With an oil lamp for light and crude pigments (charcoal and ochre), the creators of Paleolithic art crawled into the darkness of deep caves and drew all sorts of animals and signs on the rocky walls and ceilings. Some anthropologists have postulated that the art was done as a kind of good luck "hunting magic" (draw them and they will come); others suggest that many of the works were part of shamanic rituals, a indication that our ancestors had already developed spiritual concepts and a sense of the marvelous. The mythologist Joseph Campbell suggests that to early humans the caves were like wombs, the source from which all animals came. He also believed that the subterranean galleries were hunting "sanctuaries" used to initiate boys to the dangerous hunts that were essential to the tribe's survival.
Some of the most unusual art lines the walls of the Grotte Chauvet in France. Discovered in 1994, the cave's art depicts about 300 representations of animals, including wooly rhinoceros, lions, horses, mammoths, biosn, bears, reindeer, ibexes, and a panther. There are also many geometrical drawings, similar to the trance-induced imagery of altered states of consciousness.
Researchers Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams propose that the Chavet cave was used as a passage to the spirit world. The animals depicted on the cave walls acted as guides. In rituals, tribe members would climb down into the cave, no light but an oil lamp or a torch. As they descended, their flickering lamps illuminated the painted beasts and made them appear to move, undulating like breathing animals. The cave came to life; the spirit world became real.
Rock art from this same period in human history has been found in Africa, South America, Asia and Australia. "It is very important," writes archaeologist Peter Bogucki, "that the spectacular Ice Age art of southwestern Europe not be seen in isolation, as some sort of local florescence. While it is vivid in its depiction of animals, it is part of a global pattern in human expression."
This outpouring of creativity at toward the end of the Paleolithic period (around 30,000 years ago) is sometimes called the "creative explosion," a period when humans took a leap forward into sophisticated symbolic thought. But, according to articles published this summer in the journal Science it isn't that easy. The Science articles suggest that complex tasks, including art, seem to have emerged much earlier than the Paleolithic cave paintings. The researchers point to evidence of art from Africa, perhaps as early as 90,000 years ago. But then it disappears from the archaeological record, reemerging sporadically until finally taking root with the famous cave paintings.
Why didn't artistic expression stick the first time it emerged? Why would an ability appear and then disappear and then resurface anew? According to the scientists it's a matter of numbers. They think that the early African populations weren't large enough for the symbolic processes to be culturally maintained and that's why they died out. You have to have enough members of a group who know how to do things, especially difficult behaviors, to make them a part of cultural evolution. If only a few individuals know how to paint a rhino, for instance, there may be no one to continue painting rhinos once the painters die.
But think about it, that anyone was painting and carving images 90,000 years ago, means that our ancestors were thinking symbolically long before anyone imagined. Stayed tuned.
