WHY AND HOW EARLY HUMANS MADE ART

EARLY MODERN HUMAN ART

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20,000- Year- Old Cave Paintings of a Hyena
It has been said that the greatest innovation in modern humans was not tools or weapons but art and symbolic expressions that are associated with it. Around 40,000 years ago a "cultural explosion" began in Europe that would eventually yield magnificent cave paintings, detailed sculptures, elaborate body ornamentation and musical instruments. Before that time the only things that made by ancient men that qualified as art were carefully-crafted stone tools, etched rocks and minerals and perforated shells and beads. The first evidence of painting — perhaps dating as far back as 75,000 years ago — is from Australia of all places. Two Paleolithic harpoons, at least 60,000 years old, decorated with geometric figures discovered at Veyrier near Geneva, were once declared the world's oldest examples of art. But many other pieces have since had similar pronouncements made about them.

Laura Anne Tedesco wrote for The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “A virtual revolution occurred in the creation of art during the period of the Upper Paleolithic in Europe. Beginning around 40,000 B.C., the archaeological record shows that anatomically modern humans effectively replaced Neanderthals and remained the sole hominin inhabitants across continental Europe. At about the same time, and directly linked to this development, the earliest art was created. These initial creative achievements fall into one of two broad categories. Paintings and engravings found in caves along walls and ceilings are referred to as "parietal" art. The caves where paintings have been found are not likely to have served as shelter, but rather were visited for ceremonial purposes. The second category, "mobiliary" art, includes small portable sculpted objects which are typically found buried at habitation sites. In the painted caves of western Europe, namely in France and Spain, we witness the earliest unequivocal evidence of the human capacity to interpret and give meaning to our surroundings. Through these early achievements in representation and abstraction, we see a newfound mastery of the environment and a revolutionary accomplishment in the intellectual development of humankind.” [Source: Laura Anne Tedesco, Independent Scholar. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org, October 2000]

The Aurignacian (42,000 to 28,000 years ago), Gravettian (28,000 to 22,000 years ago), Solutrean (22,000 to 18,000 years ago) and Magdalenian (18,000 to 10,000 years ago) cultures are all named French sites. Each site has art, tools, weapons and adornment associated with it.

Abri Castanet cave in France, occupied as far back as 40,000 years, produced a large variety of objects and materials. The cave was a highly structured domestic site with distinct areas for various activities such as beadmaking and reindeer hide preparation. More than 90 percent of the bones found belonged to reindeer. The beads were made from soapstone for the central Pyrenees, and sea shells from both the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean. Tools found at the site have included keeled scrapers made from flint and spear points made of reindeer bones and antlers. Early humans may have created all kinds of stuff that was made of perishable materials that are even older or more beautiful but we will never about them because they have been lost time. Wood, for example, is one of the most plentiful and easy-to-work materials but is rots and disappears after a relatively short time.

Websites and Resources on Prehistoric Art: Chauvet Cave Paintings archeologie.culture.fr/chauvet ; Cave of Lascaux archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en; Trust for African Rock Art (TARA) africanrockart.org; Bradshaw Foundation bradshawfoundation.com; Australian and Asian Palaeoanthropology, by Peter Brown peterbrown-palaeoanthropology.net Websites and Resources on Hominins and Human Origins: Smithsonian Human Origins Program humanorigins.si.edu ; Institute of Human Origins iho.asu.edu ; Becoming Human University of Arizona site becominghuman.org ; Talk Origins Index talkorigins.org/origins ; Last updated 2006. Hall of Human Origins American Museum of Natural History amnh.org/exhibitions ; Wikipedia article on Human Evolution Wikipedia ; Evolution of Modern Humans anthro.palomar.edu ; Human Evolution Images evolution-textbook.org; Hominin Species talkorigins.org ; Paleoanthropology Links talkorigins.org ; Britannica Human Evolution britannica.com ; Human Evolution handprint.com ; National Geographic Map of Human Migrations genographic.nationalgeographic.com ; Humin Origins Washington State University wsu.edu/gened/learn-modules ; University of California Museum of Anthropology ucmp.berkeley.edu; BBC The evolution of man" bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life; "Bones, Stones and Genes: The Origin of Modern Humans" (Video lecture series). Howard Hughes Medical Institute.; Human Evolution Timeline ArchaeologyInfo.com ; Walking with Cavemen (BBC) bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life ; PBS Evolution: Humans pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/humans; PBS: Human Evolution Library www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library; Human Evolution: you try it, from PBS pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/evolution; John Hawks' Anthropology Weblog johnhawks.net/ ; New Scientist: Human Evolution newscientist.com/article-topic/human-evolution;

