Cave paintings are paintings found on cave walls and ceilings, and especially refer to those of prehistoric origin. The earliest such art in Europe dates back to the Aurignacian period, approximately 40,000 years ago, and is found in the El Castillo cave in Cantabria, Spain. The exact purpose of the paleolithic cave paintings is not known. Evidence suggests that they were not merely decorations of living areas, since the caves in which they have been found do not have signs of ongoing habitation. They are also often located in areas of caves that are not easily accessible. Some theories hold that cave paintings may have been a way of communicating with others, while other theories ascribe a religious or ceremonial purpose to them.
History of discovery
Age
Cueva de las Monedas
Nearly 340 caves have now been discovered in France and Spain that contain art from prehistoric times. Initially, the age of the paintings had been a contentious issue, since methods like radiocarbon dating can produce misleading results if contaminated by samples of older or newer material,[1] and caves and rocky overhangs (where parietal art is found) are typically littered with debris from many time periods. But subsequent technology has made it possible to date the paintings by sampling the pigment itself and the torch marks on the walls.[2] The choice of subject matter can also indicate chronology. For instance, the reindeer depicted in the Spanish cave of Cueva de las Monedas places the drawings in the last Ice Age.
The oldest known cave art comes from the Cave of El Castillo in northern Spain, and may be more than 40,000 years old.[3][4] This date coincides with the earliest known evidence for Homo sapiens in Europe. Because of their age, some scientists have conjectured that the paintings may have been made by Neanderthals.[5]
The second-oldest known cave art is that of Chauvet Cave in France, the paintings of which date to earlier than 30,000 BCE (Upper Paleolithic) according to radiocarbon dating.[6] Some researchers believe the drawings are too advanced for this era and question this age.[7] However, more than 80 radiocarbon dates had been taken by 2011, with samples taken from torch marks and from the paintings themselves, as well as from animal bones and charcoal found on the cave floor. The radiocarbon dates from these samples show that there were two periods of creation in Chauvet: 35,000 years ago and 30,000 years ago. One of the surprises was that many of the paintings were modified repeatedly over thousands of years, possibly explaining the confusion about finer paintings that seemed to date earlier than cruder ones.[8] In 2009, spelunkers discovered drawings in Coliboaia Cave in Romania, stylistically comparable to those at Chauvet.[9] An initial dating puts the age of an image in the same range as Chauvet: about 32,000 years old.[10]
In Australia, cave paintings have been found on the Arnhem Land plateau showing megafauna which are thought to have been extinct for over 40,000 years, making this site another candidate for oldest known painting; however, the proposed age is dependent on the estimate of the extinction of the species seemingly depicted.[11] Another Australian site, Nawarla Gabarnmang, has charcoal drawings that have been radiocarbon-dated to 28,000 years, making it the oldest site in Australia and among the oldest in the world for which reliable date evidence has been obtained.[12]
Other examples may date as late as the Early Bronze Age, but the well-known Magdalenian style seen at Lascaux in France (c.15,000 BCE) and Altamira in Spain died out about 10,000BCE, coinciding with the advent of the Neolithic period. Some caves probably continued to be painted over a period of several thousands of years.[13]
Themes and patterns
Spanish cave painting of bulls.
The most common themes in cave paintings are large wild animals, such as bison, horses, aurochs, and deer, and tracings of human hands as well as abstract patterns, called finger flutings. The species found most often were suitable for hunting by humans, but were not necessarily the actual typical prey found in associated deposits of bones; for example, the painters of Lascaux have mainly left reindeer bones, but this species does not appear at all in the cave paintings, where equine species are the most common. Drawings of humans were rare and are usually schematic as opposed to the more detailed and naturalistic images of animal subjects. One explanation for this may be that realistically painting the human form was "forbidden by a powerful religious taboo."[14]
Pigments used include red and yellow ochre, hematite, manganese oxide and charcoal. Sometimes the silhouette of the animal was incised in the rock first, and in some caves all or many of the images are only engraved in this fashion, taking them somewhat out of a strict definition of "cave painting".
Similarly, large animals are also the most common subjects in the many small carved and engraved bone or ivory (less often stone) pieces dating from the same periods. But these include the group of Venus figurines, which have no real equivalent in cave paintings.[citation needed]
Theories and interpretations
Henri Breuil interpreted the paintings as being hunting magic, meant to increase the number of animals.
Another theory, developed by David Lewis-Williams and broadly based on ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, is that the paintings were made by paleolithic shamans.[15] The shaman would retreat into the darkness of the caves, enter into a trance state and then paint images of their visions, perhaps with some notion of drawing power out of the cave walls themselves.
