A love letter to cave art (Podcast)

There is nothing we love more, here at The Universal Story, than cave art. It represents the dawning of human consciousness and creativity like nothing else in the historical record. And it has such a different perspective on the world compared to modern art. And it has so much less historical baggage. And it is just, so, incredibly, beautiful.

The first art starts showing up in the historical record about 50,000 years ago. Our ancestors became anatomically indistinguishable from us modern humans roughly 300,000 years ago. So this means that it took us hundreds of thousands of years to start making art. It was not an obvious thing we started doing straight away. As weird as it sounds to us in the modern world, it is something that took us a long time to figure out. It was really hard.

The first art is generally carvings of small animals and figures in rock. These were often carried around by people for thousands of miles from where the original rock was from. And despite the variation in human cultures, a lot of art from this early period looks pretty much identical across the globe. And the relationship that these early people had with this art, is something completely different from our relationship with art today.

Let’s dive in, to the wonderful, incredible, astonishing world, of cave art.

For our full written post on cave art, see here.