Websites and Resources on Neanderthals: Wikipedia: Neanderthals Wikipedia ; Neanderthals Study Guide thoughtco.com ; Neandertals on Trial, from PBS pbs.org/wgbh/nova; The Neanderthal Museum neanderthal.de/en/ ; The Neanderthal Flute, by Bob Fink greenwych.ca. . Fossil Sites and Organizations: The Paleoanthropology Society paleoanthro.org; Institute of Human Origins (Don Johanson's organization) iho.asu.edu/; The Leakey Foundation leakeyfoundation.org; The Stone Age Institute stoneageinstitute.org; The Bradshaw Foundation bradshawfoundation.com ; Turkana Basin Institute turkanabasin.org; Koobi Fora Research Project kfrp.com; Maropeng Cradle of Humankind, South Africa maropeng.co.za ; Blombus Cave Project web.archive.org/web; Journals: Journal of Human Evolution journals.elsevier.com/; American Journal of Physical Anthropology onlinelibrary.wiley.com; Evolutionary Anthropology onlinelibrary.wiley.com; Comptes Rendus Palevol journals.elsevier.com/ ; PaleoAnthropology paleoanthro.org.

Books: “Cave Art” by Jean Clottes (Phaidon, 2008); “The Cave Painters” by Gregory Curtis (2006), with interesting insights offer by a non-specialist; “The Nature of Paleolithic Art” by R. Dale Guthrie (2005); “Images of the Past” by Douglas I. Price and Gary M. Feinman (McGraw-Hill, 2006); “The Human Past: World Prehistory & the Development of Human Societies’ edited by Chris Scarre (Thames & Hudson, 2005); “The Dawn of European Art: An Introduction to Palaeolithic Cave Painting” by André Leroi-Gourhan (Cambridge University Press, 1982); “The Origin of Modern Humans” by Roger Lewin (Scientific American Library, 1993).

What Caused Early Humans to Produce Art

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Mammoth carved on ivory from Florida
Chip Walter wrote in National Geographic: “It seems unlikely...that some genetic “switch” flipped in our African ancestors to produce the capacity for a new, higher-order level of cognition that, once it evolved, produced a lasting change in human behavior. So how do we explain these apparently sporadic flare-ups of creativity? One hypothesis is that the cause was not a new kind of person but a greater density of people, with spikes in population sparking contact between groups, which accelerated the spread of innovative ideas from one mind to another, creating a kind of collective brain. Symbols would have helped cement this collective brain together. When populations again fell below critical mass, groups became isolated, leaving new ideas nowhere to go. What innovations had been established withered and died. [Source: Chip Walter, National Geographic, January 2015]

“Such theories are difficult to prove—the past holds its secrets close. But genetic analyses of modern populations do point to a surge in population in Africa 100,000 years ago. A 2009 study conducted by Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, and Mark G. Thomas of University College London also provides some statistical support for the power of larger populations to generate innovation. And research by Joseph Henrich, now at the University of British Columbia, suggests that as populations shrink, they have an increasingly difficult time holding on to the innovations they invented in the first place. The inhabitants of the island of Tasmania had been making bone tools, cold-weather clothing, and fishing equipment for 15,000 years before these advances disappear from the archaeological record some 3,000 years ago. Henrich argues that when sea levels rose 12,000 to 10,000 years ago and isolated Tasmania from the rest of the world, the indigenous population of perhaps 4,000 individuals was simply not large enough to keep the cultural traditions alive.

“Why Africa’s archaeological record grows dim for 150 centuries is by no means clear. Perhaps pestilence, natural catastrophe, or a sharp swing in climate caused populations to collapse. Yet Francesco d’Errico, an archaeologist at the University of Bordeaux, points out that although harsh conditions might spell doom for some cultures, others might be spurred on by them. There is no set formula. “Each region of the globe produced cultures with a number of different trajectories,” says d’Errico. “You could have situations where some short-term chaotic disaster might wipe out a culture in one area, but in another, people were able to take advantage of the challenge.” He likens it to a recipe. “Even if the ingredients are the same, you don’t necessarily get the same outcome.”“

Art and Abstraction Set Humans Apart from Animals?

