Why Did We Start Making Art?A Paleo-Anthropological Perspective
Written by Monty Pierce Jones
Throughout my undergraduate degree we looked at how the ‘golden barriers’ that humans erect to distinguish themselves from animals are often flimsy. Things like:
Habitual bipedalism - which is unique amongst primates, but not all animals;
‘Culture’ (knowledge unique to certain subgroups that is passed down) - which chimpanzees and other great apes arguably have;
Even tool-use - it turns out sparrows and dolphins are handy.
One golden barrier is still glittering: art. Animals have yet to take up art by their own volition, though Congo the chimpanzee and Pigcasso clearly have some talent for it. I am willing to say that art may be the only thing we do that is exclusively human (though it might not be limited to Homo s. sapiens - shoutout Neanderthals). Indeed, it is one of the characteristics we use to define “behavioural modernity” (when we started acting like us). If we want to figure out why we started doing it, we need to explore what art is.
Pigcasso.
What is art?
Despite the fact that we’re probably the only ones that get up to it, we still struggle to define art. Some have argued that art is anything that is made “for its own sake” - l’art pour l’art - not serving a purpose beyond aesthetics. This take was prominent during the 19th century, especially in the “fine arts” of painting, sculpture, music, theatre, dance, and poetry. I think it falls apart when someone designs a beautiful chair, or car. How can you say that a Jaguar E-Type is not art? We mustn't forget that the Latin ars from which the word “art” is derived is a translation of the Greek technè, where we got “technology”. Art means craft. Though they may be epistemologically separated by some (even defined in contraposition to each other) art and technology are deeply intertwined.
L’art pour l’art truly crumbles when you realise that all art has a social purpose, no matter how much it seems like a purely individualistic expression. Here’s some Nietzche: “What does all art do? Does it not praise? Does it not glorify? Does it not select? Does it not emphasise? In all these ways it strengthens or weakens certain value judgments...” You may remove the functions of art but it still does not exist in a vacuum. All art praises, glorifies, chooses or prefers, and thus must tell us something about the artist and the culture they came from.
Perhaps what is art is a matter of perspective: if you are looking for function, you will find function and the object will become artefact. If you are looking for beauty, you will find beauty and the object will become art, in fact. For the purposes of this blog post, however, art is any activity that culminates in visual, auditory, or performative artefacts that capture the imagination.
Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain showed us that any object can be “art” if you put it on a plinth.
When did we start making art?
Ok, so humans are the only animals that make art, but we aren’t exactly sure what it is. There are crafts (ars, technè), fine arts, and even anti-art (see the urinal above), they all kind of fit under the umbrella of “artefacts that capture the imagination” - things that make you go hmmmm. When did we start making things like that?
The oldest artefacts which are commonly understood to be art that we know about today were made during the Upper Palaeolithic Age (40 to 60 thousand years ago; “Upper” = more recent), though this date is being pushed back. The Palaeolithic, or Old (palaeo-) Stone (lithic) Age, is a period defined by human activity. It essentially runs from more or less 3.3 million years ago (when hominids first began to use stone tools) to about 10 thousand years ago (when we transitioned to agriculture, a.k.a. the Neolithic). The end of the Palaeolithic generally coincides with the end of the Last Ice Age and the Pleistocene-Holocene (geological epoch) transition.
With the various caveats in mind, the Palaeolithic art I will be focusing on is cave art, a phenomenon that has captured everyone’s imagination at some point in their lives. (A bit cheeky of me, as after all this discussion on what art is, few people would disagree on cave painting and engraving being art.) The most famous cave art site in the world is, of course, Lascaux in Montignac, France. It has a mythical discovery story (involving a dog named Robot) and the paintings found there are 17 to 20 thousand years old. They were painted using local red and white ochre, and ‘imported’ black manganese - showing a penchant for particular materials. Picasso, after visiting Lascaux, is quoted as saying “we have invented nothing new”. However, the artists of Lascaux were also standing on the shoulders of giants: they are far from the oldest cave paintings in the world.
Lascaux and Picasso.
As of 2018, the earliest artwork in Europe can be found in the Iberian peninsula. At sites like La Pasiega in Cantabria, Maltravieso in Extremadura, and Ardales in Andalucía you will find hand stencils, patterns and painted stalactites. Uranium-thorium dating by Hoffman et al. pushed this cave art back to at least 64 thousand years ago, before modern humans are said to have entered Europe - implying Neanderthal authorship…!
La Pasiega ladder form, speculated to be a clan sign.
