Greg Jenner is joined in the Palaeolithic era by Dr Isobel Wisher and comedian Seán Burke to learn about cave art.Tens of thousands of years ago, human ancestors all over the world began drawing and painting on cave walls, carving figurines, and even decorating their own bodies. Although archaeologists have known about Palaeolithic art since the late 19th century, cutting-edge scientific techniques are only now helping to uncover the secrets of these paintings and the artists who created them.From a warty pig painted on a cave wall in Indonesia, to a comic strip-like depiction of lions chasing bison in France, this episode explores the global phenomenon of cave art, and asks why humans have always felt the need to express their creative side.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Jon Norman Mason Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook
How does cave art reflect human survival and culture?
Yeah, kind of. So we experience a lot of face pareidolia. So we see faces everywhere. But if you imagine that you're a hunter-gatherer living in the Paleolithic, you're not encountering many other humans. They're living in quite sparse populations. But what you are focusing your attention on is animals. So you're tracking migrating herds across the landscape. You have to be attuned to sort of
If a bison is going to leap out and attack you or something, you have to really be paying attention to these subtle visual cues of animals. So my little pet theory is then where we see faces all the time, they're seeing animals all the time. And that might account for why animals are such a dominant theme in Paleolithic art.
Fascinating, isn't it? Yeah. I'm going to drag us back a little bit more towards form and function, a little bit of, like, why might this art have been so important to people? Sean, I mean, we've already talked about, like, hunting manual. Are there any other theories you might want to chuck out as to why people would spend such time and effort doing art? It's something to do, really.
I think the one I would pitch more seriously would be when you get people around a campfire and they start telling stories. And I've had this on an archaeology dig. You get people around a campfire from different backgrounds. They don't all speak the same language. Sometimes art is quite useful. So is there anything in that?
I definitely think so. And this is actually one theory that people have had, particularly about these very big caves and the famous caves like Lascaux or Altamira, is that maybe these are aggregation sites. So we're dealing with mobile hunter-gatherer populations. And for most of the year, they're sort of off doing their thing. But maybe they come together seasonally, aggregate in one spot.
So you have different populations of people coming together. And then they're producing art. Maybe that's like
a way of reinforcing sort of community bonds and and connecting with these people that you haven't seen in a long time or yeah it could be that they need a common language and that's bison you know wow yeah that's great that's visual storytelling you know it's a it's show don't tell truly sure it's a very ancient principle it turns out isn't it you know
There's also this idea that it's a way to exchange information. You know, some people have been off in Germany and they've seen something there and they need to communicate it efficiently.
So, OK, so I'm pushing the kind of communication functionality. Are there any other theories that you want to name check, even if you don't agree with them?
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