Cave art is graphic and energetic, but its pictographs of animals and peopleare, in a word, primitive. Maybe, as anthropologists have surmised, the untrained artists simply couldn't draw more true-to-life representations.
Now, though, a Harvard psychiatrist is offering another explanation. Stone Age people lived under such constant fear--of marauding animals, hostile tribes, even evil spirits--that it literally changed the way they saw their subjects, suggests Anneliese Pontius, M.D. To stay alert to danger, their brains worked faster, processing spatial information through a neural shortcut.
To test her theory, Pontius has been trekking for a decade to remote areas of New Guinea, Ecuador and Ethiopia to study remaining hunter-gatherer societies. Her finding: whereas more modernized, less-stressed tribes tend to draw facial features-eye, nose, and forehead--in accurate relationship, tribes continuing to live under harsher, more primitive conditions produce impressionistic sketches, with features out of proportion or omitted entirely, in that, they are similar to ancient cave artists. "In Stone Age art," notes Pontius, "the human face is never exact in its configuration of the eye, nose, and forehead."