The oldest cave art in Asia can be found in the galleries of the Maros-Pangkep karst in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Pieces include the earliest figurative painting in the world: a 50 thousand year old babirusa (deer-pig) hunting scene at Leang Bulu’ Sipong, that may involve human-animal hybrids (making it the oldest mythic scene, too). Its recent dating by Oktaviana et al. (2024) has bolstered the argument against claims that cave art was a European invention that spread from the Iberian Peninsula, echoing the narrative that the West has ‘art’ while the rest have ‘artefacts’. (‘Ethnographic’ and ‘fine art’ collections are often found in separate museums today. Though this is slowly changing, see the collaboration between the Musée du Quai Branly and the Louvre in Paris.)
Deer-pig at Leang Bulu’ Sipong.
Why did we start making art?
I’ve established that we started making art a very long time ago, but why? What was the purpose of making art? If we believe in the Romantic notion of l’art pour l’art (as early Palaeo-archaeologists did) then it was all about individuals expressing themselves, acting on an instinct to create (or decorate). As we have seen, this interpretation does not hold. Art originates in social processes and achieves certain ends, it does not exist in a vacuum and its meaning is focused by its context. Let’s run through just a few of the possible interpretations of cave art:
The sensorial experience of being in a cave is powerful - it is dark, earthy, claustrophobic, and damp, but also warmed by flickering lights, bodies, and echo. It is a different world. People who have had the privilege of seeing Lascaux with their own eyes often find them welling up. The popular imagination thinks that ‘cavemen’ lived in caves (some did, sometimes) - but mostly they lived nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyles, in the open air. In that context it is not hard to imagine caves as sacred, ritualistic places people would return to on special occasions, especially since they often have treacherous entrances.
Cave art has been connected to shamanism from early on, with its biggest recent proponent being David-Lewis Williams. The idea is that the patterns we see in cave art were hallucinated by shamans in trances induced by meditation, drumming, dancing, or hallucinogens. Furthermore, some of the earliest art involves therianthropes (human-animal hybrids) - being able to become another animal is a theme found in shamanism across space and time (in Amazonia, shamans are often linked with jaguars), and is often made possible through trance-states (ayahuasca being one of the famous ways to get there in Lowland South America). It kind of makes sense, really. Altered states have been a source of creative inspiration for people from The Beatles to Lewis Carrol to Van Gogh.
Henri Breuil, inspired by anthropological accounts of Aboriginal practices, suggested that cave art was used by shamans to control animals (their migration patterns, fertility, and entrapment) - sort of like voodoo dolls. This ‘hunting magic’ hypothesis was a step in the right direction, as it emphasised the deliberateness of cave art, but falls flat in most instances due to the lack of correlation between the animals depicted and the alimentary remains associated with the site. At Lascaux, for example, it seems that reindeer were the most important game in terms of animal bones, yet horses overwhelmingly dominate the art.
Perhaps it was not about controlling migratory patterns, but understanding them. Could caves have been the original blackboard? Were people learning and developing the theory of hunting before practising in the field? Mithen suggested this in 1988, and recent work by an amateur palaeo-archaeologist, Bennet Bacon, is showing that the markings found in certain caves connect to faunal fertility cycles on a lunar calendar. Marks like dots and lines may have referred to lunar months from the beginning of spring, thus recording ethological (animal behaviour) information. The <Y> marking found in many caves near animal representations, according to Bacon et al. (2023), likely refers to the different lunar months when fish are spawning, bison are borning, and birds are hatching. This pushes proto-writing back about 30 thousand years!
We make art for many reasons: self-expression, to understand the world around us, when we’re tripping balls, but no one explanation works for all contexts. Some caves lend themselves to shamanist interpretations, others to ‘hunting magic’, others still could be interpreted as cavernous ethological calendars. My small contribution to this debate is the idea, inspired by Lowland South American Anthropology, that this art performed all three functions. “Shaman” comes from the Manchu-Tungus word “šaman”, meaning “one who knows”. They are often elders, healers, priests, mediators, great hunters, malevolent wizards, military strategists, historians, storytellers, translators… the list goes on. I don’t think it would be surprising that those who understood the animals the best were the ones who could transform into them, that those who knew their patterns were the ones who could seemingly control them, that those who had an “expanded consciousness” (whatever that means) could bring all of this together in a practice that lasted millenia and spans the planet: cave art.
Go Further:
Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJnEQCMA5Sg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctKNMKVRuP8&t=1096s
Articles:
https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/art
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/journey-oldest-cave-paintings-world-180957685/
Books:
What Is Palaeolithic Art? Cave Paintings and the Dawn of Human Creativity by Jean Clottes
The Nature of Paleolithic Art by R. Dale Guthrie
The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art by David Lewis-Williams
N.B. This blogpost was heavily inspired by lectures given by Dr Ramon Sarro and Dr Timothy Clack for the BA in Archaeology and Anthropology.
