What Was Humanity’s First Art? Was It Beautiful?
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.
How do you make the first art?
Imagine you want to make some art. You want to draw something. But you don’t have any of the right tools to do it. You can’t just grab a pen and paper from around your house and start drawing. You can’t wander down to the local art store and buy a canvas or paintbrushes. All you can do is use the things that are around you. How would you do it?
Now imagine it’s even worse. You’ve never seen any art. We take images and color for granted in the modern world. Right now, as you read this, you can probably raise your head and see hundreds of different shades of every imaginable color, the art in your room, your clothes, your bookshelf, the advertising and signage on your street. You can quickly Google a picture of basically any piece of art ever made. Now imagine you had never seen any of them. Not even a single drawing or sketch. This is the world that the early cave artists lived in. It is almost impossible to imagine.
But it’s actually even worse than that. They had probably never even seen themselves. They’d never had a camera or even a mirror. Some might have caught an occasional glimpse of themselves in some still water, but many had probably never seen a large lake. Their view of the world and sense of self would have been so different from ours. All they’d ever seen was the animals, plants and the things around them.
People underestimate how difficult it is to create and interpret imagery – because we are very used to doing it. For instance, there are famous stories of westerners coming into contact with Muslims for the first time, who because of their religion had never seen a depiction of a human body. When the westerners showed them images of bodies, often, the Muslims did not recognize them. They just had never seen anything like it before. They could not connect the physical thing they saw in their life with the 2-dimensional representation on a flat surface.
So extrapolating back into an even more extreme version of this. Imagine being someone, who had never seen one thing represented using another thing. How would you go about making some art? It would be very hard.
The first steps were probably just collecting unusual-looking objects. There are lots of examples of small unusually colored rocks of crystals turning up alongside our early ancestors. They didn’t seem to serve any purpose or do anything with them. They just collected them, maybe traded them. But it’s the very beginning of developing an aesthetic sense.
The next step is probably to start modifying them in some way. This is where most carvings come from. Some of the earliest carvings are very basic – they almost just look like some scratches on rocks, and often, it is really hard to tell if they are naturally occurring or not.
About 50,000 years ago is when people moved from carving to experiment with some drawing. Generally, this was done with very basic color pigments, a black charcoal from burning wood, or red ochre from the ground. People have a very specific technique for doing this, pretty consistently all over the world. People would place a silhouette to block out a shape and then blow the pigment over the top of the shape to create art (imagine putting your hand against a wall, then blowing paint over it to create an outline of your hand). This was done because there were no tools or adhesives to make the pigments attach to the wall, and no paintbrushes. Instead, the best way to do it was generally to blow the pigment in so they would properly attach to the wall.
The first subjects of these paintings are generally human hands. That makes sense. It’s the first thing a child starts to draw, they put their hand against a wall and trace it with a pencil. However, people rapidly started painting animals and other things around them. They didn’t tend to paint themselves or do landscapes or portraits or anything like that. Instead, they preferred animals and half-animal half-human figures. It is fascinating to think about why (see some more early stone age carvings here).
Why did people make the first art?
One of the most magical things about cave art, is thinking about the relationship that early humans had with these paintings.
We think of art, certainly visual art like paintings, as something you go to a gallery to engage with. Something that is a leisure activity. Something that is not particularly essential or a core part of most people’s lives.
However, it is very likely these early humans had a completely different relationship with these paintings and saw them as something very special.
The first clue to this is where these paintings are. We don’t tend to find them in easily accessible places. They don’t tend to be above ground, or near the entrances of caves. They tend to be deep, deep underground, often taking kilometers of walking to the deepest parts of the cave to get to. So it would have been incredibly dark. Imagine going into a cave like that, with the possibility of cave lions suddenly attacking you, thousands of years ago, with only a flickering torch? You would only do that if it was very important to you.
The next thing to note is the caves we’ve found don’t have just one or two images. They have hundreds, some even thousands. Of lions, and buffalo and aurochs and all sorts of large mammals. There are also often human figures and hunting scenes and geometric shapes all together in patterns across many rooms of a cave. And they are often not inaccessible places within the caves. They cover the walls and ceilings, often three or four meters above the ground. People probably brought some form of an ancient step ladder to even see the paintings, let alone make them.
Thirdly, these caves seem to have been returned to by people over and over again. For instance, the ages between the earliest paintings in some of these caves, and the most recent is often more than one thousand years. These were places returned to over and over again must multiple generations. They must have been incredibly special.
Putting this all together, it is likely these caves had some “ritualistic” purpose. Lots of people study these caves and have their own theories about exactly what the people who built them were thinking. Some of the theories relate to hunting. The idea was that a group of hunters went down into a cave before a hunt, to perform some sought of ritual to bless their hunt. Other ideas focus around coming of age ceremonies, where a child would go deep into the cave, maybe with a shaman of some kind, do some form of right of passage and then come out an adult. Ultimately we will never know, in the same way we will never quite know why people built Stonehenge. All we will ever know is that it must have been incredibly important and special to them, worth spending enormous amounts of effort and risking their lives to be there. It is a beautiful thing.
Cave art: Some final thoughts
Cave paintings are some of the purest representations of the human soul that we have ever created. A lot of modern art is saddled with a lot of baggage. Don’t get us wrong, we love going to those European art museums and looking at old master paintings and Da Vinci sketches. But you do have to confront that much of that art comes from a very particular place, and has some problematic and privileged history. It was almost all painted by men, for other very powerful men, glorifying their empires.
You have none of that with cave painting. Everywhere across the world, people started these works of art. It is not tainted by empire or colonialism or any of these evil ideas. It is the pure dawning of human consciousness all around the globe.
Secondly, cave paintings see humans in such a refreshing way. Again, we love art galleries. But if you look at big portions of western art from 1500s to today, it is basically just portraits of kings and queens. And their powerful allies. Let’s face it, they are high art selfies. It’s arguably even more self-indulgent than modern Instagram feeds full of selfies, because a lot of the kings and queens paid enormous fortunes for the privilege to sit for the painters. The ego of humans, sometimes, it is just staggering.
Humans are never the stars in cave art. Human faces certainly are not. Instead, it focuses on animals, the natural world, landscapes, or half-human half-animal creatures. It places us as a part of the natural world, not apart from it. It’s a perspective we sorely lack in the modern world.
Maybe the final thing to note about cave art – is that a lot of it is dying. When they were initially discovered, many of them were immediately opened up as large tourist attractions with enormous numbers of people being rushed through. This meant that the environment inside the caves rapidly changed, doing great damage to the paintings. They have generally been locked away now, not accessible to the public to protect them. Instead, replicas of these caves have been built for tourists to appreciate, so we can preserve the originals. It’s nice to know we’ve made some progress as a species.
We think preserving these caves should be one of humanity’s highest priorities going into the 21st century. If we lose them, we will lose a big part of ourselves.
