Post by L Roebuck on Aug 2, 2006 7:27:50 GMT -5
Hunters as artists
July 26, 2006 Commentary
By KENDALL WILD RUTLAND HERALD
Paleolithic cave paintings by humans who lived more than 10,000 years ago have long attracted the attention of scholars. Most opinion has been that the paintings were the work of shamans, primitive priests similar to witch doctors, who drew them to invoke magic relationships with the real animals being hunted.
The late Paleolithic era was from roughly 50,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, and tribes of hunters wandered over a large part of Europe and Asia, dwelling in caves and leaving many very lifelike paintings on the cave walls. Mammoths, bison, elks and horses all appear in very naturalistic drawings.
In a short article in a recent Scientific American, a professor at the University of Alaska is described as advancing the idea that the paintings were not done by shamans, but by teenage boys preoccupied by hunting.
R. Dale Guthrie, emeritus professor of paleobiology in Fairbanks, is quoted as saying that Paleolithic art "was done in a more naturalistic way — real animals eating, braying or bellowing, biting."
Remains have been found in Europe where herds of horses had been driven over cliffs. The resulting slaughter would provide the humans in the region with their meat. The plains Indians in North America engaged in a similar practice with the herds of bison.
While no caves have been found to have naturalistic depictions of humans, quite a few of the artists left the imprints of their hands on the walls of caves in France and Spain. Professor Guthrie measured about 200 such prints and compared them with the handprints of 700 children, teenagers and adults in Fairbanks schools. The cave handprints almost always match those of modern children from the ages of 10 to 16.
So the professor argued that the cave art is largely the creation of adolescent boys who were preoccupied with hunting.
Like the people in Fairbanks, Professor Guthrie said, the Paleolithic people had high-protein diets.
One problem the magazine article did not address is that of life span. In Paleolithic times when a male reached the age of 16 he would have lived about one-third of his life. Even in classical Greek and Roman times a person who reached 40 was considered to be on the verge of aged. The life span of the cave dwellers, living from day to day and meal to meal, could very well have been shorter.
There is another problem with the hand measurements comparing cave prints with modern ones. It is known that people in earlier times were shorter than the average person today. So it's possible that a 25-year-old male of the cave art period could have been no taller than a 12-year-old today, with a corresponding hand size.
Some of the cave animals are depicted as if they were wounded, with red streaks from stomachs or stab lines in an animal's body. Those who hold with the magic theory say those images of wounding were part of a ritual to make sure such an animal would be wounded in real life. Those who follow Professor Guthrie's line of thought say they're the playful boasting of a teenager recording his prowess during a recent hunt.
The magazine got in touch with an anthropologist in Germany who said the cave paintings could reflect a mixture of motives. Nicholas J. Conrad of the University of Tubingen was quoted as saying: "We're talking about 30,000 years of some fairly complex imagery."
Kendall Wild is a retired editor of the Herald.
Article: www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060726/NEWS/607260311/1039/OPINION03
July 26, 2006 Commentary
By KENDALL WILD RUTLAND HERALD
Paleolithic cave paintings by humans who lived more than 10,000 years ago have long attracted the attention of scholars. Most opinion has been that the paintings were the work of shamans, primitive priests similar to witch doctors, who drew them to invoke magic relationships with the real animals being hunted.
The late Paleolithic era was from roughly 50,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago, and tribes of hunters wandered over a large part of Europe and Asia, dwelling in caves and leaving many very lifelike paintings on the cave walls. Mammoths, bison, elks and horses all appear in very naturalistic drawings.
In a short article in a recent Scientific American, a professor at the University of Alaska is described as advancing the idea that the paintings were not done by shamans, but by teenage boys preoccupied by hunting.
R. Dale Guthrie, emeritus professor of paleobiology in Fairbanks, is quoted as saying that Paleolithic art "was done in a more naturalistic way — real animals eating, braying or bellowing, biting."
Remains have been found in Europe where herds of horses had been driven over cliffs. The resulting slaughter would provide the humans in the region with their meat. The plains Indians in North America engaged in a similar practice with the herds of bison.
While no caves have been found to have naturalistic depictions of humans, quite a few of the artists left the imprints of their hands on the walls of caves in France and Spain. Professor Guthrie measured about 200 such prints and compared them with the handprints of 700 children, teenagers and adults in Fairbanks schools. The cave handprints almost always match those of modern children from the ages of 10 to 16.
So the professor argued that the cave art is largely the creation of adolescent boys who were preoccupied with hunting.
Like the people in Fairbanks, Professor Guthrie said, the Paleolithic people had high-protein diets.
One problem the magazine article did not address is that of life span. In Paleolithic times when a male reached the age of 16 he would have lived about one-third of his life. Even in classical Greek and Roman times a person who reached 40 was considered to be on the verge of aged. The life span of the cave dwellers, living from day to day and meal to meal, could very well have been shorter.
There is another problem with the hand measurements comparing cave prints with modern ones. It is known that people in earlier times were shorter than the average person today. So it's possible that a 25-year-old male of the cave art period could have been no taller than a 12-year-old today, with a corresponding hand size.
Some of the cave animals are depicted as if they were wounded, with red streaks from stomachs or stab lines in an animal's body. Those who hold with the magic theory say those images of wounding were part of a ritual to make sure such an animal would be wounded in real life. Those who follow Professor Guthrie's line of thought say they're the playful boasting of a teenager recording his prowess during a recent hunt.
The magazine got in touch with an anthropologist in Germany who said the cave paintings could reflect a mixture of motives. Nicholas J. Conrad of the University of Tubingen was quoted as saying: "We're talking about 30,000 years of some fairly complex imagery."
Kendall Wild is a retired editor of the Herald.
Article: www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060726/NEWS/607260311/1039/OPINION03