In Our Time: S23/02 Cave Art (Sept 24 2020)

this is the bbc hello in 1940 a dog called robot fell into a hole at glasgow in the dordogne his owners explored the hole deeper and discovered thousands of cave paintings of bulls and horses and deer that are now famous around the world there are many more caves like this the stone age people tens of thousands of years ago decorated with hand prints or abstract symbols or images of animals they're fascinating in themselves perhaps even more so the questions they raise of how they were made and why and what that tells us of their creators and what he meant to be a human in a world of neanderthals as well as homo sapiens with me in their homes to discuss cave art our paul pettit professor of paleolithic archaeology at durham university chantal cornella senior lecturer in early prehistory at newcastle university and alastair pike professor of archaeological sciences at the university of southampton now mr pike can you give us a broad outline of what cave art is and where in the world is found well if you include rock shelters which after all really are just kind of shallow caves then cave art is found on every continent except for antarctica and it kind of consists of a variety of forms from engravings that are usually made with perhaps a stone tool scratched into the wall to bass relief sculptures where they're carving out a texture in the in the cave wall to painted abstract symbols um and also kind of fully figurative polychrome paintings which in europe are mostly of animals when we're talking about caves is that the only environment where these works are created or is it simply where they were best preserved though we do find some examples of paleolithic art uh in the open air notably in the car valley in portugal and this is an area where there's low deposition and low erosion so the rocks have preserved so it may well have been that there was a lot of art out in the landscape and it's really the caves have protected it from erosion and from ice sheets and so on but equally we find are in the very deepest darkest parts of the cave and there's something special about those caves that are attracting these artists because it's not a place where humans are living so i think art is kind of multi-purpose there's some art which was designed to be seen from a distance and there's some art that was done in small niches that was designed to be hidden you've used the word paleolithic can you tell us what that can you put that into years yes the paleolithic which is divided into different stages starts at about two million years ago and comes down to the beginning of the holocene so the end of the last ice age at around 10 000 years ago we think the oldest piece of cave art is 65 000 or older than 65 000 years um but there are other forms of symbolic behavior that date back to at least 115 000 years so basically for the purposes of this program we're talking 55 65 thousand years to ten thousand years yes thank you very much chantal canela you we mentioned lasko can you please describe that to us and why it was so very important and what period it was created that's three questions i'm afraid never mind i'm sure you're up to it well when you went to lasko you come to really one of the most spectacular parts of the cave the hall of the bulls and this has got about 130 figures in in this these include sort of horses uh the balls themselves which are large aurochs wild cattle and deer as well and this is on a fantastic scale really it's uh there are four immense balls for example um one of them is about five and a half meters so these this is art that's sort of really designed to be impressive and the important one important things about alaska it's got a very dazzling white sort of natural calcite gleam in these in the first couple of chambers so this aren't really really really stands out and this is very large chamber it's about 20 meters it's you get one gets a sense these are really beautiful images really spectacular really impressive lots of people could fit into this chamber we can we can imagine that this is art that was meant to be perhaps seen by large groups of people and admired and this contrasts with some of the other art at lasko as alice has said we get uh we get art in the distance depth of caves and small chambers and niches um so for example another part of velasco was known as the the shaft this is a five meter deep shaft into the ground people had been lowered in down on ropes and here we see quite different type of art art that's a bit more mysterious perhaps not everyone only few people are meant to see it we have here an image of a charging bison that's wounded and next to it a really rare image of a human i think it's the only one in in this particular cave um but it's a human that seems to have a bird's head and next to this is a very an enigmatic um bird on it on a stick so this is obviously a a really interesting image that's very meaningful in some way but it's perhaps it's a lot more secret um perhaps only its maker saw it so john you use the word impressive who are they trying to impress well this is a chamber that the whole uh social group could potentially fit in so and we know that adults and children are going into these caves so certainly the immediate social group who created it we do have sites at this time period where we do seem to have more people meeting up and exchanging things and in some ways these k these painted caves mark these landscapes for people who might be