In this article, focusing on the building blocks of art with its concomitant role and meaning, we commence with a brief evolutionary overview of the origin of land vertebrates, which culminated in the rise of our species as we view it. We then review three iconic phases of human evolution, colloquially designated as the Neanderthals, the San and the Cro-Magnons, as manifested by their artistic endeavours. We are well aware that the Cro-Magnons are currently regarded as not sufficiently distinct from modern
This article explores the evolution of art and its accompanying role and meaning in an intersectional and interdisciplinary manner that fits well with the intention of this unique collection on the building blocks of our past, present and future and with the nature of this journal and our ongoing engagement with
The prehistoric conquest of land by essentially aquatic vertebrates was a watershed event that ultimately required unique adaptations throughout the body in respiration, locomotion, reproduction and feeding. The available paleontological, embryological and genetic data unequivocally underline the relationships linking all life, mainly all vertebrates. Meyer et al. (
This evolutionary paradigm presents a great historical narrative, which may be unique in the cosmos. The fact that our bodies contain chemical properties virtually of the same age as the Big Bang ties us intimately to a celestial origin, so much so that many thinking individuals recognise, in this regard, a spiritual connection with the cosmos. We would like to suggest that the particular way prehistoric people apparently experienced and visually portrayed their existence through art may represent an incipient, innate cognitive awareness of our place in nature.
One is tempted to speculate on the evolution of wonder, anxiety, joy, loss, ecstasy and awe, encompassing the whole river of human emotions that were eventually experienced billions of years later when animals, uniquely developed into humans, would have words, reflection, rituals, signs and metaphors to stand up to whatever they might face and to plead for whatever they might deem necessary.
These very brief introductory, evolutionary remarks now bring us to the following section, in which we do not focus on a definition of what art
Billions of years after the Big Bang, the Neanderthals present us with an indication of an inner psychic world (they lived between about 350 000 and 30 000 years ago). As far as we know, they were the first to bury their dead intentionally – at least occasionally (Tattersall
Have left us with signs, epitaphs to interpret and reinterpret. Those signs were their own precious will of words, their numb expression of their longing and loss. With this, art, that most sensitive and sublime form of gesturing, was ‘born’ [
The production of art is considered a big leap forward in the cultural evolution of humanity. It represents a means of recording and transmitting complex symbolic representation in a durable way. (Martí et al.
Standish and Pike (
These results demonstrate that cave art was being created in all three sites at least 20,000 years prior to the arrival of
Standish and Pike (
Don’t know the exact meaning of the paintings, such as the ladder shape (see below), but we do know they must have been important to Neanderthals. Some of them were painted in pitch black areas deep in the caves – requiring the preparation of a light source as well as the pigment. The locations appear deliberately selected, the ceilings of low overhangs or impressive stalagmite formations. These must have been meaningful symbols in meaningful places. (n.p.)
Standish and Pike’s research results are tremendously significant for our understanding of Neanderthals and ‘the emergence of behavioural complexity in the human lineage. Neanderthals undoubtedly had the capacity for symbolic behaviour, much like contemporaneous modern human populations residing in Africa’ (Standish & Pike
The San’s rock art is an important indication of their rich symbolic life and wordview (see, for example,
‘Drawing of the ladder symbol painted on the walls’.
During the San ritual dances, the shamans were filled with the potency of power animals such as the eland and the elephant to guide them in the spirit world. Ritual dancing induces out of body travel – a sensation likened to dying. In rock art, the shaman is depicted resembling a dying eland as he absorbs the power of the animal.
The rock surface on which the paintings were executed was perceived as a veil, separating the present from the spirit(ual) world. The eland, a significant symbol and the animal most often executed, thus formed an integral part of the San’s ceremonies. For example, a boy became an adult after shooting his first giant antelope – preferably an eland. When a girl reached her first menstrual period, she sat in a hut on an animal skin while the other women danced like eland cows and the men like eland bulls. When a young man wished to marry, he presented the fat of an eland’s heart to the chosen girl’s parents.
The San executed their art with fingers, sharpened reeds and brushes of bird feathers. The paint was prepared from ochre: a natural clay, mixed with juices squeezed from plants, eggs, water or blood. Although charcoal was also employed, red or yellow ochre was the most popular.
