Physical remains provide yet another point of entry into the history of nonliterate peoples. Among these, creative artistic representation has been especially useful, for it is as old as humankind itself, long preceding the emergence of urban civilizations. The most ancient of these artistic traditions are the rock paintings that Paleolithic people created all across the world. Some in Australia date to 40,000 years ago, and the tradition has continued into the twentieth-first century as artists retouched and repainted ancient images and created new ones. A contemporary Aboriginal artist explained what those paintings meant to him:
When I look at my [dreaming] paintings it makes me feel good—happy in heart, spirit. Everything is there: all there in the caves, not lost. . . . The people keep their ceremony things and pictures—they make them new. They bring young boys for learning to the caves, telling the stories, giving the laws from grandfathers’ fathers, learning to do the paintings—[the dreaming] way.33
Perhaps the most well-known Paleolithic rock art comes from the Lascaux caves in southern France, discovered by several teenage boys in 1940. Dating to at least 17,000 years ago, the cave walls depict various kinds of animals: numerous horses, stags, and bison; seven felines; and a single bear, rhinoceros, and bird. But no reindeer are included, although they were the main source of meat for the artists. Abstract designs consisting of dots and lines accompany many of the paintings.
Scholars have debated endlessly what insights these remarkable images might provide into the mental world of Paleolithic Europeans. Were they examples of “totemic” thinking—the belief that particular groups of men and women were associated with, or descended from, particular animals? Did they represent “hunting magic” intended to enhance the success of these early hunters? Because many of the paintings were located deep within caves, were they perhaps part of religious or ritual practices or rites of passage? Were they designed to pass on information to future generations? Were the abstract designs star charts, as one scholar has suggested? Or did these images represent the visions of shamans as some have also suggested for the South African rock painting on page 10? No one really knows.
But beyond their uncertain meaning as archeological evidence for Paleolithic life, modern humans have recognized the artistic value of the Lascaux paintings, appreciating their graceful lines, use of color, and distinctive sense of perspective and sometimes movement. Tradition has it that the great twentieth-century artist Pablo Picasso remarked after viewing the caves that “we have learned nothing in 12,000 years.”34 Furthermore the art of the Lascaux caves was part of a very long artistic tradition in the region that adhered over many millennia to a set of aesthetic conventions. Thus it was a conservative tradition, linked to a long-established social order and very much unlike modern art that generally challenges contemporary society.