and sculpture
Grappling with megalithic architecture
Reading between the lines in visual narratives
Hanging out in Babylon
Digging into the art of pyramids and tombs
Discovering why Egyptian statues are so colossal
Touring Greek and Roman ruins
Recognizing propaganda in “realistic” ancient art
Chapter 4
Magical Hunters and Psychedelic Cave Artists
IN THIS CHAPTER
During the last great Ice Age, a vast sheet of ice buried much of the world. In about 120,000 BC, Homo sapiens sapiens (the doubly wise — sapiens means “wise” — known today as humans) appeared on this frozen stage. They’ve stolen the show ever since.
Humans shared the scene with herds of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, aurochs (extinct horned oxen), saber-toothed cats, bison, horses, and deer, which roamed much of the planet. The first humans survived in this glacial wilderness as nomadic hunter-gatherers. We don’t know much about them because they left no written records, no art, and no permanent settlements.
The earliest surviving art came into the picture about 90,000 years later in the Paleolithic period, or Old Stone Age, which lasted roughly from 40,000 BC to 8000 BC. This “primitive” art was already highly developed in 30,000 BC — at the peak of its game, as if the prehistoric artists who made it studied their craft in some Stone Age art school. More likely, their skills were handed down from master to apprentice and honed over thousands of years. They painted highly accomplished depictions of wild animals in the world’s first art galleries, the walls of caves. More cave art continues to be discovered; the oldest thus far was found in Sulawesi, Indonesia, dating from at least 40,000 BC. To date, the most advanced cave art may be in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in southern France and Altamira in northern Spain. Their pictures of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, and aurochs are the most accurate images we have of these extinct species.
In this chapter, I introduce you to the earliest artists — those who lived in the Stone Age and New Stone Age.
TOOLS AND ART: A CRITICAL CONNECTION
Before humans could make art, they had to be able to make tools. Apes use sticks as tools to knock down bananas, for example, but they don’t produce tools (or art). Our earliest ancestors got onto their feet about four million years ago. We don’t know what they did with their hands until two million years later, when the first primitive tools appeared in east-central Africa. These tools were simply stones with sharpened edges made by our ancestors Homo habilis (which means “handy man” or “able man”). Tools were slowly refined over the millennia from handy man’s rough-flaked stones used for cutting meat and pelts (about 2,000,000 BC) to the invention of the hand ax (about 1,300,000 BC) and the spear (about 1,000,000 BC). The bow and arrow were invented around 10,000 BC. Our forebears were slowly learning to master their environment — and art was just around the corner.
FEATHERS, FUR, AND CHEWED STICKS: PREHISTORIC ART TOOLS
Cave artists used feathers, fur, moss, chewed sticks, and their fingers as paintbrushes. Sometimes they incised (cut into) the outlines of pictures into cave walls with sharp stones or charcoal sticks. They ground minerals like red and yellow ochre, manganese, and hematite into red, violet, yellow, brown, and black powders, which they applied directly to the damp limestone walls to create painted fur for bears and bison, and spots for leopards and hyenas. Today, 15,000 to 25,000 years later, this primitive paint still hasn’t peeled! (Don’t you wish you could find stuff like that at the local hardware store.)
Prehistoric artists also “spray-painted” their pictures to cover larger areas more efficiently by blowing colored powders through hollowed-out reeds or bones. Some of these hollow tubes have been discovered in the caves with traces of color still in them.
Cave painters sometimes used bumps and crevices on cave walls to emphasize an animal’s contours: a bulge for a belly, an indentation for an eye, a bump for a hump. In the Chauvet cave in southwestern France, an artist painted a bear’s paw over a knob in the wall, making it appear more threatening, as if the animal were reaching into real space to claw somebody!
Ten thousand years later, artists at the cave in Altamira, Spain, used the same technique. They painted the burly bodies of bison over swellings on the cave’s ceiling, giving the herd a sculpted, three-dimensional look.
Cool Cave Art or Paleolithic Painting: Why Keep It a Secret?
Prehistoric artists hid their paintings deep within the bowels of caves as if they were meant to be kept secret. The paintings are so well hidden, in fact, that the first discovery of a cave painting didn’t occur until 1879 in Altamira, Spain (see Figure 4-1). The second discovery took place in 1940 when two boys in Lascaux in Dordogne, France, followed their lost dog into a hole that opened into the ancient cave.
Courtesy of Spanish National Tourist Office
FIGURE 4-1: The superbly rendered cave paintings of prehistoric animals in Altamira, Spain, were the first to be discovered.
Hunting on a wall
Initially researchers believed cave art was connected to hunting. Hunting was primitive man’s main job, and the paintings are mostly of animals — with the exception of a few human stick figures, handprints, and geometric patterns in some caves.
If you wanted to kill lots of bulls, you painted lots of bulls on the walls of your cave! In the Lascaux cave, the roughly 65-foot-long cave gallery known today as the Great Hall of the Bulls could be an example of a large-scale, prehistoric magic ritual. But today researchers suspect that cave art was more than just hunting magic.
