Jun

27

Palaeolithic Genius.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 27, 2007 |

The elders would test him
beyond doubt & blood. Mica
lit the false skies where
stalactite dripped perfection
into granite. He fingered
icons sunlight & anatase
never touched.

–Yusef Komunyakaa, “Memory Cave”mammoth.jpg

Scientists at the University of Tubingen are excited about the recent discovery of a tiny (less than two inches) mammoth figurine found in Southwestern Germany. After 35,000 years it, and four other figurines carved out of mammoth ivory, are amazingly still intact. While scientists are excited to learn that there were not only people but artists in the region, this discovery, like the cave paintings in Cantabria, Lascaux, and other regions, always raises the same question in my mind: why? Our earliest ancestors did not have it easy. The survival of not just individual tribes but our species was often threatened, and yet the need to devote time and energy and resources to non-utilitarian objects–in a word, art–seems to be universal. Many cave paintings were made deep in the caves, in dangerous, cramped, uncomfortable places. Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel on his back had it easy compared to what cave painters endured. And drawing conclusions now is almost as risky as making art was in those days. As Stephen J. Gould explains in an essay titled “Up Against A Wall”, collected in his book Leonardo’s Mountain of Clams And The Diet Of Worms, the assumption made by paleoanthropologists and art historians Abbé Henri Breuil and André Leroi-Gourhan that more complex paleolithic art must, by necessity, be younger while simpler designs must be older, was not only proven wrong but turned on its head by radiocarbon dating: most of the simpler designs were actually newer. And that would seem to be a fairly safe assumption. Attempts to understand what our ancestors, regardless of how biologically close they are to us, were thinking, are going to consist of little more than thin and dangerous speculations.

A large part of the problem, I think, is that we take art for granted. It’s something you hang on the wall in museums, or over your couch. For our ancestors, I think it’s safe to say, art was a matter of life and death. We may not realize it, but perhaps that’s still true. Perhaps there’s a reason art is still being produced today, and why it’s still debated, discussed, attacked, and praised in small, tribal circles. Oscard Wilde said, “All art is quite useless.” Tens of thousands of years before he was born his own ancestors proved him wrong.


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  1. Palaeolithic Genius. — Mineral cleaning advice and tips on August 15, 2007 3:57 am

    [...] of Tubingen are excited about the recent discovery of a tiny (less than two inches source: Palaeolithic Genius., Just [...]

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