How rock paintings reflect the worldview of ancient people. How and with what people painted from primitive times to the Middle Ages
primitive artAny person endowed with a great gift - feel the beauty the surrounding world, feel harmony lines, admire the variety of shades of colors.
Painting- this is the artist’s perception of the world captured on canvas. If your perception of the world around you is reflected in the artist’s paintings, then you feel a kinship with the works of this master.
The paintings attract attention, fascinate, excite imagination and dreams, evoke memories of pleasant moments, favorite places and landscapes.
When did they appear first images created by man?
Appeal primitive people to a new type of activity for them - art - one of greatest events in human history. Primitive art reflected man’s first ideas about the world around him; thanks to it, knowledge and skills were preserved and passed on, and people communicated with each other. In spiritual culture primitive world art began to play the same universal role that a sharpened stone played in work.
What gave a person the idea to depict certain objects? Who knows whether body painting was the first step towards creating images, or whether a person guessed the familiar silhouette of an animal in a random outline of a stone and, by cutting it, gave it a greater resemblance? Or maybe the shadow of an animal or a person served as the basis for the drawing, and the imprint of a hand or a step precedes the sculpture? There is no definite answer to these questions. Ancient people could come up with the idea of depicting objects not in one, but in many ways.
For example, to the number the most ancient images on the walls of Paleolithic caves include human hand prints, and a random interweaving of wavy lines pressed into the damp clay by the fingers of the same hand.
Works of art from the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic, are characterized by simplicity of shapes and colors. Rock paintings are usually the outlines of animal figures, made with bright paint - red or yellow, and occasionally - filled with round spots or completely painted over. Such ""paintings"" were clearly visible in the twilight of the caves, illuminated only by torches or the fire of a smoky fire.
In the initial stage of development primitive art didn't know laws of space and perspective, as well as composition, those. intentional distribution of individual figures on a plane, between which there is necessarily a semantic connection.
Alive and expressive images stands before us life story primitive man the Stone Age era, told by himself in rock paintings.
Dance. Lleid painting. Spain. With a variety of movements and gestures, a person conveyed his impressions of the world around him, reflecting in them his own feelings, mood and state of mind. Crazy jumps, imitation of animal habits, stamping of feet, expressive hand gesturescreated the preconditions for the emergence of dance. There were also war dances associated with magical rituals and the belief in victory over the enemy.
<<Каменная газета>> Arizona
Composition in the Lascaux cave. France. On the walls of the caves you can see mammoths, wild horses, rhinoceroses, and bison. For primitive man, drawing was the same “witchcraft” as spells and ritual dances. By “conjuring” the spirit of a drawn animal by singing and dancing, and then “killing” it, a person seemed to master the power of the animal and “defeat” it before hunting.
<<Сражающиеся лучники>> Spain
And these are petroglyphs. Hawaii
Murals on the Tassili-Ajer mountain plateau. Algeria.
Primitive people practiced sympathetic magic - in the form of dancing, singing or painting animals on the walls of caves - to attract herds of animals and ensure the continuation of the race and the safety of livestock. Hunters acted out scenes of a successful hunt to attract energy into real world. They turned to the Mistress of the Herds, and later to the Horned God, who was depicted with the antlers of goats or deer to emphasize his primacy over the herds. The bones of animals were supposed to be buried in the ground so that animals, like people, were reborn from the womb of Mother Earth.
This is a cave painting in the Lascaux region of France from the Paleolithic era.
Large animals were the preferred food. And Paleolithic people, skilled hunters, destroyed most of them. And not just large herbivores. During the Paleolithic, cave bears completely disappeared as a species.
There is another type of rock paintings, which has a mystical, mysterious character.
Rock paintings from Australia. Either people, or animals, or maybe both...
Drawings from West Arnhem, Australia.
Huge figures and small people next to them. And in the lower left corner there is generally something incomprehensible.
Here is a masterpiece from Lascaux, France.
North Africa, Sahara. Tassili. 6 thousand years BC Flying saucers and someone in a spacesuit. Or maybe it's not a spacesuit.
Rock art from Australia...
Val Camonica, Italy.
and the next photo is from Azerbaijan, Gobustan region
Gobustan is included in the UNESCO heritage list
Who were those “artists” who were able to convey the message of their time to distant eras? What prompted them to do this? What were the hidden springs and driving motives that guided them?.. Thousands of questions and very few answers... Many of our contemporaries love it when they are asked to look at history through a magnifying glass.
But is everything really so small in it?
After all, there were images of gods
In the north of Upper Egypt is ancient city temples of Abydos. Its origin dates back to prehistoric times. It is known that already in the era Old Kingdom(about 2500 BC) in Abydos, the universal deity Osiris was widely worshiped. Osiris was considered a divine teacher who gave the people of the Stone Age a variety of knowledge and crafts, and, quite possibly, knowledge about the secrets of the sky. By the way, it was in Abydos that the oldest calendar was found, dating back to the 4th millennium BC. e.
Ancient Greece And Ancient Rome also left a lot of rock evidence reminding us of their existence. They already had a developed written language - their drawings are much more interesting, from the point of view of studying everyday life, than ancient graffiti.
Why is humanity trying to find out what happened millions of years ago, what knowledge did ancient civilizations have? We look for the source because we think that by revealing it, we will find out why we exist. Humanity wants to find where the starting point is, from which it all began, because it thinks that there, apparently, there is an answer, “what is all this for,” and what will happen in the end...
