The "What Does Prehistoric Art Tell Us?

 It was an ordinary day.  Picked up my morning newspaper and started leafing through it.  Came upon an article that was titled "What does prehistoric art tell us?"  It read: Where does art begin?  When in prehistoric human life did the drive start that spun poems, paintings, and symphonies?  It's not difficult to reason from what we seem to know.  Art grows out of necessary work.  People had to learn to weave clothing for cover.  Some of them did it with more patience and awareness and skill.  They learned to do what had to be done, and did it better than it had to be done.  There were rewards for that, but also, once you start doing the work for the sake of the excellence, it starts to become art.  Extend that to everything.  At bottom, it's still art, it's still work.  Dance grows grows out of the regular motions on the threshing floor.  In old French the word we have as "thresh' meant "to dance."  Music learns to keep a beat, so it can liven and encourage the communal work.  Add words and you get poetry, which is words dancing, but words can be places bodies can't.  Thus the m modern form of art closest to its prehistoric utilitarian ancestor might be the chain-gang work-chant or the drill sergeant's jody call.  Art is an amusing paint job on the daily grind of survival.  A beauty made from a necessity.  It is entirely explicable.  Then you go to Lascaux. 

The Lascaux cave drawings, seen here in 2008,
are considered some of the finest examples of prehistoric art

When the Stone Age cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux were stumbled upon in modern times, archaeologists and anthropologists regarded them as certainly frauds.  The images on rock in Spain and France were so strikingly modern that some of them were used as advertisement art on cigarette packages.  But, they aren't forgeries.  This is 17,000 years into the human past.  In one corner in Lascaux is a little tableau.  The human is a glorified stick-figure, albeit posed skillfully, so you almost intuitively sense he's dead.  But the bison is different.  They not only drew bison, they took care to draw them so well - true to the way the animal feels in its hide and shag - that it instantly appeals to the eye of Picasso.  The miracle isn't just what's there.  It's what is implied.  Nobody picks up a charcoal stick for the first time and draws like that.  They have techniques for making certain shapes.  Invisible but thick in the still air is a long process of skill-acquisition, perhaps spread over generations.  if new have a half dozen of these cave scenes, they imply hundreds, or thousands, off designs or sketches in bark, pottery, tattooing, all now long lost.  Someone had to feed those artists off the communal kill while they learned the art of drawing and painting.  Someone had to take the time from gathering wild roots to go collect and grind the materials needed to mix the pigments.  It's a leap from the notion of Ice Age savages clinging to survival.  Why?  Likely this art was crucial to the beliefs of the artist's people, to the shaman's attempt to bring about a successful hunt or to reinforce the cycle of birth long the hunted animals.  That's lost to us.  "Divinely superfluous beauty" is the poet Robinson Jeffers' phrase, and he thought that the evidence of Gos was in that the creator took the trouble to limn the deep interior surfaces of sealed seashells with luminous substances.  From what but sheer joy is being creator?  Here, in Lascaux, I think it is a human trait - "humanely superfluous beauty."   Here were artists.  After the Stone Age came the Neolithic.  In almost every place representational art disappeared.  Geometric design took its place.  They are boring, lines, angles,, zig-zags, across the entire surface of pottery, over and over; whole museum of them.  A code mute to us.  Our representational art is a rediscovery, or a relearning.  WE are not direct heirs of Altamira.  it might as well have been painted by space aliens.  There are other astonishing evidences.  Prehistoric human sacrifices or benighted drunks are sometimes found in Danish bogs, preserved down to the braids in their hair.  A frozen hunter from 3000 B.C. tumbles out of a melting glacier with his tattoos intact; in a lost desert tomb on the plateau pf Ukok, a priestess lies perfectly preserved in her towering headdress and tattoos of, what are they? wild antlered horse leaping like dolphins.  These are evidence that time forgot to erase; a spot under a table whee it neglected to cut.  The ancient bison in Lascaux stares back at is in the faces of the panicked animals in "Guernica," when the bombs fell.  In their eyes, the dry fiction of a purely utilitarian human past, vanished.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.