Melissa Hogenboom wrote for the BBC: “One study proposes that our technological innovation was key for our migration out of Africa. We started to assign symbolic values to objects such as geometrical designs on plaques and cave art. There is little evidence that any other hominins made any kind of art. One example, which was possibly made by Neanderthals, was hailed as proof they had similar levels of abstract thought. However, it is a simple etching and some question whether Neanderthals made it at all. The symbols made by H. sapiens are clearly more advanced. We had also been around for 100,000 years before symbolic objects appeared so what happened? [Source: Melissa Hogenboom, BBC, July 6, 2015 |::|]



“Somehow, our language-learning abilities were gradually "switched on", Tattersall argues. In the same way that early birds developed feathers before they could fly, we had the mental tools for complex language before we developed it. We started with language-like symbols as a way to represent the world around us, he says. For example, before you say a word, your brain first has to have a symbolic representation of what it means. These mental symbols eventually led to language in all its complexity and the ability to process information is the main reason we are the only hominin still alive, Tattersall argues. It's not clear exactly when speech evolved, or how. But it seems likely that it was partly driven by another uniquely human trait: our superior social skills. |::|

“We are unique in the level of abstractness with which we can reason about others' mental states This tells us something profound about ourselves. While we are not the only creatures who understand that others have intentions and goals, "we are certainly unique in the level of abstractness with which we can reason about others' mental states", says Katja Karg, also of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. |::|

“When you pull together our unparalleled language skills, our ability to infer others' mental states and our instinct for cooperation, you have something unprecedented. Us.Just look around you, Tomasello says, "we're chatting and doing an interview, they (chimps) are not." We have our advanced language skills to thank for that. We may see evidence of basic linguistic abilities in chimpanzees, but we are the only ones writing things down. |::|

“We tell stories, we dream, we imagine things about ourselves and others and we spend a great deal of time thinking about the future and analysing the past.There's more to it, Thomas Suddendorf, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Queensland in Australia is keen to point out. We have a fundamental urge to link our minds together. "This allows us to take advantage of others' experiences, reflections and imaginings to prudently guide our own behaviour. "We link our scenario-building minds into larger networks of knowledge." This in turn helps us to accumulate information through many generations.” |::|

Aurignacians: Producers of Europe's First Great Art?


Chaevet Cave art produced in the Aurignacian period

The Aurignacian people is the name given to the early modern humans that created Europe's first art works. On their skill the German film director Werner Herzog said: “We should never forget the dexterity of these people. They were capable of creating a flute. It is a high-tech procedure to carve a piece of mammoth ivory and split it in half without breaking it, hollow it out, and realign the halves.

“We have one indicator of how well their clothing was made. In a cave in the Pyrenees, there is a handprint of a child maybe four or five years old. The hand was apparently held by his mother or father, and ocher was spit against it to get the contours and you see part of the wrist and the contours of a sleeve. The sleeve is as precise as the cuffs of your shirt. The precision of the sleeve is stunning.

“Aurignacian people that lived in Europe between 37,000 and 28,000 years ago have been divided into three subcultures based on the ornaments they wore: usually teeth, bones or and shells with a hole or a groove to accommodate a chords. A group that lived in present-day Germany and Belgium preferred perforated teeth and disk-shaped ivory beads. In Austria, southeast France, Greece and Italy they preferred shell. A third group lived in Spain and southern and western France.”

Art Not Accompanied by Genetic Mutations

Hannah Devlin wrote in The Guardian: “A study found that the advent of modern human behaviours around 100,000 years ago, indicated by cave art and more sophisticated tools, does not appear to have been accompanied by any notable genetic mutations. “Your genome contains the history of every ancestor you ever had,” said Swapan Mallick, a geneticist at Havard Medical School who led the analysis of the genomes of people from 142 distinct populations. [Source: Hannah Devlin, The Guardian, September 21, 2016 |=|]

“The study also suggests that the KhoeSan (bushmen) and Mbuti (central African pygmies) populations appear to have split off from other early humans sooner than this, again suggesting that there was no intrinsic biological change that suddenly triggered human culture. “There is no evidence for a magic mutation that made us human,” said Willerslev. |=|

“Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, said the findings would be controversial in the field, adding: “It either means that the behaviours were developed earlier, they developed these behaviours independently, they acquired them through exchanges of ideas with other groups, or the estimated split times are too old.” Ya pulingina. Bringing these words to life is an extension of our identity.” |=|

Early Modern Human Painting Methods

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Lascaux lamp
Ancient artists used earth pigments — mainly colors ground from red and yellow ochers and blackish manganese oxides — flint chisels, limestone lamps fueled by animal fat and some kind of scaffolding to reach the high walls and ceiling. The negative hand paintings found in many caves were believed to have been made placing a hand on a cave wall and blowing pigment through a tube and spitting it out of the mouth.