After all, the world is so vast, and human brain narrow and limited. The most complex crossword puzzle of history must be solved gradually, cell by cell...
Cro-Magnons, who lived on earth 30 thousand years ago, used to express their feelings and emotions simple drawings. But the cave paintings of primitive people cannot be called primitive, since they were created by people with extraordinary artistic talents. Drawings of primitive people in caves are graphic and three-dimensional images, bas-reliefs on the walls. Many such drawings are known today: in France (southwestern part), Spain (northwestern part), Italy, even in Russia, Serbia and England there are single copies.
Rock painting and the pictures of primitive people are unique and most often resemble a two-dimensional image. At the same time, techniques that help convey volume began to be used only during the Renaissance. Rock art is replete with images of rhinoceroses, bison, mammoths, and deer. Also in the drawings there are scenes of hunting, people with arrows and spears are depicted. Occasionally there are drawings of fish, plants, and insects. The colors used to make the drawings do not fade and fully convey their original brightness. It is difficult to imagine a person who has no idea what rock paintings are (photos will help you understand this).
Where did the first people draw?
Hard-to-reach areas of the caves, located hundreds of meters from the surface, were an excellent place for drawing. This is explained primarily by the cult significance of rock carvings, which require the performance of a certain ritual. Drawing was such a ritual. Melted and still hot fat from wild animals, tufts of moss or wool were poured into the bowls. Then the artist began to work in the light of stone lamps.
What are the rock paintings called?
The rock paintings of the ancients are called petroglyphs (Greek - to carve a stone). There are drawings made in the form of symbols or symbols. The drawings contain a huge amount of valuable information about the life of the representatives ancient population, reveal traditions and historical events, which influenced ancient man.
Later drawings were made in the form of symbols or symbols. Man initially sought to express thoughts through signs and writing. Painting brought this moment closer, becoming transition period between graphic drawings and writing. The images are called pictograms. For example, on the territory of Armenia, archaeologists discovered designs reminiscent of all known ancient alphabets. The oldest images found here were created more than 9,000 years ago. Prehistoric cave paintings are pictures created by the first people.
Technique and materials
What motivated people to draw? Just the desire to create beauty or the need to perform and capture a special ritual? Making a rock engraving was not so easy, especially if the paint was applied into deep slits, which the ancient painter carved with a rough cutting tool. It could have been a large stone chisel. Such a tool was discovered at the site of the ancient people of Le Roc de Serre. During the Middle and Late Paleolithic period, the technique of performing rock paintings of primitive people was more subtle. The outlines of the engravings were carved several times with shallow lines. Even then, shading and combined painting were used. There are similar images on the tusks and bones of animals that belong to the same period.
Rock paintings, photo in Altamira Cave
The paint of primitive man is all shades of ocher, which were used as a red dye, charcoal and manganese ore. Chalk and guano were also used bats. Future paint rubbed with bone or stone. The resulting powder was mixed with animal fat. Ancient people even had prototypes of modern tubes. They stored paints in hollow parts of animal bones, both sides of which were sealed with a hardened lump of the same animal fat. There were no other colors, such as green or blue.
Primitive artists used bones or sharp sticks as brushes, the ends of which were split. They also used pieces of wool that were tied to bones. First they drew the outline and then painted it in. But there are other images as well. For example, a handprint that has been splattered with paint through a reed.
Ancient people had no idea about the composition or proportions of the body. They painted large predators and, against their background, tiny mountain goats. But this did not stop them from creating masterpieces comparable to modern representation about painting. The accuracy of the representation of objects and animals is amazing, and the drawings of ancient people in caves captured in stone ancient animals that had long since become extinct. The visual effect was enhanced by the fact that the image was applied to a rock ledge.
What did primitive people draw?
The cave paintings of ancient people are a manifestation of emotional and vivid imaginative thinking. Not everyone could create such masterpieces, but only those in whose subconscious arose visual images. Those who were overwhelmed vivid images, transferred them to the plane of the rocks.
There is an assumption that with the help of cave paintings visions were transmitted, a person expressed himself and passed on what he received life experience. But most scientists adhere to the version about cult significance drawings: they were probably created before the hunt. Thus, the person tried to influence the result, to attract the preferred animal during the hunt.
The disappearance of some animals and climate change have led to a serious change in human activity. Now he spent more time raising animals and cultivating the land. There was less time left for hunting. This was also reflected in rock art. The drawings were no longer done deep in the cave, but outside. Images of humans were now becoming more common. Animals that were domesticated were also depicted in cave engravings (fox hunting scenes). Spread schematic drawings: triangles, straight or winding lines, a jumble of colored spots.
If earlier hunting scenes were most often depicted, now they were also ritual dances, battles, grazing. There are many such drawings in Spain.
Where can you see rock art?
In France, in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet, drawings were discovered that date back to approximately the 18th-15th millennia BC. e. They depict horses, cows, bulls, and bears. In Spain, in the Altamira cave, hunting scenes were depicted by ancient artists so skillfully that if you look at them with a blazing fire, you get the impression of objects moving. In Africa there is a whole complex of caves with rock paintings. These are Laas Gaal in Somaliland and Tassilien Adjer in Algeria. Rock paintings have also been discovered in Egypt (Swimmers Cave), Bulgaria, Bashkiria, Argentina (Cueva de las Manos Cave) and many others.
