What was the first "art"? How would we know? - PNAS
←
→
Page content transcription
If your browser does not render page correctly, please read the page content below
NEWS FEATURE
NEWS FEATURE
What was the first “art”? How would we know?
Recently discovered cave paintings and bone carvings offer new perspectives on long-held
questions about art’s origins—not to mention the nature of art itself.
Amy McDermott, Science Writer
Archaeologist Adam Brumm recalls the moment in Indonesia. Their notes to him that afternoon were
late 2017 when his phone buzzed with a WhatsApp nonchalant, Brumm recalls, along the lines of “Oh by
message that included a rather astounding image: the way, we found this spectacular cave painting.”
three little pigs leaping across the limestone walls of He was quickly scrolling through the messages on his
Leang Tedongnge cave on the Indonesian island of iPhone, when he saw the first images of the pigs flash
Sulawesi. by on his screen. “I nearly had a heart attack,”
It was a few months after the field season, and Brumm says. “They were absolutely incredible. I
Brumm sat in his office at Griffith University in Bris- replied, at 3:58 pm: ‘Holy hell!!!!! Amazing pig
bane, Australia. His field team had remained in paintings!!!’” At least 45,500 years ago, a human
Researchers believe this 45,500-year-old Indonesian cave painting, apparently of a pig, is the oldest known depiction of the animal world.
It’s among several recently unearthed prehistoric images that are shedding new light on the dawn of art. Image credit: Maxime Aubert (Grif-
fith University, Nathan QLD, Australia).
Downloaded by guest on November 4, 2021
Published under the PNAS license.
Published October 27, 2021.
PNAS 2021 Vol. 118 No. 44 e2117561118 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117561118 j 1 of 5
And then there’s nonfigurative, or nonrepresenta-
tional, expression. Examples abound in modern art,
from Mark Rothko’s color blocks on canvas to Anne
Truitt’s colorful minimalist pillars. The earliest abstract
markings appear hundreds of thousands of years ear-
lier than the Sulawesi pigs, when humans and other
hominids began etching parallel lines, grids, and
circles into shell and bone. But archaeologists dis-
agree as to whether these are in fact the earliest
glimmers of artistic expression.
Recent discoveries of both figurative and abstract
images, including 51,000-year-old etchings in bone
made by Neanderthals in Germany, are prompting
researchers and others to ask the question: When did
art truly arise, and in what species? Adding to the
archaeological evidence are modern day cognitive
experiments using photographs of ancient line carv-
ings. The work could help researchers recognize
whether the carvings were originally intended as
“art”—images and etchings purposefully created to
stimulate the visual senses.
The large limestone cave known as Leang Tedongnge is nestled in a valley on
the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The “three little pigs” painted there leap By Hand and Firelight
across a back wall in what appears to be a depiction of some social interaction, “There’s a big problem in studying Paleolithic art, in
perhaps mating or fighting. Image credit: Ratno Sardi (photographer).
that we don’t know what art is,” confesses evolutionary
cognitive archaeologist Dietrich Stout at Emory Univer-
hand had painted the pigs in ochre, making them the sity in Atlanta, GA. When amateur archaeologist Mar-
oldest known examples of figurative art by at least celino Sanz de Sautuola stumbled across the first
several thousand years—and, by some standards, the gallery of cave paintings at Altamira, Spain, a discovery
oldest artwork in the world (1). he published in 1880, archaeologists assumed that the
But which painting, drawing, or carving deserves art was forged (2). Even decades later, when the paint-
the superlative “oldest” is debatable. The moniker ings were dated to a minimum of 13,500 years ago,
depends, in part, on how archaeologists define art Stout says that researchers didn’t spend much time on
itself. The Sulawesi pigs are certainly the oldest known definitions of art; the sense was, “you know it when
figurative, or representational, art. That entails work you see it.” Here were paintings requiring technical
depicting objects from life, Brumm explains, such that skill, a range of materials, and probably torchlight for
an average observer would glance at the paintings the artists to see while painting. And they looked like
and recognize them as pigs rather than abstractions. paintings a 19th century European gallery would dis-
Representational art is common in art history, from play, heavily favoring the figurative over the abstract.
