IF YOU have ever marvelled at the accomplishment of Stone Age cave artists, you are in good company. In 1940, on visiting Lascaux cave in southern France, Pablo Picasso supposedly said: “Since Lascaux, we have invented nothing.” Perspective, movement, impressionism, abstraction, pointillism – it is all there. And these artworks are some 17,000 years old.
Picasso’s remark may be apocryphal. It was certainly premature. In 1994, hundreds of paintings twice the age of those at Lascaux were discovered at Chauvet cave, also in France. The Chauvet paintings are, quite simply, stunning: prowling lions and galloping horses are captured so vividly that the remote Stone Age world becomes almost tangible. Even more astonishingly, this art was created shortly after the dawn of the “cultural explosion”, an event archaeologists have long recognised as marking a surge in creativity that seems to have come out of nowhere. How could these first artists have already been so good?
Advertisement
We now have an answer: the Chauvet artists weren’t the first. Discoveries in recent decades have shattered the assumption that art was invented by our species some 40,000 years ago. Instead, we have increasingly compelling evidence of artistry in other ancient hominins.
Needless to say, this challenges our beliefs about who invented art. But it does more besides. It offers an insight into our forerunners’ appreciation for aesthetics and the value they placed on objects that seem, at first glance, unnecessary for survival. In so doing, it also provides tantalising hints that art has been a vital component of hominin life for millions of years.
To say that humans are the only living artists might seem questionable. After all, many species produce beautiful objects, from flowers to bowers (see “But is it art?”, below). However, an artist does more than make a thing of beauty. In fact, art can be seen as the apogee of human cognitive sophistication. It requires consciousness and abstract thought: imagination to conjure up something that doesn’t exist, mental time travel for planning, symbolism to express ideas using arbitrary marks and “theory of mind” to understand how others will interpret your work. Language is a conduit for all this – and, of course, no other animal has our ability to communicate complex ideas. More nebulous requirements include a creative urge and an aesthetic sensibility. Practical abilities such as manual dexterity are needed too, to realise a vision.
Our ancestors didn’t evolve all these capabilities in one fell swoop, so the idea of a “cultural explosion” about 40,000 years ago was always surprising. Nevertheless, discoveries of cave art in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries did support it. They also pointed to Homo sapiens as the original artist, because 40,000 years ago is when our species began to colonise Europe – and when the Neanderthals became extinct. Given the long-standing perception of Neanderthals as sub-human and brutish, this painted a neat picture. But it turned out to be an illusion.
The myth that Neanderthals lacked creativity was convincingly exploded in 2018, when a team led by at the University of Southampton, UK, used the gold-standard uranium-thorium dating technique to analyse artworks in three Spanish caves. They were all more than 40,000 years old, implying that the oldest known cave artists were Neanderthals. Among the artworks was a hand stencil dated to at least 66,000 years ago.
But the Neanderthals weren’t content with decorating cave walls. Roughly 175,000 years ago, deep inside Bruniquel cave in France, they used around 400 stalagmites to make enigmatic structures, including a ring measuring 7 metres across. It has been suggested that this might have served as a sort of Stone Age xylophone. That is just speculation, but it raises the point that art isn’t confined to the visual domain.
Neanderthal creativity
Nor is it confined to large installations. Indeed, some of the most impressive evidence of Neanderthal artistic flair is provided by the small objects they carried with them on their travels. We know that they adorned themselves with 115,000 years ago and up to 130,000 years ago.
Perhaps the most impressive discovery to date was announced in 2021. In a cave entrance in Germany, archaeologists found a 51,000-year-old toe bone from an Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus) that had been . The archaeologists wouldn’t speculate on what, if anything, the carved bone signified, but to the untrained eye, the bone does have something of the appearance of a human torso.
Even in the face of such evidence, there is still widespread resistance to the idea that Neanderthals were artists. “Every time a new discovery is put forward that could be Neanderthal art or symbolism, it is questioned,” says at Kenyon College in Ohio.
