Origins

Humans make art. We do this for many reasons and with whatever technologies are available to us. Extremely old, non-representational ornamenation has been foundacross Africa. The oldest firmly-dated example is a collection of 82,000 year oldNassarius snail shells found in Morocco that are pierced and covered with red ochre. Wear patterns suggestthat they may have been strung beads. Nassarius shell beads found in Israel may be more than 100,000 years old and in the Blombos cave in South Africa, pierced shells and small pieces of ochre (red Haematite) etched with simple gemetric patterns have been found in a 75,000-year-old layer of sediment.

The oldest known representational imagery comes from the Aurignacian culture of the Upper Paleolithic period. Archeological discoveries across a broad swath of Europe (especially Southern France, Northern Spain, and Swabia, in Germany) includeover two hundred caves with spectacular Aurignacian paintings, drawings and sculpture that are among the earliest undisputed examples of representational image-making. The oldest of these is a 2.4-inch tall female figure carved out of mammoth ivory that was found in six fragments in the Hohle Fels cave near Schelklingen in southern Germany. It dates to 35,000 B.C.E.

The caves at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc (see the image below), Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Altamira contain the best known examples of pre-historic painting and drawing. Here are remarkably evocative renderings of animals and some humans that employ a complex mix of naturalism and abstraction. Archeologists that study Paleolithiic (old stone age) era humans, believe that the paintings discovered in 1994, in the cave at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardèche valley in France, are more than 30,000 years old. The images found at Lascaux and Altamira are more recent, dating to approximately 15,000 B.C.E. The paintings at Pech Merle date to both 25,000 and 15,000 B.C.E.

What can we really know about the creators of these paintings and whatthe images originally meant? These are questions thatare difficult enough when we study art made only 500 years ago. Howmuch more perilous, to assert meaning for the art of people whoshared our anatomy but had not yet developed the cultures or liguistic structuresthat shaped who we have become. Do the tools of art history even apply? Here is evidence of a visual language that collapses the more than 1,000 generations that seperate us but we must be cautious. Especially so if we want understand the people that made this art as a way to understand ourselves. The desire to speculate based on what we see and the physical evidence of the caves is wildly seductive.

The cave at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc is over 1,000 feet in length with two large chambers. Carbon samples date the charcoal used to depict the two head-to-head Rhinoceroeses (see the image above, bottom right) to between 30,340 and 32,410 years before 1995 when the smaples were taken. The cave's drawings depict other large animals including horses, mammoths, musk ox, ibex, reindeer, aurochs, megaceros deer, panther, and owl (scholars note that these animals were not then a normal part of people's diet). Photographs show that the drawing shown above is very carefully rendered but may be misleading. We see a group of horses, rhinos and bison and we see them as a group, overlapping and skewed in scale. But the photograph distorts the way these animal figures would have been originally seen. The bright electric lights used by the photographer create a broad flat scope of vision; how different to see each animal emerge from the dark under the flickering light cast by a flame.

In a 2009 presentation at UC San Diego, Dr. Randell White, Professor of Anthropology at NYU suggests that the overlapping horses pictured above might represent the same horse over time, running, eating, sleeping, etc. Perhaps these are far more sophisitcated representations then we have imagined. There is another drawing at Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc that cautions us to against ready assumptions. It has been interpreted as depicting the thighs and gentials of a woman but there is also a drawing of a bison and a lion and the images are nearly intertwined. In addition to the drawings, the cave is littered with the skulls and bones of cave bear and the track of a wolf. There is also a foot print thought to have been made by an eight-year-old boy.

INVITATION: If you are a scholar with expertise in Paleolithic art,please consider contributing text to this page. Your work will be full credited. Please contact us at:drszucker{at}gmail{dot}com or beth.harris{at}gmail{dot}com