Objects of art or primitive reflection of reality?
It is impossible to put an equal sign between primitive “art” and modern one. But when considering ancient images, modern art historians rely on familiar formulations, going far beyond the specifics of primitive art. Today in the art world there is an author of a work, and there is a consumer. Ancient artists created their creations only because they had the ability to draw and felt the need to reflect the reality around them or significant events. They had no ideas about art or were blurry, but the images that filled their consciousness found a way out into the world through their creator, who, most likely, was considered by their fellow tribesmen to be endowed with supernatural power.
So what is the difference between rock art and ordinary modern art? The only difference is that the first drawings were made by artists of the Paleolithic era, and rock was used as a canvas. Of course, the phenomenon of creativity is associated with the interaction of all spiritual forces and the release of emotions in a special way. A person could create something new and important for himself, but the awareness of this phenomenon occurred gradually. The Cro-Magnon man lived in such cultural environment, in which there was no division into separate areas of activity. But the ancient people did not have leisure in our understanding, since their life was not divided into strict work and rest. The time when a person was not fighting for existence, he devoted to performing rituals and other actions important for the well-being of the tribe.
Traditionally, rock paintings are called petroglyphs, this is the name given to all images on stone from ancient times (Paleolithic) up to the Middle Ages, both primitive cave rock carvings and later ones, for example, on specially installed stones, megaliths or “wild” rocks.
Such monuments are not concentrated somewhere in one place, but are widely scattered across the face of our planet. They were found in Kazakhstan (Tamgaly), in Karelia, in Spain (Altamira cave), in France (Fond-de-Gaume, Montespan caves, etc.), in Siberia, on the Don (Kostenki), in Italy, England, Germany, in Algeria, where gigantic multicolor paintings of the Tassilin-Ajjer mountain plateau in the Sahara, among the desert sands, were recently discovered and created a sensation throughout the world.
Despite the fact that cave paintings have been studied for about 200 years, they still remain a mystery.
Rock paintings of the Hopi Indians in Arizona, USA, depicting certain kachina creatures. The Indians considered them their heavenly teachers.
According to the generally accepted theory of evolution, primitive man remained a primitive hunter-gatherer for many tens of thousands of years. And then he suddenly had a real insight, and he began to draw and carve mysterious symbols and images on the walls of his caves, rocks and mountain crevices.
Famous Onega petroglyphs.
Oswald O. Tobisch, a man of generous and varied talents, spent 30 years studying more than 6,000 cave paintings, trying to reconstruct some logical system that unites them. When you get acquainted with the conclusions of his research and numerous comparative tables, literally takes your breath away. Tobish traces the similarities of a variety of rock paintings, so that it seems as if in ancient times there was a single proto-culture and universal knowledge associated with it.
Spain. Rock art. 11th century BC
Of course, millions and millions of cave paintings did not appear at the same time; very often (but not always) they are separated by many millennia. In other cases, drawings were created on the same rocks over several millennia.
Africa. Rock painting. VIII - IV centuries BC
Nevertheless, it is a striking fact that many cave paintings in various parts of the world arose almost simultaneously. Everywhere, be it Toro Muerto (Peru), where tens of thousands of rock paintings were found, Val Carmonica (Italy), the vicinity of the Karakoram Highway (Pakistan), the Colorado Plateau (USA), the Paraibo region (Brazil) or southern Japan, almost identical symbols and figures. Of course, I cannot help but note that each individual place has its own, strictly localized types of images that cannot be found anywhere else, but this in no way clears up the mystery of the striking similarity of the remaining drawings.
Australia. XII - IV century BC
If you consider all these images with all their attributes and symbols, you get the amazing impression that the sound of the same trumpet suddenly rang out across all continents: “Remember: the gods are those who are surrounded by rays!” These “gods” are in most cases depicted as much larger than other little men. Their heads are almost always surrounded or crowned with a halo or halo, as if shining rays are emanating from them. Besides, ordinary people always depicted at a respectful distance from the “gods”; they kneel before them, prostrate themselves on the ground, or raise their hands to them.
Italy. Rock painting. XIII - VIII centuries BC
Oswald Tobisch, a rock art specialist who has traveled all over the world, with his tireless efforts has come even closer to solving this ancient mystery: “Perhaps this striking similarity in the images of deities is explained by “internationalism”, incredible by our standards today, and the humanity of that era, quite perhaps still remained in the powerful force field of the “primordial revelation” of the one and all-powerful Creator?
Dogu's space suit. The world's oldest depiction of a spacesuit.
Death Valley, USA.
Peru. Rock painting. XII - IV century BC
Rock paintings of the Hopi Indians in Arizona, USA
Australia
Rock paintings near Lake Onega. Incomprehensible images that some philosophers interpret as flying machines.
Australia
Petroglyphs from the vicinity of the village of Karakol, Ongudai district
Hunting scenes, where anthropomorphic creatures (people or spirits?) with bows, spears and sticks hunt animals, and dogs (or wolves?) help them, appear 5-6 thousand years ago - that’s when this petroglyph was created.
on a rock in Japan 7 thousand years ago
Algerian Sahara, Tassili massif (tinted rock paintings). The era of round heads. Reach 8 meters. Stone Age drawings
Similar examples of the creativity of ancient peoples can be found all over the world. In Altai there are rock portraits of humanoid creatures in spacesuits, created 4 - 5 thousand years ago. IN Central America- launching “spaceships”. They are depicted on some Mayan tombs dating back about 1,300 years. In Japan, bronze figurines from the 4th century BC are found dressed in helmets and overalls. In the mountains of Tibet there are “flying saucers” drawn 3000 years ago. Entire galleries of monsters with antennas on their heads, tentacles instead of arms and mysterious weapons are “exhibited” for us, our descendants, to see in caves, on plateaus and in the mountains in Peru, the Sahara, Zimbabwe, Australia, France, Italy.
