Perceptions of the Paleolithics

Horse at Lascaux

On the walls of caves across the globe, from the steppes of Eurasia, and the tundra of Siberia, to the Saharan desert, testimonies up to 1.4 million years old reveal the perceptions of our ancestors. But rather than depict an accurate image of the world around them, these first manifestations of an artistic culture display a scenography of spiritual power. Moreover, a fixation on certain elements is unusually consistent across the distribution of all of our ancestors geographic range. It is the herbivoires which captivated the facination of those early hunter gathers, with figural representations of buffalo, deer and equid species far out weighing images of carnivores, or other assemblages such as fish and bird species. According to paleontological records, the abundance of these representations does not match the local abundance of species.

Most surprising is a complete absence of pictoral representations of landscapes, hills, rivers, vegetation, nor the moon and the starts. Whatever reason for this is lost in the sands of time, but these images allow paleontologists to make certain estimations about the ancient hominin attitudes to nature, but also to determine the ecology of a landscape which will have long since experienced numerous climatic changes. Under a rocky overhang on the upper escarpment of Tassili n'Ajjer in southern Algeria, depictions of herds of antilope and giraffe illustrate the lush pastures which existed before the expansion of the current desert during the last ice age. Whilst only permitting a glimpse, this rock art leaves a deep impression on our understanding of the blossoming of human kind in an environment and frame of mind where nature played a central role.