological evolution. In the talk, I analyse the notion of imagic iconicity in particular, and argue that early signs were not in fact iconic for their users. In this case, iconicity does not offer a way of explaining the evolution of early linguistic systems. Instead, this opens up a way of differentiating non-iconic but non-arbitrary signs, the comprehension of which arguably relies on different cognitive capacities, which may or may not be able to bootstrap the evolution of modern linguistic capacities. Nevertheless, it is suggested that iconicity did play an important role in building the lexicon of a proto-language and aiding horizontal transmission of novel signs, based on existing capacities and communicative context.