wandering through but also for for future generations we have people coming back and making new marks on some of these painted caves several thousand years later thank you very much paul can we get a sense of what it was like to experience these multicolored paintings in caves without natural light was certainly very different to today i mean obviously we see these things statically lit with electric light whether we're looking at them in books in museums or in the caves themselves and obviously uh they didn't have these uh these benefits at their disposal the light sources they had were either small little halves you know literally literally burning small amounts of um wood fuel on the cave's floor or little lamps uh just by made by taking a small block of stone a cobble perhaps battering out a little concavity in it so it forms a natural bowl filling that with some animal fat and a little wick perhaps of juniper wood it would give you a little light perhaps of a meter or two's diameter might last half an hour before you needed to replace the fat that obviously is nothing like a powerful torch of any form so caves are obviously mysterious frightening places the other thing our paleolithic artists wouldn't have known about is how caves form what they are and most importantly what acoustics explain particular noises and so on it would all mean mysterious not to mention dangerous in places it's a very tactile experience to explore these mysterious places and we have to remember that in caves where light stops life stops we have lots of evidence that these hunter-gatherers of the paleolithic are occupying cave mouths but they don't really need to explore particularly deep into the dark zone they might want to ensure there aren't any sleeping carnivores in the back before they bed down themselves but beyond that and the fact that we can find art several kilometers into very difficult systems suggests that there is a real importance for being there that we assume goes beyond that that quotidium so we have to remember in that shifting light we're surrounded by impenetrable darkness everything is moving shadows are elongating and we certainly can see in some of the art this concern with animating it as well so the art becomes not so much the fixed picture on the wall but a second or two of a little film uh image rather like a flick book image and there abouts and finally the very fact that as alastair's already mentioned some of the art is in very difficult to access difficult to see places the very positioning the difficulty of getting there suggests to us that actually we should think of this as a form of installation art you know that the difficulty the the discomfort uh the way that one's position changing alters the view of the art and so on is all part of this overall experience in a very mysterious and frightening place so what's your view um why they would take the trouble and to face the dangers uh to go that deep and that far into these caves to do these things to us to an extent we can say that in some cases it would be simple curiosity obviously these places offer uh shelter from the very severe climates these people are living in it is the ice age after all but really the extent to which these groups have brought in materials pigments from various sources equipment kit if you like and lugged it through often very deep caves suggest to us that of course this isn't simple graffiti you know this isn't i got here uh far to the back of the cave aren't i clever that it is planned it is a deliberate and it presumably forms part of wider activities that we might call ritual cosmological and this kind of thing and i think there's a lot of themes that we can find in the art that that further support this notion that they are there for non-normal purposes let's just have a bit more information about what's going on alistar pike we know that you've pioneered a way of dating images where there's no carbon could you summarize that for it and basically how are you dating these images yes there's a there's a real difficulty in dating k paintings by radiocarbon dating which is the the kind of go-to dating method for most archaeology and the reason for that is that um not all paintings contain organic carbon and also radiocarbon really has an effective limit of around 50 000 years so it can't take anything older than that so we've been using the radioactive decay of uranium to thorium in a method called uranium thorium dating and that can work out the age of a sample that incorporated uranium at its formation and that's not the case for pigments but it is the case for calcium carbonate formations in caves similar to stalagmites and stalactites these are thin layers of calcite that form and if they form on top of paintings we can use the ratio of thorium to uranium to work out how long has elapsed since that layer formed and because it's on top of the painting that gives us a minimum age for the art in a few really rare examples we have painting that's done on top of an existing layer of calcite and then maybe even calcite forms again on top of the painting so we have a kind of sandwich of dates and that way we can get a minimum and a maximum age can you just flush it out with numbers um probably from the end of the ice age to around 18 000 years ago you have a period of painting that's that's very figurative it includes the wonderful polychrome bison of altamira cave in cantabria and the period before that going back to maybe 27 000 years you see a lot of