Scholars speculate that the first drawing may have been made with the charred end of a burnt stick placed in a fire. Later the artists started using other material around them and experimented until they found the best substances. Some of the paintings are placed along cracks the follow the outline of an animals body, or, in the case of ta carving in La Magadelaine Cave in France, the curves of a woman's body. [Source: History of Art by H.W. Janson, (Prentice Hall)]

The Lascaux paintings were made early modern humans, using animal fat lamps — made with a plant wick placed in hollow stone — to light the cave and scaffolding to reach the cave ceiling. The "paints" came from brown, reddish-brown, yellow, black and white minerals; and it appears they were mixed and heated to get the best shading. The painting themselves were made by rubbing these minerals along the rock. Red and black are the primary colors with red being made with crushed hematite (ocher) and the black made with charcoal made from the embers of Scotch pine.

Laura Anne Tedesco wrote for The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “The pigments used to paint Lascaux and other caves were derived from readily available minerals and include red, yellow, black, brown, and violet. No brushes have been found, so in all probability the broad black outlines were applied using mats of moss or hair, or even with chunks of raw color. The surfaces appear to have been covered by paint blown directly from the mouth or through a tube; color-stained, hollowed-out bones have been found in the caves. [Source: Laura Anne Tedesco, Independent Scholar. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, metmuseum.org, October 2000]

100,000-Year-Old Art Supplies Found in South African Cave


ocher from Blombos Cave

David Herbert wrote in Archaeology magazine: “A cave in southwestern South Africa was used as a paint production workshop, where ancient artists made a liquid ochre pigment. The toolkit of shells, stone, and bone from Blombos Cave suggests Middle Stone Age humans were capable planners. [Source: David Herbert, Archaeology, January/February 2012 +]

“Similar paint-making workshops have been found, such as the one at Lascaux Cave in France. But, at 100,000 years old, the Blombos toolkit is now the oldest one uncovered. "A Middle Stone Age painter has left all his tools for us," says Francesco d’Errico, a University of Bordeaux archaeologist involved in the excavation, noting the kit’s complete and preserved state. +\

“Two abalone shells were found with ochre and mineral residue in them, along with tools resembling mortars and pestles made of stone and bone from a variety of animals. The shells used for storing the powder are caked with both yellow and red pigments, implying repeated use. The variety of tools suggests their owner returned to the cave repeatedly to grind ochre from clay found nearby, using and discarding tools as needed. +\

“The acquisition of different ingredients and equipment, as well as evidence of storage, "implies planning abilities that a number of researchers would have not previously granted to Middle Stone Age populations," explains d’Errico. He adds that the ochre might have been produced for painting and body decoration.” +\

Rock Art in Australia Colored by Microbe Rather Than Paint

Eliza Strickland wrote in Discover: “A particular set of rock paintings dating from more than 40,000 years ago don’t seem to be made of paint anymore. According to a new study published in the journal Antiquity, the vibrant artworks were long ago colonized by colorful microbes, which serve as “living pigments” in the paintings. [Source: Eliza Strickland, Discover, December 29, 2010]

“Lead researcher Jack Pettigrew, of the University of Queensland in Australia, explains: ‘Living pigments’ is a metaphorical device to refer to the fact that the pigments of the original paint have been replaced by pigmented micro-organisms…. These organisms are alive and could have replenished themselves over endless millennia to explain the freshness of the paintings’ appearance.” [BBC News]

“When the researchers analyzed the so-called Bradshaw rock artworks found in Western Australia’s Kimberley region, they didn’t find paint. Instead they found a black fungus, probably belonging to a fungi group known as Chaetothyriales, as well as a reddish organism that is suspected to be a species of cyanobacteria.

“Successive generations of these fungi grow by cannibalising their predecessors. That means that if the initial paint layer – from tens of thousands of years ago – had spores of the fungus within it, the current fungal inhabitants may be direct descendants. The team also noted that the original paint may have had nutrients in it that “kick-started” a mutual relationship between the black fungi and red bacteria that often appear together. The fungi can provide water to the bacteria, while the bacteria provide carbohydrates to the fungi. [BBC News]

“The constant refreshing of the microbes that make up the paintings may account for the difficulty researchers have had in dating the Bradshaw artworks. According to the study, these works have only been indirectly dated via their subject matter: they’re thought to have been painted between 70,000 years ago, when the first boab trees began growing in Australia, and 46,000 years ago, when the megafauna depicted in the paintings died out.”


La Pasiega Cave in Spain


Early Modern Human Painting Images

The images found in cave art are mainly of animals that early man hunted, some of them have lines marked on their flanks that perhaps are spears use to kill them. In Lascaux there is a famous depiction of a partially-disemboweled bison. There are not many images of reindeer even though they were a primary food source. Bears also don't show up much. Some art historians and archaeologists suggest this is because maybe they were ritual, totemic species and rendering them in a cave was inauspicious.

