Where were cave paintings first found? What paints did ancient people use?

Cave or rock paintings are drawings that are found on the walls and ceilings of caves and rock surfaces. Made during the prehistoric period, the images date back to the Paleolithic era, approximately 40,000 years ago. Some scientists believe that rock paintings primitive people- a way of communicating with the outside world. According to another theory, the drawings were applied for ceremonial or religious purposes.

History of discovery

In southwestern France and northern Spain, archaeologists have discovered more than 340 caves containing images from prehistoric times. Initially the age of the paintings was controversial issue, since the radiocarbon dating method may have been inaccurate due to the dirty surfaces that were examined. But further development technologies made it possible to establish the exact period of drawing images on the walls.

The chronology can also be determined by the themes of the drawings. Thus, the reindeer depicted in the Cueva de Las cave, which is located in Spain, dates back to the end Ice Age. The earliest drawings in Europe were discovered in the Chauvet Cave in France. They appeared 30,000 BC. The surprise for scientists was that the images had been altered many times over thousands of years, which caused confusion in the subsidization of the drawings.

Painting in three stages

There are monochrome and polychrome cave paintings. Polychrome rock painting was created in three stages and depended entirely on the experience and cultural maturity of the artist, lighting, type of surface and available raw materials. At the first stage, the contours of the depicted animal were outlined using charcoal, manganese or hematite. The second stage involved completing the drawing and applying red ocher or another pigment to the image. At the third stage, contours were drawn in black to visually enlarge the image.

Subjects and themes

The most common subject in cave paintings of primitive people is the image of large wild animals. At the beginning of the Stone Age, artists painted:

• Lviv;
• rhinoceroses;
• saber-toothed tigers;
• bears.

Images of animals hunted by people appear during the Late Paleolithic period. The image of a person is a very rare phenomenon and the pictures are less realistic than painted figures of animals. In primitive art there are no images of landscapes and landscapes.

Work of ancient artists

Prehistoric inhabitants of the planet discovered that paint made from animals and plants was not as stable as paint extracted from the earth. Over time, people have determined the property of iron oxides in the ground not to lose their original appearance. Therefore, they looked for hematite deposits and could walk tens of kilometers a day to bring the dye home. Modern scientists have discovered paths leading to deposits along which ancient craftsmen plied.

Using sea shells as a reservoir for paint, working by candlelight or weak daylight, prehistoric painters used a variety of painting techniques and techniques. At first they painted with their fingers, and then switched to crayons, moss pads, animal hair brushes, and vegetable fibers. They used a more advanced method of spraying paint using reeds or bones with special holes.

Holes were made in the bird's bones and filled with red ocher. By studying the cave paintings of ancient people, scientists have determined that such devices were used 16,000 BC. In the Stone Age, artists also used the techniques of chiaroscuro and foreshortening. In each era, new painting methods appear and the caves are replenished with drawings made in new styles over many centuries. Brilliant works prehistoric artists have inspired many modern masters to create beautiful works.

After visiting the Altamira cave in northern Spain, Pablo Picasso exclaimed: “After the work in Altamira, all art began to decline.” He wasn't joking. The art in this cave and in many other caves that are found in France, Spain and other countries is among the greatest artistic treasures that have ever been created.

Magura Cave

Magura Cave is one of the largest caves in Bulgaria. It is located in the northwestern part of the country. The cave walls are decorated with prehistoric cave paintings created approximately 8,000 to 4,000 years ago. More than 700 drawings were discovered. The pictures depict hunters, dancing people and many animals.

Cueva de las Manos

Cueva de las Manos is located in Southern Argentina. The name can be literally translated as “Cave of Hands”. Most of the images in the cave are left hands, but there are also hunting scenes and images of animals. The paintings are believed to have been created between 13,000 and 9,500 years ago.

Bhimbetka

Located in central India, Bhimbetka contains over 600 prehistoric rock art. The drawings depict people living in the cave at that time. The animals were also given a lot of space. Images of bison, tigers, lions and crocodiles were found. It is believed that the most old picture 12,000 years.

Serra da Capivara

Serra da Capivara is a national park in northeastern Brazil. This place is home to many stone shelters, which are decorated with rock paintings that represent ritual scenes, hunting, trees, animals. Some scientists believe that the oldest rock paintings in this park were created 25,000 years ago.

Laas Gaal

Laas Gaal is a complex of caves in northwestern Somalia that contain some of the earliest known art on the African continent. Prehistoric cave paintings are estimated by scientists to be between 11,000 and 5,000 years old. They show cows, ceremoniously dressed people, domestic dogs and even giraffes.