red outline animals so they're not filling them in they're not trying to make them look completely realistic and then the period before that and and back to the point at which humans arrive in europe you see a lot of symbols being painted abstract symbols that we we probably don't know the meaning of but what we've been able to do is to take samples on top of some of these symbols and show that some of them date to older than 65 000 years now that makes them something very different because we know that there were no modern humans in in europe uh until around 42 000 years ago this is rather radical so what is it telling us it's telling us that these paintings must have been made by neanderthals but previously just to set those in context i mean in the late 19th century when and neanderthals stirred the interest of people to a great extent they were considered to be inferior in every way nearer chimpanzees and humans was one one line accredited that seems to have been blown out of the water by this doesn't it well well it should have been yes um but the the kind of notion that neanderthals were kind of dumb brutish creatures uh which you know originated in the original definition of what a neanderthal is when william king uh defined the species he identified it as a separate species uh and he said it was devoid neonitals were devoid of all theistic concepts they had no god if you like and to him that represented something that was was um very uncivilized and very backward and to the extent where when they were debating what they were going to call this new species a german scientist ernst high court suggested that the name homo stupidis the stupid human and you would think that actually once you can demonstrate that neanderthals are painting and in fact what they're painting is is indistinguishable to what modern humans who at this point are only in africa and the near east it's completely indistinguishable it's it's the use of very basic mineral pigments it's painting symbols nothing figurative then you suddenly realize that we should never you know we should not have this idea about neonatals being kind of dumb and brutish what's your revised view of their undertale how should we think about them now in terms of symbolic capability that they were just as able as modern humans were they had the capacity to think and express themselves symbolically and this may have even included some form of language um and what's really interesting is if you we've always looked for the origin of the evolution if you like of that the ability to to exhibit symbolic behavior within the kind of modern human lineage but now we've found it in the additives we should perhaps start looking much earlier on um perhaps in the last shared common ancestor between neanderthals and modern humans perhaps half a million years ago chantal what techniques did people use to make the works what skills would they need well there's a variety of uh different techniques yes from the very simple to very complex so at the most basic level cables are quite a calcium carbonate sheen or clay through which people can drag their their fingers um then we have engravings uh using flint tools which is a very common way to decorate to these caves and we even find sometimes find the worn flint tools in these caves as well so simple engravings but also more elaborate bass relief for example we also have line drawings made with a black pigment quite often charcoals used or burnt bone but also mineral as well black mineral manganese dioxide but the more elaborate ones the polychrome images are made through a variety of different types of mineral pigments varying sort of iron oxides which produce sort of reds or yellows white a variety of different pigments are used micro or elite or calcium carbonate taken from that from the cave and these pigments we sort of ground up and again we sometimes find evidence for this on the floor of caves and mixed with binders so water or animal fats for example and then these could be applied we sometimes uh there's something happens for use of brushes made from animal hair or or pads uh also stencils as well either made from hide or people use their hands as stencils as well people um could spray paint with using pigment in their mouth and then even sort of splitting it directly or through hollow bone and these all give quite different effects and sometimes sort of effects of depth and and shading which gives give a lot of these paintings quite a lot of realism and sense of of motion and and the animal can i bring paul in now paul how skillful would you say that some of these works were well to an extent the answer depends on what particular phase we're dealing with so for example if we're dealing with alistars greater than 65 000 year old neanderthal phrase not very because this is a non-figurative art not that that needs to be unsophisticated but it's made of um covering the body or the hands and fingers with pigment and pressing them against the wall and a few variations thereof so obviously something that most parents have an example of that their children have done uh on their fridge but when figurative art appears and we think at the moment that seems very clearly uh exclusive to homo sapiens whether we're a different species to neanderthals or otherwise when that appears in my opinion between 36 000 37 000 years ago fairly abruptly in several parts of europe the animal outlines that are being created that are being drawn with wet pigment are fairly simplistic