Some of the more interesting images and caves include a frieze of pregnant fat women holding a bison horn found in a subterranean tunnel near Beune, France; a 20 foot-long painting in a the Niaux cave near Toulous that could only reached by swimming over a mile in an underground cave; a painting a figure with a bearded human face, antlers, the eyes of an owl, the tail of a horse and the claws of lion, believed to be a representation of a prehistoric shaman, found near Les Trois Fréres, a French town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. [ World Religions edited by Geoffrey Parrinder, Facts on File Publications, New York]

The 36,000-year-old art in Pech Merle, a cave open to the public, is one of the oldest in Europe. Describing it Christopher Shaw wrote in the New York Times, there “are charcoal drawings of horses, reindeer, mammoths and a rare “wounded man” that many interpret as a trancing shaman...Most riveting were the “twin horses," two life-size horses painted in black and dull rust with heavy outlines and facing in opposite directions, one behind the other, their transparent hindquarters arranged in convincing perspective and their equine forms wedded to the natural shapes on a freestanding boulder...Large spots made by artists who painted the palms of their hands and then slapped them onto the rock, and negative hand prints made by blowing pigment over the hand and top the rock, made the horses shimmer with life. A spectral fish, probably a pike, was superimposed over the horses like a Chagall angel, fusing the ephemeral with the substantial."

When pre-historic cave artists drew spots and lines on animals it often isn’t clear whether they were meant to be symbolic or accurate depictions. Some renderings of horses contains spots like those found on modern Appaloosa horses. It was long thought that the spots on these horses were probably symbolic. According to National Geographic: “Though dappled coats were thought to exist only on a few modern horses, the genotype showed up frequently in DNA analysis of horse bones from western Europe’s Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago).


Canaica del Calar in Spain


Early Painted Images of Human Beings

There are few depictions of human beings in the caves and when they are rendered they tend to be crudely drawn. The only image of a human in Lascaux cave in southern France is a human with a bird mask with a large beak, thought to be a shaman of some sort, being charged by a bison with a spear in its stomach. In La Marche cave there is a 15,000-year-old profile of made by a modern human of one of his own.

Describing the image of woman in a remote alcove of Chauvet Cave, as seen from a images from a digital camera rigged to a pole, Judith Thurman wrote in The New Yorker, “Wrapped around or, as it appears, straddling the phallus is the bottom half of a woman's body, with heavy thighs and bent knees that taper at the ankle, Her vulva is darkly shaded, and she has no feet. Hovering above her is a bison's head and hump, and an aroused white eye. But a line branching from its neck looks like a human arm with fingers. The relationship of these figure to each other ...is among the great enigmas in cave art, The woman's position suggests that she may be squatting in childbirth, and the animals, on a level with her loins, seems to be streaming away from her."

Hand stencils are common motifs on the walls of Paleolithic and Neolithic caves in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas. Some of have missing digits. Others show the sleeves of clothing. Many hand stencils from the Gravettian cultural period (roughly 28,000 to 22,000 years ago) were made in caves in southern France .

About 150 hands were stenciled onto the wall of Grotte Cosquer, an underwater cave discovered near Marseilles that can only be reached through a treacherous underwater tunnel in which three divers have drowned. Cosquer was discovered in 1991. At first is was regarded as a fraud with many making the claims based on photographs because they were unable to scuba dive into the cave. But later carbon dating proved that some of images were at least 27,000 years old, making them among the oldest cave art known.


Hand prints in Chauvet Cave


Ancient Cave Painters Were Realists, DNA Reveals

When pre-historic cave artists drew spots and lines on animals it often isn’t clear whether they were meant to be symbolic or accurate depictions. Some renderings of horses contains spots like those found on modern Appaloosa horses. It was long thought that the spots on these horses were probably symbolic. According to National Geographic: “Though dappled coats were thought to exist only on a few modern horses, the genotype showed up frequently in DNA analysis of horse bones from western Europe’s Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). Associated Press reported: “Cave painters during the Ice Age were more like da Vinci than Dali, sketching realistic depictions of horses they saw rather than dreaming them up, a study of ancient DNA finds. It's not just a matter of aesthetics: Paintings based on real life can give first-hand glimpses into the environment of tens of thousands of years ago. But scientists have wondered how much imagination went into animal drawings etched in caves around Europe.” [Source: Associated Press, November 8, 2011 ~||~]

