IF YOU have ever marvelled on the accomplishment of Stone Age cave artists, you might be in good firm. In 1940, on visiting Lascaux collapse southern France, Pablo Picasso supposedly stated: “Since Lascaux, now we have invented nothing.” Perspective, motion, impressionism, abstraction, pointillism – it’s all there. And these artworks are some 17,000 years previous.
Picasso’s comment could also be apocryphal. It was definitely untimely. In 1994, a whole lot of work twice the age of these at Lascaux had been found at Chauvet cave, additionally in France. The Chauvet work are, fairly merely, beautiful: prowling lions and galloping horses are captured so vividly that the distant Stone Age world turns into nearly tangible. Much more astonishingly, this artwork was created shortly after the daybreak of the “cultural explosion”, an occasion archaeologists have lengthy recognised as marking a surge in creativity that appears to have come out of nowhere. How may these first artists have already been so good?
We now have a solution: the Chauvet artists weren’t the primary. Discoveries in current many years have shattered the idea that artwork was invented by our species some 40,000 years in the past. As a substitute, now we have more and more compelling proof of artistry in different ancient hominins.
For sure, this challenges our beliefs about who invented artwork. But it surely does extra moreover. It gives an perception into our forerunners’ appreciation for aesthetics and the worth they positioned on objects that appear, at first look, pointless for survival. In so doing, it additionally supplies tantalising hints that artwork has been an important element of hominin life for tens of millions of years.
To say that people are the one dwelling artists…
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