and it's only a few thousand years after that that we can start seeing a concern for naturalism and it's from this point we can start saying they're very accomplished in terms of their ability to think i want to draw a horse and that looks pretty dynamically uh like a horse but really it's only from the time of lasko as chantal mentioned about 20 000 years ago the late upper paleolithic we uh we call it that we can really see all the spectacular iconic aspects of upper paleolithic art so these great scenes of all of these herd animals these lawn mowers of the pleistocene grasslands bison wild cattle like all rocks and horse red deer and so on that we can see them interacting in these little film clips if you like from uh from the tundra and also a concern with perspective a concern with detail alastair what i find really interesting is that there are a significant number of paintings that are of animals where they've not needed to paint a complete animal what they've done is taken the topography of the wall and simply kind of highlighted it so you'll find a kind of bulge on the wall a bit like the bosses on the ceiling of the polychrome chamber in altamira they've wrapped the bison around them there are some examples where they've used the cracks to form the back of animals and so on and so they're using a real economy to express these animals and it's almost as though the animals were already there on the wall and they were just highlighting them by just putting perhaps a horn on or perhaps putting a hind leg in or something yes i think absolutely and of course that the idea of technical skill is a a modern concept and i'm sure in places like lasko in altamira in neo this was very important but i quite agree that much of the art we have is very incomplete and what seems to have been important is the creation of the art rather than you know i'm gonna make an engraving that then lots of people can come to enjoy it's me creating it that's important and it's getting that message uh across that yes this is a bison i'm drawing chantal if homo sapiens has more in common with neanderthals than was once thought how does it change ideas about what it means to be human now for a few years rep art has been seen as the sort of last bastion of human exceptionalism and i think it's really exciting these new findings suggesting neanderthals are making art as well it just shows what we see as something quite key to humanity is shared it's shared across species and very different people looked at cave walls and were keen to leave their imprint leave their sign and saw their relationship to these particular places does that or how does that change the idea of what it is to be human well i think it completely changes it um no longer can we hold these anthropocentric and and to some extent euro-centric views of the kind of primacy of humans the fact the idea that they are at the very top of the evolutionary tree um because one of the uh the characteristics that have always been attributed to humans ie symbolic behavior and painting and so on we can show that's now shared with neanderthals paul i think it's looking increasingly unlikely that the neanderthals were a distinct species to us now the more we have genetic sequences from the two so the answer would be there that you know well that this is cultural variation we can see a lot of variation among chimpanzee groups from group to group so we might expect it uh between western european neanderthals near eastern neanderthals homo sapiens uh and so on so to me it's not surprising uh that neanderthals are producing art in deep caves but as chantal says the important thing is is what is the variability here uh you know that their behavior leaving behind a hand stencil could be just as symbolic as writing um a a phrase of shakespeare's or something like that uh on the cave wall we work with very blunt tools uh when we talk about uh symbolism so really it's about behavioral variability and what works and what helps you survive in these difficult climates this might be an area where everyone has a different view but what was the purpose of the art why were they doing it well for the first hundred years or so that uh the the age and authenticity of the art was recognized people would forward umbrella theories you know one idea that would explain the whole of the art and obviously for the figurative phase alone we're dealing with some 25 000 years and it changes quite significantly over that time so uh there will be of course a number of reasons for it some of it public if you like some of it group orientated what were these reasons well when it was first shown to be authentic this was the late 19th century and we see this very victorian view of art that well it's aesthetics isn't it you know you're you're in a deep cave you're probably bored because it's snowing outside and uh you draw the animals that are important to you and it's simply that it has no function it's not a religion or anything like that and it's really only when we come into say the 1920s that uh people are now observing shall we say small-scale tribal societies elsewhere around the world and and demonstrating that art is rarely that it always has some kind of function magical function so the idea that it's sympathetic magic it was either produced to create fertility or to ensure success in the hunt for example and then as we come through to the 60s and 70s the information age the notion that it's didactic you know you can learn a lot about your prey