The Origin of Humankind

by Richard Leakey

  The Upper Paleolithic essentially begins with the Aurignacian period, from 34,000 to 30,000 years ago. Although there are no known painted caves from this period, the people devoted considerable effort to making small ivory beads, presumably for decorating clothes. They also produced exquisite human and animal figures, usually carved from ivory. For instance, half a dozen tiny ivory figures of mammoths and horses have been recovered from the site of Vogelherd, in Germany. One of the horse figures is as skillfully produced a piece as can be found throughout the Upper Paleolithic. As I’ve said, music surely played an important part in these people’s lives, and a small bone flute from the Abri Blanchard, in southwestern France, is testimony to that.

  The people of the Gravettian period, from 30,000 to 22,000 years ago, were the first to manufacture clay figurines, some of which were animal and some human. Cave paintings in this period of the Upper Paleolithic are rare, but negative handprints are found in some caves, perhaps made by holding the hand up to the cave wall and blowing paint around the edges. (A slightly macabre example of this practice has been found at the site of Gargas, in the French Pyrenees, where more than two hundred prints have been counted, almost all of them missing one or more parts of fingers.) The most famous of the Gravettian innovations, however, are the female figures, often lacking facial features and lower legs. Made from clay, ivory, or calcite, and found throughout much of Europe, they have typically been called Venuses, and have been assumed to represent a continent-wide female fertility cult. Recent and more critical scrutiny, however, shows a great deal of diversity in the form of these figures, and few scholars would now argue for the fertility-cult idea.

  Cave painting, which generally captures most attention, began in the Solutrean period of the Upper Paleolithic, from 22,000 to 18,000 years ago. Other forms of artistic expression were more prominent, however. For instance, the carving of large, impressive basreliefs, often at living sites, was evidently important to the Solutreans. A wonderful example is at the site of Roc de Sers, in the Charente region of France, where large figures of horses, bison, reindeer, mountain goats, and one human were cut into the rock at the back of a shelter; some of the figures stand out six inches or so in relief.

  The final period of the Upper Paleolithic—the Magdalenian, from 18,000 to 11,000 years ago—was the era of deep-cave painting: 80 percent of all painted caves date from this period. Lascaux was painted during this time, as was Altamira, a similarly spectacular cave in the Cantabrian region of northern Spain. The Magdalenians were also talented sculptors and engravers of stone, bone, and ivory objects—some utilitarian, such as spear throwers, some not obviously so, such as “batons.” Although it is often said that the human form is a rarity in Ice Age art, in the Magdalenian period this was not the case. Mag-dalenian people at the cave of La Marche, in southwestern France, engraved more than a hundred profiles of human heads, each so individualistic as to give the impression of a portrait.

  The spectacular painted ceiling of Altamira might have forever remained undiscovered but for Maria, the young daughter of Don Marcellion de Sautuola, who owned the farm where the cave is located. One day in 1879, father and daughter explored the cave, which had been discovered a decade earlier. Maria entered a low chamber that de Sautuola had explored previously. She was “running about in the cavern and playing about here and there,” she later recalled. “Suddenly [she] made out forms and figures on the roof. . . . ‘Look, Papa, oxen,’” she cried. In the flickering light of an oil lamp, she saw what no one had seen for 17,000 years: images of two dozen bison grouped in a circle, with two horses, a wolf, three boars, and three female deer around the periphery. They were in red, yellow, and black, appearing as fresh as if they had just been painted.

  An enthusiastic amateur archeologist, Maria’s father was astonished to see what he had missed and his daughter had found, and recognized it as a great discovery. Unfortunately, the professional prehistorians of the day did not: the paintings were so bright and vital that they were considered to be the work of a recent artist. They looked too good, too realistic, too artistic to be the work of primitive minds. Instead, they must have been done by a recent itinerant artist.