Huge figures and small people next to them.
The history textbook says that primitive man wanted to somehow express himself and realize his primitive creativity with what was at hand. So on the rocks deep caves rock paintings appeared.
But just how primitive were our ancestors? And was everything really as simple a few thousand years ago as we imagine? The drawings from primitive art collected in this article may make you think about something.
The cave was discovered on December 18, 1994 in the south of France, in the Ardèche department, on the steep bank of the canyon of the river of the same name, a tributary of the Rhone, near the town of Pont d'Arc by three speleologists Jean-Marie Chauvet, Elette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire.
All of them already had extensive experience in exploring caves, including those containing traces of prehistoric man. The half-buried entrance to the then unnamed cave was already known to them, but the cave had not yet been explored. When Eliet, squeezing through the narrow opening, saw a large cavity going into the distance, she realized that she needed to return to the car for the stairs. It was already evening, they even doubted whether they should postpone further examination, but nevertheless they returned behind the stairs and went down into the wide passage.
The researchers stumbled upon a cave gallery, where a flashlight beam snatched an ocher spot on the wall from the darkness. It turned out to be a “portrait” of a mammoth. No other cave in the south-east of France, rich in “paintings,” can compare with the newly discovered one, named after Chauvet, either in size, or in the preservation and skill of the drawings, and the age of some of them reaches 30-33 thousand years.
Speleologist Jean-Marie Chauvet, after whom the cave got its name.
The discovery of the Chauvet cave on December 18, 1994 became a sensation, which not only delayed the emergence primitive drawings 5 thousand years ago, and also overturned the concept of the evolution of Paleolithic art that had developed by that time, based, in particular, on the classification of the French scientist Henri Leroy-Gourhan. According to his theory (as well as the opinion of most other experts), the development of art went from primitive forms to more complex ones, and then the earliest drawings from Chauvet should generally belong to the pre-figurative stage (dots, spots, stripes, winding lines, other scribbles) . However, researchers of Chauvet's paintings found themselves face to face with the fact that ancient images almost the most perfect in their execution of the Paleolithic ones known to us (Paleolithic is at least: it is not known what Picasso, who admired the Altamiran bulls, would say if he had a chance to see Chauvet’s lions and bears!). Apparently, art is not very friendly with evolutionary theory: avoiding any stadiality, it somehow inexplicably arises immediately, out of nothing, in highly artistic forms.
Here is what the largest expert in the field of Paleolithic art Z. A. Abramova writes about this: “Paleolithic art arises like a bright flash of flame in the depths of centuries. Having developed unusually quickly from the first timid steps to polychrome frescoes, this art just as abruptly disappeared. It is not finds itself a direct continuation in subsequent eras... It remains a mystery how the Paleolithic masters achieved such high perfection and what were the paths along which genius creativity Echoes of art penetrated Picasso ice age"(quoted from: Sher Ya. When and how did art arise?).
(source - Donsmaps.com)
The drawing of black rhinoceroses from Chauvet is considered to be the oldest in the world (32,410 ± 720 years ago; there is information on the Internet about a certain “new” dating, giving Chauvet’s painting from 33 to 38 thousand years old, but without credible references).
On at the moment, this is the oldest example of human creativity, the beginning of art, unencumbered by history. Typically, Paleolithic art is dominated by drawings of animals that people hunted - horses, cows, deer, and so on. The walls of Chauvet are covered with images of predators - cave lions, panthers, owls and hyenas. There are drawings depicting rhinoceros, tarpans and a number of other animals of the Ice Age.
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In addition, no other cave contains so many images of a woolly rhinoceros, an animal whose “dimensions” and strength are not inferior to a mammoth. In size and strength, the woolly rhinoceros was almost equal to the mammoth, its weight reached 3 tons, body length - 3.5 m, the size of the front horn - 130 cm. The rhinoceros became extinct at the end of the Pleistocene, earlier than the mammoth and the cave bear. Unlike mammoths, rhinoceroses were not herd animals. Probably because this powerful animal, although it was a herbivore, had the same vicious disposition as their modern relatives. This is evidenced by scenes of fierce “rock” fights between rhinoceroses from Chauvet.
The cave is located in the south of France, on the steep bank of the canyon of the Ardège River, a tributary of the Rhone, in a very picturesque place, in the vicinity of the Pont d’Arc (“Arch Bridge”). This natural bridge is formed in the rock by a huge ravine up to 60 meters high.
The cave itself is "mothballed". Entrance to it is open exclusively to a limited circle of scientists. And even those are allowed to enter it only twice a year, in spring and autumn, and work there only for a couple of weeks, a few hours a day. Unlike Altamira and Lascaux, Chauvet has not yet been “cloned,” so ordinary people like you and me can only admire the reproductions, which we will certainly do, but a little later.
