Why cave paintings were made

Many of the Cumberland Plateau caves feature a spiritual figure who changes from a man into a bird, says Jan F. Simek, an archaeology professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who has studied and written about cave and rock art in the region.

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Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. Recommended for you. How Did Humans Evolve? The prehistoric artists, we may responsibly conjecture, given that we know they had the same cognitive-perceptual apparatus as we do, were only using their imaginations, reading figures into the rock forms that were not, strictly speaking, there.

Given the lingering memories of animals seen outside the caves, they were predisposed to make those forms reappear, just the way the human cognitive-visual apparatus always works—in part by receiving what is there and in part by complementing it with what we have already seen, what we expect, what we want. Why were our progenitors seemingly blind to so many other features of the natural world?

We do not know. What does our cognitive-perceptual apparatus pick out as most salient? Not the plants. Chimpanzees have been observed awe-struck before waterfalls. Were not Paleolithic humans also impressed? They may have been, but they left no record of this impression on the walls of the caves.

Their imaginative life, if the figurations on the walls are any accurate measure of its variety, was singularly centered on their fellow animate beings, the kind that move about, that breathe and perceive, just as they experienced themselves doing.

Why such a limited range? Again, we do not know. It is the poetics of the space that explains the particular poiesis within it, whose material traces we seek to understand. You cannot understand Paleolithic cave art if you have not seen it in situ.

This is not, or not only, because the real thing reveals details undetectable even in high-resolution images; it is rather because the works gain their sense from their milieu.

Cave art is not art that happens to be found in caves. Even if we do not know what its function was—shamanism? The guides at the Grotte des Merveilles are aware that the speleothems of their cave, the Escherian columns and organlike flowstone, are more commanding than the faded animals and scattered dots, and they fill their narration with invitations to meditate on the grotesque forms that seem present in the place.

The floor appears littered with calcitic phalluses. The art in the Font-de-Gaume cave was discovered in , and after inspection by the great prehistorian Henri Breuil this marked the beginning of French scholarly study of parietal art.

Did they notice the images on the walls? It is possible that they did, but that this did not seem particularly noteworthy to them; a nineteenth-century French farmer likely would have presumed the paintings to be old, but not old in any way worthy of solemnly respectful preservation, of state intervention for the protection of a national landmark and of cultural heritage, even of primordial proto-Frenchness.

In the deep recesses of Font-de-Gaume a horse appears. Under the installed electric light the horse is easy to spot, and it appears as a two-dimensional painting. When the light is turned off, and replaced by the faint beam of a flashlight, the lines of the painting itself disappear, and what instead emerges is the vivid three-dimensional impression of equine haunches.

The painting fades, and the sculpture appears, and we see again that the former was made only to draw out the latter. This seems an exaggeration of healthy caution. We know that Paleolithic artists were singularly interested in the nonhuman mammals with which they shared an environment.

Wide-focused quantitative surveys of forms and patterns have moreover revealed much that European cave art is not. Unlike Australian and southern African art from the same broad period, cave art in Europe offers no depiction of landscape, no horizon, no vegetation, almost no depiction of human-animal interaction, almost no hunting scenes, no obvious interaction between different species of any sort though there are overlapping species painted at different times.

If we exclude the nonrepresentative symbols, then, the focus of European cave art is remarkably narrow: it is the depiction, more or less naturalistic though removed from the environment, of various species of megafauna.

Alain Testart has gone so far as to attribute a taxonomic function to the pictures, isolating and differentiating the various natural kinds. Ramli knows the art in these caves intimately. The first one he visited, as a student in , was a small site called Leang Kassi. He remembers it well, he says, not least because while staying overnight in the cave he was captured by local villagers who thought he was a headhunter.

Almost all of the markings he shows me, in ocher and charcoal, appear in relatively exposed areas, lit by the sun. And they were apparently made by all members of the community. At one site, I climb a fig tree into a small, high chamber and am rewarded by the outline of a hand so small it could belong to my 2-year-old son.

At another, hands are lined up in two horizontal tracks, all with fingers pointing to the left. Elsewhere there are hands with slender, pointed digits possibly created by overlapping one stencil with another; with painted palm lines; and with fingers that are bent or missing.

Perhaps, he suggests, the stencils with missing fingers indicate that this practice too has ancient origins. This is my home. There are two main phases of artwork in these caves. Alongside these are red and occasionally purplish-black paintings that look very different: hand stencils and animals, including the babirusa in Leang Timpuseng, and other species endemic to this island, such as the warty pig. These are the paintings dated by Aubert and his colleagues, whose paper, published in Nature in October , ultimately included more than 50 dates from 14 paintings.

