Soulscape 18, Art Is the Foundation of Human Evolution
From My Upcoming Book: Soulscape – The Role of Art in Our Lives
Horses' Heads from the Chauvet Cave, c. 30,000-32,000 BC. Ardèche, France. Photo: © Bradshaw Foundation.
Art from the prehistoric era, such as the horse head paintings in Chauvet Cave, predated the written word by 25,000 years. Instead of reacting only to immediate survival needs, these early humans began to imagine and represent things—i.e., make art. By painting images like the horse heads, they captured visual abstractions of reality—something no other animals can do. This act required memory, imagination, and keen observation. It was an epochal cognitive leap that laid the foundation for human evolution and the birth of modern humans.
Though taken for granted today, visual art still has that extraordinary power—to guide humanity’s next evolutionary steps. Innovative art enhances our perceptual awareness, sparks new ways of thinking, and catapults our spiritual awareness—just as it did at the birth of modern humanity.
Art is a window to our future.
Artwork: Chauvet Caves, Horses’ Heads.
Written by Michael Newberry.
Video and Voice created with Clipchamp.
IMHO, the coolest thing about the Chauvet cave paintings is their refinement. They are not the scrawlings of some half-beast scratching the cave walls with a stick for the first time. They represent well-observed — and memorized! — details as well as a holistic understanding of how an animal's anatomy works, including its volume and its motion. The gradient shading is subtle and volumetric, and not crude daubs. Already they are reckoning with the technical problem of how to make a rendering of a 3-D subject believable in 2-D. And the arrangement of animals across the cave walls, designed so that when viewed by flicking torchlight, the animals appear to move like the frames in a Muybridge film — this is very sophisticated. There are just too many innovations to represent the work of one genius. The Chauvet cave paintings have to represent the culmination of a long, inherited and highly developed visual tradition. They raise questions about the rest of the culture — the mythology, the literature, the verbal tradition, the music, the dance, the fashions (because fashion is a visual language and there are always fashions) — and they raise questions about what happened to this people, what was its history, what happened to their highly skilled tradition, and why.
I am always in awe of these, thank you for sharing them!