Prehistoric Painting

It's 25,000 B.C.E., give or take a few thousand years. A tribe lives in southern Europe. They have chased some wild animals out of a cave and taken up residence inside. This tribe has fashioned crude clothing from animal pelts and rough tools from stones lying around. The sick and malnourished members of the tribe die young and often violently.

Yet, hundreds of feet into the frightening black depths of the cave, in the light of sputtering animal-fat lamps, some members of the tribe are wielding sticks dipped in a mixture of dirt, rocks, and fat, and painting on the rough ceilings and walls. They are creating the earliest surviving paintings produced by humankind.

Such works occur not only in one cave, but also in over 130 caves discovered to date. The most notable paintings are found at the caves of Lascaux in southern France and Altamira in northern Spain. What did the earliest artists draw, and what inspired them to do it?

These artists depicted what probably mattered most to them: the animals their tribe hunted, including bison, deer, wild boars, and horses. Some of the figures are quite large — one bull at Lascaux is 18 feet long! More surprising is the quality of many drawings: the proportions are correct, the poses are lifelike, and the outlines are firm and vigorous. Figures are occasionally shaded to suggest the roundness of the animal, stippled to indicate the texture of its pelt, and even drawn on a natural protrusion of the rock surface to give its form more fullness. In contrast to the animals, the few human images are small, roughly drawn stick figures, sometimes carrying spears or bows.

Why did early humans expend the time and effort to execute these drawings? Archaeologists may never know for sure, but they can fashion educated guesses. Surely, these paintings were not mere wall decorations. ("Gorgar, dear, we could use a nice bison picture over the sleeping straw.") In fact, at Altamira traces of human habitation exist in only one painted room. This separation of living quarters from painted areas suggests that the paintings served a ritual function, either to ensure a good hunt or to promote the fertility of the animals the tribe hunted.

Scholars suggest the paintings functioned as a "how-to" guide to hunting. Paintings in which human figures with weapons appear certainly support a connection with the hunt.

The fact is, scholars don't know for sure why these prehistoric paintings were created, and it is likely that they never will. Those who study cave paintings don't know how the earliest people believed the world worked, what they hoped for, what they thought controlled life, and what they thought happened after death. Prehistoric means that writing had not been invented yet, so there was no way for early humans to record why they spent time painting. In the end, the full significance of the cave paintings will remain a mystery.

Whatever their function in the past, the cave paintings are significant today for the simple, but incredible, fact that they exist. Hunger, cold, wild animals, and even darkness could not deter humans from picking up brushes and depicting their world.