Prehistoric Art

• First skeleton remains of the common ancestor of Homo sapiens from about 400,000 years ago found in Africa

• Oldest human remains from Omo Kibish, Ethiopia from about 195,000 YA

• By 20,000 BC, humans were on every continent except Antarctica

Some of the oldest human artifacts includes shells thought to make a necklace and incised ochre with geometric pattern (Blombos Cave, South Africa, 75,000 YA)

Blombos Cave, South Africa

Many of the oldest artifacts are identifiable as tools for cutting, chopping, and piercing

Oldest known figurative sculpture is the Venus of Hohle Fels Cave in Germany (35,000 YA)

• Early pottery to hold food and water

• Pottery fragments from Xianrendong Cave, Jiangxi Province, China (about 22,000 YA)

• Functional items become decorative and designed for use and beauty

• Spear thrower carved from reindeer antler (La Madeleine, France, 14,000 YA)

• Cave artists painted the big mammals around them

• Bears, bison, and reindeer in France (Chauvet, 37,000 YA)

• Elephants, boar and horses in India (Bhimbetka, 30,000 YA)

• Antelope in Algeria (Tassili n’Ajjer, 10,000 YA)

• Giraffes, tigers, zebras in Namibia (6,000 YA)

Do we have an obsession with the animals around us today?

Jeff Koons, Puppy, 1997

Louis Bourgeois, Maman, 1979

Cave artists also painted abstract and geometric patterns(El Castillo, Spain, 40,000 YA)

Was there a code to their visual language? (El Castillo, Spain, 40,000 YA)

• A common theme across continents: artists traced their hands

• Cueva de los Manos, Argentina (13,000 - 9,000 YA)

It’s not a habit that disappeared.

It’s not a habit that disappeared.

How did the cave artists work?

• They used rocks and minerals around them for different colors

• These colors found by Chuck Kritzon near his California home http://www.primitiveways.com/paint_a_mammoth.html]

• They made brushes from sticks, bone, rock, fur, and hair

• Used incised rocks to “erase” or make highlights in stone

• They used reeds as blow guns for the first kind of spray painting

• Cave artists erected scaffolding to paint images that were difficult to get to

• Some of the paintings are in tight spaces over 10 feet high

• Prehistoric artists paid attention to composition and responded to their site

• Drew animals in twisted perspective with bodies in profile and heads frontal

• (Lascaux, 28,000 - 10,000 YA)

• The cave artists used repetition to capture movement

• Edward Muybridge, The Attitudes of Animals in Motion, 1881

Horses, Chauvet Cave, France

What happened to the prehistoric artists?

• End of ice age + Neolithic revolution around 12,000 YA

• Development of agriculture: goats, sheep, pigs, cattle

• Domesticated farming• Developing permanent settlements