The Prehistoric Aesthetic Achievement

The birth, maturity and death of the earliest artistic achievement of mankind found in Europe occupies a very long period. Somewhere around 45,000 thousand years ago appear decorated and coloured objects, often of bone and ivory. Then, four or five millennia later, we reach the first figurative art. Soon after that we reach the peak of the prehistoric aesthetic achievement, the great painted and incised cave ‘sanctuaries’ (as they have been called), with their processions of animals and mysterious repeated symbolic shapes. This high phase lasted about 5,000 years, a startlingly long time for the maintenance of so consistent a style and content.

So long a period – almost as long as the whole history of civilization on this planet – illustrates the slowness with which tradition changed in ancient times and its imperviousness to outside infl uence. Perhaps it is an index, too, of the geographical isolation of prehistoric cultures. The last phase of this art, which has been discerned, takes the story down to about 9000 BC ; in it, the stag more and more replaces other animals as subject-matter (no doubt thus refl ecting the disappearance of the reindeer and the mammoth as the ice retreated), before a fi nal burst of richly decorated tools and weapons brings Europe’s fi rst great artistic achievement to an end. The age which followed produced nothing approaching it in scale or quality; its best surviving relics are a few decorated pebbles. Six thousand years were to pass before the next great art.

We know little about the collapse of this great human achievement. The light is never more than dim in the Upper Palaeolithic and the darkness closes in rapidly – which is to say, of course, over thousands of years. Nevertheless, the impression left by the violence of the contrast between what was before and what came after produces a sense of shock. So relatively sudden an extinction is a mystery. We have no precise dates or even precise sequences: nothing ended in one year or another. There was only a gradual closing down of artistic activity over a long time which seems in the end to have been absolute. Some scholars have blamed climate.

Perhaps, they argue, the whole phenomenon of cave art was linked to efforts to infl uence the movements or abundance of the great game herds on which the hunting peoples relied. As the last Ice Age ebbed and each year the reindeer retreated a little, men sought new and magical techniques to manipulate them, but gradually as the ice sheets withdrew more and more, an environment to which they had successfully adapted disappeared. As it did, so did the hope of infl uencing nature. Homo sapiens was not powerless; far from it, he could adapt, and did, to a new challenge. But for a time one cultural impoverishment at least, the abandonment of his fi rst art, was a consequence of adaptation.

It is easy to see much that is fanciful in such speculation, but diffi cult to restrain excitement over such an astonishing achievement. People have spoken of the great cave sequences as ‘cathedrals’ of the Palaeolithic world and such metaphors are justifi ed if the level of achievement and the scale of the work undertaken is measured against what evidence we have of the earlier triumphs of man. With the fi rst great art, the hominids are now left far behind and we have unequivocal evidence of the power of the human mind.

Much else that is known of the Upper Palaeolithic confi rms the sense that the crucial genetic changes are behind and that evolution is now a mental and social phenomenon. The distribution of major racial divisions in the world which last down to early modern times appears already broadly fixed by the end of the Upper Palaeolithic. Geographical and climatic divisions had produced specializations in skin pigment, hair characteristics, the shape of the skull and the bone structure of the face. In the earliest Chinese relics of Homo sapiens the Asian regional characteristics are discernible. All the main regional groups are established by 10,000 BC , broadly speaking in the areas they dominated until the great resettlements which were one aspect of the rise of European civilization to world domination after AD 1500. The world was fi lling up during the Old Stone Age. Men at last penetrated the virgin continents, where none of their ancestors or relatives had been.

Already around 50,000years ago the fi rst humans reached Australia, roughly at the same time as men of our kind settled in Europe. They were the descendants of people who had mainly followed the coasts from the Middle East, becoming skilled gatherers of protein-rich seafood in the process. It is now likely that they used boats to travel onwards to the new continent, although the sea-levels in the Indonesian archipelago then would have been signifi cantly lower than what it is today, opening up a world of land-bridges and calm seas. After reaching Australia by island-hopping through the Timor and Banda seas, they spread out very quickly. The then lush landscape suited them; it had huge lakes and rivers, with a number of now-extinct species that could be hunted for food, such as the giant wombat-like marsupial Zygomaturus (similar in size to a modern pygmy hippopotamus) and a 450 -pound kangaroo, the Procoptodon.

Big-game Hunting, Homo Erectus and Arrival of a New Epoch