“In the fifteen-odd years since its discovery, many more people have been to the summit of Everest than have seen these drawings,” writes Adam Smith in his review of Werner Herzog’s documentary about Chauvet. Haven't tested it, but sounds good.
So, the famous German film director somehow miraculously managed to get permission to film. Film "Cave" forgotten dreams"was filmed in 3D and shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 2011, which, presumably, attracted the attention of the general public to Chauvet. It is not good for us to lag behind the public.
Researchers agree that the caves containing drawings in such quantities were clearly not intended for habitation and did not represent prehistoric art galleries, but were sanctuaries, places for rituals, in particular, the initiation of young men entering into adult life(this is evidenced, for example, by preserved children’s footprints).
In the four “halls” of Chauvet, along with connecting passages with a total length of about 500 meters, more than three hundred perfectly preserved drawings depicting various animals, including large-scale multi-figure compositions, were discovered.
Elette Brunel Deschamps and Christian Hillaire - participants in the discovery of the Chauvet Cave.
The paintings also answered the question: did tigers or lions live in prehistoric Europe? It turned out to be the second. Ancient drawings of cave lions always show them without a mane, which suggests that, unlike their African or Indian relatives, they either did not have one, or it was not as impressive. Often these images show the characteristic tuft on the tail of lions. The coloring of the fur, apparently, was one color.
In Paleolithic art mostly drawings of animals from the “menu” of primitive people appear - bulls, horses, deer (although this is not entirely accurate: it is known, for example, that for the inhabitants of Lascaux the main “food” animal was the reindeer, while on the walls of the cave it is found in single copies). In general, one way or another, commercial ungulates predominate. Chauvet is unique in this sense because of the abundance of images of predators - cave lions and bears, as well as rhinoceroses. It makes sense to dwell on the latter in more detail. Such a number of rhinoceroses as in Chauvet has never been found in any other cave.
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It is noteworthy that the first “artists” to leave their mark on the walls of some Paleolithic caves, including Chauvet, were... bears: in some places the engravings and paintings were applied directly on top of the traces of powerful claws, the so-called griffads.
In the late Pleistocene, at least two species of bears could coexist: brown bears survived safely to this day, and their relatives, cave bears (large and small) died out, unable to adapt to the damp gloom of caves. The big cave bear wasn't just big - it was huge. Its weight reached 800-900 kg, the diameter of the skulls found is about half a meter. A person most likely could not emerge victorious from a fight with such an animal in the depths of a cave, but some zoological experts are inclined to assume that, despite its terrifying size, this animal was slow, non-aggressive and did not pose a real danger.
An image of a cave bear made with red ocher in one of the first halls.
The oldest Russian paleozoologist, Professor N.K. Vereshchagin believes that “among Stone Age hunters, cave bears were a kind of meat cattle that did not require care for grazing and feeding.” The appearance of a cave bear is conveyed in Chauvet more clearly than anywhere else. It seems that it played a special role in the life of primitive communities: the beast was depicted on rocks and pebbles, its figurines were sculpted from clay, its teeth were used as pendants, the skin probably served as a bed, and the skull was preserved for ritual purposes. Thus, in Chauvet a similar skull was discovered resting on a rocky base, which most likely indicates the existence of a bear cult.
The woolly rhinoceros became extinct a little earlier than the mammoth (according to different sources from 15-20 to 10 thousand liters. AD), and, at least, in the drawings of the Magdalenian period (15-10 thousand years BC) it almost never appears. In Chauvet, we generally see a two-horned rhinoceros with larger horns, without any traces of fur. This may be the Merka rhinoceros, which lived in southern Europe, but is much rarer than its woolly relative. The length of its front horn could be up to 1.30 m. In short, it was a monster.
There are practically no images of people. Only chimera-like figures are found - for example, a man with the head of a bison. No traces of human habitation were found in the Chauvet Cave, but in some places the footprints of the cave's primitive visitors were preserved on the floor. According to researchers, the cave was a place for magical rituals.
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Previously, researchers believed that in the formation primitive painting Several stages can be distinguished. At first the drawings were very primitive. The skill came later, with experience. More than one thousand years had to pass for the drawings on the walls of the caves to reach their perfection.
Chauvet's discovery shattered this theory. French archaeologist Jean Clotte, having carefully examined Chauvet, stated that our ancestors probably learned to draw even before moving to Europe. And they arrived here about 35,000 years ago. The most ancient images from the Chauvet cave are very perfect works of painting, in which you can see perspective, chiaroscuro, different angles, etc.
Interestingly, the artists of the Chauvet Cave used methods that were not applicable anywhere else. Before applying the design, the walls were scraped and leveled. Ancient artists, first scratching the contours of the animal, gave them the necessary volume with paints. "The people who painted this were great artists," confirms French rock art expert scientist Jean Clott.
A detailed study of the cave will take several decades. However, it is already clear that its total length is more than 500 m at one level, the ceiling height is from 15 to 30 m. There are four consecutive “halls” and numerous side branches. In the first two rooms, the images are made in red ocher. The third contains engravings and black figures. There are many bones of ancient animals in the cave, and in one of the halls there are traces of the cultural layer. About 300 images were found. The painting is perfectly preserved.
(source - Flickr.com)
There is an assumption that such images with multiple contours layered on top of each other are a kind of primitive animation. When a torch was quickly moved along the drawing in a cave immersed in darkness, the rhinoceros “came to life”, and one can imagine the effect this had on the cave “spectators” - “The Arrival of a Train” by the Lumiere brothers is resting.
