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I'm just across the room from a paleolithic block of red oxide with finger-dimple dents one one side, hardened marks of fiber brushes on the other side. Moving ahead about 14,000 yrs, there's also a Sioux ceremonial knife shaped of red steatite and gorgeously engraved with prairie lilies - it was actually worn to battle and lost on the battlefield, but useless as an actual weapon. What does that say?
Eddie - My field was the early peopling of North America and related Pleistocene periglacial geomorphology. Cave painting did not really exist in that fashion here, but there are certain commonalities of rock art I've studied. In each case there seems to be some attempt to secretly intervene with the unseen world in order to predict or sustain sucessful hunts, fish migrations, and later crop harvests. The most remarkable discovery of late involved paintings even earlier than Lascaux. Over the years, I've often noticed how the profiles of certain animals tended to overlap, without understanding it. Then not too long ago, it dawned on a specialist in that area that all our past studies of these figures have been based on artificial modern lighting, whereas when they were viewed in ancient times, it would have been by torchlight. So he similated that by turning off all the other lights and quickly walking past serial figures of lion and rhinos, and notice that just like in a schoolroom flip card cartoon, the creatures seemed to predictably move - the lion charged, and the rhino not only charged, but upswept his horn doing so.
Pretty sophisticated. They were dramatizing things in a sacred enclosure in order to sustain them predictably in the real world; likewise with speared horses, red deer, etc.
Some of our more stunning artifacts here were in fact what remains of gorgeously fabricated kill weapons or atlatl points, deliberately made of rare materials which must have been hard to acquire from remote trade, and served in the same manner as ritualized art, probably made by specialist shamans, and deliberately left behind at mammoth and mastodon kills as a kind of ritual exchange for the animal's life. Not everyday food; it would have been dangerous work, so was a big deal, and probably a ritualized hunting cult for a relatively brief era, over the entire western hemisphere, top of Alaska tall the way to Tierra del Fuego.
Eddie - My field was the early peopling of North America and related Pleistocene periglacial geomorphology. Cave painting did not really exist in that fashion here, but there are certain commonalities of rock art I've studied. In each case there seems to be some attempt to secretly intervene with the unseen world in order to predict or sustain sucessful hunts, fish migrations, and later crop harvests. The most remarkable discovery of late involved paintings even earlier than Lascaux. Over the years, I've often noticed how the profiles of certain animals tended to overlap, without understanding it. Then not too long ago, it dawned on a specialist in that area that all our past studies of these figures have been based on artificial modern lighting, whereas when they were viewed in ancient times, it would have been by torchlight. So he similated that by turning off all the other lights and quickly walking past serial figures of lion and rhinos, and notice that just like in a schoolroom flip card cartoon, the creatures seemed to predictably move - the lion charged, and the rhino not only charged, but upswept his horn doing so.
Pretty sophisticated. They were dramatizing things in a sacred enclosure in order to sustain them predictably in the real world; likewise with speared horses, red deer, etc.
Some of our more stunning artifacts here were in fact what remains of gorgeously fabricated kill weapons or atlatl points, deliberately made of rare materials which must have been hard to acquire from remote trade, and served in the same manner as ritualized art, probably made by specialist shamans, and deliberately left behind at mammoth and mastodon kills as a kind of ritual exchange for the animal's life. Not everyday food; it would have been dangerous work, so was a big deal, and probably a ritualized hunting cult for a relatively brief era, over the entire western hemisphere, top of Alaska tall the way to Tierra del Fuego.
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