The early modern humans (EMHs) of the Upper Palaeolithic (UP) in Europe presented rock paintings
For at least 25,000 years before the dawn of civilization, ragged bands of mammoth hunters and seed gatherers – the Cro-Magnon peoples of the ice age – roamed the rolling valleys of Europe and the flat steppe of Asia, hurling spears at wild horses and woolly mammoths, and grubbing in the dirt for roots. (Rensberger
According to Rensberger (
[
In this respect, we want to refer to the dated painted stone of the Apollo 11 site in southern Namibia. These stones also dated to 30 000 years ago (Wendt
The ‘cave men’ of popular belief, these ancient peoples have long been considered primitive, hulking brutes, able to withstand the rigors of their environment by virtue of a thick skull as much as a thick skin. (n.p.)
Although these mysterious, prehistoric wanderers built no lasting structures and wrote nothing in what we understand as language, they did create art of astonishing beauty and technical mastery. Through a vast collection of paintings, sculptures and engravings, some of which have only recently been discovered and many of which have not been closely studied until now, it is becoming apparent that the Cro-Magnons possessed not only a highly developed artistic sensibility but also a capacity for creating and using symbols that is far beyond anything attributed to them. (Rensberger
Rensberger strikingly indicates that these:
Aesthetic creations of these peoples can, on one level, be appreciated for their artistic excellence; but, because art is also a way of expressing one’s mind, ice age art can also be analysed as fossil thought. (n.p.)
She then continues:
In these artworks, and in the stone tools and other artifacts that have been found with them, lie all we are likely to know of the roots of our own culture: for the Cro-Magnons were us. They were, despite their pervasive but erroneous cave-man stereotype, the earliest known representatives of our own kind – Homo sapiens sapiens (sic). (n.p.)
Many unnerving words and cliches have stagnated our consciousness over centuries, but are we approaching the quintessence of life or just treading water? Are we sketching life with a proverbial ‘comma’ or a classic, dogmatic and fundamentalistic ‘full stop’?
The in-depth psychologists Sigmund Freud (Freud
Endeavoured to show us that we all carry a ‘river’ of unconscious memories and intentions with(in) us. A river that we succeed to sublimate, to deform into dry docks. Freud emphasized a personal instinctual world that we handle by ways of light or deep dark lying to ourselves (Freud
How did it then happen that the multi-dimensional depth of a deep dark river, forever in turmoil, so often turned into oversimplified daylight configurations? How did fascism, nationalism, ethnicity, materialism, classism, dogmatic religious speculation, Facebook personas, and one-dimensional soapies, succeed to sever the focal cords of our souls? (W. Van der Walt pers. comm., 05 May 2021)
With French philosopher René Descartes’
‘In the dark deep waters of the mythical river’, Lethe
In addition to Freud, the French novelist Proust (
The German philosopher Heidegger (
Heidegger (
We believe it is the artists who can save our species. Not necessarily the politicians, theologians or the military. The artists: people with a strange unconditioned hypersensitivity to life who help us not only to look differently at art as such but also at the world around us. Where they come from, often surprises us. But just as one loses heart or nerve, they are there: people who keep peeling the ‘lethe’; people who cannot help but make things visible, brighter with amazement; to give us pride and courage and especially hope; individuals who continue to dream on our behalf.
As the old Christian church father Augustine said of one of the biblical gospels, and which we use here merely as a successful metaphor: ‘The Gospel of John is deep enough for an elephant to swim and shallow enough for a child not to drown’ (Wellman
Art that provides only first-level enjoyment, that only creates one code of understanding, and that records one-time wording and one-time phrasing against a ‘rock wall’ is art that handles the spiritual, prophetic, protesting respect for the millions upon millions of years of existence on ever-evolving earth and the immeasurable universe, with simplistic hands.
Artists with integrity do not play for the pavilions. They cannot help but continually express the wonder and mystery of the totality of life, involved with their full being, although hesitantly. They are hypersensitive mouthpieces of the earth, carrying an inherent moral obligation to address the spirit of the times, the ‘Zeitgeist’, people’s artificial dealings with life. They decode oversimplified codes with indignation – they reinterpret, recode, rephrase, so that through their art certain calls and protests can lead to increased interaction with the breadth and depth of life.
Serious artists struggle with their prejudices and comfort zones, refuse cheap art and admiration, they often walk alone, back into a cave, a studio – picking up a brush, a pencil, a piece of art material and again start to become new, fresh, with deep marvellous earthly intuition, messengers of the demythologised existence of things. They begin to draw lines and colours again so that old views and codes can be decoded, thus ‘rephrasing’ the constant mystery of everything that exists, everything that is difficult to grasp. This is what happens, although hesitantly, on a canvas – the constant re-coding, the re-wording of the mysterious; the refinement of a human’s vague touches on the mystery of life to give breath and vibrations.