There are other considerations in this regard. For example, that in this way a group of animals is depicted in perspective. Nevertheless, the same Herzog in his film adheres to “our” version, and he can be trusted in matters of “moving pictures”.
Chauvet Cave is currently closed to public access because any noticeable change in air humidity could damage the wall paintings. Only a few archaeologists can gain access, for only a few hours and subject to restrictions. The cave has been cut off from the outside world since the Ice Age due to the fall of a rock in front of its entrance.
The drawings of the Chauvet cave amaze with their knowledge of the laws of perspective (overlapping drawings of mammoths) and the ability to put shadows - until now it was believed that this technique was discovered several thousand years later. And an eternity before Seurat had the idea, primitive artists discovered pointillism: the image of one animal, it seems, a bison, consists entirely of red dots.
But the most surprising thing is that, as already mentioned, artists give preference to rhinoceroses, lions, cave bears and mammoths. Typically, the models for rock art were the animals that were hunted. "From the entire bestiary of that era, artists choose the most predatory, most dangerous animals," says archaeologist Margaret Conkey of the University of Berkeley in California. By depicting animals that were clearly not on the menu of Paleolithic cuisine, but symbolized danger, strength, and power, artists, according to Klott, “understood their essence.”
Archaeologists paid attention to exactly how the images were included in the wall space. In one of the rooms, a cave bear is depicted in red ocher without the lower part of its body, so that it appears, says Klott, “as if it were coming out of the wall.” In the same room, archaeologists also discovered images of two stone goats. The horns of one of them are natural crevices in the wall, which the artist widened.
Image of a horse in a niche (source - Donsmaps.com)
Rock art clearly played significant role in spiritual life prehistoric people. This can be confirmed by two large triangles (symbols feminine and fertility?) and an image of a creature with human legs, but with the head and body of a bison. Probably, Stone Age people hoped in this way to appropriate at least partially the power of animals. The cave bear, apparently, occupied a special position. 55 bear skulls, one of which lies on a fallen boulder, as if on an altar, suggest the cult of this beast. Which also explains the choice of Chauvet Cave by the artists - dozens of potholes in the floor indicate that this was a hibernation site for giant bears.
Ancient people came again and again to look at the rock paintings. The 10-meter-long “horse panel” shows traces of soot left by torches that were mounted in the wall after it was covered with painting. These marks, according to Conkey, are on top of a layer of mineralized sediments covering the images. If painting is the first step on the path to spirituality, then the ability to appreciate it is undoubtedly the second.
At least 6 books and dozens have been published about Chauvet Cave scientific articles, not counting sensational materials in the general press, have been published and translated into major European languages four large albums of beautiful color illustrations with accompanying text. The documentary film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3D” will be released in Russian theaters on December 15. The director of the film is German Werner Herzog.
Picture "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" appreciated at the 61st Berlin Film Festival. More than a million people went to see the film. This is the highest-grossing documentary film in 2011.
According to new data, the age of the coal used to paint the pictures on the wall of the Chauvet cave is 36,000 years old, and not 31,000, as previously thought.
Refined radiocarbon dating methods show that the settlement of modern humans (Homo sapiens) in Central and Western Europe began 3 thousand years earlier than thought, and happened faster. The time of cohabitation between sapiens and Neanderthals in most parts of Europe was reduced from about 10 to 6 thousand years or less. The final disappearance of European Neanderthals may also have occurred several millennia earlier.
The famous British archaeologist Paul Mellars published a review of recent advances in the development of radiocarbon dating, which have led to significant changes in our understanding of the chronology of events that occurred more than 25 thousand years ago.
The accuracy of radiocarbon dating in recent years increased sharply due to two circumstances. Firstly, methods have emerged for high-quality purification of organic substances, primarily collagen isolated from ancient bones, from all foreign impurities. When we're talking about For very ancient samples, even an insignificant admixture of foreign carbon can lead to serious distortions. For example, if a 40,000-year-old sample contained only 1% modern carbon, this would reduce the “radiocarbon age” by as much as 7,000 years. As it turned out, in most ancient archaeological finds such impurities are present, so their age was systematically underestimated.
The second source of errors, which was finally eliminated, is related to the fact that the content of the radioactive isotope 14C in the atmosphere (and, consequently, in organic matter, formed in different eras) is not constant. The bones of people and animals that lived during periods of high levels of 14C in the atmosphere initially contained more of this isotope than expected, and therefore their age was again underestimated. In recent years, a number of extremely precise measurements have been made that have made it possible to reconstruct the fluctuations of 14C in the atmosphere over the past 50 millennia. For this purpose, unique marine deposits were used in some areas of the World Ocean, where sediment accumulated very quickly, Greenland ice, cave stalagmites, coral reefs, etc. In all these cases, it was possible for each layer to compare radiocarbon dates with others obtained on the basis ratio of oxygen isotopes 18O/16O or uranium and thorium.
As a result, correction scales and tables were developed that dramatically increased the accuracy of radiocarbon dating of samples older than 25 thousand years. What did the updated dates tell us?