But other archaeologists are willing to entertain the idea of Neanderthal artists. Do so and new questions arise, chief among them being: what exactly drove Neanderthals to explore their creative side?
The Stone Age is often seen as a forbidding world where ancient humans lived a hand-to-mouth existence, surviving rather than thriving. In other words, an unlikely place in which to find ancient humans dabbling with art, which some of us might view as a luxury we can easily do without. “That notion is a very modern, Western view of separating work and play, the sacred from the mundane,” says at the University of Liverpool, UK. “I don’t think that’s actually how most of humanity has lived.”
It is possible, then, that Neanderthals might have felt a real need to express themselves aesthetically. Presumably that need wasn’t equal to the ever-present requirement for food and water, but it was important nonetheless.
“It’s a sensory thing,” says Wragg Sykes. “And we can see exactly the same thing with chimps and bonobos. Interacting with and altering the properties of materials – their colour, texture – is, at a basic level, an emotionally satisfying experience.” If this view is correct, then the prehistory of art should extend much deeper into the past than even the Neanderthals. We now know that it does.
Sure, undisputable works of art that predate the “cultural explosion” are few and far between. But there is a proxy for creativity that is found in great quantities: ochre. These iron-oxide-based pigments, which can range in colour from yellows and browns to bright red, weren’t just used in cave paintings. They turn up at hominin sites dating all the way back to 500,000 years ago. Ochre has functional uses – in adhesives, for tanning hides and as medicine – so it doesn’t always indicate an artistic mind. Nevertheless, there is also plenty of reason to connect it to creativity.
For instance, at Blombos cave in South Africa, people were mixing ochre with bone marrow fat and urine to make paint 100,000 years ago. The same site has yielded the oldest known drawing, made with an ochre crayon on rock, and dated to 73,000 years ago. And pieces of ochre with geometrical engravings have turned up at Blombos and other South African sites. Some are 160,000 years old. Red ochre has also been found on shell beads, sometimes with indications that the pigment was originally on the wearer’s skin and then rubbed off on the beads. In other words, this is evidence that ochre was used in prehistoric body art.
The first artists?
It wasn’t just H. sapiens who used ochre. Last year, at the University of Heidelberg in Germany and his colleagues made starting 500,000 years ago – which is some 200,000 years before H. sapiens evolved. “We view a large proportion of ochre finds… as the material remains of past ritual activity,” they wrote. This usage was “primarily in the form of body and face painting”.
Ochre was clearly an important artistic material in prehistory, but it wasn’t the only one. Some 500,000 years ago, on a riverbank in Java, someone etched markings onto a saucer-sized clam shell. Experiments reveal that the pattern was made by a skilful right-hander, using a shark’s tooth. They might have been a Denisovan, a group closely related to Neanderthals, which lived in Asia from around that time. That Denisovans were creative can be seen in the jewellery that some researchers attribute to them, which included a bracelet of polished green rock and an ivory tiara. Another geometric etching – this one on bone, dating to 100,000 years ago – shows they were more than capable of producing artwork similar to that preserved on the clam shell.
However, at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands, who led the clam shell study, thinks it was probably etched by Homo erectus, a species of human that walked Earth between about 2 million and 100,000 years ago. It may seem far-fetched to apply the term “artist” to these early humans, who may have lacked language, but they clearly had an eye for beauty and the manual dexterity to create it. What’s more, they had acquired these traits long before that Javan doodle.
Some 1.7 million years ago, H. erectus invented the hand axe, an elegant, symmetrical Swiss-army-knife of a tool. A tool is not art, almost by definition. But a hand axe requires mental sophistication to make. And according to , also at the University of Liverpool, its invention marks the . Aside from possessing skills required for planning and execution, these craftspeople were clearly interested in form: axes are often leaf-shaped, but can take a variety of other geometric forms, including circles, ovals, triangles and squares.
Moreover, some hand axes clearly transcend utility. These include several fashioned from semiprecious stones like jasper and obsidian, which are difficult to sculpt and shatter easily – but beautiful to behold. One is even .