Tadrart Akakus

Tadrart Akakus forms a mountain range in the Sahara Desert, in western Libya. The area is famous for its rock art dating back to 12,000 BC. up to 100 years. The paintings reflect the changing conditions of the Sahara Desert. 9,000 years ago, the surrounding area was full of greenery and lakes, forests and wild animals, as evidenced by rock paintings depicting giraffes, elephants and ostriches.

Chauvet Cave

Chauvet Cave, in the south of France, contains some of the earliest known prehistoric cave paintings in the world. The images preserved in this cave may be about 32,000 years old. The cave was discovered in 1994 by Jean Marie Chauvet and his team of speleologists. The paintings found in the cave represent images of animals: mountain goats, mammoths, horses, lions, bears, rhinoceroses, lions.

Rock art of Kakadu

Located in the Northern Territory of Australia, National Park Kakadu contains one of the largest concentrations of Aboriginal art. The oldest works are believed to be 20,000 years old.

Altamira Cave

Discovered in the late 19th century, Altamira Cave is located in northern Spain. Surprisingly, the paintings found on the rocks were like this high quality that scientists have long doubted their authenticity and even accused the discoverer, Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, of forging the painting. Many people do not believe in the intellectual potential of primitive people. Unfortunately, the discoverer did not live to see 1902. In this mountain the paintings were recognized as authentic. The images were made with charcoal and ocher.

Paintings of Lascaux

The Lascaux Caves, located in southwest France, are decorated with impressive and famous cave paintings. Some of the images are 17,000 years old. Most of the rock paintings are depicted far from the entrance. The most famous images This cave contains images of bulls, horses and deer. The largest rock painting in the world is a bull in the Lascaux cave, which is 5.2 meters long.

A long time ago, it was not the tires of cars and bicycles, nor even human feet shod in comfortable shoes that plowed the earth - a long time ago, the earth was the place of residence of ancient people. And although primitive man was not the rightful ruler of the prehistoric planet, in the distant future he was destined to take the main place on it. How to draw primitive man in a few steps - we'll look at it in this lesson.

1. To begin with, let’s designate the figure of our thug. Let's draw the outline of the head - it looks like a triangle with rounded edges. Let's draw the axes of the torso, arms and legs, not forgetting about the lines of the shoulders and hips.

Advice: notice that the right leg is in the front and slightly bent at the knee. This means that the axis with this leg will be larger (longer) and have a bend approximately in the middle.

1. In the contour of the head we will draw a rounded line, dividing the face from the mane of primitive man. Let's highlight the protruding places on the man's body with ovals; with their help, it will be easier for us to draw the figure of a Neanderthal. Let us denote the boundaries of the body with two vertical lines.

Advice: The far leg is further away from the main figure, so its knee and foot will be positioned higher than the leg in the foreground.

1. And now - the most interesting part. Let's sculpt the figure of our ancient warrior, based on the previously made outlines and looking at the photo of the original. Primitive man has a massive figure - strong hands and legs, slightly sagging belly and overhanging chest, sloping cries. Moreover, his arms are longer than his modern man– and they remind us of the hands of a monkey. For now we draw the feet in the form of trapezoids, expanding towards the toes.

On the Neanderthal’s face, we’ll use a line to indicate the overhanging forehead, draw the eyes, and outline the nose and mouth.

1. Let's erase everything auxiliary lines and let's start drawing the face of a Neanderthal. The narrow forehead hangs over big face, the arched shaggy eyebrow gives the face a menacing expression. Let's designate a high cheekbone. Under the big nose we draw a mustache and beard with strokes. We draw the hair on top - I ended up with something between Igor Nikolaev and Dzhigurda.

In the left hand we outline the axis of the large club. We will divide the tips of the feet with four lines - for drawing the fingers.

Let's warm the primitive man and put a loincloth on him. On the elbows, knees and stomach, we will outline the folds of the skin with strokes - to make the picture more realistic.

We remove unnecessary leg lines from the loincloth. Draw the toes on the feet. We “dress” primitive man with body hair using light, small strokes. We also decorate the bear skin with hairs. Draw the baton along the previously drawn axis. The drawing of a primitive man is ready!