An “analysis published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences focused on horses since they appeared most frequently on rock walls. The famed Lascaux Cave in the Dordogne region of southwest France and the Chauvet Cave in southeast France feature numerous scenes of brown and black horses. Other caves like the Pech Merle in southern France are adorned with paintings of white horses with black spots. Past studies of ancient DNA have only turned up evidence of brown and black horses during that time. That led scientists to question whether the spotted horses were real or fantasy. ~||~

“To get at the genetics of equine coat color, an international team led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany analyzed DNA from fossilized bones and teeth from 31 prehistoric horses. The samples were recovered from more than a dozen archaeological sites in Siberia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Iberian peninsula. It turned out six of the horses had a genetic mutation that gives rise to a spotted coat, suggesting that ancient artists were drawing what they were seeing. Brown was the most common coat color, found in 18 horses. ~||~

“Researchers who were not part of the study praised the use of genetics, saying it supports their observations. Paleoanthropologist John Shea of Stony Brook University in New York said he was not surprised that cave artists were in tune with their surroundings since they needed to know all they could about their prey to hunt them. "These artists were better observers of their natural environment than many humans are today," Shea said. Just because cave art was rooted in reality doesn't mean Ice Age painters lacked creativity. Archaeologist Paul Pettitt of the University of Sheffield in England said ancient artists were "immensely creative," using techniques such as charcoal shading that are still found in modern art.” ~||~

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Chauvet cave paintings

DNA Helps Scientists Decode Dappled Horse Paintings

Nikhil Swaminathan wrote in Archaeology magazine: “Genetic material from the bones and teeth of wild horses, some of which died more than 20,000 years ago, has answered a longstanding debate about some Paleolithic cave artists: Were these ancient painters realists, depicting the natural world they saw around them, or did they portray more imaginative representations? [Source: Nikhil Swaminathan, Archaeology, Volume 65 Number 2, March/April 2012 =/=]

“One of the paintings in question, The Dappled Horses of Pech-Merle, in a cave in southern France, is a nearly 25,000-yearold depiction of horses with spotted coats. While spots are seen in many modern horses, they were believed to be a product of later domestication and thus would not have coexisted with humans in the Paleolithic. =/=

“That belief turned out to be wrong. An international team of scientists examined ancient DNA from predomesticated horse remains found in Europe and Siberia. The team found gene variants common to domesticated spotted horses in more than 20 percent of their samples. Though the finding doesn't rule out some ancient creative license, the artists could have seen spotted horses in the wild. In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report, "At least for wild horses, Paleolithic cave paintings were closely rooted in the real-life appearance of the animals."” =/=

Why Early Man May Have Painted

"We do not precisely why [early modern humans] made these earliest surviving fixed images," wrote historian Daniel Boorstin in The Creators , "We brashly assume that he must have had a reason. But where he made them tells us something." Many theorize that because the images were typically of animals early man hunted the images were connected in some way with bringing success to the hunt and ensuring there was enough to eat.

"He must have felt a community with the animals he hunted, with whom his own life was bound," Boorstin wrote. “Here, in the every act of trying to “represent” — to represent — his quarry, the fearful powers all around him, he was awakened to another power in him, his power to create. Here in the secret passages of deep limestone caves, in the womb of the earth, he felt safe while he created. Was any of man's other discoveries more shocking or mysterious?"

Some speculate that the act of painting may have been more important than the paintings themselves. One scholar told the Washington Post, "some were not meant to be seen. You'd have to have climb up into narrow passages on your hands and knees to see them, which leads us to believe it was made for contact with the spirits."

There are no images of violence or warfare although three sites there are four drawings of a man's limbs and torso pierced with spearlike lines. One of the interesting things about the caves with the exception of Vilhonneur (where skull of a young man was found) and Cussac (where five adults were found) the caves are absent of human remains.

The mysterious circles, dots and chevrons on some animals, some scientists believe, were created by a painter in an altered state. Rock paintings by !Kung Bushmen are often made by shaman in a trancelike state to ward off demons.

Early Interpretations of Early Man Cave Paintings

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Lascaux cave images
Some scholars speculate that early cave painting were made by people who performed ritual hunts to kill the spirits of the animals to make them less formidable during the hunt and to prevent them from coming back to haunt the hunters. They also speculate that the concept of spirit developed out of the conception that something alive contained a spirit and something dead didn't, and when an animal died its spirit had to go somewhere. [Source: History of Art by H.W. Janson, (Prentice Hall)]

Many of the cave paintings are believed to have been involved in rituals and ceremonies because many of the caves are so hard to get to, sometimes involving climbs up steep slopes, squeezes through narrow fissures and stomach crawling through tiny tunnels. Anthropologists have long noted that the more risky and uncertain an activity is the more likely it is to be surrounded by magical practices. Because hunting is a risky, uncertain activity, many scientists believe that the painting may have been part of a magical ritual.

