In
1884, Georges Seurat strategically placed dots atop a canvas, leading
people to believe they were looking at an image of park-goers lounging along the Seine River
in France. The technique was known as pointillism, and it seemed new at
the time. But 38,000 years ago, people living inside caves in southwest
France were doing something similar, according to findings published last month in Quaternary International.
“Their
skills speak of a very high ability to observe in detail what
surrounded them and reproduce it with great economy of means,” said Vhils, a Portuguese street artist who is known for his own chiseling of dots and lines into walls, and was not involved in the study.
These
pointillist creations of early modern humans were recently discovered
when scientists revisited Abri Cellier, a cave site in France’s Vézère
Valley. There, they found 16 limestone tablets left behind by a previous
excavation. Images of what appear to be animals, including a woolly
mammoth, were formed by a series of punctured dots and, in some cases,
carved connecting lines. Combined with previous images from nearby caves
in France and Spain, the tablets suggest an early form of pointillism,
and a very early point on art history’s timeline.
“Imagine the first time a human convinced someone else that a line, or a group of lines is an animal,” said Randall White, an anthropologist
at New York University who led the excavation. “Today we live in an
extremely visual culture, and we digest and interpret, on the run, a
million different kinds of illusions that we take to be reality,” he
said. It is impossible to say that this was a magical moment when humans
invented art. But in these tablets, he thinks he and his team may have
gotten close.
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Step
back, 38,000 years to what are now the forests of southwestern France.
There lived the Aurignacians, Europe’s earliest known modern humans, a
hunter-gatherer society. In the steppe grasslands, they stalked
reindeer, mostly. Horses, aurochs (ancient bison), woolly mammoths and
rhinoceroses were also around.
During
winters much colder than the ones in France now, one group of
Aurignacians lived beneath a rock shelter, about 20 feet deep and 67
feet long. Across its open mouth, suspended animal skins trapped the
heat from a fire. Someone butchered a reindeer. Another person made
ornamental beads of ivory and animal teeth. Their bodies, which were
probably painted with ochre, were covered in animal skins, which were
painted, too. Someone also decorated the ceiling, walls and tablets with
images of vulvas and animals.
“In
circumstances where we’d probably have a tendency to sit in a corner by
the fire and shiver,” Dr. White said, the Aurignacians “are engraving,
and painting and making ornaments.”
About
10,000 years later, the ceiling of this cave collapsed in such a
perfect way that it preserved all the stuff they left behind. Some
archaeologists found it in 1927, and put some of what they excavated in
museums. But they left behind 16 tablets that appeared to have been
turned over just after they were made, for some unknown reason. Nearly a
century later Dr. White returned with an international team of 21
scientists and even more student volunteers to find them. When the
undersurface of the first tablet was revealed, Dr. White got chills.
There
was no paint, but someone had taken the dull tip of a flint stone just
half the size of a person’s palm and punctured the surface. Dots formed
in the shape of an animal. In other tablets, the dots were connected.
In a paper published in January, Dr. White and his colleagues revealed
a similar engraving of an auroch, in Abri Blanchard, another French
cave. Combined with dotted images which were first painted on hands and
then stamped onto walls in Chauvet Cave, they think the Aurignacians had
their own artistic style. It was kind of like connect the dots.
Their
subject matter was something more abstract and meaningful than simply
dinner, Dr. White said. Dinner was reindeer, primarily, but no reindeer
art has been found. The animals used for their body art were also
depicted in their wall art. “They’re painting what’s good to think, not
eat,” Dr. White said.
Dr.
White does not think the art in these caves is the root of Western art,
because modern Europeans are not genetic descendants of these cave
dwellers. This cave art outlived its creators, who did not hand down
their pointillist techniques to European artists tens of thousands of
years later.
“All
of this stuff got invented, but it’s not continuous,” Dr. White said.
“It may well have just disappeared or transformed into something else.”
The Aurignacians’ techniques probably developed independently, and the
pointillist style employed by Seurat later emerged.
“One
of the most interesting things I’ve learnt through my work is how
history has a way of repeating itself, despite the change in social and
material circumstances,” Vhils wrote in an email. “And these findings
seem to reinforce this view.”
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