Greek Hellenistic marble goddesses to First Nations All this suggested to early archaeologists that
masks of killer whales and ravens in the Americas. European cave painters must have been cognitively
Downloaded by guest on November 4, 2021
This engraved giant deer bone, made by Neanderthals and found at a cave site in Germany, suggests that the origins of art are earlier than
many contend. Image credit: Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage/Volker Minkus (photographer).
2 of 5 j PNAS McDermott
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117561118 What was the first “art”? How would we know?
fully modern, undergoing an abrupt leap from crude One big challenge, Brumm says, is that most cave
to relatively sophisticated, which allowed them to paintings are difficult to date. In Indonesia, for exam-
take images from the real world, held in the mind’s ple, archaeologists first reported cave paintings in
eye, and then create a physical representation of the same region as Leang Tedongnge in the 1950s,
those images by using lines on rock. Despite a lack of created by blowing a mouthful of pigment around an
direct evidence, archaeologists at the time assumed outstretched hand, pressed to a cave wall. The
these artists must have had all kinds of other assumption until recently was that the hand stencils
“modern” characteristics as well, such as language, couldn’t be very old, Brumm says, because Indonesia
culture, abstract thought, and religion, Stout is so hot and humid. The paint should quickly erode.
explains. Art, as those early archaeologists imagined But in 2011, Brumm and colleagues noticed
it, came out of a creative revolution coinciding with popcorn-shaped growths formed over the top of
the earliest European cave paintings, dated to about some Indonesian paintings in limestone caves, which
30,000 years ago at their oldest in Chauvet, France. would have formed sometime after the paintings
But these would turn out to be hasty conclu- appeared. The growths turned out to be precipitated
sions. “That’s a problematic concept,” Stout says, calcite deposits, similar to stalactites, which build up
noting that brain size hasn’t changed much for in hundreds of hardened layers over centuries. By
Homo sapiens in the last 500,000 years. Also, measuring the ratio of uranium to a product of its
plenty of modern cultures make both figurative decay, thorium, Brumm and colleagues dated the
and abstract art. So there’s no good reason to oldest layers of the popcorn deposits. In 2014, his
assume that European figurative artworks are evi- team dated popcorns on a hand stencil to at least
dence of a cognitive leap that enabled art-making, 40,000 years ago (3). The subsequent discovery of a
as opposed to simply heralding the arrival of new hunting scene in another Indonesian cave in 2019
groups in Europe that showed up with representa- pushed back the oldest figurative art to 43,900 years
tional artistic skills. “I’d say the key point is that the ago (4). And then, in 2017, Brumm’s team found the
idea of a ‘revolution’ was an artifact of looking only pigs and dated them to 45,500 years ago by using a
at the archaeological record of Europe,” he says. calcite deposit, making that work, published in 2021,
Indications of migration in Europe had created an so far, “the oldest representational painting in the
impression of sudden revolutionary change, which world,” Brumm says. The discoveries in Sulawesi
is now known to be more gradual elsewhere. could imply that representational art began in Asia,
“Around the world today we see lots of diversity in but more likely, Brumm says, it’s just part of a trail of
the expression of ‘art’ by modern Homo sapiens,” representational art through human history. He
he explains. “There is no real reason anymore to expects the oldest rock art will eventually turn up
see figurative art as a key indicator of a broader from before Homo sapiens’ diaspora out of Africa.
package of ‘modern’ traits.”