R. Dale Guthrie, who has studied both highly artistic and publicized paintings and a variety of lower quality art and figurines, identifies a wide range of skill and ages among the artists. He hypothesizes that the main themes in the paintings and other artifacts (powerful beasts, risky hunting scenes and the representation of women in the Venus figurines) are the fantasies of adolescent males, who constituted a large part of the human population at the time.[16][verification needed] However, in analysing hand prints and stencils in French and Spanish caves, Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University has proposed that a proportion of them, including those around the spotted horses in Pech Merle, were of female hands.[17]
At uKhahlamba / Drakensberg Park, South Africa, now thought to be some 3,000 years old, the paintings by the San people who settled in the area some 8,000 years ago depict animals and humans, and are thought to represent religious beliefs. Human figures are much more common in the rock art of Africa than in Europe.[18]
Cave paintings found at the Apollo 11 cave in Namibia are estimated to date from approximately 23,000–25,000 BCE.[19]
In 2002, a French archaeological team discovered the Laas Gaa'l cave paintings on the outskirts of Hargeisa in the northwestern Somaliland region of Somalia. Dating back around 5,000 years, the paintings depict both wild animals and decorated cows. They also feature herders, who are believed to be the creators of the rock art.[20]
Many cave paintings are found in the Tassili n'Ajjer mountains in southeast Algeria. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the rock art was first discovered in 1933 and has since yielded 15,000 engravings and drawings that keep a record of the various animal migrations, climatic shifts, and change in human inhabitation patterns in this part of the Sahara from 6000 BCE to the late classical period.[21] Other cave paintings are also found at the Akakus, Mesak Settafet and Tadrart in Libya and other Sahara regions including: Ayr mountains, Niger and Tibesti, Chad.
The Cave of Swimmers is a cave in southwest Egypt, near the border with Libya, in the mountainous Gilf Kebir region of the Sahara Desert. It was discovered in October 1933 by the Hungarian explorer László Almásy. It contains rock painting images of people swimming estimated to have been created 10,000 years ago during the time of the most recent Ice Age.
Australia
Significant early cave paintings have been found in Kakadu, Australia. Ochre is not an organic material, so carbon dating of these pictures is often impossible. Sometimes the approximate date, or at least, an epoch, can be surmised from the painting content, contextual artifacts, or organic material intentionally or inadvertently mixed with the inorganic ochre paint, including torch soot.[2]
A red ochre painting discovered at the centre of the Arnhem Land plateau depicts two emu-like birds with their necks outstretched. They have been identified by a palaeontologist as depicting the megafauna species Genyornis, giant birds thought to have become extinct more than 40,000 years ago; however, this evidence is inconclusive for dating. It may merely suggest that Genyornis became extinct at a later date than previously determined.[11]
The Whitsunday Islands are also home to a surprising number of cave paintings. The cave paintings by the seafaring Ngaro people on Hook Island, Australia, are remarkable for their non-figurative, non-representational, or abstract content. Their significance is a mystery.
Rock painting was also performed on cliff faces, but fewer of those have survived because of erosion. One example is the rock paintings of Astuvansalmi in the Saimaa area of Finland.
When Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola first encountered the Magdalenian paintings of the Altamira cave, Cantabria, Spain in 1879, the academics of the time considered them hoaxes. Recent reappraisals and numerous additional discoveries have since demonstrated their authenticity, while at the same time stimulating interest in the artistry of Upper Palaeolithic peoples.
The Bhimbetka rock shelters exhibit the earliest traces of human life in India; a number of analyses suggest that some of these shelters were inhabited by humans for more than 100,000 years. The earliest paintings on the cave walls are believed to be of the Mesolithic period, dating to 12,000 years ago. The most recent painting, consisting of geometric figures, date to the medieval period. Executed mainly in red and white with the occasional use of green and yellow, the paintings depict the lives and times of the people who lived in the caves, including scenes of childbirth, communal dancing and drinking, religious rites and burials, as well as indigenous animals.[23]
It is located in southeast state of Piauí, between latitudes 8° 26' 50" and 8° 54' 23" south and longitudes 42° 19' 47" and 42° 45' 51" west. It falls within the municipal areas of São Raimundo Nonato, São João do Piauí, Coronel José Dias and Canto do Buriti. It has an area of 1291.4 square kilometres (319,000 acres). The area has the largest concentration of prehistoric small farms on the American continents. Scientific studies confirm that the Capivara mountain range was densely populated in prehistoric periods.