It was previously believed that modern humans (Homo sapiens) appeared in southeastern Europe approximately 45,000 years ago. From here they gradually settled in a western and northwestern direction. The peopling of Central and Western Europe continued, according to “uncorrected” radiocarbon dates, for approximately 7 thousand years (43-36 thousand years ago); the average rate of advancement is 300 meters per year. Refined dating shows that settlement occurred faster and began earlier (46-41 thousand years ago; advancement speed up to 400 meters per year). At about the same speed, agricultural culture later spread in Europe (10-6 thousand years ago), which also came from the Middle East. It is curious that both waves of settlement followed two parallel paths: the first along the Mediterranean coast from Israel to Spain, the second along the Danube Valley, from the Balkans to Southern Germany and further to Western France.
In addition, it turned out that the period of cohabitation between modern humans and Neanderthals in most areas of Europe was significantly shorter than thought (not 10,000 years, but only about 6,000), and in some areas, for example in western France, even less - only 1-2 thousand years old. According to updated dating, some of the brightest samples cave painting turned out to be much older than thought; the beginning of the Aurignac era, marked by the appearance of various complex products made of bone and horn, also moved into the depths of time (41,000 thousand years ago according to new ideas).
Paul Mellars believes that previously published datings of the latest Neanderthal sites (in Spain and Croatia; both sites, according to “unspecified” radiocarbon dating, are 31-28 thousand years old) also need to be revised. In reality, these finds are most likely several thousand years older.
All this shows that the indigenous Neanderthal population of Europe fell to the onslaught of the Middle Eastern newcomers much faster than thought. The superiority of the Sapiens - technological or social - was too great, and neither the physical strength of the Neanderthals, nor their endurance, nor their adaptability to the cold climate could save the doomed race.
Chauvet's painting is amazing in many ways. Take, for example, camera angles. Business as usual It was for cave artists to depict animals in profile. Of course, here too this is typical for most of the drawings, but there are breakthroughs, as in the above fragment, where the buffalo’s muzzle is shown in three-quarters. In the following picture you can also see a rare image from the front:
Maybe this is an illusion, but a distinct feeling of composition is created - the lions are sniffing in anticipation of prey, but have not yet seen the bison, and it has clearly tensed and frozen, feverishly wondering where to run. True, judging by the dull look, he doesn’t think well.
Remarkable running bison:
(source - Donsmaps.com)
Moreover, the “face” of each horse is purely individual:
(source - istmira.com)
The following panel with horses is probably the most famous and widely circulated of Chauvet’s images:
(source - popular-archaeology.com)
In the recently released science fiction film “Prometheus,” the cave, which promises the discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization that once visited our planet, is copied completely from Chauvet, including this wonderful group, which includes people who are completely inappropriate here.
Still from the film “Prometheus” (dir. R. Scott, 2012)
You and I know that there are no people on the walls of Chauvet. What is not there is not. There are bulls.
(source - Donsmaps.com)
During the Pliocene and especially during the Pleistocene, ancient hunters exerted significant pressure on nature. The idea that the extinction of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear, and cave lion is associated with warming and the end of the Ice Age was first questioned by the Ukrainian paleontologist I.G. Pidoplichko, who expressed what seemed at the time a seditious hypothesis that man was to blame for the extinction of the mammoth. Later discoveries confirmed the validity of these assumptions. The development of radiocarbon analysis methods showed that the last mammoths ( Elephas primigenius) lived at the very end of the Ice Age, and in some places lived until the beginning of the Holocene. At the Predmost site of Paleolithic man (Czechoslovakia), the remains of a thousand mammoths were found. There are known massive finds of mammoth bones (more than 2 thousand individuals) at the Volchya Griva site near Novosibirsk, dating back 12 thousand years. The last mammoths in Siberia lived only 8-9 thousand years ago. The destruction of the mammoth as a species is undoubtedly the result of the activities of ancient hunters.
An important character in Chauvet's paintings was the big-horned deer.
The art of Upper Paleolithic animalists serves, along with paleontological and archaeozoological finds, as an important source of information about what animals our ancestors hunted. Until recently, the Late Paleolithic drawings from the caves of Lascaux in France (17 thousand years old) and Altamira in Spain (15 thousand years old) were considered the oldest and most complete, but later the Chauvet caves were discovered, which gives us a new range of images of the mammal fauna of that time. Along with relatively rare drawings mammoth (among them is an image of a baby mammoth, strikingly reminiscent of one discovered in permafrost Magadan region baby mammoth Dima) or alpine ibex ( Capra ibex) there are many images of two-horned rhinoceroses, cave bears ( Ursus spelaeus), cave lions ( Panthera spelaea), Tarpanov ( Equus gmelini).
The images of rhinoceroses in Chauvet Cave raise many questions. This is undoubtedly not a woolly rhinoceros - the drawings depict a two-horned rhinoceros with larger horns, without traces of hair, with a pronounced skin fold, characteristic of the living species of the one-horned Indian rhinoceros ( Rhinocerus indicus). Perhaps this is Merck's rhinoceros ( Dicerorhinus kirchbergensis), who lived in southern Europe until the end of the Late Pleistocene? However, if from the woolly rhinoceros, which was the object of hunting in the Paleolithic and disappeared by the beginning of the Neolithic, quite numerous remains of skin with hair, horny growths on the skull have been preserved (in Lvov there is even the only stuffed animal of this species in the world), then from the Merck rhinoceros we have only bone remains, and the keratin “horns” were not preserved. Thus, the discovery in Chauvet Cave poses the question: what type of rhinoceros was known to its inhabitants? Why are the rhinoceroses from Chauvet Cave depicted in herds? It is very likely that Paleolithic hunters were also to blame for the disappearance of the Merck rhinoceros.