Today, Stout sees several different camps in Marks and Meaning
archaeology, adhering to slightly different defini- Other interpretations for what constitutes “art” could
tions—all of which get to the heart of a decidedly suggest a different origin story—one that doesn’t nec-
modern-day conundrum: What is art? The most com- essarily begin with our species. Evidence of abstract
mon criterion for what’s considered art is behavior images dates as far back as 500,000 years ago, when
without any apparent practical use. Take the red pig- Homo erectus etched zig zag lines into a seashell in
ment ochre, for instance, which humans used to paint Java (5). And just this year, archaeologist Dirk Leder dis-
the Sulawesi pigs. The pigment, also found at older covered 51,000-year-old abstract triple L-shaped pat-
sites pre-dating figurative art, may have been used terns carved in deer bone, placed between a cave bear
artistically as face paint or other body ornamentation, skull and two deer shoulder blades, in a Neanderthal
but that’s hard to prove. Ochre also has practical cave dwelling in Germany (6). Microscopy and CT scans
uses, for example in processing animal hides. Still revealed a three-dimensional picture of the bone in
other archaeologists would like to see stronger evi- which the engravings are precisely spaced, with cuts at
dence that the art was actually intended to convey neat angles, suggesting they were made deliberately
some kind of aesthetic principle or meaning, Stout rather than as accidental hacking marks from a tool. The
notes. Beads, for instance, are decorative but can carving’s estimated age of 51,000 years is based on
also signal group identity. But again, it’s hard to rule radiocarbon dating of collagen in the bone itself, which,
out practical uses. combined with tools characteristic of Neanderthals at
Still, there are some growing areas of agreement. the site, implies that it was made several thousand years
The notion that modern human art began in Europe before Homo sapiens arrived in Europe.
some 40,000 years ago has been “a crumbling The takeaway is twofold, says Leder, who is at the
edifice,” Brumm notes. The Sulawesi pigs firmly Lower Saxony State Office for Cultural Heritage in
usher it out; the figures are representational and pre- Hanover, Germany. First, Neanderthals were capable
date any equivalent figurative depiction in Europe of constructing deliberate symbolic expressions, a
easily by 5,000 years, he adds. And the pigs may not notion that has been debated in the past. And sec-
even be the oldest figurative art. Cave scenes of ond, he says, art’s origins should be pushed back
Downloaded by guest on November 4, 2021
hunter-gatherer life from India to China could possi- “not just to 45,000 years ago, but a much longer
bly be even older. timeframe.” Leder expects that both Homo sapiens
McDermott PNAS j 3 of 5
What was the first “art”? How would we know? https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117561118
and Neanderthals were making expressive and com- artifacts were easier to recall than older ones. How-
municative carvings and drawings—even if not repre- ever, in another set of experiments in the same study,
sentational—off and on throughout their history, and participants matched identical patterns as quickly as
that although debate will likely continue, artistic possible. Here, the researchers did not find meaningful
expressions made by Neanderthals, and possibly even differences in the discriminability of younger or older
earlier hominins, will be recognized more and more. patterns. “We should think about these scribbles as
If Leder’s and others’ definitions of art seem sub- proto-art,” Tylen says. “They were made to be pretty
jective, they are. But cognitive scientists are now try- and stimulate the visual system, more than to be com-
ing to offer a more objective assessment by municative signs that denote a particular meaning.”
pinpointing the origins of symbolism—which some Derek Hodgson, a neuro-archaeologist now semi-
treat as a synonym for the origins of art itself. Some retired from the University of York in England, had
archaeologists argue that each scribble denotes published a 2019 review proposing essentially the
some meaning. A circle for instance, might mean same conclusion (8). He suspects that the first inten-
“horse,” although the shape looks nothing like the tional markings, often parallel lines or crosses, resulted
animal. Others see the carvings as aesthetically inter- from a bias in the visual cortex, in which neurons are
esting, but otherwise meaningless, decorations. particularly sensitive to horizontal and vertical lines. If
To help resolve the debate, cognitive scientist the marks had greater symbolic meaning, Hodgson
Kristian Tylen, at Aarhus University in Denmark, col- adds, he would expect to see more variation between
laborated with archaeologists beginning in 2017, them from one culture to the next, just as languages
with a resulting study published in 2020, using up-to- vary. But instead, the earliest grids, V-shapes, and lines
100,000-year-old abstract carvings from South Afri- turn up in a limited number of configurations around
ca’s Blombos cave and other sites to probe the the world, suggesting to Hodgson that they were visu-
beginnings of symbolic behavior (7). Tyl en and col- ally interesting but not explicitly meaningful.
