This is what I get to spend two weeks studying in Easter.
If it doesn’t look much, let me give a bit of context. The people who made these are called the ‘Cro-Magnons’, and they’re living about 35 000 years ago. Before this point, there have been loads of our different ancestors living on the planet; the Australopithecines, Homo Erectus, Neanderthals, and more. Each brings a different group of things to the world; the introduction of tools and then different kinds of tools, different adaptations to daily life like walking on two legs or deliberately burying their dead. But in terms artistic expression you get only little possible fragments, if you add your own imagination and squint a little bit.
Then the ‘Cro-Magnons’ come along. There’s this big explosion of really exciting, tangible stuff in the archaeological record that we can recognise as art; though ‘art’ might not have been how the Cro-Magnons themselves saw it, there is an undeniable sense of ‘this here is a sculpture of a human head’, ‘this is a lion, see?’. There are also paintings on cave walls, a lot of other kinds of sculpture, decorated weaponry and even possible jewellery.
Though it is possible that art in some form could have been around before this point, the Paleolithic art explosion amazes me. I don’t understand how our ancestors can so suddenly go from so little to so much, how one possible way of thinking and acting can develop at such apparent speed into something I so strongly recognise.
My project this easter will be focusing on whether we can draw conclusions about the cognitive abilities of the Cro-Magnons using this art, and will involve trips to a handful of cave art sites around Europe. With only two weeks, plus the fact that I’ve only been studying this for a year, it’s unlikely I’ll do anything more than deepen my own understanding of the material, but it’s a fantastic opportunity and, to me, it’s so damn cool!
More photos and a write up of the British Museum ‘Ice Age Art’ exhibition from the Guardian here.
More about Human Evolution here and in this fantastic book.
Photo credit to Graeme Robertson of the Guardian.
