paleolithic art

Paleolithic Art, pt. 4

January 22, 2007

In one of the many sidebars in this book, readers are given a picture of an airplane diving and shooting at a tank. Jagged lines of an explosion surround the tank and indicate a hit. Guthrie writes: "If you found this drawing in a wastebasket or dustbin, you should be able to guess the drawer's age and sex" (181). The book has nothing to do with the art of modern school children, but Guthrie wants us to reason similarly about paleolithic art.. by its themes and preoccupations we should be able to instantly guess what general age group and gender is responsible for much of this art..

What interests me here is not so much the conclusion, but his way of reasoning. A long past world is illumined by the simple drawing of a child.. and something similar happens when Guthrie introduces his own experience as an adolescent cave explorer in the Ozarks. On the topic of the age scatter of young paleolithic youngsters, he notes: "Similar combos, from my youth, explored creeks and woodlands, built forts, fished, and made general mischief" (197). The habits of modern children come in handy to explain the habits of very ancient children.

Behind this easy back and forth movement lies the conviction that human beings are unified in important ways. It is a conviction that goes against the grain:

I do not want to underemphasize the cultural diversity humans construct from our innate predispositions. These have been thoroughly publicized and are a central feature of social anthropology. What has been missing from contemporary intellectual tradition until very recently is a broad airing of the continuity within this diversity, the human universals. [164]

That statement caught me because it resembles some of the stances I took in my dissertation (and soon to be book?). I used a comparative method, examining several cultural traditions concurrently, and my justification for that method was based on the fact that I wanted to avoid writing about the unique characteristics of a single cultural tradition and locate instead something broader about the way human beings construct meaningful places.. such as Mecca or Delos.

The universals that Guthrie is particularly interested in are those related to gender difference. Young males are universally the risk-taking members of a society.. and far more attracted to violent activities. Guthrie adds that they also have "an ear-ringing, mind-buzzing preoccupation with hard-core sexual fantasy" (190). The biology of being an adolescent boy is not something that Guthrie will admit has changed over the past thousands of years.. and he when he gazes at the cave walls filled with drawings he sees universals.. and not mysteries:

We've seen that the Paleolithic cavers seem not to have been imagining frogs, beetles, babies, moles, hedgehogs, or beautiful necklines. Instead they recognized stalactites and cracks as parts of large mammals, a scatter of ugly faces, erections, and vulvae. These subjects were likely not foremost on everybody's minds. [187]

That is to say: they were on the mind of adolescent males. Just as by its subject we could recognize the age and gender of the person who made a drawing that wound up crumpled in a school wastebasket.. so we should be able to recognize the source of the drawings on paleolithic cave walls.

Guthrie sees most of what remains from the paleolithic time through the male lens of testosterone. Yet strangely this point of view also opens up an unknown world for the female presence in the paleolithic times. Much of it is lost, but it would have filled the same cultural niches that we see in traditional cultures all over the world.. and this female artistic vision would have been captured by less durable materials.. Guthrie laments the loss of this other material:

If sounds could crystallize, we could dissolve them back to Paleolithic songs and dances aplenty and hear the wealth of children's stories and learn about the herbal tonics and unique ways of making and preserving delicacies. [199]