Paleolithic art does not know the concepts of good and evil. Both the peacefully grazing rhinoceros and the lions ambushed are parts of a single nature, from which the artist himself does not separate himself. Of course, you can’t get into the head of a Cro-Magnon man and you can’t talk “for life” when you meet, but I am close and, at least, understandable to the idea that art at the dawn of humanity is not in any way opposed to nature, man is in harmony with the world around him. Every thing, every stone or tree, not to mention animals, is considered by him as carrying meanings, as if the whole world were a huge living museum. At the same time, there is no reflection yet, and questions of existence are not raised. This is such a pre-cultural, heavenly state. Of course, we won’t be able to feel it fully (as well as return to heaven), but suddenly we will be able to at least touch it, communicating through tens of thousands of years with the authors of these amazing creations
We don’t see them vacationing alone. Always hunting, and always with almost a whole pride.
In general, the admiration of primitive man for the huge, strong and fast animals around him, be it a big-horned deer, a bison or a bear, is understandable. It’s even somehow absurd to put yourself next to them. He didn't bet. There is something to learn from us, who fill our virtual “caves” with immeasurable quantities of our own or family photographs. Yes, something, but narcissism was not characteristic of the first people. But the same bear was depicted with the greatest care and trepidation:
The gallery ends with the strangest drawing in Chauvet, definitely of cult purpose. It is located in the farthest corner of the grotto and is made on a rocky ledge, which has (for good reason, presumably) a phallic shape
In literature, this character is usually referred to as a “sorcerer” or taurocephalus. In addition to the bull's head, we see another one, a lion's, female legs and a deliberately enlarged size, let’s say, the womb, which forms the center of the entire composition. Compared to their colleagues in the Paleolithic workshop, the craftsmen who painted this sanctuary look like pretty avant-garde artists. We know individual images of the so-called. “Venus”, male sorcerers in the form of animals and even scenes hinting at the intercourse of an ungulate with a woman, but in order to mix all of the above so thickly... It is assumed (see, for example, http://www.ancient-wisdom.co.uk/ francech auvet.htm) that image female body was the earliest, and the heads of the lion and bull were painted later. It is interesting that there is no overlap of later drawings with previous ones. Obviously, maintaining the integrity of the composition was part of the artist’s plans.
, and also look again at AndWhich drawing is the oldest? Probably it should be drawn on an old, worn-out piece of papyrus, which is now kept in some museum under certain temperature conditions. But time will not be kind to such a drawing even under the most optimal storage conditions - after several thousand years it will inevitably turn into dust. But destroy rock albeit over several tens of thousands of years - a difficult task even for the all-consuming time. Perhaps, in those distant times, when man had just begun to live on Earth and huddled not in houses built with his own hands, but in caves and grottoes created by nature, he found time not only to get food for himself and keep the fire going, but also to create?
Indeed, cave paintings dating back several tens of thousands of years BC can be found in some caves scattered across different parts of the planet. There, in a dark and cold confined space, paint for a long time retains its properties. Interestingly, the first cave paintings were found in 1879 - relatively recently by historical standards - when archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, walking with his daughter, wandered into the cave and saw numerous drawings decorating its roof. Scientists around the world at first did not believe in the amazing find, but studies of other caves around confirmed that some of them really served as a refuge for ancient man and contain traces of his stay, including drawings.
To determine their age, archaeologists radiocarbon date the particles of paint that were used to paint the images. After analyzing hundreds of drawings, experts saw that rock art existed ten, twenty, and thirty thousand years ago.
This is interesting: “arranging” the found drawings into chronological order, experts saw how rock art changed over time. Starting with simple two-dimensional images, artists of the distant past improved their skills, first adding more detail to their creations, and then shadows and volume.
But the most interesting thing, of course, is the age of the rock paintings. The use of modern scanners when exploring caves reveals to us even those rock paintings that are already indistinguishable to the human eye. The record of the antiquity of the found image is constantly updated. How deeply were we able to penetrate into the past by exploring the cold stone walls of caves and grottoes? To date, the cave boasts the oldest rock paintings El Castillo, located in Spain. It is believed that the most ancient rock paintings were discovered in this cave. One of them - the depiction of a human palm by spraying paint on a hand leaning against a wall - is of particular interest.
Most ancient drawing today, age ~ 40,800 years. El Castillo Cave, Spain. Since traditional radiocarbon dating would give too wide a scatter in the readings, to more accurately determine the age of the images, scientists used the method of radioactive decay of uranium, measuring the amount of decay products in the stalactites formed over thousands of years on top of the picture. It turned out that the age of the rock paintings is about 40,800 years, making them the most ancient on Earth among those discovered so far. It is quite possible that they were not even drawn by homo sapience, but by a Neanderthal.
But El Castillo Cave has a worthy competitor: caves on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. To determine the age of the local drawings, scientists examined the age of the calcium deposits that formed on top of them. It turned out that calcium deposits appeared no less 40,000 years ago, which means that the rock paintings cannot be younger. Unfortunately, it is more accurate to determine the age of creations ancient artist not possible. But we know one thing for sure: in the future, humanity will face even more ancient and amazing discoveries.
Illustration: image of a bison in a cave in Altamira, Spain. About 20,000 years old
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