IDOL

Neanderthals repeatedly carried their dead into one cave in northern Iraq and put them down in the floor. Shanidar 4 was found on his side with his arm under his head; Shanidar Z lay in a hollow gouged out to fit her, with a stone under her head. The cluster dates to roughly seventy to seventy-five thousand years ago.

At Sunghir on the Russian plain, thirty-four thousand years ago, three burials were lavish with beads and ochre and one was not treated that way at all. People were buried in a site that kept producing them for thousands of years, individually and very differently.

Round enclosures on a hillside in Anatolia holding T-shaped pillars carved to suggest human figures, built by people who had not yet domesticated a single animal - used for over a thousand years, then deliberately filled in and built over.

A Roman aristocrat had a wax mask of his own face taken while he was alive - usually in his thirties or forties, on taking office - and it was kept in a cupboard in the entrance hall beside a painted family tree and a label listing his offices. He never saw it worn. After his death, actors put it on and walked it in his funeral procession, in order of death, wearing the robes of the office he had held.

Eight thousand life-size soldiers, each with a face and ears no other has, buried in battle order facing the enemy with the emperor behind them - made from the likenesses of real men so the substitute army would stand where the real one could not.

In 787 the Second Council of Nicaea ended the first phase of the Byzantine iconoclastic dispute and defined what an icon was for: the honour paid to the image passes to the figure it shows. Icons were lawful because in Christ the invisible God had been seen. The panel itself never answered anyone.

Supporting a club as a condition of belonging to a place, a class, a family, or a city.

Sarah Bernhardt toured more like a head of state than a player: when she sailed for New York in 1891 the crossing was covered the way a royal visit is, and 'Divine Sarah' was by then the whole public's phrase for her. Mark Twain's note put it exactly - there were five kinds of actresses, and Sarah Bernhardt. An idol built at distance.

An adult with authority over a child for years, who is remembered partly by how they made them feel at nine.

A player who has been attached to for years leaves, and the grievance is felt as betrayal by the entire locality.

An Italian workman walked out of the Louvre with the painting under his coat, and the wall it had hung on went on drawing a crowd: four iron hooks, no picture, and thousands of people come to look at the hooks anyway. The papers printed the absence, and when she came back she had become public property - the first mass art icon, made by a thief rather than by a painter.

The first movie fan magazine appeared in February 1911, because by 1910 the letters were arriving faster than the studios could absorb them. What it invented was not the letter but the reply - a department, a set of rules, a Chicago address, and a flat refusal to publish studio addresses. Thousands of letters went in. A handful were printed.

By 1917 nine out of ten men at a costume ball came as him, a hold-up man in Cincinnati borrowed his costume as a disguise, and in 1916 somebody was paging him in more than eight hundred hotels at the same moment. Later, fans sent letters with a doodle of his face where the address should have been. The likeness had stopped being a picture and started being an instruction.

The first film performer whose value could be counted instead of guessed. She was on the cover of the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1911, an honour then kept for theatrical stars; by 1916 her fan following had become ten thousand dollars a week, half her film profits and a production company of her own. The audience was never asked for any of it, and every line of the contract exists because of it.

Support for a team or an athlete as a bond with a person, a place and a lineage, frequently inherited from a parent.

A physical object that had to be opened, a volume small enough for one person to hold, and a reply that was an exception. Clara Bow, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, all had staff whose job was correspondence. Some of it came back.

A screen persona called the Latin Lover, and a death at thirty-one that produced public mourning on a scale nothing before it had managed - including a woman claiming an engagement he had never mentioned to anyone.

The first documented fan clubs, organised around sheet music and radio rather than film. Following became joining.

Her church went on the air on 6 February 1924: KFSG - 'Kall Foursquare Gospel' - broadcasting at 500 watts from Angelus Temple, listener-supported one day at a time. She is credited by her own church as the first woman to preach a sermon on radio (1922), and after the first broadcast the letters came from other states and other countries, cataloguing where the signal had been heard.

In 1927 Babe Ruth hit sixty home runs and became the most replayed figure in a game most fans knew through print. His bylined column ran in syndication, much of it ghostwritten, and radio was beginning to carry him into rooms the stadium never reached. The 1920s press manufactured a 'hot romance' and he was its star.

Paramount signed Clara Bow in 1926 and released six of her pictures in 1927, one of which - It - put a novelist's definition of 'It' onto a face and left the language with the phrase 'It Girl'. At the top of her fame she was the most-answered person in America: more than 45,000 fan letters arrived in January 1929 alone, and when fans found out she used henna, sales of the dye tripled.