animals um uh it comes about and then finally from the late 90s this awful new age notion that it's all about shamans in altered states of consciousness and and stuff like that alistair first of all i would i'd just like to add to what the sort of interpretive side of looking at cave paintings and one of the ideas that i'm quite keen on is really about how you survive as a hunter-gatherer in the ice age and the role that cave art might have may have played in that and if you are kind of hunting animals and gathering then you don't want to be in an enormous group because you just have to travel much further to get enough food to feed everyone or move the whole group continuously around the landscape and so there's this idea that in fact what would happen is that groups would break off into into smaller groups and they might spend a season or a good part of a year in their smaller groups but this creates certain problems one of which is in breeding is that if you have a small group then your mates are selected from people who are much more likely to be related to you so the way that this kind of model would work is by having an aggregation event where you bring all these small groups back together and then they can interbreed with each other but also they can swap knowledge and they can swap you know knowledge about hunting grounds and how they've managed to survive the year and so on and we wonder whether or not these uh suddenly these large caves with very public large spaces with um big impressive cave paintings might have formed a part of that kind of aggregation of these hunter-gatherers but then on the other hand we have very personal pieces of art and i think the hand stencils are are perhaps one of the most intimate kind of relationships you can have with the artists themselves because they would have stood in almost the same place in a cave as you the observer um and they would have had the same kind of body attitude you may have had to crawl underneath a small ledge because these are not always positioned on nice flat walls in fact some of them are quite deliberately hidden away and that gives you a real sense of connection with the past and with the artist just your hand outlined on the wall well you know some people just say it's a it's it's like a graffiti tag it's like saying uh i am here but actually if you look at the location of these hands um you've got to ask yourself who are they actually saying that to because some of them are you wouldn't be able to see them if you just were walking down a cave so for example one of the 65 000 year old hand stencils in el traviezo cave in esther madura in spain it's actually underneath a kind of little overhang of the wall and to see it you actually have to lie down on the k floor and kind of shimmy in it's a bit like trying to lie down underneath the table and it's about 50 to 70 centimeters above your head now that doesn't strike me as a kind of um a a demonstration of i've been here that's something a little bit more personal i think it's about putting something in a very particular and special place within a cave you know we have some small object about from the stone age portable art it's called how do these objects relate to the art in caves well there's some similarities particularly in the sort of themes we see so we get animal bones and flat stones engraved with animals and geometric designs that are found across cave art and some of this more portable art and there's similar sort of play between material and form so as alistair said the shape of the cave is used to um if it looks like a horse's head for example horses it is painted and we can see this similar interesting play with forming in decorated tools so animal bodies are sort of fitted in to tools quite often with huge with quite a lot of humor so we get this class of uh objects um uh spearferrers or lattles which have a hook on the end to um to keep the javelin in place and animal bodies are sort of contorted into this to create air to create particular forms so a bird beak might uh be the hook or a mammoth might lift up its tail we even have a sort of fawn defecating with a bird perched on it which acts as the hook for this um so we do see similarities we also see some differences as well so some of the cave art is so much uh based on the cave as a place and this other material is portable it can be carried around with you but it's also found in much more domestic contexts and there's quite a complementarity sometimes between cave art uh uh caves with lots of engravings in them and adjacent caves with lots of this this portable art this a lot of this portable art uh seems um much more impermanent than cave art which lasts for very long periods uh we get evidence it's engraved uh then perhaps broken that's perhaps reused in much more sort of domestic context so it's much more temporary art but also much more sort of domestic art whereas some cave art cave arts seem to be set apart from daily life and perhaps visited only on special occasions paul what does cave art tell us about who was where when and why they moved around well to an extent uh we can tell that these the groups the individuals whoever they were creating the art came from very widely in the landscape we can source the minerals uh used for the pigments in the art for example lascaux has uh six or seven different sources of different coloured pigments from 40 to 50 kilometers away we can do even more when we look at stone tools that we can source to uh their