The youngest stencil was dated to no more than 27, years ago, showing that this artistic tradition lasted largely unchanged on Sulawesi for at least 13 millennia.

The findings obliterated what we thought we knew about the birth of human creativity. At a minimum, they proved once and for all that art did not arise in Europe. By the time the shapes of hands and horses began to adorn the caves of France and Spain, people here were already decorating their own walls.

On that, experts are divided. He points out that although hand stencils are common in Europe, Asia and Australia, they are rarely seen in Africa at any time. You have to find your way around, and deal with strange plants, predators and prey. Perhaps people in Africa were already decorating their bodies, or making quick drawings in the ground.

But with rock markings, the migrants could signpost unfamiliar landscapes and stamp their identity onto new territories. He thinks these techniques must have arisen in Africa before the waves of migrations off the continent began. The eminent French prehistorian Jean Clottes believes that techniques such as stenciling may well have developed separately in different groups, including those who eventually settled on Sulawesi. People arrived on Sulawesi as part of a wave of migration from east Africa that started around 60, years ago, likely traveling across the Red Sea and the Arabian Peninsula to present-day India, Southeast Asia and Borneo, which at the time was part of the mainland.

To reach Sulawesi, which has always been an island, they would have needed boats or rafts to cross a minimum of 60 miles of ocean. Brumm and his team have unearthed evidence of fire-building, hearths and precisely crafted stone tools, which may have been used to make weapons for hunting.

Yet while the inhabitants of this cave sometimes hunted large animals such as wild boar, the archaeological remains show that they mostly ate freshwater shellfish and an animal known as the Sulawesi bear cuscus—a slow-moving tree-dwelling marsupial with a long, prehensile tail. Ancient Sulawesians, it seems, were likewise moved to depict larger, more daunting and impressive animals than the ones they frequently ate.

Aubert is collecting samples of limestone from painted caves elsewhere in Asia, including in Borneo, along the route that migrants would have taken to Sulawesi. And he and Smith are also independently working to develop new techniques to study other types of caves, including sandstone sites common in Australia and Africa.

More substantial evidence of this spiritual character, that could have led to cave art, is burials from the Lower Palaeolithic period about , years ago. These burials contain grave goods and the people used colour on their bodies in the form of tattoos.

These tattoos are drawn using such minerals as ochre, manganese oxide or charcoal. Later they painted on cave walls using lines, circles and V markings. It is later in the Upper Palaeolithic period that there is the appearance of carved anthropomorphic animal and human images with strange symbols and marks and the creation of cave paintings. All this evidence would suggest Palaeolithic humans had begun to believe in supernatural or spiritual beings early on. It can be argued that we have always collected things and doodled, so how is that connected to the cave paintings?

Archaeologists argue that collecting is connected to ritual a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order and that is an indicator of a belief system or religious behaviour. So ritual and religion is an essential mark of modern human behaviour. It has been said that it displays the emergence of the modern mind.

From the evidence available it is assumed that this aspect of human behaviour emerged around 40 - 50, years ago. Hundreds of images of animals in vibrant colour and striking poses of action can be seen in the prehistoric art gallery on rocks worldwide. There are many examples in France and Spain. These cave wall paintings are known as pictographs and are found all over the world alongside petroglyphs the incised, pecked or cut designs on rock surfaces.

The word art does not appear before the 15 th century so the Palaeolithic people did not know it as art. Using the word art from the 15 th century means that the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans had no word for art.

In fact art is a Middle English word coming from the Latin ars skill or technique. The first use of the word art was when it was used to show a mark of human achievement in the early universities and that exists today in the Bachelor of Arts BA or Master of Art MA awarded by universities.

Yet, art is more than a skill or technique. It has a purpose going beyond making something. Any connection with our modern use of the word art did not appear until the late s. So it is possible some of the pictures were used to teach young hunters but so many of them have other characteristics that mean there had to have been links with some belief system.

Each set of paintings show differences and a development in style of representation. In Chauvet the drawings depict animals. It is suggested that these represent the animals that provided the people with food and raw materials along with the predators that endangered or competed with them.

The Lascaux paintings, on the other hand, show depictions of strange beasts such as ones that are half-human and half-bird and others that are half-human and half-lion.