The Lion Man is another intriguing half-animal sculpture.
Realistic human images seem to be quite rare.
I’m surprised at the Dope, taking this long to get to the only GQ answer to the question. We can make educated guesses and infer all we want, but there is no way to be even remotely certain what the art means, why the chosen subjects were used, or why some subjects were not.
…which is one more reason it’s so fascinating.
People do Art. It isn’t surprising that people drew stuff even back then, and I don’t necessarily think it has to be associated with rituals. Let’s please not fall into the Archaeology Fallacy of associating every stupid thing with Religion.
However, they don’t regularly do art deep in utterly lightless caves that is hidden from casual observation, as is the case with European Paleolithic cave paintings. The difficulty of access would argue that there was some special significance to the images.
That’s just it.
I hate to be the spoilsport, but we are in GQ.
(Also absent from Paleolithic cave paintings, BTW: Landscapes. Odd, no?)
While of course we can never be certain, we can make educated guesses based on how art has been used in recent hunting societies, and that’s well withing the scope of GQ. Simply saying the question can’t be addressed at all is not particularly useful.
Dammit Thog, why are you always smearing mud on the walls… get ou tthere with your father and bring home home food!
<adolescent grumps and slopes off to find a deeper cave to get away from his mother because he wants to be a hipster and daub at walls …>
Never seen kids ‘forting up’ deep under bomas of blackberry thicket, building forts deep in a wood lot well away from the parents? I guess that is now a thing of the past, but in our day my brother, cousins, friends and assorted age cohort kids would split the house after breakfast and vanish until dusk and do mysterious kid stuff.
Ha ha. But there are still people in northern China who use long home-made skis and one pole, which functions like a rudder. They won’t be around much longer, unfortunately. It’s a fascinating story… they still hunt Elk on skis, with lassos.
^^^ Wow.
Perhaps they did also do drawings in better-lit, more accessible caves, but because those caves were better lit and more accessible those drawings disappeared over time.
But they certainly did many paintings deep in unlit caves where they were not easily accessible or seen. Why should they have done that?
When I was in France I visited several caves that were more easily accessible, though the art they contained was less spectacular–less accomplished, in a word. The spectacular caves like Lascaux and, I can’t remember the name but as of 2005 it was the only French cave with polychrome paintings open to the public, these are the amazing World Heritage sites controlled by the government. But there are other less spectacular sites on private land you can go see, too, and I remember these as being much more easily accessible, though maybe they were made so for tourists. I think the attraction for one of them was that there was a picture of a bear.
Anyway, could there have been a hierarchy of art based on accessibility?
ETA, it was Font-de-Gaume I visited. Highly recommended.
The best explanation I got from my art history professor in college was that the drawings were probably some ritualized summoning of animals for hunting. If so, the more realistic the drawing of the animal, the more powerful the summoning, but the summoning of a person would have been taboo, as it meant taking power over that person’s spirit. I suppose it draws on the old superstition that an image of yourself captures a piece of your spirit.
I think it’s an interesting explanation, but I agree with the others that there is no way of ever knowing. Even if we encountered a paleolithic tribe today who created similar art, their reason for not portraying people wouldn’t necessarily be the same as the earlier creators of art.
Saharan rock art has lots of humans depicted.
There’s lots of rock art in Australia and the Americas that depicts humans, often in rock shelters rather than in deep caves. Paleolithic European art, like that referenced in the OP, may be unusual in rarely depicting humans.
An interesting point about early art, was that many renderings of people, animals, etc. were stylistic rather than realistic. In Egyptian art, the classic “walk like an Egyptian” was a result of the legs and feet being most recognizable and simply, explicitly depicted from the side, while the chest and shoulders are best depicted from the front so one arm does not hide the other (although females are often depicted bare-breasted so the side view was more functional); and the face was easier to depict in profile, because the nose, lips and chin are easier to render.
Note that the most common view in today’s art, 3/4 profile, is more complex to draw and does not appear much in earlier art.
Perhaps part of the problem, too, is that the face is magical - it takes a skilled artist to depict someone’s face recognizably. It would be probably even more difficult to do explicit portraiture when many of the group or tribe were closely relate and looked the similar The face is the hardest drawing to get right. (Especially if your skill and tools are at the “is it a man or a bird?” level.)
I wonder if in small societies, the concept of drawing “a man, but not any specific man or anyone we know” existed. Random unfamiliar bears and bulls come out of the woods regularly, almost like it was Wall Street, but people are specific people.
Side note: if you’re traveling in the vicinity of Death Valley and have an interest in petroglyphs, try to make time for a tour of the Coso Art Rock District.
It’s all speculative, but they could have been hiding from a severe snow-storm deep in the warmth of the mountain, when out of sheer boredom, someone says “hey, I bet I can draw an auroch better than you - loser has to go up to the surface for more firewood”.
The Lascaux artists were highly skilled. The thing that was so astonishing about some of this art is how exquisitely detailed it was. There is no question those artists could do a good face if they had the mind to.
No, the ears just indicate that he’s on the “bunny hop” slope.