Early Art History

[peter]

The whole area of early art history may need to be re-evaluated if the newly revised date of the figurative cave paintings found at Pettakere Cave, Sulawesi [Indonesia] is confirmed.

To date all other examples of such work dated at 30,000 years or more had been located in France or Spain, with the oldest being those at Cave Chauvet in France [32,000 years]. The revised dating of the Sulawesi paintings, coming in at 36,000 years minnimum, would however make them the oldest known works by a significant margin and would demand a complete rethink as to the timing, location and spread of figurative art work in the prehistoric world. The ageing, carried out by assesing the age of stalectite like formations on the surface of the works, has overturned the previous estimated age of 10,000 years made at the time of the caves discovery in the 1950's. The works, which have striking similarities with those of european locations, depicting wild-pigs and babirusa [deer-pigs] and hand-stencils, if confirmed as the oldest examples of such art would almost certainlt topple Europe from it's exaulted position as 'the cradle of art'.

[Vraith]

The whole area of early art history may need to be re-evaluated if the newly revised date of the figurative cave paintings found at Pettakere Cave, Sulawesi [Indonesia] is confirmed.

To date all other examples of such work dated at 30,000 years or more had been located in France or Spain, with the oldest being those at Cave Chauvet in France [32,000 years]. The revised dating of the Sulawesi paintings, coming in at 36,000 years minnimum, would however make them the oldest known works by a significant margin and would demand a complete rethink as to the timing, location and spread of figurative art work in the prehistoric world. The ageing, carried out by assesing the age of stalectite like formations on the surface of the works, has overturned the previous estimated age of 10,000 years made at the time of the caves discovery in the 1950's. The works, which have striking similarities with those of european locations, depicting wild-pigs and babirusa [deer-pigs] and hand-stencils, if confirmed as the oldest examples of such art would almost certainlt topple Europe from it's exaulted position as 'the cradle of art'.

I saw a blurb about that, pretty cool if it turns out to be accurate [maybe it already has, I didn't look for any details].
Oldest surviving art is a cool thing to find...even though we'll never ever find the earliest time folk were doing art. [without a time machine...or at least a time-scope for peering backwards].
And Euro-folk need to be brought down a peg.

[peter]

We can't actually have that many pegs left to be brought down by before our humiliation is complete! .

[TheFallen]

Cheer up Peter. Things could be worse – we could have been born Americans.

[Vraith]

Cheer up Peter. Things could be worse – we could have been born Americans.

Heh...I was actually trying to think of a really good way to say to him something like "you don't ever want to run out of pegs, cuz once you hit bottom the next thing that happens is we crash on top of you..."

[Ananda]

I saw this story a few days ago and what struck me was the similarity in styles from the pictures the story showed. Why did people decide to outline their hands? Somehow, the hands represented the true essence of a person to them. I wonder why some did not blow the paint around the whole form or the heads. Why the hand?

[Vraith]

I saw this story a few days ago and what struck me was the similarity in styles from the pictures the story showed. Why did people decide to outline their hands? Somehow, the hands represented the true essence of a person to them. I wonder why some did not blow the paint around the whole form or the heads. Why the hand?

That's something I've once in a while wondered about in a 'not-enough-to-find-out' way about art in general. [though I didn't notice it in this instance...I'm going to take another look cuz of your eyes.] Things that have strong presences/appearances multi-culturally/generationally: eyes, hands, and breasts/penises are deep, long, wide. [[one can re-order those two lists for some fun results. ]]

I'm sure someone[s] have a psycho/bio/social theory about hands-in-art.
But they don't seem quite as obvious at first blush as eyes or breasts/penises.
Peoples hands are fairly unique-ish [compared to other species]...but not as unique as hair, or noses, or feet, or legs, etc.
If I had to guess though...I would bet that part of it is that hands, besides their mechanical functions, picked up a highly valuable, flexible, and effective secondary use in communication. I mean, think on it...pretend you just met someone who, not only doesn't speak YOUR language, has never learned ANY language. Imagine trying to teach him/her language...except you have no hands/gestures.
Just a speculation.