Abbe Henri Brueil, a French priest who skipped Mass to copy hundreds of paintings, is sometimes called the “Pope of Prehistory." He helped classify cave art before World War II, hypothesizing the art was involved with rituals of “hunting magic” and were an attempt to capture the beauty of the animals the hunters hunted — a view that was discredited in later studies. The post-war, Marxist German art historian Max Raphael, concluded the animals represented clan totems and the paintings depicted strife and alliances associated with clan warfare.

In 1962, French archaeologist Annette Laming-Emperaire wrote a doctoral thesis entitled The Meaning of Paleolithic Art . The work made her famous and it is still widely embraced today. In it she chided her predecessors for taking too many liberties in their interpretations and warned about looking at modern hunter-gatherers for insights. Instead she opted for more of a number-crunching, spacial and geometric approach in which images were carefully catalogued, with notes taken on the gender, action and position of figures, and notes were made on they way they were grouped and their frequency and spacial relation to things like hand prints and abstract symbols.

In his book Lascaux , Norbert Aujoulat noted that often when horses, aurochs and stags are drawn together the horses are on the bottom, the aurochs are in middle and the stag are on top and the variations of their coats corresponds to respective mating seasons. This in turn has links to the fertility cycle and is perhaps sacred or symbolic.

Later Interpretations of Early Man Cave Paintings

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In his 1996 book The Shamans of Prehistory , co-authored by South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams, Clottes, defied the taboo of bringing in outside sources, and related the work of the cave artists to shamanism among hunter-gatherers, particularly the San (Bushmen) of southern Africa and to experiments on visual illusion caused by drugs, music, fashion and oxygen deprivation that produce images in three stages: 1) patterns, points, zigzags and other abstract forms; 2) the morphing of these forms into objects, such as the zigzags become snakes; and 3) the deepest stage in which subjects are called up in a world of hallucinations, monsters and animals. Clottes believes the cave painting represent the experiences and vison of shaman, with animals often incorporating the contours of the caves because they were regarded as part of the cave. The book generated a lot of controversy and criticism, with one critics calling it “psychedelic ravings."

In defense of his book Clottes told The New Yorker, “Everyone agrees that the paintings are in some way, religious. I'm not a believer myself, and I'm certainly not a mystic. But Homo sapiens is Homo spiritualis . The ability to make tools defines less than the need to create belief systems that influence nature. And shamanism is the most prevalent belief system of hunter-gatherers."

Describing an experiment he did that involved bringing some elders from a group of Australian Aboriginal hunter-gatherers to Lascaux Cave, Jean-Michel Geneste told The New Yorker, “When they entered the cave, they took a while to get their bearing. Yes, they said, it was an initiation site. The geometric signs, in red and back, reminded them of their clan insignias, the animals and engravings of figures from their creation myths." But Geneste also believes the caves could be like a modern church, with different meanings to different people, offering spiritual, social and meditative opportunities.

Dale Guthrie, a professor of zoology at the University of Alaska, has gone out and hunted animals similar to ones in the painting to gain insights into what the cave painters were all about. In his book The Nature of Paleolithic Art , he emphasized the creative “freedom," playfulness and the sexuality of the art, showing little patience for those who get too hung up on small details and metaphysical explanations. Based on an examination of hand prints he has theorized that a lot of the art was created by teenage boy who drew pubic triangles and other things to amuse themselves, Critics of his interpretation say his ideas may explain some of the art but is a misrepresentation of the most significant art.

Reading Australian Rock Art

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Djulirri, a rock shelter in the Wellington Range of Arnhem Land on Australia's north coast, contains1,100 separate paintings, including the overlapping spirit figure and kangaroo above them. Samir S. Patel, Archaeology magazine, the aboriginal elder “Ronald Lamilami first came to Djulirri (JUH-lih-ree) in the early 1960s, when he was three years old. On foot and by canoe, his father, Lazarus, showed him the route that their Aboriginal ancestors had used for thousands of years, following food and shelter inland from Australia's north coast. Each wet season, those ancestors spent several months at Djulirri, a well-concealed rock shelter in a horseshoe-shaped valley. “I remember paintings on rocks," Lamilami says. [Source: Samir S. Patel, Archaeology magazine, January/February 2011]

Lamilami, the aboriginal owner of the sit has worked with archaeologist and rock art specialist Paul S. C. Taçon of Griffith University in Gold Coast, Australia to interpret the rock art. Djulirri's additions and overpaintings cover an immense period of time. Tacon traces its early images back 15,000 years and the last major additions to the panels were painted about 50 years ago.