Any 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 random weaves wavy lines, pressed into damp clay with 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 fine arts 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 history of the life of 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 own feelings, mood and state of mind. Crazy jumping, imitation of animal habits, stamping feet, expressive hand gesturescreated the preconditions for the emergence of dance. There were also war dances associated with magical rituals, with faith 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 cave drawing 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 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 it was found ancient calendar, 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...

For many years modern civilization had no idea about any objects ancient painting, however, in 1879, the Spanish amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, together with his 9-year-old daughter, during a walk, accidentally came across the Altamira cave, the vaults of which were decorated with many drawings of ancient people - an unprecedented find extremely shocked the researcher and motivated him to study it closely.

1. White Shaman's Rock

This 4,000-year-old ancient rock art is located in the lower Peco River in Texas. The giant image (3.5 m) shows central figure surrounded by other people performing some rituals. It is assumed that the figure of a shaman is depicted in the center, and the picture itself depicts the cult of some forgotten ancient religion.

2. Kakadu Park

Kakadu National Park is one of the most... beautiful places for tourists in Australia. It is especially valued by its rich cultural heritage— the park contains an impressive collection of local Aboriginal art. Some of the rock paintings at Kakadu (which were included in the fund world heritage UNESCO) is almost 20,000 years old.

3. Chauvet Cave

Another UNESCO World Heritage Site is located in the south of France. More than 1000 different images can be found in the Chauvet Cave, most of them are animals and anthropomorphic figures. These are some of the most ancient images known to man: their age dates back to 30,000 - 32,000 years. About 20,000 years ago, the cave was filled with stones and has remained in excellent condition to this day.

4. Cueva de El Castillo

In Spain, the “Castle Cave” or Cueva de El Castillo was recently discovered, on the walls of which they found the oldest cave paintings in Europe, their age is 4,000 years older than anyone else rock paintings, which were previously found in the Old World. Most images contain handprints and simple geometric shapes, although there are also images of strange animals. One of the drawings, a simple red disk, was made 40,800 years ago. It is assumed that these paintings were made by Neanderthals.

5. Laas Gaal

Some of the most ancient and well-preserved rock paintings on African continent can be found in Somalia, in cave complex Laas Gaal (Camel's Well). Despite the fact that their age is “only” 5,000 - 12,000 years, these rock paintings are perfectly preserved. They depict mainly animals and people in ceremonial clothes And various decorations. Unfortunately this one is wonderful cultural site cannot receive World Heritage status because it is located in an area constantly at war.

6. Cliff dwellings Bhimbetka

The cliff dwellings at Bhimbetka represent some of the earliest traces of human life on the Indian subcontinent. In natural rock shelters on the walls there are drawings that are about 30,000 years old. These paintings represent the period of development of civilization from the Mesolithic to the end of prehistoric times. The paintings depict animals and people engaged in daily activities such as hunting, religious ceremonies and, interestingly, dancing.

7. Magura

In Bulgaria, the rock paintings found in the Magura cave are not very old - they are between 4,000 and 8,000 years old. They are interesting because of the material that was used to apply the images - guano (droppings) bat. In addition, the cave itself was formed millions of years ago and other archaeological artifacts, such as the bones of extinct animals (for example, the cave bear).

8. Cueva de las Manos

The "Cave of Hands" in Argentina is famous for its extensive collection of prints and images of human hands. This rock painting dates back to 9,000 - 13,000 years. The cave itself (more precisely, the cave system) was used by ancient people 1,500 years ago. Also in Cueva de las Manos you can find various geometric shapes and images of hunting.

9. Altamira Cave

The paintings found in the Altamira Cave in Spain are considered masterpieces of ancient culture. Stone painting era Upper Paleolithic(14,000 - 20,000 years old) is in exceptional condition. As in Chauvet Cave, a collapse tightly sealed the entrance to this cave about 13,000 years ago, so the images remained in their original form. In fact, these drawings are so well preserved that when they were first discovered in the 19th century, scientists thought they were fakes. It took a long time until technology made it possible to confirm the authenticity of rock art. Since then, the cave has proved so popular among tourists that it had to be closed in the late 1970s because large number Carbon dioxide from the breath of visitors began to lead to the destruction of the painting.

10. Lascaux Cave

This is by far the best known and most significant collection rock art in the world. Some of the most beautiful 17,000-year-old paintings in the world can be found in this cave system in France. They are very complex, very carefully made and at the same time perfectly preserved. Unfortunately, the cave was closed more than 50 years ago due to the fact that, under the influence of carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors, the unique images began to collapse. In 1983, a reproduction of part of the cave called Lascaux 2 was discovered.