Long before religion, long before language, long before civilization, there was the artist: shaping the emergence of human cognition from tusk and colored grit. It was art that fine-tuned, integrated, and supported free will, imagination, thought, sensory perception, and feeling—universal forces that every human possesses. By contrast religions, local customs, political and racial affiliations, and the haves or the have-nots push humans into tribes, it is us against them. Silly, when every person shares all of the same core attributes as every human since the dawn of humanity. And that is what art speaks to, the universal in all of us.
The birth of figurative art 40,000 years ago, with Lion Man, is the first unambiguous joining of perception, emotion, and thought. Lion Man is a result of real-life perception of male proportions and a lion skin and its head; the emotional romanticism of imbuing a human with lion powers; and the artist recreating his thought/vision of a lion-caped man. …