http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file For complete access to all the files of this collection see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php ========================================================== Paleolithic Art lecture by Skuzzy Although human beings learned how to stand up and walk on two feet about 4 million years ago, it was not until about 40,000 years ago that art was probably invented. This date is not firm, however, because archaeological discoveries are made every year which push it farther back into time. Regardless, we can be certain that humans (as we know them) existed for a long, long time before any creative works that we can call "art" first appeared. Paleolithic or "Old Stone Age" is a term used to define the oldest period in the history of humans. The Paleolithic lasted for approximately 2.5 million years, from the appearance of the first stone tools until the end of the last glacial period 10,000 years ago. The people of this period are classified as hunter/gatherers because agricultural cultivation did not develop until about 8,000 years ago. The first art objects were not created just to adorn the human body or to beautify the caves that humans lived in. The oldest surviving art objects are tiny sculptures of animals and people made from bone, ivory, stone or antlers, and they were created to control or appease the forces of nature. These objects are so accomplished and artistically created that scholars believe they must be the result of an artistic tradition that was already many thousands of years old. /Horse/, from Vogelherd cave (Germany) c. 28,000 BC Mammoth Ivory, length 2-1/2 inches Photo ©Alexander Marshack The earliest discoveries of Paleolithic Art were made around 1835 in France and Switzerland. At first it was believed that the paintings and artifacts were created by the Celts because it was then thought that humans had only existed on earth about 4,000 years. After the 1860's, when more and more artifacts and cave paintings were discovered, it was recognized that some of the animals depicted (such as the wooly rhino and the mammoth) had long been extinct in Europe. The carved bones, artifacts and engraved representations were found in the same rock layers with bone remains of the animals represented. So scientists concluded that the human race is much older than they first thought because the people who had created these cave paintings and artifacts must have existed at the same time when those animals were actually hunted. /Bison Licking Insect Bite,/ La Madeleine (France) c. 15,000-10,000 BC Reindeer Horn, length 4 inches The first "paintings" were probably made in caves as long as 35,000 years ago. A cave was discovered in 1994 in the south of France, the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc cave, which contains hundreds of paintings that are nearly twice as old as any others known before this discovery. However, the study of Paleolithic art was pioneered during the first half of the 20th century by the French prehistorian Abbé Henri Breuil who made detailed studies in the caves of southern France, northern Spain, Ethiopia, and southern Africa. Most of the cave art documented by Breuil was painted between 17,000 and 12,000 years ago. /Standing Bison,/ Altamira (Spain) c. 15,000-10,000 B.C The paintings and engravings are found on the ceilings and walls in the most remote recesses of deep caves, far from the reach of natural light. Bison, mammoths, cave bears, lions, rhinos, horses, auroch (wild cattle), red deer and reindeer are represented naturalistically with vigorous lines. Sometimes, the artists incorporated natural bumps or depressions in the cave walls into the painting to give additional form to the animal represented. The artists used "paints" made from chunks of red and yellow ocher ground into powder and applied with brushes or blown onto the surface through hollow bones. Humans are rarely depicted in these paintings, and when depicted, are painted only as sticklike figures, sometimes wearing masks or pointing arrows at the vital parts of the animals. /Painted Gallery Ceiling,/ Lascaux (France) c. 15,000-13,000 B.C Scientists and art historians can really only guess at the meaning or purpose of Paleolithic cave paintings. Because of their remote location deep within caves, it is widely believed that the paintings were associated with hunting magic or ritual, perhaps intended to ensure success in the hunt or preservation of the herd --in other words, to guarantee preservation of the food supply. New images were sometimes made over older ones, suggesting that the "act of painting" may have been the essence of the ritual magic and not the finished image itself. Abbé Breuil suggested that "by confining the animal within the limits of a painting, one subjected it to one's power in the hunting grounds." Sharp gouges in the sides of many animals have suggested that the hunters in the caves threw spears at the images, treating them as if they were alive and "magically commanding the death" of the animals represented by the paintings. Whatever the purpose of their paintings, the people who created them were gifted artists by any standards. Their work is important not just because it is old or because it is beautiful, but because it documents the artist's earliest efforts to express his observations of the world around him. The paintings, engravings and sculptures of the Paleolithic can --without challenge-- be called "the beginning of art." ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Audience graphic from "The Dancer" by Milo Back to Programme