As authentic prophets and priests, serious artists illuminate the full circle of life. On the shoulders of our predecessors in history, they acknowledge the timeline from the first conquest of land up to the present. Over the centuries, artists have grappled in the lonely cave ‘studios’, simple roof rooms, garages, back rooms, with life, with reformulated life codes, to take us all a little further down the significant path of life.
In their reply to a
[
It is about ‘intention and perception’ – and ‘communication between artist and viewer’ (Morriss-Kay
In addition, Adams (
Now that we have reflected on three different but significant phases in human evolution (the Neanderthals, San and the EMHs of the UP) and the interpretation accompanying the role and meaning of art as we view it, let us broadly review the evolutionary building blocks of art of which these three phases are fully part, and through which our understanding of and engagement with the evolution of these phases are richly illuminated and complemented.
‘Art, in its many forms, is practiced by almost all human cultures and can be regarded as one of the defining characteristics of the human species’ according to Morriss-Kay (
In all societies today, the visual arts are intimately intertwined with music, dance, ritual … and language … Vocalization, ritualized movement and visual display are part of animal courtship and dominance competition as well as human ritual and communication, so it is likely that the roots of music, dance and body decoration lie deep in the evolutionary history of the animal kingdom. Nevertheless, with the evolution of human cognition, they were deployed in new ways, with complex symbolic meaning becoming attached to them. (p. 158)
Morriss-Kay (
[
She reasoned that ‘tool-making and language share a basis in the human capacity for complex goal-directed manual activity’:
As this includes artistic creativity, evidence of the increasing sophistication of tool technology, as well as evidence from crania of increasing brain size, suggests that our ancestors had the ability to create art or proto-art much earlier in evolution than is suggested by current knowledge of art-related artefacts. (Morriss-Kay
‘The periods of human evolution to be covered’, according to Morriss-Kay (
The African Middle Stone Age (MSA) dates from at least 285 000 BP, based on the earliest use of stone point technology and hafted tools in East Africa, succeeding the use of Acheulian stone technology characterised by cleavers and hand axes (Tyron & McBrearty
‘Periods of time and species of
Although it is not possible to delve into all the periods mentioned here and artefacts, this figure provides a broad and informative timeline on the evolution of art:
Recent excavations, most revealingly in South African caves, have provided significant insight into symbolling activity including the use of colour, engraving patterns, bone technology and bead-making, dating from up to 164 000 years ago. (Morriss-Kay
Morriss-Kay (
Confirm that European Upper Palaeolithic paintings, engravings and carvings, many of which are mature works of skilled craftsmanship, have a long history in terms of human evolution and culture behind them. The unrivalled wealth of European material, which clearly indicates a highly developed artistic culture, may indeed be due to a sudden flowering of a more sophisticated symbolic creativity. Alternatively, it may be a historical artefact arising from a change in the use of locally available sites, materials and traditions, e.g. from rock surfaces exposed to the elements to the protected environment of enclosed caves for paintings. (p. 160)
Over many years a number of scholars
We, however, agree with Morriss-Kay (
Sculpture has probably begun with wood carving, which is still the favourite material to work within Africa today. We know that wood is perishable unless fossilised. ‘The few centuries-old African stone carvings that have survived are sophisticated in representational skill and aesthetic sensitivity, indicating a long-established creative tradition there’ (Morriss-Kay
Consequently, we concur with Morriss-Kay (
Earliest known evidence of ‘artistic behaviour is of human body decoration
According to Miyagawa, Lesure and Nóbrega (
In the rapid innovation in tool making
While they ‘can readily observe the results of this high-order cognitive capacity, it is difficult to see how it could have developed’ (Miyagawa et al.