The creative virtuosity of H. erectus didn’t begin with hand axes, though. Starting around 2 million years ago, they were making . Sculpted from limestone or more eye-catching rocks, including quartz, the purpose of these orbs is unknown. One suggestion is that bolas were mere byproducts of tool production. However, reveals them to have been intentionally crafted.
At the very least, bolas show an appreciation of symmetry. In their book The , Michel Lorblanchet and Paul Bahn, two leading experts on palaeolithic art, go further, describing them as “aesthetic productions” and “works of art”. “Bolas seem to mark the emergence of the spiritual dimension of humankind,” they write.
All this pushes the origins of art way back to the start of the human genus, Homo. But there’s more. The oldest known object hinting at an artistic sensibility is a staggering 3 million years old, comfortably predating the appearance of humans. The Makapansgat pebble, discovered a century ago in South Africa, is a lump of red jasperite in the shape of a cute little head with a quiff. It wasn’t crafted to look that way: it is natural. But what is remarkable is that it was moved from its formation site to a new location several kilometres away by an unknown hominin. The collector was probably of the genus Australopithecus, meaning they were similar in appearance to the famous ape-like hominin known as Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis).
Discoveries like this matter. Ten years ago, at a site in northern Italy, a team of archaeologists found an acorn-sized fossil shell at a Neanderthal site. Going on the geology of the area, the fossil must have been picked up and then carried at least 100 kilometres as the crow flies. . It is one of Wragg Sykes’s favourite Neanderthal artefacts because it shows our sister species going beyond an everyday focus on survival. For the Neanderthals carrying everything by hand as they traversed the difficult terrain of the Alpine foothills, it must have represented something precious. The Makapansgat pebble suggests the wandering Neanderthal was continuing a tradition for carrying curious or aesthetically pleasing objects that predates the human genus.
We still have only the roughest sketch of the prehistory of art. According to Lorblanchet and Bahn, leaving aside artefacts that are arguably functional, there are only around 200 pieces of “artistic” evidence across the whole world for the period stretching from 2 million years up to 40,000 years ago. That is an average of just one every 10,000 years.
Most early artworks were probably ephemeral – including body painting and tattooing, doodles in the sand and objects made of perishable materials such as wood. Music-making, too, might leave only the faintest of marks in the archaeological record. Nevertheless, as palaeoarchaeologists extend their focus beyond Europe and Africa, ever more artefacts are turning up. There are surely many yet to be discovered – and they may reveal the roots of art to be even deeper. With such a long pedigree, it is no wonder the painters at Chauvet were so good.
żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ audio
You can now listen to many articles – look for the headphones icon in our app
But is it art?
Nature is full of beautiful things. That doesn't necessarily make their creators artists. An orchid that produces an exquisite flower is simply fulfilling its genetic destiny. The sculptural worm cast you might find on a sandy beach is just a lugworm's pile of poo. But the artistic abilities of a few animals do seem more like ours.
Bowerbirds, in particular, show flair. All 20 species build elaborate structures, which they may decorate with colourful objects or paint with regurgitated berries. This behaviour isn't entirely hardwired – bowerbirds may choose to decorate with human-made objects that wouldn't have been available when their bower-building talents evolved. Nevertheless, it is quite stereotyped. Only males build bowers, and they have no choice but to do so. What's more, bowers serve one purpose: they are designed to attract a mate.
As for our closest living relatives, the other primates, they don't produce anything like visual art in the wild. Some enculturated chimps have been given paints and encouraged to draw. However, they seem to treat this more like a contest with the blank page than an expression of ideas or self. . Alternatively, you might compare it with the scribbles of a 2-year-old child. And while all preschoolers will progress to drawing increasingly realistic figures, this is the limit of chimp artistry. This isn't surprising when you consider the mental gymnastics that underpin art.
Kate Douglas is a features editor at żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ. Additional reporting by Colin Barras
