Prehistory of Art By D. Andrew White, 07/07/2009

Human beings have been rendering images and sculpting forms for a very long time.

In 2002 a team of archaeologists in South Africa announced that they had found the earliest example of what appears to be human art. The find consisted of two chunks of red ochre in the Blombos Cave archaeological site. These hard ochre slabs had 'crosshatches' scratched on them. While most such doodlings would warrant little attention, in this case they did, for they were at least 77,000 years old! While one can argue about whether they were 'art' or not, the fact remains that they are the oldest engravings resembling 'art' that has been verified to date. Before that time human tools seem to have been purely utilitarian. At Blombos they were drawing without an obvious practical function , perhaps these marks were symbols or an art form (Balter 2002).

Near Katanda Congo have been found harpoons carved in bone. These have been dated, with some contestation, to 65,000 years before the present. Although they had no images carved upon them, these tools were exquisite in their design. These harpoons seem to go beyond mere functionality in the extent of their beauty. If tool making traditions of the present and recent past have any bearing on antiquity, then, it is possible that the artistry of the Katanda harpoons represents an artistic tradition. In recent times many nomadic peoples, like the Khosians, have created tools not only for practical functions, but also as expressions of their ethnic and personal identity (Shreeve 1995).

The oldest paintings, known to date, are to be found in caves in Europe. These date in the range of 17,000 to 32,000 years before the present. Most truly ancient cave paintings are found in Europe. Possibly this is because cave paintings were more likely to survive the predations of time in the cool karst caverns of Europe. Probably most rock paintings in warmer climes have long since faded (Clotte & Lewis-Williams 1998, Kunzig 2000).

In the caves of Altamira, Lascaux, Rouffignac and Tuc d'Audoubert, in western Europe, we can still today see images of bisons, deer, horses, lions, mammoth, and even images of human beings. The images are vivid, realistic and, to my mind, only somewhat abstract. Although, this judgement depends upon one's interpretation.

During the twentieth century paleontologists have confirmed that the now extinct species illustrated in these caves were very accurate indeed. Mammoth's really had extra wool around their feet, they did have long 'fingers' on their trunks, and short hairy tails. The steppe bison really did have dark manes and light sides. In most cases science only knows this coloration from a few carcasses of these beasts found frozen in permafrost (Guthrie 1990). In any case, the accuracy of these ancient works of art have been confirmed.

Human beings as we know them, that is Homo sapiens sapiens, seem to have been the first true artists. Homo sapiens sapiens, if the fossils tell the complete story, originated in Africa. Other forms of the genus Homo, like the Homo neandertalensis of Europe and Homo erectus of Asia, have left little evidence that they made any true art at all (Shreeve 1995). The tools of these other humans seem to have been purely functional. This hypothesis, of course, is based on an absence of evidence to the contrary. Indeed, like all art appreciation, such a pronouncement is subjective. Perhaps we fail to see the artisty of these early tools for our own biases. Perhaps the art of these humans were made of perishable materials. A single fossil-find could shatter the illusion of our artistic supremacy.

On the Tassili plateau in Algeria can be found paintings on rock surfaces. Similar paintings are also found on sheltered rock-faces of the Gilf Kebir plateau in Egypt. These paintings depict people, presumably cowherds, their cattle, green plants and flowing rivers. The Gilf Kebir pictures even show people swimming and sitting arround drinking. The images are fluid and elegant. In colour and style they resemble the renderings that the Khosian people of southern Africa have been making in recent times. Evidently, the rock paintings of Tassili and Gilf Kebir illustrate a time much more comfortable than the Sahara of today. These images were drawn during the dawn of the agricultural age. These paintings are believed to date from as far back as 5,000 years before the present. This epoch was tail end of the Holocene Optimum, a slightly warmer time than now (Kunzig 2000).

All over Europe, the the north-west, can be found megaliths. There are menhirs - tall standing stones, dolmens - table like arrangements of balanced stones, and henges - immense piles of cobble or earth. Megalithic complexes are often composed of long stones. Stones that were carefully selected. Generally speaking, the stones were only minimally dressed. Some indeed appear to have been stones in their natural form, carefully selected for their shape. These stones can weigh several to hundreds of tonnes. Often spiral glyphs are carved into the sides of standing stones. The most famous megaliths are probably Stonehenge in England, and the menhir rows in Carnac Brittany. Examples of megaliths can be found in the Basque region, Brittany, the British isles, Denmark, France, the Iberian peninsula and even in Sardinia. Somewhat similar menhirs can be found in North Africa and India.