  At this time, several pieces of portable art—that is, engraved and carved bone and antler—had been discovered. Prehistoric art had therefore been recognized as real. But no paintings had been accepted as ancient. Ironically, just before the images of Altamira were discovered, Leopold Chiron, a schoolteacher, found engravings on the walls in the cave of Chabot, in southwestern France. The engravings were difficult to decipher, however. Prehistorians were reluctant to accept them as evidence of Upper Paleolithic wall art. As the British archeologist Paul Bahn has observed, “Whereas the pictures of Chabot were too modest to make an impact, those of Altamira were too splendid to be believed.”

  When de Sautuola died in 1888, Altamira was still dismissed as a transparent attempt at fraud. The final acceptance of Altamira as genuinely prehistoric was brought about by a steady accumulation of similar finds, albeit of lesser impact—principally in France. Most important among these was the Cave of La Mouthe, in the Dordogne region of France. Excavations beginning in 1895 and continuing to the turn of the century revealed wall art, such as an engraved bison and several painted images. Deposits of Upper Paleolithic age covered some of these images, proving them to be ancient. Furthermore, the first example of a Paleolithic lamp, carved from sandstone, was discovered in the cave, providing a means by which cave artists could work. Professional opinion began to turn, and very soon Upper Paleolithic painting was accepted as a reality. The most famous landmark of that acceptance was a paper by Émile Carthailac, a leading opponent of the paintings’ authenticity, called “Mea Culpa d’un Sceptique,” published in 1902. “We no longer have any reason to doubt Altamira,” he wrote. Although Carthailac’s paper has become a classic example of a scientist’s admitting his mistake, its tone is actually rather grudging, and he defends his earlier skepticism.

  At first, the Ice Age paintings were viewed as “simply idle doodlings, graffiti, play activity: mindless decoration by hunters with time on their hands,” as Bahn puts it. This interpretation, he says, stems from the conception of art in contemporary France: “Art was still seen in terms of recent centuries, with their portraits, landscapes and narrative pictures. It was simply ‘art,’ its sole function was to please and to decorate.” Moreover, some influential French prehistorians were sharply anticlerical and did not like to impute religious expression to Upper Paleolithic people. This early interpretation can be seen as reasonable, especially as the first examples of art—portable objects—indeed looked simple. With the later discovery of wall art, however, this view changed. The paintings did not reflect real life, in the relative numbers of animals on the roof and on the wall; and there were enigmatic images, too, geometric signs without obvious representation.

  John Halverson, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, has recently proposed that prehistorians should return to the “art for art’s sake” interpretation. We should not expect human consciousness to emerge full-blown during our evolution, he reasons, so that the first examples of art in prehistory are likely to be simplistic because the people’s minds were cognitively simple. The Altamira paintings do look simplistic: depictions of horses, bison, and other animals appear as single individuals or sometimes as groups, but only rarely in anything that approaches a naturalistic setting. The images are accurate but devoid of context. This, says Halverson, indicates that the Ice Age artists were simply painting or engraving fragments of their environment, in the complete absence of any mythological meaning.

  I find this argument unconvincing. Just a few examples of the images of the Ice Age are sufficient to indicate that there’s more to the art than the first halting workings of the modern mind. For instance, in one of the other caves owned by Count Bégouën, the cave of Trois Frères, is an image of a human/animal chimera, known as the Sorcerer. The creature stands on its hind legs, its face tur
ned to stare out of the wall. Sporting a large pair of antlers, it seems to be made of the body parts of many different animals, including human. This is not a simple image, “unmediated by cognitive reflection,” as Halverson would have us believe. And neither is the first creature in the Hall of Bulls in Lascaux. Known as the Unicorn, the creature may be meant as a human disguised as an animal or may be a chimera. Many such drawings are sufficient to convince us that we are seeing images greatly mediated by cognitive reflection.

  Most significant, however, is that the images are more complex than Halverson implies. As I’ve indicated, the paintings and engravings are not of naturalistic scenes from the Ice Age world. There is nothing like a true landscape painting. And, to judge from the remains of animals at the living sites of these people, neither are the depictions a simple reflection of daily diet. The Upper Paleolithic painters had horses and bison on their minds, whereas they had reindeer and ptarmigan in their stomachs. The fact that some animals are far more prominent as images on cave walls than they were in the landscape is surely significant: they appear to have had a special importance to the Paleolithic people who painted them.

