Ten thousand years later, artists at the cave in Altamira, Spain, used the same technique. They painted the burly bodies of bison over swellings on the cave’s ceiling, giving the herd a sculpted, three-dimensional look.
Cool Cave Art or Paleolithic Painting: Why Keep It a Secret?
Prehistoric artists hid their paintings deep within the bowels of caves as if they were meant to be kept secret. The paintings are so well hidden, in fact, that the first discovery of a cave painting didn’t occur until 1879 in Altamira, Spain (see Figure 4-1). The second discovery took place in 1940 when two boys in Lascaux in Dordogne, France, followed their lost dog into a hole that opened into the ancient cave.
Courtesy of Spanish National Tourist Office
FIGURE 4-1: The superbly rendered cave paintings of prehistoric animals in Altamira, Spain, were the first to be discovered.
Hunting on a wall
Initially researchers believed cave art was connected to hunting. Hunting was primitive man’s main job, and the paintings are mostly of animals — with the exception of a few human stick figures, handprints, and geometric patterns in some caves.
If you wanted to kill lots of bulls, you painted lots of bulls on the walls of your cave! In the Lascaux cave, the roughly 65-foot-long cave gallery known today as the Great Hall of the Bulls could be an example of a large-scale, prehistoric magic ritual. But today researchers suspect that cave art was more than just hunting magic.
Psychedelic shamans with paintbrushes
Later researchers discovered that the animals that appeared on Old Stone Age dinner menus showed up least in cave art. Many paintings depict predators like panthers, lions, and hyenas — not typical dinner fare and not easy to hunt with primitive weapons. These researchers offered a new theory based on the fact that hunter-gatherer societies from Africa to Siberia and North America practiced shaman magic. Prehistoric hunter-gatherers may have done the same thing.
Hollywood portrays shamans as witch doctors, but tribal shamans are more than spell-casting, dancing doctors in Halloween costumes — they are visionaries and sometimes artists. Here are some interesting thoughts about the role and methods of shamans:
Primitive peoples believed that the shaman could “beam up” into the spirit world to talk to the souls of beasts. They even thought a shaman could learn from animal spirits how to fix imbalances in nature.
Some shamans appear to have used natural hallucinogens to give them a boost into the sixth dimension. Primitive peoples throughout the world have often depicted shaman journeys with hallucinogenic images of humans and animals entwining and even merging. Cave art might depict these journeys, too.
Trainee shamans had to undergo ceremonial, fake deaths, as well as food and sleep deprivation. Perhaps a prone figure that appears in a cave painting is a trainee shaman, faking death after a long fast and a couple of all-nighters.
In 19th-century Siberia, shamans used a so-called “world pole” topped by a bird to launch their voyages into the underworld.
Flirting with Fertility Goddesses
Sculpture grew up alongside painting as a sister art. Most prehistoric sculptures were either small statues called statuettes or reliefs. In a relief, the sculptor outlines an image in stone or wood, and then carves out the background so that the image projects above it. The most famous early statuette is the Woman of Willendorf, also known as Venus of Willendorf.
Woman of Willendorf is a pudgy 4½-inch-high figure carved out of limestone. She doesn’t look very sexy to modern eyes, but she may have been a fertility symbol 25,000 years ago. Because concentric braids of hair wrapped around her head like a stocking cap conceal Woman of Willendorf’s face, we can surmise that her looks didn’t matter. But these other characteristics and purposes do matter:
She wasn’t an individual, but a type. Cave people didn’t necessarily think of Woman of Willendorf as hot stuff, the Marilyn Monroe of the cave era, so to speak. What mattered were her sexual characteristics: huge breasts, a bulging belly (as if she were permanently pregnant), watermelon-sized buttocks, and prominent genitals. Her other features weren’t given much attention by the artist. Her pudgy arms and cut-off legs seem to be an afterthought. The same female type is found in many prehistoric cultures around the world.
Her purpose was to promote fertility and abundance. Was the appeal of Woman of Willendorf meant to turn people on? Probably not. Rather than seeking a libido boost, a woman might have held the statuette in her hand before having sex so that the statuette’s fertility could be magically transferred to her.
Her ample proportions may have been a sign of wealth. Why is Woman of Willendorf so fat? Living off nuts, berries, and wild game means primitive peoples didn’t need to sign up for weight watchers. Many of them probably died of malnutrition — and most didn’t reach 30. Only a very privileged woman could afford to be this big.
Dominoes for Druids: Stonehenge, Menhirs, and Neolithic Architecture
Technological progress followed the melting glaciers. As the land warmed up, humans were able to farm it, domesticate animals, improve their stone tools, and build permanent settlements. People were no longer dependent on hunting and gathering for survival. Historians call this period the Neolithic Age or New Stone Age. It began in the warm southern climes and migrated northward in the wake of the retreating glaciers.
In this section, we check out New Stone