with paintbrushes
Later researchers discovered that the animals that appeared on Old Stone Age dinner menus showed up least in cave art. Many paintings depict predators like panthers, lions, and hyenas — not typical dinner fare and not easy to hunt with primitive weapons. These researchers offered a new theory based on the fact that hunter-gatherer societies from Africa to Siberia and North America practiced shaman magic. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers may have done the same thing.
Hollywood portrays shamans as witch doctors, but tribal shamans are more than spell-casting, dancing doctors in Halloween costumes — they are visionaries and sometimes artists. Here are some interesting thoughts about the role and methods of shamans:
Primitive peoples believed that the shaman could “beam up” into the spirit world to talk to the souls of beasts. They even thought a shaman could learn from animal spirits how to fix imbalances in nature.
Some shamans appear to have used natural hallucinogens to give them a boost into the sixth dimension. Primitive peoples throughout the world have often depicted shaman journeys with hallucinogenic images of humans and animals entwining and even merging. Cave art might depict these journeys, too.
Trainee shamans had to undergo ceremonial, fake deaths, as well as food and sleep deprivation. Perhaps a prone figure that appears in a cave painting is a trainee shaman, faking death after a long fast and a couple of all-nighters.
In 19th-century Siberia, shamans used a so-called “world pole” topped by a bird to launch their voyages into the underworld.
Flirting with Fertility Goddesses
Sculpture grew up alongside painting as a sister art. Most prehistoric sculptures were either small statues called statuettes or reliefs. In a relief, the sculptor outlines an image in stone or wood, and then carves out the background so that the image projects above it. The most famous early statuette is the Woman of Willendorf, also known as Venus of Willendorf.
Woman of Willendorf is a pudgy 4½-inch-high figure carved out of limestone. She doesn’t look very sexy to modern eyes, but she may have been a fertility symbol 25,000 years ago. Because concentric braids of hair wrapped around her head like a stocking cap conceal Woman of Willendorf’s face, we can surmise that her looks didn’t matter. But these other characteristics and purposes do matter:
She wasn’t an individual, but a type. Cave people didn’t necessarily think of Woman of Willendorf as hot stuff, the Marilyn Monroe of the cave era, so to speak. What mattered were her sexual characteristics: huge breasts, a bulging belly (as if she were permanently pregnant), watermelon-sized buttocks, and prominent genitals. Her other features weren’t given much attention by the artist. Her pudgy arms and cut-off legs seem to be an afterthought. The same female type is found in many prehistoric cultures around the world.
Her purpose was to promote fertility and abundance. Was the appeal of Woman of Willendorf meant to turn people on? Probably not. Rather than seeking a libido boost, a woman might have held the statuette in her hand before having sex so that the statuette’s fertility could be magically transferred to her.
Her ample proportions may have been a sign of wealth. Why is Woman of Willendorf so fat? Living off nuts, berries, and wild game means primitive peoples didn’t need to sign up for weight watchers. Many of them probably died of malnutrition — and most didn’t reach 30. Only a very privileged woman could afford to be this big.
Dominoes for Druids: Stonehenge, Menhirs, and Neolithic Architecture
Technological progress followed the melting glaciers. As the land warmed up, humans were able to farm it, domesticate animals, improve their stone tools, and build permanent settlements. People were no longer dependent on hunting and gathering for survival. Historians call this period the Neolithic Age or New Stone Age. It began in the warm southern climes and migrated northward in the wake of the retreating glaciers.
In this section, we check out New Stone Age architecture, from Anatolia to the British Isles.
Living in the New Stone Age: Çatalhöyük, Göbekli Tepe, and Skara Brae
One of the oldest New Stone Age settlements was at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (modern Turkey). It thrived from around 6500 BC to 5650 BC. Interestingly, the people of Çatalhöyük appear to have had no fortifications or war gods — they seem to have been a truly peaceful people. They mastered textiles, basketry, and simple pottery (the potter’s wheel hadn’t been invented yet), and built rectangular, mud-brick homes with doors in the roofs (they climbed into their houses from the top like sailors entering a submarine). Other characteristics of their houses include
Multipurpose features: Each house had two or more elevated, multipurpose platforms, one of which was always painted red. The platform served as a table, workbench, bed, and bier (a bed for corpses — in this case, skeletons). Çatalhöyük inhabitants let vultures eat the flesh off their dead before burying them. That must’ve put a damper on funeral attendance.
Decoration: Some of the rooms in Çatalhöyük homes included paintings and sculptures. Çatalhöyük paintings frequently feature stick-form men who are usually hunting; hardly any women appear in the paintings. But the female figure shows up in Çatalhöyük sculptures with Woman of Willendorf features and dimensions (see “Flirting with Fertility Goddesses” earlier in this chapter), apparently as a fertility symbol or earth mother.
Göbekli Tepe (which means “belly hill”), a Neolithic temple or sanctuary, is an even earlier Neolithic structure in southeastern Anatolia, erected between 9500 and 8000 BC. The roughly 22-acre complex is built with elaborately carved megaliths (huge stones some over 16 feet high and weighing up to 10 tons) arranged in layered, circular formations connected by walls of small, stacked stones. But no signs of settlement exist around Göbekli Tepe, suggesting that those who created it were still hunter-gatherers. The site challenges the old assumption
