Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
What Cave Art Means
The art inside the caves is, by contrast, remarkably uniform; transformations in style and technique are measured not in centuries but in tens of millennia. It is only when the artist happened to use charcoal, an organic residue, that absolute dating by means of carbon 14 is possible; when the artist chose ferrous oxide instead, for example, only a very rough date can be estimated, based on stylistic clues that now appear frustratingly stable. One wants change, if only in order to help establish chronology. If a key feature of art is innovation, then we might do better to see the Paleolithic figures of horses and lions not as art but as a natural manifestation of humanness, generated by an encoded species-specific behavior like avian nest construction.
One seriously regarded, if highly contested, theory of the origins of stone hand-axes or bifaces among our hominid ancestors (long before the cave art of our fellow Homo sapiens) has it that these were not tools at all, but rather an evolutionally determined universal behavior among male hominids, a product of sexual selection that signaled to females of the species,the makers’ selectively advantageous mastery of symmetrical forms. If they could produce a perfect biface in stone, then potential female mates might believe that they could also produce bilaterally symmetrical offspring. We see similar activity in the males of a number of bird species, whose members build special mating nests, the principal purpose of which is to impress females with their talent for symmetry, their ability to reproduce in artifice what is already written into the body of every vertebrate.
Some specialists in parietal art, notably Michel Lorblanchet, insist that the most basic method of research in this area consists of personally copying, by hand and as accurately as possible, what is observed on the walls. Notoriously, the Lascaux cave—having long been closed to visitors, whose presence, whose very breath, would quickly degrade the site’s masterpieces—features a near-perfect simulacrum for tourists to visit. Lascaux II is often derided as the culmination of a dispiriting trend toward artifice in the contemporary world already analyzed by social critics like Jean Baudrillard, yet in fact the site has great value for researchers seeking to understand the original Lascaux. The production of the simulation enables specialists to approximate what the early modern philosopher Francis Bacon thought of as “maker’s knowledge,” which, in this case, is extended from the understanding of artifacts to the most adequate knowledge one can have of the natural world.
One seriously regarded, if highly contested, theory of the origins of stone hand-axes or bifaces among our hominid ancestors (long before the cave art of our fellow Homo sapiens) has it that these were not tools at all, but rather an evolutionally determined universal behavior among male hominids, a product of sexual selection that signaled to females of the species,the makers’ selectively advantageous mastery of symmetrical forms. If they could produce a perfect biface in stone, then potential female mates might believe that they could also produce bilaterally symmetrical offspring. We see similar activity in the males of a number of bird species, whose members build special mating nests, the principal purpose of which is to impress females with their talent for symmetry, their ability to reproduce in artifice what is already written into the body of every vertebrate.
Some specialists in parietal art, notably Michel Lorblanchet, insist that the most basic method of research in this area consists of personally copying, by hand and as accurately as possible, what is observed on the walls. Notoriously, the Lascaux cave—having long been closed to visitors, whose presence, whose very breath, would quickly degrade the site’s masterpieces—features a near-perfect simulacrum for tourists to visit. Lascaux II is often derided as the culmination of a dispiriting trend toward artifice in the contemporary world already analyzed by social critics like Jean Baudrillard, yet in fact the site has great value for researchers seeking to understand the original Lascaux. The production of the simulation enables specialists to approximate what the early modern philosopher Francis Bacon thought of as “maker’s knowledge,” which, in this case, is extended from the understanding of artifacts to the most adequate knowledge one can have of the natural world.
Thoroughly fascinating long read. It's a lot to digest:
https://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/magazines/cave-art-means/
