When watching Cave of Forgotten Dreams, I was struck by the beauty of the wall paintings inside the Chauvet Cave. My preconceived assumptions about prehistoric cave art were that it consisted mainly of crude and simple drawings. I was amazed by the detail and expression exhibited by the paintings in the cave. The art appeared to be quite sophisticated and advanced. The paintings presented illusions of movement, and the artists used the features of the cave to add depth, direction, and symbolism. The artists even went as far as scraping away portions of the cave wall to create a smooth working surface. The art sparked my interest, so I decided to learn more about art from that time period and the people who created it.
The majority of the art in the Chauvet Cave is believed to be about 30,000 to 32,000 years old, which aligns it with the Aurignacian archaeological culture. The Aurignacian lasted from about 40,000 to 28,000 years ago, and is believed to be when anatomically modern humans began to spread throughout Europe. Aurignacian culture was present in many areas across Europe, including modern-day Germany, Austria, Spain, and France. The Aurignacian marks a transition to from simple works of art to more advanced creations, including small detailed sculptures made of bone, ivory, and clay. The paintings in Chauvet Cave are so advanced that some scholars believed them to be only 12,000 to 17,000 years old.
The Aurignacian is also characterized by advancement in tool making, specifically flint knapping methods. It is also characterized by the appearance of many new types of tools. Hunters in this time period made their projectile heads out of ivory, bone, and antler. It is believed that Aurignacian humans also used bone and ivory to make jewelry, such as bracelets and necklaces.
Thinking about the sophistication of the art in the Chauvet Cave and my preconceptions about cave art reminded me of our discussion about the trends present in all of the alternative theories about the origins of the pyramids in Egypt. For some reason, we sometimes assume that ancient peoples were too primitive to create great works of art or engineering. In the past, when I thought about people creating cave art, I pictured Neanderthals drawing rudimentary stick figures on the walls. I assumed that most cave art was simple and crude, and was amazed to see how advanced the paintings in Chauvet Cave were. In fact, they are probably more sophisticated than any work of art I could create. I had no idea cave artists could have been very much like us. These misconceptions speak to the general public’s lack of education about the development of human culture, and show how important it is to learn about our development as a species.
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/fr/arcnat/chauvet/en/index.html
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/43368/Aurignacian-culture