Paleolithic Art, pt. 3

December 27, 2006

The opening of chapter three contains an interesting specimen of academic poetry. It will not be anthologized by poetry editors.. but it is nevertheless refreshing to read these rhyming lines.. adding as they do an element of play and creativity to the practice of scholarship. It is this attention to play and unseriousness that allows Guthrie to see something new in these wall scratches from thousands of years ago. The conclusion to this poetic opening goes as follows:

We see—and know—these marks alright,
Fun, now accounted by today's reason
Fossils of a developing imagination,
Hints of a young brain's configuration.
Recognize—and reach—gently thus,
Our hand to theirs, in humanness. [114]

I was particularly taken by the line about "Fossils of a developing imagination.." One can imagine Coleridge perking up and finding reason in that to study paleolithic art. The poet who spent so much time thinking about the development of the imagination could not fail to be interested in these first surviving relics of the human imagination.

The chapter later returns and expands upon this idea of the imagination as the role of improvisation is pointed out. There are many examples in paleolithic art of figures that were not drawn upon a simple blank surface, but incorporated the natural shapes which were suggestive of some animal or human feature. That may not seem a major point, but it is a strong piece of evidence that these ancient drawings were not made according to some master plan, but were rather the result of the growing human mind's fascination with shapes and contours that mimic something from life. A paleolithic cave is not some chamber of mysteries, but a place for expressive experiment.. for connecting the dots.

If these images were created in a spirit of improvisation, then they are also good evidence for what was actively on the minds of our ancestors. Guthrie compares these improvised images to a Rorschach test. Faced with indeterminate and random natural marks, these early artists time and time again saw large mammals and women. Accordingly, Guthrie will spend two central chapters examining these two aspects of paleolithic culture: hunting large mammals and sexual fantasy.

I should clarify that these fixations were not shared by everyone in paleolithic culture.. the women and young girls undoubtedly expressed themselves in their own ways, through their own crafts. It just happens that these were not preserved very well, often being in softer materials. What we see drawn on cave walls and carved onto shafts of bone was the art of young men.. and their fascinations happen to parallel the fascinations of young men in our own day.

The age and sex of the cave drawers is reasonably clear from the handprints and footprints left in the caves by these artists. Guthrie is pretty certain that these artists were mostly male adolescents and children. This means we need to update that common mental cartoon of our ancient ancestors.. a band of men and women sitting around a fire in a cave. First of all our ancestors did not use deep caves for living.. but more importantly, we should imagine somewhere nearby a gaggle of kids.

This identification of children and adolescents as the culprits for much cave art is probably the most controversial aspect of this work. Guthrie supplies a possible reason for the academic disinterest in children as producers of this art:

I suspect that the older magico-religious paradigm has played a hand, mesmerizing attention toward what it deems serious and significant—and weighting children very lightly. In the old dichotomy of sacred and profane, children simply weigh in as lightweights compared to the many other, more officially important or spiritual concerns of adults. [116]

Being willing to call these drawings non-serious and playful allows Guthrie to make some fundamental and concrete comments about human nature and the early human lifestyle.. where the magico-religious viewpoint would cover the drawings in possible symbolic interpretations.

Not least important of the comments is his attention to the imagination. The drawings become firmly situated within a lifestyle.. and thereby get dragged away from airy notions of unpolished geniuses. These images are those that occur to growing human beings as they scan the contours of the cave walls.. much as my mind used to roam as I stared at the ceiling while lying on my bed.. and the images leaped out at me. This simple fact also goes some distance to proving that the imagination is not some modern luxury, but is a central part of who we are as human beings. It was a part of who these strange people were.. and therefore it is also a part of who we are.. or should be.