{"id":22153,"date":"2023-02-06T18:54:11","date_gmt":"2023-02-06T17:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.historyextra.com\/?p=224122"},"modified":"2023-02-06T20:35:11","modified_gmt":"2023-02-06T19:35:11","slug":"5-key-things-to-know-about-prehistoric-cave-art","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbchistory\/rss_feed\/5-key-things-to-know-about-prehistoric-cave-art\/","title":{"rendered":"5 key things to know about prehistoric cave art"},"content":{"rendered":"

When you think of the old stone age, or the Palaeolithic period, you might well think of cave art. The drawing, painting and engraving on cave walls, famously typified by sites such as Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain, has fascinated scholars for generations, but what was it all about and how should we understand it today? <\/p>

By Rachel Dinning\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Monday, 06 February 2023 at 12:00 am<\/p>

\n\n

1<\/span>

Neanderthals started it<\/h3>\n<\/div>
Palaeolithic art spans several tens of thousand years. We tend to think of images of horses, but actually the earliest phase was non-figurative. It was marks of the body -hands being placed against walls, fingers being covered in pigment \u2013 and that probably was originated not by our own species but by Neanderthals at least 64,000 years ago.<\/p>\n

On the podcast<\/h4>\n
Paul Pettitt answers listener questions on what cave art can reveal about the palaeolithic era<\/p>\n
LISTEN NOW<\/a><\/p>\n
<\/p><\/div>

<\/div> <\/div> <\/section>
2<\/span>
Art wasn\u2019t made by Homo Sapiens all the time<\/h3>\n<\/div>
The figurative art we think of when we think of cave art appeared somewhere after 40,000 years ago, perhaps as late as 37,000 years ago, by which time Homo sapiens had been in Europe for a few thousand years and Neanderthals had become extinct. So we shouldn\u2019t necessarily think that it was always created by Homo sapiens as we dispersed out of Africa. There was probably lots of periods in-between in which it wasn\u2019t created for whatever reason.<\/p>
3<\/span>
It\u2019s dominated by hunted herbivores<\/h3>\n<\/div>
When we do have what we tend to think of in terms of cave art, it is overwhelmingly dominated by images of those animals that were so important to hunt \u2013 those gregarious herbivores on the steppe grasslands of Europe.<\/p>
4<\/span>
It changes a lot over time<\/h3>\n<\/div>
We can see lots and lots of experiments with stylistic change. The ways you depict horses or the ways you depict bison develops a lot. This really shows that over some 25,000 years of figurative cave art, there was considerable change in the way people thought it should be done.<\/p>
5<\/span>
We need to get over own biases<\/h3>\n<\/div>
We think of it as art in a modern Western sense. We have to dismiss all of these modern Western notions. It was one part of a series of activities, the exploration of dangerous caves being one of them. There was probably also dance, singing, etc. Art is just the tangible part that survived of what one assumes was a ritual behaviour, perhaps with a religious underpinning, and that\u2019s about creation of those animals that were so important to think about and to hunt.<\/p>\n
Paul Pettit is professor of Palaeolithic Archaeology at Durham University and he specialises in Palaeolithic art. He is author of Homo Sapiens Rediscovered: How science is revolutionising our origin story<\/em> (Thames and Hudson), which traces the origins of our own species, Homo sapiens, and our behaviour in the Ice Age<\/strong><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n
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