[peter]

If I had to bet, I'd go that hands are chosen for a two related reasons. Assuming the painter was a solitary individual; what else could he choose that was specifically his [ie akin to his signature], that effectively was saying 'I was here.' The hand outline serves this function perfectly as well as being conveniently located for the purpose [imagine trying to do this with your penis and you'll get my drift]. In respect of doing it with the head , well - the tecnique of blowing paint from the mouth used to get the effect could only create the most godawful mess in your hair...... I mean, people!

[Hashi Lebwohl]

I think that by day 3 newborn infants can distinguish their mother's face and voice from other faces and voices. That being said, infants that young ignore what we see as "obvious" facial features--nose, lips, ears; to them, the human face is an oval blur with two large eyes on it. We know this because psychological tests on infants at that age show that when people wear facial masks with noses, ears, and lips of varying shapes and sizes the infants have generally the same reaction to those masks. Take away the eyes, though, or put only one eye in the middle, or give it three eyes, and they become more upset--it doesn't look correct. In short, the eyes are important in art because they are hard-coded into our brain and help us bond with the mother or identify other humans.

Hands probably fall into that category, as well, given that they are how we, as infants, explore the world--we grab objects, we touch objects, we throw objects, etc. Besides, like peter said the artist could sign their work by blow-painting the reverse image of their hand.

A lot of early art, especially the ones depicting hunts, served one of two purposes: either the art was supposed to guarantee a good hunt via some form of magic or it was a record of a good hunt.

[Vraith]

Hands probably fall into that category, as well, given that they are how we, as infants, explore the world--we grab objects, we touch objects, we throw objects, etc. Besides, like peter said the artist could sign their work by blow-painting the reverse image of their hand.

Almost surely part of it, no doubt.
But I still have a strong intuition that if you ignore the hands role/contribution to communication of all kinds, you miss something very important.
In almost every culture I'm aware of, there are rules, beliefs, and judgments made by observing the hands. They are common and highly weighted in everyday lives and in symbol and metaphor.
Even in the object/hunt thing: the communicative/gestural function of hands is nearly as important for a successful mammoth hunt as the hurling of spears.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

In almost every culture I'm aware of, there are rules, beliefs, and judgments made by observing the hands. They are common and highly weighted in everyday lives and in symbol and metaphor.

There are probably times and places where I would have been run out of town for things I do with my hands from time to time. I drum. I twirl pens or pencils. I flex my fingers when they have been on the mouse for too long.

[peter]

Just taking one of the common features of the indonesian and european cave art mentioned above, ie that the hand images are made by blowing a spray of paint from the mouth onto the hand, which is placed onto the rock surface, and thereby creating a 'stencil' image of the hand. Does the fact that this appears in the two places at similar [albeit a few theousand years difference] times indicate that the tecnique has been developed somewhere else much earlier and then carried from a common scource to these far apart locations - or are we dealing with a tecnique that has been 'discovered' twice; perhaps even resulting as a reflection of some inherent underlying pattern in the way the brain works [an idea that applies just as well as to why people painted on cave walls at all in the first place, maybe].

[aliantha]

Could have been developed in two different places at once. All it would take would be for some whippersnapper to put his hand in the paint one time, and plant it on his buddy's backside.

[Vraith]

In almost every culture I'm aware of, there are rules, beliefs, and judgments made by observing the hands. They are common and highly weighted in everyday lives and in symbol and metaphor.

There are probably times and places where I would have been run out of town for things I do with my hands from time to time. I drum. I twirl pens or pencils. I flex my fingers when they have been on the mouse for too long.

I, quite literally, cannot talk without my hands, and have a very hard time listening with them still, too. They gesture when I'm speaking, and fidget when I'm listening. [not 'twitchy', though. Not random/disconnected...I don't look like I'm jonesing.]

Peter: I think it was likely just one of those things that is invented over and over. It's too simple to necessitate any handing down/passing on. Not that it couldn't have been, it's obviously really easy to pass down...but it needn't have been.