laborators designed a series of cognitive experiments Hodgson’s theory, however, was met with swift dis-
for modern-day human subjects, testing, for instance, agreement in a 2019 paper by archaeologist Francesco
how memorable and how discriminable each carved d’Errico and collaborators (9). D’Errico pointed out that
pattern is. If there were some adaptive pressure to he’d used functional magnetic resonance imaging
make patterns mean specific things over time, for (fMRI) in a prior study to identify the brain areas stimu-
instance evolving from simple grids into pictograms lated by a variety of images, including 540,000- to
or words, archaeologists would expect the patterns 30,000-year-old engravings, as well as landscapes,
to become more memorable and easier to tell apart objects, words with no meaning in alphabetic writing,
over thousands of years. and fragments of Linear B ancient writing systems, as
The researchers showed subjects the ancient well as the scrambled versions of all these stimuli (10).
engravings, for instance flashing the images on a mon- D’Errico and coauthors found that the scrambled ver-
itor for a few seconds and then asking participants to sions of all the stimuli were processed in participants’
redraw the pattern they’d just seen from memory. primary visual cortexes, indicating simple visual percep-
Consistent with the evolution of symbolism, younger tion without further processing by the brain. But the
engravings activated brain regions in a similar pattern
to how objects are perceived, suggesting that they are
processed as organized visual representations and may
have been used to attach symbolic meaning.
One limitation of modern studies is that they use
modern human subjects. In d’Errico’s work, for exam-
ple, modern brain activity in areas associated with
complex forms is interpreted as evidence of symbolic
meaning thousands of years ago. “The problem is,
modern humans have learned to read and write, so we
have highly symbolic ability attached to that area of
the brain,” Hodgson says. Whether that brain area
behaved similarly before people had written language
is impossible to tell, he adds. D’Errico plans to address
the limitation of working with modern humans in forth-
coming unpublished work, by comparing patterns of
brain activity in archaeologists to those of non-experts.
Both the experts and non-experts will look at a collec-
In their 2020 study, Tyl
en and collaborators showed modern participants engrav- tion of real engravings and unintentional, natural mark-
ing patterns, or “experimental stimuli,” distilled from the original outlines of ings that look like engravings. The archaeologists
engravings on rock artifacts that were made over a period of 30,000 years. should quickly spot the unintentional markings by
Younger artifacts had more attention-grabbing, intentional, and memorable
using a motor area of the brain that remembers the
patterns than older ones, but they did not necessarily contain more distinguish-
able patterns. Reprinted from ref. 7. Photographic materials adapted from refs. hand motions required to make a real carving. Com-
Downloaded by guest on November 4, 2021
11 and 12, with permission from Elsevier. Original outlines reproduced from ref. paring the responses in the brains of modern experts
13, with permission from Cambridge University Press. with those in the brains of modern non-experts is fairer,
4 of 5 j PNAS McDermott
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117561118 What was the first “art”? How would we know?d’Errico says, than using the response of modern par- and which specific research questions they’re asking.
ticipants to infer symbolic meaning in the past. The conceit that abstract art is primitive, and then
On the phone from the University of Bordeaux in evolved into representational art, seems increasingly
France, d’Errico is careful to note that “art is a very flawed. Tyl en, for his part, suspects that abstract art and
ambiguous notion.” He, Tyl en, Hodgson, and their figurative work such as the Sulawesi pigs could have
collaborators are not explicitly debating the dawn of independent origins. In Europe, some Paleolithic animal
art, per se. Rather, they’re arguing over the emer- figurines, which appear after the dawn of representa-
gence and evolution of symbolic material culture. tional art, are decorated with abstract engravings similar
The San of the Kalahari use hatch marks to denote, to much older patterns. That suggests two simultaneous
as one example, ownerships of their arrows. And forms of expression: One that’s purely aesthetic and
although those markings have a symbolic role, the abstract, and one that’s symbolic, representational, and
San would consider them to be craftsmanship, not perhaps requires more complex cognition.
