Why Did Humans in the Upper Paleolithic Era Create Art
Paleolithic Cavern Fine art
Archeological discoveries across a wide swath of Europe (especially southern French republic and northern Kingdom of spain) include over two hundred caves with spectacular paintings, drawings, and sculpture that are amongst the primeval undisputed examples of representational image-making. Paintings and engravings along the caves' walls and ceilings fall under the category of parietal art .
The most mutual themes in cavern paintings are big wild animals, such as bison, horses, aurochs , and deer. Tracings of human hands and hand stencils were also very pop, too as abstract patterns called finger flutings. The species establish about frequently were suitable for hunting by humans, but were not necessarily the typical casualty plant in associated bone deposits. For example, the painters of Lascaux, France left mainly reindeer bones, but this species does non announced at all in the cave paintings; equine species are the most common. Drawings of humans were rare and were usually schematic as opposed to the detailed and naturalistic images of animals.
The pigments used appear to be ruby and yellow ochre , manganese or carbon for black, and china clay for white. Some of the color may have been mixed with fat. The paint was applied by finger, chewed sticks, or fur for brushes. Sometimes the silhouette of the beast was incised in the rock first, and in some caves, many of the images were only engraved in this fashion, taking them out of a strict definition of "cavern painting."(4)
Main Examples of Cave Paintings: France and Kingdom of spain
Lascaux (circa 15,000 BCE), in southwestern France, is an interconnected series of caves with one of the most impressive examples of creative creations past Paleolithic humans.
Discovered in 1940, the cave contains nearly two one thousand figures, which can be grouped into 3 main categories animals, homo figures, and abstract signs. Over nine hundred images depict animals from the surrounding areas, such as horses, stags, aurochs, bison, lions, bears, and birds species that would take been hunted and eaten, and those identified as predators. The paintings incorporate no images of the surrounding landscape or the vegetation of the time.
The Chauvet–Pont–d'Arc Cavern (circa 30,000 BCE) in the Ard'che department of southern France contains some of the earliest known paintings, besides as other evidence of Upper Paleolithic life. The Chauvet Cave is uncharacteristically large, and the quality, quantity, and status of the artwork found on its walls have been called spectacular. Hundreds of beast paintings have been catalogued, depicting at least 13 different species not but the familiar herbivores that predominate Paleolithic cave art, but besides many predatory animals, such as cave lions, panthers, bears, and cave hyenas.
As is typical of most cave fine art, there are no paintings of complete homo figures in Chauvet. There are a few panels of red ochre hand prints and hand stencils made past spitting pigment over hands pressed confronting the cave surface. Abstract markings lines and dots are establish throughout the cave.
The artists who produced these unique paintings used techniques rarely found in other cavern art. Many of the paintings appear to take been made after the walls were scraped articulate of debris and concretions, leaving a smoother and noticeably lighter area upon which the artists worked. Similarly, a three-dimensional quality and the suggestion of movement are achieved by incising or etching around the outlines of certain figures. The art besides includes scenes that were complex for its time animals interacting with each other. For instance, a pair of wooly rhinoceroses are seen butting horns in an apparent contest for territory or mating rights.(4)
Spain
Altamira (circa 18,000 BCE) is a cave in northern Kingdom of spain famous for its Upper Paleolithic cave paintings featuring drawings and polychrome rock paintings of wild mammals and homo hands. The cavern has been declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
The long cave consists of a series of twisting passages and chambers. Human occupation was limited to the cave mouth, although paintings were created throughout the length of the cave. The artists used polychromy charcoal and ochre or haematite to create the images, often diluting these pigments to produce variations in intensity , creating an impression of chiaroscuro . They besides exploited the natural contours in the cave walls to give their subjects a three-dimensional effect.
Similar all prehistoric art, the purpose of these paintings remains obscure. In recent years, new research has suggested that the Lascaux paintings may comprise prehistoric star charts. Some anthropologists and fine art historians too conjecture that the paintings could be an account of past hunting success, or they could represent a mystical ritual to meliorate hereafter hunting endeavors. An alternative theory, broadly based on ethnographic studies of contemporary hunter-gatherer societies, is that the paintings pertained to shamanism.(4)
Venus Figurines
"Venus figurines" is an umbrella term for a number of prehistoric statuettes of women that have been plant mostly in Europe, merely besides in Asia and Siberia, dating from the Upper Paleolithic. These figures are all quite small-scale, between iv and 25 cm tall, and carved mainly in steatite, limestone, bone, or ivory. These sculptures are collectively described as "Venus" figurines in reference to the Roman goddess of beauty, as early historians assumed they represented an ideal of beauty from the fourth dimension.
The Venus figurines have sometimes been interpreted as representing a mother goddess; the abundance of such female imagery has led some to believe that Upper Paleolithic (and later Neolithic) societies had a female-centered organized religion and a female-dominated social club. Various other explanations for the purpose of the figurines take been proposed, such as the hypothesis that the figurines were created as cocky-portraits of actual women.
Venus figures are characterized past shared stylistic features, such as an oval shape, large belly, broad-prepare thighs, big breasts, and the typical absence of arms and feet. Hundreds of these sculptures take been found both in open-air settlements and caves. The Venus of Hohle Fels, a six cm figure of a adult female carved from a mammoth's tusk, was discovered in Deutschland'southward Hohle Fels cave in 2008 and represents 1 of the earliest institute sculptures of this type.
Additionally, the Venus of Willendorf is a particularly famous example of the Venus figure. While initially thought to exist symbols of fertility, or of a fertility goddess, the true significance of the Venus figure remains obscure, as does much of prehistoric fine art.(v)
Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-fscj-earlyhumanities/chapter/paleolithic-cave-art/
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