  The first major hypothesis to explain why Upper Paleolithic people painted what they did adduced hunting magic. At the turn of the century, anthropologists were learning that Australian aboriginal paintings were part of magical and totemic rituals designed to improve the spoils of a forthcoming hunt. In 1903, the historian of religions Salomon Reinach argued that the same could be true of Upper Paleolithic art: in both societies, paintings overrepresented a few species in relation to the natural environment. Upper Paleolithic people may have made paintings to ensure the increase of totemic and prey animals, just as the Australians were known to do.

  Henri Breuil liked Reinach’s ideas, and developed and promoted them vigorously during his long career. For almost sixty years, he recorded, mapped, copied, and counted images in the caves throughout Europe. He also developed a chronology for the evolution of art during the Upper Paleolithic. During this time, Breuil continued to interpret the art as hunting magic, as did the majority of the archeological establishment.

  An obvious problem with the hunting-magic hypothesis was that the images depicted very often did not, as noted, reflect the diet of the Upper Paleolithic painters. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once noted that in the art of the Kalahari San and the Australian aborigines certain animals were depicted most frequently not because they were “good to eat” but because they were “good to think.” When Breuil died in 1961, it was time for the emergence of a new perspective, which came from André Leroi-Gourhan, who was to become as prominent in French prehistory as Breuil had been.

  Leroi-Gourhan looked for structure in the art, seeking meaning in patterns of many images, not in individual images as Breuil had done. He conducted lengthy surveys of the painted caves and came to see repeated patterns, with certain animals “occupying” certain parts of the caves. Deer, for instance, often appeared in entranceways but were uncommon in main chambers. Horse, bison, and ox were the predominant creatures of the main chambers. Carnivores mostly occurred deep in the cave system. Moreover, some animals represented maleness, some femaleness, he said. The horse image represented maleness, and the bison femaleness; the stag and the ibex were also male; the mammoth and the ox were female. To Leroi-Gourhan, the order in the paintings reflected an ordering in Upper Paleolithic society: namely, the division between maleness and femaleness. Another French archeologist, Annette Laming-Emperaire, developed a similar concept of male-female duality. However, the two scholars often disagreed over which images represented maleness and which femaleness. This difference of opinion contributed to the eventual downfall of the scheme.

  The notion that the caves themselves might impose structure on artistic expression has recently been revived, but in a most unusual way. The French archeologists Iégor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois conducted detailed surveys of three decorated caves in the Ariège region of southwest France. Unconventionally, they were not looking for stone tools, engraved objects, or new paintings. They were singing. More specifically, they moved slowly through the caves, stopping repeatedly to test the resonance of each section. Using notes spanning three octaves, they drew up a resonance map of each cave and discovered that those areas with highest resonance were also those most likely to harbor a painting or engraving. In their report, which they published at the end of 1988, Reznikoff and Dauvois commented on the stunning impact of cave resonance, an experience that would have surely been enhanced in the flickering light of simple lamps back in the Ice Age.

  It requires little imagination to think of Upper Paleolithic people chanting incantations in front of cave paintings. The unusual nature of the images, and the fact that they are often deep in the most inaccessible parts of caves, begs the suggestion of ritual. When one stands in front of an Ice Age creation now, as I did with the bison of Le Tuc d’Audoubert, the ancient voices force themselves on one’s mind, with an accompaniment, perhaps, of drums, flutes, and whistles. Reznikoff and Dauvois’s is a fascinating discovery that, as the Cambridge University archaeologist Chris Scarre commented at the time, draws “new attention to the likely importance of music and singing in the rituals of our early ancestors.”

  When Leroi-Gourhan died in 1986, prehistorians were again ready for a major rethinking of their interpretations, just as had happened when Breuil died. These days, researchers are prepared to entertain a diversity of explanations, but in all cases the cultural context is emphasized and there is a greater awareness of the danger of imposing ideas from modern society on Upper Paleolithic society.