Cueva de las Manos (Spanish for Cave of the Hands) in the Santa Cruz province in Argentina
The hand images are often negative (stencilled). Besides these there are also depictions of human beings, guanacos, rheas, felines and other animals, as well as geometric shapes, zigzag patterns, representations of the sun, and hunting scenes. Similar paintings, though in smaller numbers, can be found in nearby caves. There are also red dots on the ceilings, probably made by submerging their hunting bolas in ink, and then throwing them up. The colours of the paintings vary from red (made from hematite) to white, black or yellow. The negative hand impressions date to around 550 BC, the positive impressions from 180 BC, while the hunting drawings are calculated to more than 10,000 years old.[24]
Most of the hands are left hands, which suggests that painters held the spraying pipe with their dexterous hand.[citation needed] The size of the hands resembles that of a 13-year-old boy, but considering they were probably smaller in size, it is speculated that they could be a few years older, and marked their advancement into manhood by stamping their hands on the walls of this cave.[citation needed]
Southeast Asia
There are rock paintings in caves in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Burma. In Thailand, caves and scarps along the Thai-Burmese border, in the Petchabun Range of Central Thailand, and overlooking the Mekong River in Nakorn Sawan Province, all contain galleries of rock paintings. In Malaysia the oldest paintings are at Gua Tambun in Perak, dated at 2000 years, and those in the Painted Cave at Niah Caves National Park are 1200 years old. The anthropologist Ivor Hugh Norman Evans visited Malaysia in the early 1920s and found that some of the tribes (especially Negritos) were still producing cave paintings and had added depictions of modern objects including what are believed to be cars.[25] (See prehistoric Malaysia.)
In Indonesia the caves at Maros in Sulawesi are famous for their hand prints, also recently found in 38 painted caves in the Sangkulirang area of Kalimantan.[26]
"During the last decade we've discovered about 1,500 negative handprints in 30 caves in East Kalimantan... I find a remarkable similarity between the act of creating these handprints and traditional healing practices in Borneo. To create a design, a painter would place a hand on the wall, then spray it by mouth with pulverized pigments made of ochre. A traditional healer would do much the same, laying hands on the body, then expelling his breath to spray on therapeutic ingredients. Both processes resulted in a kind of magic."[27]
The Padah-Lin Caves of Burma contain 11,000-year-old paintings and many rock tools.
^Clottes, Jean (2003). Chauvet Cave: The Art of Earliest Times. Paul G. Bahn (translator). University of Utah Press. ISBN0-87480-758-1. Translation of La Grotte Chauvet, l'art des origins, Éditions du Seuil, 2001, p. 214.
^Amos, Jonathan (June 14, 2012). "Red dot becomes 'oldest cave art'". BBC News. Archived from the original on 2012-06-15. Retrieved 15 June 2012. One motif – a faint red dot – is said to be more than 40,000 years old.((cite web)): Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
^Clottes, Jean (October 2002). "Chauvet Cave (ca. 30,000 B.C.)". Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Retrieved 11 May 2013.
^Pettitt, Paul (1 November 2008). "Art and the Middle-to-Upper Paleolithic transition in Europe: Comments on the archaeological arguments for an early Upper Paleolithic antiquity of the Grotte Chauvet art". Journal of Human Evolution. 55 (5): 908–917. doi:10.1016/j.jhevol.2008.04.003.
^Schiller, Ronald (1972). Reader's Digest: Marvels and Mysteries of The World Around Us. The Reader's Digest Association. pp. 51–55. LCCN7277610. ((cite book)): Check |lccn= value (help)
^Whitley, David S. (2009). Cave Paintings and the Human Spirit: The Origin of Creativity and Belief. Prometheus. p. 35. ISBN978-1-59102-636-5.
^Jaroff, Leon (1997-06-02). "Etched in Stone". Time. Retrieved 2008-10-07. Wildlife and humans tend to get equal billing in African rock art. (In the caves of western Europe, by contrast, pictures of animals cover the walls and human figures are rare.) In southern Africa, home to the San, or Bushmen, many of the rock scenes depicting people interpret the rituals and hallucinations of the shamans who still dominate the San culture today. Among the most evocative images are those believed to represent shamans deep in trance: a reclining, antelope-headed man surrounded by imaginary beasts, for example, or an insect-like humanoid covered with wild decorations.
^Chazine, Jean-Michel. 2005. "Decoding the Hands." National Geographic. ;Aug. 2005, Vol. 208 Issue 2, pages 44-45. Discusses the discovery of negative handprints in 30 caves in East Kalimantan, Borneo. How most were found in the highest, hardest to reach caves; Possibility that the caves were connected to special rituals; Observation that secluded, forbidden spots were often used for the instruction and initiation of traditional healers, or shamans; How handprints are a common motif in prehistoric rock art worldwide; Ways that the handprints in the Kalimantan caves differ from hands discovered at other sites; Similarity between the act of creating these handprints and traditional healing practices in Borneo.
Further reading
Fage, Luc-Henri (2010). Borneo – Memory of the Caves. Le Kalimanthrope. ISBN978-2-9536616-1-3. ((cite book)): Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
Heyd, Thomas; Clegg, John, eds. (2005). Aesthetics and Rock Art. Ashgate Publishing. ISBN0-7546-3924-X.
Curtis, Gregory (2006). The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World's First Artists. Knopf. ISBN1-4000-4348-4.
Nechvatal, Joseph (2005). "Immersive Excess in the Apse of Lascaux". Technonoetic Arts. 3 (3): 181–192.
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