geological uh outcrops originally so we know that these people are moving hundreds of kilometers over the course of an annual year uh in pursuit of the the wild animals they're almost entirely dependent upon uh for survival so it's a highly mobile life that leads them to particular points in the landscape where particular animals are aggregated and lascaux is beautifully important here because as a late french specialist nobel augili demonstrated so beautifully lascaux is actually a calendar of rutting it's a calendar of sex of creation and a lot of the the art has creation uh in mind here too so what it shows is horse the extinct wild cattle the allrocks and red deer all in their rutting coats in their finest as it were and in their rutting behaviors they actually rut based on modern analogies of those animals at different times of the year we have three seasons of creation represented in lasko so these are the kind of sites that as alistair says these groups aggregating to keep information and mates flowing and so on and so forth and preserve this important information from a very far-flung environment alisa there are clearly differences over time and space but you see similarities too well there are there are lots of similarities especially amongst the kind of symbols that are used and these have variously been explained as entoptic phenomena um which is really the way that you the way that your brain is kind of hardwired so if you are in a kind of dark room and you start to see patterns on the wall those patterns seem to be something a product of the brain so they're shared between individuals so we seem to see the same symbol sorry i have to hold it up for a moment do you mean that everybody in this dark cave if they see shapes on the walls are seeing the same sort of sharp shapes because of the way their brain works yes not all at once but especially if yeah especially if you have um yes there's been lots of experiments of depriving people of you know kind of sound and light and also experiments people taking uh psychoactive substances and getting them to do sketches and you see these geometric shapes they appear again and again what bearing does this have on on on cave art well that might explain why you find symbols in argentina that you also find in australia despite the fact that the cave art might differ in age by 25 000 years and they are 12 000 miles apart well this notion that its altered states of consciousness has been largely uh disproven what caves do is make us hypersensitive to those shadows shapes and and so on and so forth and when we're when we're into doing figurative art it suggests the shapes of horse and so on in the in the uh morphology of the cave walls that's as far as it goes we don't need uh drugs or jumping up and down for several hours to to start seeing these lines which are in any case absent largely from the paleolithic caves of uh of europe this may well explain some rock art uh say north america uh or thereabouts but uh as an explanation for ice age art it's really nonsense chantal the comparisons are often made they've been alluded to in this program so far between modern art liberia and cave art and what connections do you see well i think i think this is quite an instructive exercise because it shows us really what's particular about uh public art um but also some similarities so i mean my colleagues have talked about um evidence we've got evidence for children in caves um but we've also got people who are really good at art specialists similar range of people producing the art as today but there's some real differences so some of the main themes we see in western art of the last couple of centuries um portraits and landscapes for example these are not themes in palithic art we see very little evidence of vegetation and we see hardly any images of humans it's this perhaps seems to be a taboo on the accurate representation of humans what we see is really much more abstract and all part human part animal um there's also um other differences really so we see uh in our current day artists commodities whereas political art isn't separate inseparable from its sort of context of creation and there's perhaps a sort of broader contrast between um our uh after the last few centuries has sort of really focused on representation a sort of um to decorate something something we admire something that's consumed visually versus passing up which is much more sort of uh if we take analogies from small-scale uh societies across the world art there's much more about intervention about doing something in the world paul mentioned the idea of sympathetic sympathetic magic but that does seem to be the case for at least some palliative art it has a it has a purpose it does something what analogies with artists like picasso tell us is that these people uh were thinking about animals they had an intimate knowledge of their ethology appearance and so on and at least the ones who have left an artistic record were able to do it very very well but i think beyond that uh it doesn't really help us when we're we're really reduced to just looking at them and saying wow aren't these people clever back then and this kind of thing so of course it's not surprising um it's far more difficult to hunt a one and a half ton bison dangerous you know and uh and difficult i should imagine it's a lot easier to remember what that animal is like when you're butchering them uh so frequently uh and reproduce it i don't know why we're so hung up on art being