Not much is know about the megalithic culture, except that it started about 3000 B.C. and ended at about the time that the Celtic speaking peoples began to dominate western Europe. It is natural to presume that megalithic society was organised enough to conscript workers, or to motivate voluntary labour. Few things are know with relative certainty about the megalithic culture, they were neolithic agriculturalists, who had not yet learned of iron smelting. It is not even certain that they were a single culture. These people may or may not have spoken a Celtic language. Celts have often been credited as being the megalith builders because the regions where the megaliths occur roughly corresponds to the maximum range of the Celtic language just before the Roman period.

The motivation for building the megaliths is still a mystery. Nevertheless, there is little reason to doubt that the megaliths were an art form.

As M. Scott Peck stated: "I have pooh-poohed the usual explanations of forums and gravestones and astral observatories. Theorists in this Age of Reason have, I believe, overlooked the obvious. And the reason for their oversight is that the stones are, on a certain level, unreasonable. - - - One obvious thing overlooked is that the stones were art. -- " (Peck 1995).

Judging by the messages in the art, the Cro Magon of France seem to have been hunters. The people of Katanda engaged in fishing, so one would suppose. The people of Tassili and Gilf Kebir were probably cattle herders. The megalithic artists must have been argriculturalists. All of these conclusions are based on inductive reasoning. In truth, no one really knows.

Art no doubt, it seems, has been with humanity a long time, so has art interpretation.

The artists of Katanda, Lascaux, Gilf Kebir and Tassili are not with us today. They cannot comment upon their own work. They cannot review our critiques. All interpretation, as to motive, as to function, as to their beliefs is supposition, on our part.

Some maintain that the rock paintings were made for religious purposes. Abbé Henri Breuil beleived that he could interpret evidence of a ritual in the artefacts of the Tuc d'Audoubert cavern. Footprints were found near a clay sculpture of two bison copulating. Abbé Breuil interpreted these footmarks as evidence of a 'coming of age' ceremony (Breuil 1958).

Sister Wendy Beckett, took a more cautious interpretation. She noted, as others had before, that animals were often depicted in far more lifelike allure than human beings. Humans were often depicted as little more than stick figures in these cave paintings. She suggests that there was some ritual significance to these portraits, perhaps a preparation for the hunt. Although, she did not elaborate upon the nature of the rituals involved (Beckett 1994).

Jean Clotte and David Lewis-Williams have compared the rock paintings of the ancients to those of the recent past. Rock art amoung various tribal peoples was, and is, often associated with shamanism. Geometric designs, spirals, dots and half-human creatures, all could be renderings of things seen in trances and hallucinations. Some recent rock paintings were certainly related to shamanism, the artists themselves have declared it so. Critics claim that Clotte and Lewis-Williams have gone too far. However, other artists claimed that they were expressiing them selves in art, the same motivation declared so often by "modern" artists (Clotte & Lewis-Williams 1998, Conniff 1999).

Other theorists maintain that we have acquired our artistic tastes during our long evolutionary past. Richard Coss went so far as to suggest that our we have an innate preference for savannah landscapes, smooth water and pictures with acacia-like trees in them. A preference with its genesis in our hunter-gatherer past on the plains of Africa (Conniff 1999). Many theorists see this explanation as being too specific. Artistic sensibility, that is aethetics, may be more general in its origin.

Our sense of aethetics may still have an instinctual foundation. Sociobiologists have long held that the sense of beauty has a neurological origin. The sense of beauty may be a taste for order, structure and pattern. The mind, it seems, is naturally motivated to seek out order, to predict the future from the past, a motivation common to mammals and birds. This hunger for order may have a close association with play. The Graphic arts would then be a visual extension of play. Birds and mammals have, in their youth, a strong desire to play. They play with objects, their bodies, their siblings, or their prey, apparently this functions so as to habituate themselves with motion, inertia and other minds. Play has its own internal rewards. To predict the future is to survive it, or at least to be more likely so to do. Play increases our répertoire of personal experience. Experience prepares us for the future. Humans according to this conjecture take play further than any other animal. Humans are symbolic creatures, we have language, and we have skill enough to draw recognizable images. Therefore, play for us can developed into true art. Perhaps this explains the joy of understanding a joke, listening for patterns in musics and even the joy that some receive in solving a mathematical problem (Wilson 1998). The philosopher of art Mark Kingwell has explicitly linked art to play. It is like play because it is yet another expression of mental play - as language and culture are (Kingwell 2008).

Sister Wendy Beckett ended her commentary on rock art by noting that: "we have to confess our ignorance of its meaning, yet this lack of knowledge does not affect our response - unless, indeed, it deepens it" (Beckett 1994).

We can surmise the psyche of these ancient artists. We can compare them to examples closer in time to ourselves. We can compare them to the visions of shamans in our age. But do these comparisons really hold?

Ancient art should give us pause in interpreting the art of today. We are creatures that live in a world that grades between myth and fact, fact and myth. We see what we think we should see, and think what we should see.

Bibliography