Relaxation and rest has always been a necessity, and having hobbies and passions has always been a part of human life: playing games, talking to friends, playing music, and making art. Mallory Shotwell said, “Art is an expression of the human experience, and its value lies in its ability to bring people together”.
The earliest examples of artwork in human history were cave paintings made over 43,000 years ago. It is still unknown what each piece of art represents or what the purpose of creating them was, but archaeologists and historians have quite a few theories.
One theory is that these paintings were used to depict stories early humans wanted to share with one another or that they had been used to tell where different resources or dangers could be found. It is possible, however, that they were simply made for fun and entertainment. Many scientists have thought that the paintings may have been created by religious shamans or priests and that they were only used for practices of faith. What the drawings truly meant to them is still a mystery.
Possibly the most well-known form of cave paintings are the various animals depicted: deer, bison, ox, and horses are among the most common. Most large mammals are featured in many places. However, fish, birds, plant life, and humans are rarely shown. While human-like stick figures are sometimes depicted, they are never drawn with the same attention to detail that is seen in the animals.
These animals have been used to speculate what the reasoning behind the art would be. Often they are seen to be either drawings of what people who lived in that area might have seen and they drew them because it was what they knew. Another theory is that they were shown for religious purposes. Because of how closely the early humans lived with nature it is possible that they say aspects of it as sort of gods.
Along with being used to learn about the history of human beings, these cave paintings are also used to help paleontologists make more accurate depictions of extinct animals. The paintings can assist by giving them what is known to be the most precise example of what the animals looked like while they were alive.
This year, 2024, a painting was found in La Belle France, a cave site in South Africa, depicting what appeared to be a dicynodont. The dicynodont were herbivores that had turtle-like beaks and tusks. They were thought to have been alive 200 to 265 million years ago, long before mankind. However, if the painting is of the creature, that would mean the dicynodonts were around at least 200 million years later than scientists formerly believed.
Renaud Joannes-Boyau, co-author of the study, posted on the new discovery made about this specific painting. Along with Oktaviana, A.A. and Hakim, B. “Representation of human figures is already extremely rare,”. “But storytelling of 51,200 years old is even more incredible.”
Most cave paintings, especially the more elaborate ones, are found deep in caves and often in places that are known as “hot spots”, which are places where sound travels to every wall similar to a theater’s acoustics. Because of this, MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa looked into the connections between the art and the stories that could have been told using the art work, and the way that sound can travel throughout the room.
Creating a visual of what someone wants to express is a very common ways to learn to process thoughts and how to express them in a way that others can understand. As Shigeru Miyagawa stated, “Cave art was part of the package deal in terms of how homo sapiens came to have this very high-level cognitive processing”.
There are many ways to define a language but the most agreed upon one is that it’s a structured form of communication that is both written and spoken. If early humans did use cave paintings to talk with one another, then they may have been the ones to create the first written language.
While the animals are well known, symbols and geometric shapes are even more prevalent and possibly had more importance in the communication of early humans. In 2013, paleoarchaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger, set out to find meaning behind the paintings in caves. Her discoveries led her to find that some of the symbols on cave walls were frequently repeated and had the potential to be the beginning of a language.
Petzinger found there to be 32 repeated symbols in 52 sites across Spain, France, Italy, and Portugal over roughly 30,000 years old. While this could merely have been a coincidence, it is more likely “That really small number [of symbols] tells you that they must have been meaningful to the people who were using them because they were replicating them,” said Petzinger.
Most cave paintings are made from black charcoal or a red ink thought to be from ochre or an iron oxide called hematite. Occasionally, there will be paintings that appear to be purple or orange, however, these pigments were made from less permanent materials making them less likely to be seen currently. Frequently, they would also carve the pictures into stone either before painting over the etchings or simply leaving them to be the drawing itself.
They would make the pigments by crushing different types of natural resources: berries, flowers, leaves, minerals, with a mortar and pestle and adding in some sort of liquid. Or they would heat up resources causing a chemical reaction that would change the original colors of the substance.
These cave paintings may have been used to leave messages for one another, but it is also possible that it was art in the same way art is created in modern days, to be seen and evoke feelings. The true meaning of this art may never be known, but it meant something to the one who painted it and maybe that’s all that needs to be known.