art. Still, when symbolism emerged is a relevant Looking ahead, the Sulawesi pigs may not be the
question to art’s beginnings, as some archaeologists oldest figurative art for long. Brumm is now applying
argue that images must be symbolic to be artistic. for funding to explore the islands between Sulawesi
D’Errico personally does not subscribe to that and Papua Indonesia, following the path of those who
view. Symbolism and art aren’t necessarily related, first migrated down the Indonesian island chain and
he says. Even if researchers arrive at some agreement onto the northern tip of Australia some 65,000 years
on the definition of symbolism, they’d still be hard ago. “We hope to find earlier rock art in these unex-
pressed to reach a consensus on the definition of art plored islands east of Sulawesi,” Brumm says. If paint-
itself—and such a consensus could still deviate from ings there are indeed as old as the first inhabitants of
the beliefs of the artists themselves. For his part, Australia, it would suggest that wayfarers have carried
without proof that a given society had an indepen- artistic expression for at least twice as long as some
dent role for the artist, d’Errico would be hesitant to 19th- and 20th-century archaeologists had thought.
say that group made “art” per se. “I think art begins It’s these big questions—and historical revi-
in a society when someone gets a societal role as art- sions—that are piquing the interest of archaeolo-
ist, independent of what they’re producing,” he says. gists and others. “It’s one of the biggest questions
“The society is recognizing someone has special in archaeology,” Brumm says. “When did our
training and taste that others cannot do.” ancestors or close relatives start to produce mark-
So when was the earliest art? The answer depends ings or forms on the continuum of art, and why did
on which definition of art an archaeologist adheres to they do it?”
1 A. Brumm et al., Oldest cave art found in Sulawesi. Sci. Adv. 7, eabd4648 (2021).
2 P. M. Gray, “Cave art and the evolution of the human mind,” Master’s thesis, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New
Zealand (2010).
3 M. Aubert et al., Pleistocene cave art from Sulawesi, Indonesia. Nature 514, 223–227 (2014).
4 M. Aubert et al., Earliest hunting scene in prehistoric art. Nature 576, 442–445 (2019).
5 J. C. A. Joordens et al., Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving. Nature 518, 228–231 (2015).
6 D. Leder et al., A 51,000-year-old engraved bone reveals Neanderthals’ capacity for symbolic behaviour. Nat. Ecol. Evol. 5,
1273–1282 (2021).
7 K. Tyl
en et al., The evolution of early symbolic behavior in Homo sapiens. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 117, 4578–4584 (2020).
8 D. Hodgson, The origin, significance, and development of the earliest geometric patterns in the archaeological record. J. Archaeol.
Sci. Rep. 24, 588–592 (2019).
9 E. Mellet, I. Colag e, A. Bender, C. S. Henshilwood, What processes sparked off symbolic representations? A reply to Hodgson and
an alternative perspective. J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep. 28, 102043 (2019).
10 E. Mellet et al., Neuroimaging supports the representational nature of the earliest human engravings. R. Soc. Open Sci. 6, 190086
(2019).
11 C. S. Henshilwood, F. d'Errico, I. Watts, Engraved ochres from the middle stone age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa. J. Hum.
Evol. 57, 27–47 (2009).
12 P.-J. Texier et al., The context, form and significance of the MSA engraved ostrich eggshell collection from Diepkloof Rock Shelter,
Western Cape, South Africa. J. Archaeol. Sci. 40, 3412–3431 (2013).
13 D. Hodgson, Decoding the Blombos engravings, shell beads and Diepkloof ostrich eggshell patterns. Camb. Archaeol. J. 24,
57–69 (2014).
Downloaded by guest on November 4, 2021
McDermott PNAS j 5 of 5
What was the first “art”? How would we know? https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2117561118You can also read
