The Really Dark Ages

[Fist and Faith]

A quick check shows carvings of nature scenes and geometric figures in the Nevada desert that go back 10,500 to 14,800 years.

I don’t know about the motivations behind ancient art. It’s probably much the same as graffiti taggers today, desire to leave a mark. I was here. Keep out. Watch out. I’m bored.

I cannot imagine they had so much spare time on their hands that long ago that they could waste as much of it as that must have taken for those kinds of reasons.

[peter]

One of my favourite examples is the wonderful lioness in Cave Chauvet. Done in a single uninterrupted stroke, it could only have been done by an individual completely composed and prepared for making the necessary manoeuvre (the piece is well over eight feet in width, demanding a line of charcoal black paint well in excess of twelve feet long. And it's perfect. The painter had all of the skills of Japanese calligraphy master (which itself begs the question, where are the practice drawings; how emerged this master artist, as it were, out of the ether?).

I just love the conjured vision of this person (and I can't help it - the piece has a feminine feel to me so I see her as a woman) squatting hands on knees with the prepared reed brush in front of her. She takes a breath, grasps the brush and moves in one graceful arc of movement.......

And it's done. And thirty thousand years later, we can connect directly to her, just as if it were yesterday.

That's a thing of true beauty to me.

[Avatar]

In fairness my check was as I said - quick. There may be much older art on the site (or indeed the info I posted simply wrong - it has been known ). But I believe that possibly some of the oldest art is found in S.A. - more in the form of decorative embellishment of jewellery iirc.

Oh no, you were quite right, this site also has 2,500-3,000 year old rock art, it was just interesting to me that although we think of it as an ancient form of art, it was still being practised relatively recently as well.

I cannot imagine they had so much spare time on their hands that long ago that they could waste as much of it as that must have taken for those kinds of reasons.

I think you would be surprised. We should never lose sight of the fact that for all the millennia and changes that separate us, people are, and always will be, people.

Sure, some was almost certainly ceremonial / ritualistic in nature, but some will just as certainly be the equivalent of the oldest known graffiti in Pompeii, dated 78 BCE:

“Gaius Pumidius Diphilus was here.�

--A