“Djulirri is among the top handful of rock art sites in the world, and in its layers of pigments and stained rock is an abundance of information about Aboriginal culture and how it dealt with the sweeping changes of the last few centuries." “All the stories are here in the rock” says Lamilami. “Each year, a new concept would be drawn - what happened the year before that, it's a time lapse." Patel points out that “Other rock art sites, such as Lascaux in France, capture only a narrow period of time, and even the deepest archaeological deposits aren't willful creations like this. Djulirri might be the longest continuously updated human record in the world." In other words according to Lamilami, this site represents an annually updated record of what happened to his people over that span of time, much like the winter counts of many of the Native American tribes of the Great Plains of North America.

Prehistoric Art, 20,000–8000 B.C.

Laura A. Tedesco wrote in for the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Art, as the product of human creativity and imagination, includes poetry, music, dance, and the material arts such as painting, sculpture, drawing, pottery, and bodily adornment. The objects and archaeological sites presented in the Museum's Timeline of Art History for the time period 20,000–8000 B.C. illustrate diverse examples of prehistoric art from across the globe. All were created in the period before the invention of formal writing, and when human populations were migrating and expanding across the world. By 20,000 B.C., humans had settled on every continent except Antarctica. The earliest human occupation occurs in Africa, and it is there that we assume art to have originated. African rock art from Apollo 11 and Wonderwerk Caves contain examples of geometric and animal representations engraved and painted on stone. In Europe, the record of Paleolithic art is beautifully illustrated with the magnificent painted caves of Lascaux and Chauvet, both in France. Scores of painted caves exist in western Europe, mostly in France and Spain, and hundreds of sculptures and engravings depicting humans, animals, and fantastic creatures have been found across Europe and Asia alike. Rock art in Australia represents the longest continuously practiced artistic tradition in the world. The site of Ubirr in northern Australia contains exceptional examples of Aboriginal rock art repainted for millennia beginning perhaps as early as 40,000 B.C. The earliest known rock art in Australia predates European painted caves by as much as 10,000 years. [Source: Laura A. Tedesco, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Independent Scholar, metmuseum.org, August 2007 \^/]

“In Egypt, millennia before the advent of powerful dynasties and wealth-laden tombs, early settlements are known from modest scatters of stone tools and animal bones at such sites as Wadi Kubbaniya. In western Asia after 8,000 B.C., the earliest known writing, monumental art, cities, and complex social systems emerged. Prior to these far-reaching developments of civilization, this area was inhabited by early hunters and farmers. Eynan/Ain Mallaha, a settlement in the Levant along the Mediterranean, was occupied around 10,000–8000 B.C. by a culture named Natufian. This group of settled hunters and gatherers created a rich artistic record of sculpture made from stone and bodily adornment made from shell and bone. \^/

“The earliest art of the continent of South Asia is less well documented than that of Europe and western Asia, and some of the extant examples come from painted and engraved cave sites such as Pachmari Hills in India. The caves depict the region's fauna and hunting practices of the Mesolithic period. In Central and East Asia, a territory almost twice the size of North America, there are outstanding examples of early artistic achievements, such as the expertly and delicately carved female figurine sculpture from Mal'ta. The superbly preserved bone flutes from the site of Jiahu in China, while dated to slightly later than 8000 B.C., are still playable. The tradition of music making may be among the earliest forms of human artistic endeavor. Because many musical instruments were crafted from easily degradable materials like leather, wood, and sinew, they are often lost to archaeologists, but flutes made of bone dating to the Paleolithic period in Europe (ca. 35,000–10,000 B.C.) are richly documented. \^/

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Woolly mammoth cave art

“North and South America are the most recent continents to be explored and occupied by humans, who likely arrived from Asia. Blackwater Draw in North America and Fell's Cave in Patagonia, the southernmost area of South America, are two contemporaneous sites where elegant stone tools that helped sustain the hunters who occupied these regions have been found.” \^/

“Whether the prehistoric artworks illustrated here constitute demonstrations of a unified artistic idiom shared by humankind or, alternatively, are unique to the environments, cultures, and individuals who created them, is a question open for consideration. Nonetheless, each work or site superbly characterizes some of the earliest examples of humans' creative and artistic capacity.” \^/

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: National Geographic, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Nature, Scientific American. Live Science, Discover magazine, Discovery News, Ancient Foods ancientfoods.wordpress.com ; Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, BBC, The Guardian, Reuters, AP, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated September 2018


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