so fantastic there's your moon around there's you know mostly uh people appreciate the art in terms of aesthetics isn't it wonderful that these people could do it they're us they have the same brains and nervous systems okay they're living a long time ago uh but uh really there's a lot more difficult things they had to deal with daily uh in their environments yes but just to stay around this for a moment or two um if it's not much different what does that say about the way that the mind's working even over that time the art is supposed to be and the creativity then imagination gets into what is supposed to be seminal in the construction of what human nature is and how do you think that idea plays into what you've just said i think very well we have to remember that we evolved as a hunter gatherer dependent on wild animals in the main so to an extent our brains have evolved around the importance of animals so it's no surprise that many of the mechanisms our brain has the ability to uh make sense out of a random pattern very very quickly this kind of thing reflect animals it's no surprise either that if you think about the rise of cgi and advertisements many of them on television uh have some kind of animal or anthropomorphised animal which i gather sell things far better than another human uh would as well so they're still with us and that's not even to mention dogs and cats and uh and this kind of thing so what it does tell us of course is that although figurative art was not necessarily inevitable you know and it probably didn't come out of nothing that somebody had the idea of i'll draw one of those bison but the important thing is uh that it's animals and that was probably an inevitability as soon as the brain is able to make things up very very quickly and interpret you know faces in the clouds and this kind of thing then perhaps for a hunter-gatherer it's inevitable and that to me uh is the importance of the link yeah so so it's been kind of said i think um by people who are struggling with the notion that somehow neanderthals had the equivalent symbolic abilities as modern humans that the neanderthals were making hand stencils and doing little symbols and squiggles on cave walls but look at lasko and look at altamera and surely that represents a massive difference in the difference in the cognitive abilities of the two but actually as we know from even just looking at our history that that art and what people do with art is completely culturally determined um determined to some extent by fashion as well and and so it could just be that the difference in behavior is that they didn't need animals absolutely they didn't need to paint animals they needed to paint hand stencils and squiggles um and it was only until the later period where the cultural demands on the groups were such that that this kind of thought process and uh need to to to depict the animals around them kind of paul petty can we come into the end now but we just skipped over the idea that this might be some sort of magic or something to do with spiritualism so um is there more to be said about that have i just let it go yes i think there is uh we have to remember that it's a social enterprise it probably is part about all saying that we're singing from the same song sheet uh shall we say so in a way if you think about it i suppose as a christian church service it's people coming together with a shared practice a liturgy almost if you like and that involves the perpetuation of the animals that these people are hunting on which they're critically dependent as well so if you have to say there's anything and i'm i'm careful of not generalizing 25 000 years and so on that something that does come out time and time again uh is that it's almost some kind of magical way to renew those animals to bring them back into the world and that's very much how the hunter-gatherers of the recent past think can i ask you briefly each of you to say what would be most exciting for you to discover about this cave art in the next 10 15 years we we currently have uh three or four examples of neonatal art and that really is not enough for it for us to be able to characterize it for us to be able to work out what its distribution is um what the differences are between you know what what's important to neanderthals and what's subsequently important to modern humans so i think really if we were going to spend some time uh continuing this work we would go out and try and find as much neanderthal art as we could i think i would agree with that much better dating but not just for the early art um we i think these universalistic models that we uh none of us are particularly keen on are very much based on seeing it as an entire thing and not really picking out uh the themes uh that that do change throughout the time and that only then can we sort of assess the significance the art much more in its particular social context chronology yes and geography too so um in terms of the geography we only recently know that in indonesia we have very similar our hand stencils and also figurative art as early as 40 000 which suggests uh that it was part of the behavioral repertoire of homo sapiens at least as we dispersed out of africa but we have nothing in between so obviously survey of everywhere between europe uh and ireland indonesia uh to see how common it was or whether in fact it's very exceptional well thank you very much thank you chantal canela paul pettit and alistair pike next week is this a dagger which i see