The topic of cave art and archeoacoustics
We know that the ‘San produced rock art that has been dated as far back as 70 000 years ago
They find this type of rock art in other regions of the world as well, typically those with an animistic tradition
In this regard, it is vital to turn to David Lewis-Williams who:
Is convinced of the shamanistic nature [an important aspect of religion in hunter-gatherer communities as we have already noted] of the first religions and their link to the layout of cave art. He advances the idea that, with the emergence of language, early humans would have been able to share the experience of two and possibly three altered states of consciousness: dreams, drug-induced hallucinations, and trance. (Watson
According to Lewis-Williams, in the words of Peter Watson, these ‘would have convinced early humans that there was a “spiritual world” elsewhere, with caves – leading to a mysterious underworld – as the only practical location for this other world’ (Watson
No less important … [are the fact] that many paintings and engravings in the caves make use of naturally occurring forms or features, suggesting, say, a horse’s head or bison. (p. 51)
‘The art’ as suggested by Lewis-Williams, ‘was designed to “release” the forms, which were “imprisoned” in the rock’ (Watson
Lewis-Williams also argues in favour of a ‘form of organisation in the caves’ (Lewis-Williams
[
Watson (
[
Although the ideas postulated by Lewis-Williams are gripping, they are speculative. But what we can be sure of according to Watson ‘is that none of the complex art and the ancient ceremonies that surrounded the painted caves, could have been accomplished without language’ (Watson
Although there is much about the origins of art that we do not know, some things are getting clearer. As referred to above, the appearance of art is beautiful, accomplished and, in some cases, very modern-looking … ‘that captures the imagination of all who encounter it’, according to Watson (
This art takes three main forms – the famous cave paintings … the so-called Venus figurines, found in a broad swathe across western and eastern Europe, and multicoloured beads, which in some respects are the most important evidence of all. (p. 44)
In this article, we focussed on the building blocks of art. After a brief narrative introduction of the origin of our species, we reviewed the artistic endeavours of three representative phases in human evolution, represented by the Neanderthals, the San and the anatomically modern humans of the UP, against a broader background of the function of art in society. This was followed by more contemporary human developments intertwined with our interpretation of the role and meaning of art and the artist in society. Subsequently, we explored a broader account of art’s evolution, in which the above three phases are firmly embedded. Our understanding of the role and function of art since prehistoric times was meaningfully broadened in different areas, firstly by the realisation that a substantial linguistic and cognitive component gradually became integral to the execution of specific artistic trends. Secondly, the deliberate positioning of images to conform anatomically to the natural undulations on rock surfaces suggests that the artist was not only enhancing the three dimensionalities of the image but also that the shaman used his prowess as a healer or medicine man to enter the spirit world in an out-of-body experience through the ‘veil’, the rock face into the nether world, to gain the potency to heal, make rain and restore harmony among the group when he re-entered the ordinary world again. Thirdly, the fact that these artists also seemed to have been well aware of the acoustic properties within specific chambers of caves or the rock shelters that they frequented is borne out by the fact that herds of clattering herbivores are usually depicted in chambers that produce resounding echoes, whilst the ‘silent’ chambers, lacking the spatial configuration to produce echoes, are reserved for impeccable images of the silent hunters, that is, members of the Felidae.
Finally, in conjunction with an extensive survey of the relevant literature, we have convinced ourselves that the known artistic compilations across the spectrum of human evolution are visual interpretations of the natural world that represent attempts to cognitively encompass and express the increasing complexity of human mental states and attitudes.
The authors would like to acknowledge the comments and suggestions for improvements to the text suggested by Dr Renée Rust of the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand. The authors, however, remain responsible for any ambiguities that may have inadvertently been included in the text.
The authors declare that they have no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this article.
Both authors contributed equally to this work.
This article followed all ethical standards for research without direct contact with human or animal subjects.
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated agency of the authors.
There is no complete agreement on how to define art. For further information regarding a definition of art, see Layton (
According to Watson (
They ‘present dating results for three sites in Spain that show that cave art emerged in Iberia substantially earlier than previously thought. Uranium-thorium (U-Th) dates on carbonate crusts overlying paintings provide minimum ages for a red linear motif in La Pasiega (Cantabria), a hand stencil in Maltravieso (Extremadura) and red-painted speleothems in Ardales (Andalucía). Collectively, these results show that cave art in Iberia is older than 64.8 thousand years (ka). This cave art is the earliest dated so far and predates, by at least 20 ka, the arrival of modern humans in Europe, which implies Neandertal authorship’.
For more information in this regard, see Martí et al. (
For more information, see Witelson et al. (
Watson reasons that the ‘Suspicion is … that cave art is in fact to be understood as writing as much as art, a secret and sacred recording of the animals which early man relied upon for food. (This is an idea supported by the fact that many contemporary tribes who create rock paintings have no word for art in their language)’ (Mithen
See Lotha (
See, among others, Bar-Yosef (
For more information, see Marean et al. (
Morriss-Kay (
See Henshilwood et al. (
See Gombrich (
Gowlett (
Tattersall (
Huijbregts (
Rodríguez-Vidal et al. (
Reznikoff (
See Blesser and Salter (
Thackeray (
Lewis-Williams and Dowson (
Bahn and Fossati (