[peter]

Another thing that interests me is whether the appearence of 'art' is by necessity a thing that has to be seen alongside a concurrent leap forward in the wiring of the brain; alternately is the brain of the fifty thousand years before still the same brain, but it's just that no-one got around to thinking about making a lifelike mark on a cave wall before? Also, how rapidly did this figurative style appear; do we see evidence of any move toward it in earlier cave markings or did the brilliance of the artists of Cave Chauvet etc suddenly burst unannounced onto the scene? These must be the questions that anthropologists ask - how did I miss this as a career! It seems to me that there is only one way to get a handle on what was going on in these guys heads and that is to look long and hard at the art - all of it!

[Vraith]

All good questions, none of which I know definitive answers to.
I'm fairly sure the brain hasn't changed much, if at all, in the last 50k...I think around 75k is the current dating?
Caves are, for a lot of things, almost all we have...but that's limited cuz hardly any people ever actually lived in caves...compared to the number who didn't. There just aren't that many caves around.
Art almost surely is older...I believe there are carved figures around 200k or more?
But something surely happened around the 30/35k...maybe simply that peeps finally had enough food, some free time, and materials at hand. Cuz there is a carved piece from Germany that is definitely figurative, and around 35k [give or take a few k.] I think they've found lots of them that are 25k or older. [lots being relative...I'd say anything more than about 2 is a lot when we're talking those time stretches.]

[peter]

Good point there V. about the late development of painted art as compared to carved pieces [or at least as we have yet discovered]. I'd no idea pieces of such age were extant but a quick 'google' turned up carvings of approx 270,000 - 700,000 years age! Seems I have been perhaps not giving the requisite thought to what may have been ongoing way before actual painting came on to the scene. [It appears that India holds the current record for the 'oldest known carving'.]

[Vraith]

Ran across a thing on this...some of it is things already mentioned above, but some isn't, pretty sure.
For instance, I don't recall this from previous [though I'm not re-reading it all to find out]:

At Blombos, he and his team unearthed a 100,000-year-old animal-bone paintbrush and palettes: abalone shells in which prehistoric humans mixed pulverized red ocher with bone marrow, charcoal and water to form a colorful paste. The cave also contained an ocher slab with 75,000-year-old geometric engravings and 41 sea-snail shells drilled through with holes so they could be strung as beads.

www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/magazine/hun ... ticle&_r=0

[peter]

I think this work featured in a recent UK edition of National Geogreaphic. The 'symbolic' work was a series of overlapping triangular scratches on a block of red ochre. Many authorities dismiss the marks as simply 'random scratches or idiosyncratic doodling' but it's discoverer [Christopher Henshillwood] insists the marks are invested with symbolic meaning. I guess the jury is still out on this one at present. I'd be interested to see a series of pictures showing the development from simple to complex in the various examples of cave art from around the world, and then see if the dating evidence of each corresponds to that progression [ie with the simplest being the earliest and the most complex the latest etc] {Or even within a given cave system eg Chauvet}

[Hashi Lebwohl]

From the article Vraith linked:

This primal fascination with naturally occurring symbols coincided with a nascent appreciation for the aesthetics of tools. I recently visited a forthcoming exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, where a few prehistoric tools are on display. A 300,000-year-old hand ax was particularly gorgeous: a teardrop of russet flint marbled yellow and gray, tapered neatly to a point. I could see the many marks where one of our distant ancestors had struck the stone again and again to achieve its striking symmetry.

To make such hand axes — the oldest of which date to 1.76 million years ago — early hominins had to imagine a finished tool in a lump of rock and guide their hands to realize it. Chimpanzees use this same mental process when they strip twigs of leaves to make ant-fishing rods, but they never continue the process beyond the minimum required for a tool to work. But early humans became dissatisfied with the merely pragmatic. They spent a great deal of time and effort making their tools beautiful, sometimes struggling with unmalleable but attractive materials.

A few ancient hand axes are so handsome, large and heavy — to the point of being unwieldy — that some researchers have argued they were not intended for practical use, but were instead meant to attract mates by symbolizing skills or status in a group. Once early humans realized that their handicrafts could be both utilitarian and symbolic, both functional and beautiful, it would not have taken a great leap to start experimenting: to try recreating with stone and paint the icons they observed in weathered pebbles, fossils and their own handprints.

More findings like this and we will have to seriously reconsider all our ideas about early humans and early art. Our lack of knowledge about our distant ancestors is almost shocking but it really isn't our fault they didn't leave written records.