before me yes it's shakespeare's macbeth written when he was at the height of his powers and thank you for listening and the in our time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from melvin and his guests none of us are particular fans of these broad universal uh explanations such as shamanism but i think some of the work that's associated with that is quite interesting for thinking about the nature of caves and life in life in the palatic so uh as i mentioned the idea of certain rocks shapes suggest an animal form clots the french french archaeologist has suggested it's actually seen as this is seen as spirit animals trying to emerge from uh another another world behind behind the cave and that painting them helps helps bringing them bring bring that out and similarly sort of hand stencils paint you spit paint all over your hand that paints you into the cave into perhaps this important spiritual membrane and we see offerings in stuck into crevices into the cave bits of animal bone uh flint uh flint tools occasional beads so perhaps a concern to a world behind the cave wall i think is quite an interesting idea and is the idea of going into the underworld part of that and going into the cave yes i mean it's such common imagery across history that caves are ancient the underworld um uh either the world of the dead or another spiritual the whale realm of spirits for example so yeah um the sort of scariness of caves some of these are several uh kilometers long people going in there just a it's a ordeal it's dangerous really getting the sense that you're going into the earth into something dark that's that's quite different it does really fit in very well to those ideas as caves as entrances to an underworld anybody else yeah i think the important thing is that we have to remember that the greater majority of cave art is undated in any absolute sense now we we have a lot of schemes relative stylistic comparison all this uh that we think are fairly safe but it remains to be seen that there's a lot of surprises probably ahead of us much of archaeology certainly prehistoric archaeology went through its great period of of getting dates for things with the advent of radiocarbon and dendrochronology in the mid 20th century but because of the difficulties uh and it's only been in the last few years as alistair says that we've been able to start doing this so we have to remember we're still in the dark to an extent and as alistair says we we have these great dogmas and we make great generalizations uh so people take the 25 000 years of the upper paleolithic as a block and say look they've got lasko which might be you know half of that age and so on it really is the same as as taking say a very early iron age community pre-roman iron age comparing it with late roman or early medieval and saying look how different the two are you know i'm the early iron age people much less sophisticated than our early uh early medieval people and so on so it's really important that we have to nuance as chantal said can i just come in there it's really interesting um the analogy you make there but you can actually compare what the taos were doing with what modern humans were doing if you look at the african evidence so 70 000 years we have an engraved ochre block it's got a kind of hash mark on it if you like along with a kind of a pebble that's got a similar kind of x's on it made with an ochre crayon we've got perforated shell beads maybe a hundred thousand years ago in israel and seventy thousand in morocco and then some kind of scraped lines geometric patterns if you like on ostrich eggshells from rock deep rock shelter in south africa and this is what modern humans are doing how they're expressing themselves symbolically if you compare that with what the editors were doing sometime before 65 000 years ago you really can't tell the difference they are painting uh squiggles and lines uh doing hand stencils and so on and it's it's that it's the misunderstanding that somehow what came much later represents what humans ability is um versus what what the other tiles what we know that neanderthals did quite right i think they're they're both variations on a theme both biologically and behaviorally and in the artistic realm neanderthals are into bodies either their own bodies and extending them into the landscape by by art or by suspending little bits of animal bodies bones uh and teeth on their bodies as as jewellery whereas we overlap with that in africa uh but also we seem to be developing this non non-figurative geometric incisions that might reflect perhaps clothing patterns uh on clothing or something like that so again nuancing uh is the important thing is there do you think there's gonna be lots more caves that will be discovered over time yes i mean any dogs around called robots tends to be speleologists these days the spanish are doing wonders there's one or two caves a year discovered with paleolithic art in them that might only be one or half a dozen images but it's there less so in in france and also in other countries um the first examples in the czech republic have just been found some in germany we've had some in britain uh now so where ice age humans are present in some abundance then we're much more likely to find it in other countries yes

Channel: In Our Time

Views: 1,660

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: BBC, Radio, Four

Id: 2f5EPl3mX0k

Length: 47min 4sec (2824 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 24 2020