  Almost certainly, at least some elements of Ice Age art concerned the way Upper Paleolithic people organized their ideas about their world—an expression of their spiritual cosmos. We’ll come to this again a little later. But there may have been more practical aspects in the way they organized their social and economic worlds. Margaret Con-key, an anthropologist at the University of California, Berkeley, has suggested, for instance, that Altamira might have been a fall gathering place for many hundreds of people from the region. Red deer and limpets would have been abundant then, and this would have provided ample economic justification for such an aggregation of bands. But, as we know from modern hunter-gatherers, such aggregations, whatever the ostensible economic reason, are more for social and political alliance building than for mundane practicalities.

  The British anthropologist Robert Laden believes that he can perceive something of the structure of such alliances in the cave sites in northern Spain. The major sites, such as Altamira, are often surrounded by smaller sites within a 10-mile radius, as if they were centers of political or social alliance. The 20-mile diameter of such a sphere may represent the optimum distance over which alliances could readily be maintained. No such patterning has yet been discerned among the cave sites of France.

  Perhaps the arrangement of bison and other animal images on the painted ceiling of Altamira depicts the center’s sphere of influence in some way. The main structure of the painted ceiling consists of almost two dozen polychrome images of bison, arranged principally around the periphery. These, suggests Margaret Conkey, may represent the different groups that aggregate at the site. Significantly, the range of engraved objects that archeologists have found at Altamira seems to be a sampling of many local decorative forms. Throughout northern Spain at this time, people decorated utilitarian objects with various designs, including chevrons, lunate structures, nested curves, and so on. About fifteen such designs have been identified, each of which tends to be geographically restricted, suggesting local styles or band identities. At Altamira, many of these local styles are found together, hence the argument for an aggregation site of some social and political importance. So far, no such evidence has been uncovered at Lascaux. It is reasonable, however, to think of the site as having considerable importance to people over a wide area, rather than as the local product of enthusiastic painters. Perhaps Lascaux der
ived its power as the location of an important spiritual event, such as the appearance of a deity in the Upper Paleolithic cosmos. Such is the case with many otherwise sterile parts of the environment for the Australian aborigines, for example.

  I’ve already said that the images in Ice Age art are of animals plucked from their ecological context, and in proportions that do not represent their occurrence in the real world. This in itself tells us something of the enigmatic nature of the art. In addition to the representational images, however, there are other markings that are even more enigmatic: a scattering of geometric patterns—or signs, as they have been called. They include dots, grids, chevrons, curves, zigzags, nested curves, and rectangles, and are among the most puzzling elements of Upper Paleolithic art. For the most part, they have been explained as components of whatever hypothesis prevailed, in hunting magic, for instance, or the maleness/femaleness dichotomy. David Lewis-Williams has recently offered a new and interesting interpretation: they are the telltale signs of shamanistic art, he says—images from a mind in the state of hallucination.

  Lewis-Williams has studied the art of the San people of southern Africa for four decades. Much of their art dates back to perhaps 10,000 years ago, but some was created within recent historical memory. Gradually, he came to realize that the images of San art were not simpleminded presentations of San life, as Western anthropologists had long assumed. Instead, they were the product of shamans in a state of trance: the images were a connection with a shamanistic spirit world and were depictions of what the shaman saw during his hallucination. At one point in his studies, Lewis-Williams and his colleague Thomas Dowson interviewed an old woman who lived in the Tsolo district of the Transkei. The daughter of a shaman, she described some of the now-vanished shamanistic rituals.

  Shamans may induce trance in themselves by various techniques, including drugs and hyperventilation, she said. However it was achieved, the trance state was almost always accompanied by the rhythmic singing, dancing, and clapping of groups of women. As the trance deepens, the shamans begin to tremble, their arms and bodies vigorously vibrating. While visiting the spirit world, the shaman often “dies,” bending over as if in pain. The eland is a potent force in San mythology, and the shaman may use blood from cuts in the neck and throat of the animal to infuse potency into someone by rubbing it into cuts on the person’s neck and throat. Later, the shaman often uses some of the same blood while painting a record of his hallucinatory contact with the spirit world. The images have a potency of their own, derived from the context in which they were painted, and the old woman told Lewis-Williams that some of the power could be acquired by placing one’s hand on them.