Two white broadcasters voiced two fictional black men from March 1928, and at its peak about forty million listeners a night followed their fortunes - half the nation's radios, by one estimate. The audience the show loved most was also the one it caricatured, and from 1931 that audience organised.

A dentist and a painter's sister were made into a national type on purpose, and one of them denied it for five years.

In Grand Hotel (1932) Greta Garbo said 'I want to be alone', and the line became her biography: the press called her the Swedish Sphinx and MGM capitalised on the mystery. In LIFE in January 1955 she corrected the record - she had wanted to be let alone, not alone, and there is all the difference - but the correction did not take, and the letters she wrote at the time read lonelier than the legend does.

Franklin Roosevelt talked to the radio as if the listener were already in the room, and he did it often enough between March 1933 and June 1944 that the habit became a form - one he did not name. There is no solid definition of what counted as a chat; the estimates run from twenty-seven to thirty-one. The count does not matter. The sitting next to a fireplace does.

Teenagers organised in public, in letterpress newsletters, to buy records and argue about a singer. A press of ten thousand.

The early frames on attraction to media figures, work that treated the person doing the gazing as a slightly odd specimen and the celebrity as an object of study rather than a participant.

A formal organisation with membership, dues, an elected president, a newsletter and rules. Not a spontaneous thing that happened to fans - a structure somebody built for them and that fans then ran themselves.

A national simultaneous viewing event, and an industry that learned within two years that the appeal was not the music.

A label, a songwriter and an image, assembled and launched. Not discovered - assembled.

Support for a politician structured as a personal bond rather than a policy preference, in a way that transfers poorly across candidates.

Warhol's 1962 double panel repeats one publicity still of Marilyn Monroe fifty times: colour on the left, draining to monochrome on the right, taken from Gene Kornman's Niagara photograph. Monroe died in August of that year, and the silkscreen turns her into a pattern a person can look at without her.

She received correspondence by the sackful and answered it by name, individually, for years. The closest thing the twentieth century produced to a genuinely reciprocal parasocial relationship.

A global mass hysteria, documented live, with screaming, fainting, and an industry that began pricing it within months.

Research on why some political candidates reliably produce personal attachment and others do not, despite comparable policy positions.

Elvis Presley was filmed in a two-dimensional process that placed an apparently three-dimensional Elvis on stage, in a scene where real people were supposed to react to him. Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite reached an estimated half the planet.

A costume is put on by a new actor and the audience transfers its entire attachment to whoever is now inside it. Running five days a week, in front of millions of children, with nobody pretending otherwise.

A death broadcast in real time to a generation that had grown up with a songwriter's complaints as a soundtrack.

Bands assembled for a market, with fan clubs, fan voting, fan merchandise and fan-financed releases.

Organised, commercialised intrusion: tracking schedules, buying flight details, intercepting travel, surveilling buildings.

A person famous for being filmed, with no skill, no work and no release schedule - and an audience that formed anyway.

Public mourning in a way that produced its own genre of documentary and speculation.

The pattern of locating and publishing a private address over a disliked fictional portrayal.

Fans are injured or killed attempting to get closer to a performer, in volume, repeatedly, for years.

An actor's persona and a character's persona are widely treated as the same thing, and one retires while the other continues.

Paid message apps where a window shaped exactly like the one holding your best friend costs about four dollars a month per artist, plus anniversary counters that make the bond feel cumulative and streaks that convert it into a hostage situation.

Organised conflict between fanbases, with brigading, ratioing and coalition behaviour, conducted with the grammar of war.

Evidence that the value of a celebrity endorsement falls when the audience suspects the relationship is a transaction.

A mass coordinated response in which the metric being weaponised is attention rather than truth.

A death announced through an initialism, and a global response before anybody knew the details.

Idol apps, paid messaging, fan-owned content, fan-voted releases, anniversary features, and a fandom documented and researched as a business model.

Organised refusal to engage with a person, usually a public figure, over something they said or did.

Envy of the object of the attachment and simultaneous relief that it is not actually being withheld from you - the emotional ambivalence that is present in almost every long-term fan relationship and rarely discussed.

A single artist booking a stadium for many consecutive nights, generating a physical economy around one very large parasocial bond.

A season of a reality format and a global sporting event produce millions of viewers who then investigate the participants' personal lives. A relationship with an edited construct becomes a licence to intervene in a real life.