I wrote an essay on Palaeolithic cave art for Art in America. To read the whole thing, go here.
... It is a coincidence, though it feels like something more, that the Dordogne region of France features not only limestone caves decorated with mammoths, aurochs, indecipherable tectiform signs and punctuations, but also, outside, splendiferous medieval cathedrals with stained glass, votive candles, statues, paintings, and myriad crosses. The cathedrals are often held to be the more formidable achievement, in part because they were built up by intention and will, while the caves were arranged by nature, and then only faintly modified with pigments.
You can discern the cathedral builders’ intention in the rule-boundedness of their constructions, in the angles and proportions and the relative uniformity of the individual sites over the course of several centuries. Every cave by contrast is unique, and there appears to be no rule governing an individual cave’s particular configuration. There are laws of geomorphology, but the shape or size of any given cavern is dictated entirely by the unrepeatable conditions of its singular formation.
The art inside the caves is, by contrast, remarkably uniform; transformations in style and technique are measured not in centuries but in tens of millennia. It is only when the artist happened to use charcoal, an organic residue, that absolute dating by means of carbon 14 is possible; when the artist chose ferrous oxide instead, for example, only a very rough date can be estimated, based on stylistic clues that now appear frustratingly stable. One wants change, if only in order to help establish chronology. If a key feature of art is innovation, then we might do better to see the Paleolithic figures of horses and lions not as art but as a natural manifestation of humanness, generated by an encoded species-specific behavior like avian nest construction.
One seriously regarded, if highly contested, theory of the origins of stone hand-axes or bifaces among our hominid ancestors (long before the cave art of our fellow Homo sapiens) has it that these were not tools at all, but rather an evolutionally determined universal behavior among male hominids, a product of sexual selection that signaled to females of the species, the makers’ selectively advantageous mastery of symmetrical forms. If they could produce a perfect biface in stone, then potential female mates might believe that they could also produce bilaterally symmetrical offspring. We see similar activity in the males of a number of bird species, whose members build special mating nests, the principal purpose of which is to impress females with their talent for symmetry, their ability to reproduce in artifice what is already written into the body of every vertebrate...
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