Reviews
The Mind in the Cave
054
The earliest known examples of painting and sculpture in Europe appeared rather suddenly, about 30,000 years ago in a period we call the Upper Paleolithic. These images—mainly of animals, but also of nude women and geometric shapes—range from tiny sculptures to larger-than-life-size paintings. The depictions of animals are so accurate and detailed that more than a hundred species can be differentiated.
Over the past 150 years, scholars have theorized endlessly about the origins and meaning of this art. Some believe the images derive from religious and magic rituals. Others insist that they represent calendars, or male-female forces, or even historical events.
None of these hypotheses explains the entire corpus of images. In The Mind in the Cave, David Lewis-Williams, Professor Emeritus of Cognitive Archaeology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, attempts to remedy the situation by providing a multifaceted theory of the origin and meaning of Upper Paleolithic art.
He begins with an excellent overview of Paleolithic studies, tracing the history of our knowledge of our prehistoric ancestors from the 18th century to the present. Lewis-Williams provides a cogent summary of 19th-century evolutionary theory, a brief explanation of radiocarbon dating and a selection of the main theories about Upper Paleolithic art. This material alone makes The Mind in the Cave a welcome addition to the literature.
Then he turns to his main thesis. For years Lewis-Williams has studied the art of modern hunter-gatherers, which is mainly created by shamans (part-time religious practitioners). His research has been more ethnological than art historical, with his major publications focusing on the cultural contexts of hunter-gatherer art—such as wide-ranging patterns of religious belief and ritual—rather than on aesthetics or style.
Many hunter-gatherer societies believe the world is divided into three tiers: a spirit realm below, a realm of daily life and a spirit world above. The shamans in these societies are responsible for healing the sick, improving the weather (usually by ending droughts), attracting or repelling animals, and mediating community conflicts. They preside over rites of passage—birth, puberty, marriage and death—and are essential to maintaining the continuity of the community. When they need help, they travel to the spirit worlds and consult supernatural beings. To make these journeys, shamans use altered states of consciousness, or trances.
Anyone can experience altered consciousness, which is at times induced by migraine headaches, flickering lights, low-frequency drumming, sensory deprivation or the use of hallucinogens. The rites of passage of some North American tribes have included vision quests, in which every adolescent boy—and in some cases, every girl—fasts in social isolation until he “sees” his adult name. Shamans from hunter-gatherer societies often report meeting spirit guides in the form of animals.
In many cultures, shamans record their trances artistically. Some shamans believe that painted 055images—often of animals—become doors through which they can pass more easily to the spirit world. Others report that the paint they use dissolves the barrier between the spirit world and the everyday world. Sometimes the images themselves are believed to retain power, and community members visit these image-shrines, often leaving behind hand prints to record their visits.
Upper Paleolithic peoples were also hunter-gatherers, and so they may well have had shamans. If modern shamans record their trances artistically, it’s likely their ancient counterparts did too. Indeed, many characteristics of Upper Paleolithic painting appear to parallel modern shamanic art.
Most Upper Paleolithic paintings are found in places conducive to trances—dark, still caverns isolated from everyday life. Caves were commonly used for housing in the Upper Paleolithic period, but these decorated caves were never inhabited. The paintings were made over long periods of time—perhaps millennia—during which the artists moved deeper and deeper into the cave complexes. In some caves, the paintings show finger marks, as if people repeatedly touched them; in others, there are dozens of hand prints.
For Lewis-Williams, the ancient parallels with the art of more recent hunter-gatherer groups suggests that Upper Paleolithic paintings are remnants of shamanic ritual. This is the first plausible theory for the origin and meaning of Upper Paleolithic images.a
Why, after millennia of seemingly art-free existence, did shamans suddenly begin painting their trances some 30,000 years ago? The answer, Lewis-Williams suggests, has to do with the development of the brain (meaning its inner workings, 058not its size and shape).
Briefly, scientists fall into two groups: those who believe the brain underwent a period of rapid change around 30,000 years ago, and those who think the brain evolved in concert with the body and appeared in its modern form about 100,000 years ago. The former see the appearance of art as proving the existence of the new brain. According to the latter, including Lewis-Williams, our ancestors were always capable of making art; they simply didn’t bother until it became culturally important.
Lewis-Williams suggests that Upper Paleolithic people (he refers to them as Aurignacians or Homo sapiens) had “higher-order consciousness”; that is, their thinking processes were essentially modern. He believes that higher-order consciousness engenders a cluster of cultural characteristics including a concept of life after death, a hierarchical social system based on other than purely physical attributes, and the ability to make art. According to Lewis-Williams, our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, had “lower-order consciousness”; they had no concept of life after death, no complex hierarchical social systems and no ability to make art. Homo sapiens didn’t bother to make art until they encountered the Neanderthals in Europe about 30,000 years ago. At that point, Lewis-Williams suggests, art arose as a cultural weapon, a visible emblem of the Homo sapiens’ intellectual superiority over their Neanderthal rivals.
Lewis-Williams’s ideas about the Neanderthals are surprisingly old-fashioned. Today, most scholars believe Neanderthal culture was complex and included a concept of an afterlife (at some sites, Neanderthals buried their dead). Neanderthals seem to have honored or cared for individuals for reasons other than their strength and hunting ability; for example, the skeletons of some Neanderthals suggest that they survived long after becoming severely disabled. Although there is little evidence for the plastic arts, Neanderthals may well have made music. The most interesting recent theories about the disappearance of the Neanderthals suggest that natural factors—such as a low birth rate—rather than competition with Homo sapiens caused their demise.
No one alive today has a pre-modern brain, and of course there are no contemporaneous texts that might reveal the thinking processes of prehistoric people. Because of this lack of evidence, scholars generally avoid assigning specific intellectual attitudes to our very distant ancestors. It is therefore surprising that Lewis-Williams supports his thesis by attempting to recreate the thoughts and feelings of Upper Paleolithic people, including the Neanderthals.
More than that, he makes assertions that are dubious at best. The book’s weakness lies in passages like this one: “When there was conflict, it seems likely that it was the Homo sapiens men who killed the Neanderthal men and ravished their women. But the Homo sapiens communities were intelligent enough to realize that the offspring of such unions would be infertile and probably mentally inferior to themselves.”
Or this one: “The exploitation of a particular kind of consciousness and mental imagery for social concerns thus became, for the Aurignacians [Homo sapiens], a major distinguishing feature of their society vis-à-vis their Neanderthal neighbors. That their possession of it would have engendered a sense of superiority over the Neanderthals and coloured their relationship with them are inescapable conclusions.”
Perhaps, as Thomas Aquinas noted in his Summa Theologica, “the slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.” As an archaeologist, however, Lewis-Williams should have known better.
The earliest known examples of painting and sculpture in Europe appeared rather suddenly, about 30,000 years ago in a period we call the Upper Paleolithic. These images—mainly of animals, but also of nude women and geometric shapes—range from tiny sculptures to larger-than-life-size paintings. The depictions of animals are so accurate and detailed that more than a hundred species can be differentiated. Over the past 150 years, scholars have theorized endlessly about the origins and meaning of this art. Some believe the images derive from religious and magic rituals. Others insist that they represent calendars, or male-female forces, or even […]
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Footnotes
See Dan Bahat, “Does the Holy Sepulchre Church Mark the Burial of Jesus?” BAR 12:03.