by Mike Pengelly
A lecture given to the Society on 16th November 2024
Mike Pengelly started his talk by explaining the importance of prehistoric art; the fact that art sets humans apart from other animals. ‘Art is one of the things that makes us uniquely human’, said Mike. Art is evidence of early human culture, showing as it does expressions of beliefs or actions. It is also evidence of the human capacity for symbolic thought, by using symbols to represent beliefs and ideas. In short, prehistoric art shows that early humans were artistic, creative, intelligent and had a spiritual dimension… just like us!
We looked at a map of Ice Age art sites, ranging across Europe and Eurasia, with Cresswell Crags in England the most northerly site. Mike told us of the three types of prehistoric art forms; portable, petroglyphs (carved into rock) and pictograms (painted on cave walls).
Starting with portable art, we looked at the Mask of la Roche-Cotard, made about 70,000 years ago. The Mask is a flint, 10.5 cm wide, that had been worked to make it look more like a face. Through a hole behind the ‘nose’, an animal bone had been positioned so that its protruding ends resembled eyes. The Neanderthal creator of the Mask had inserted flint flakes to hold the bone in position.
The Venus of Hohle Fels, small enough to hide in a fist, is at 40,000 years old, the oldest sculpture of a human being so far found. Figures like these, of women with large breasts, a prominent ‘mummy tummy’, genitalia clearly marked, and with little or incomplete representations of arms, legs, and sometimes even the head, became known as Venus figures in the mid- nineteenth century. The Marquis de Vibraye, on finding an ivory figure, named it Venus Impudica, ‘immodest Venus’, presumably comparing it to Botticelli’s Venus, who modestly covers herself in his painting, “The Birth of Venus”.
A carved ivory plate, about 32,000 years old, was found in Geißenklösterle cave, Germany, and is known as “The Adorant”. On one side a human figure reaches arms upwards ‘adoringly’, but it may also represent the constellation Orion. On the other side is a series of 88 notches. 32,000 years ago, this was approximately the number of days when Orion disappeared from view each year; leaving the night sky before the spring equinox and returning before the summer solstice.
We looked at other examples of portable art including musical instruments, such as a 32,000-year-old bone flute, and an elaborately decorated Magdalenian ‘bullroarer’. A perforated conch shell was shown to have been used to spray pigment on cave walls, but could also have made musical sounds.
Moving on to petroglyphs, we looked at the earliest traces of human life in India; the Bhimbetka Petroglyphs, dating to 290,000-700,000 BC. Carved into sandstone walls are more than 500 cupules, ranging in shape from circular to roughly triangular, and in size from about 6cm to 1.6cm across. They do not show any definite patterns, but pseudo-patterns have been suggested.
In France, dated to 60,000 BC, is a child’s grave capped with a stone in which 18 cupules had been carved. It is thought that the La Ferrassie cupules may represent the last few remaining members of a Neanderthal tribe. Mike pointed out that while we all have some Neanderthal DNA, the Neanderthals as a distinct species died out, possibly from inbreeding within small tribal groups, which can cause sterility.
We looked at a Venus figure carved on the wall of a rock shelter in the Dordogne, France, about 25,000 years ago. The female figure holds a bison horn with 13 notches, thought to represent the number of lunar months and/or menstrual cycles in one year. Britain’s most famous Ice Age art is found in the caves at Cresswell Crags, Nottinghamshire. Here, lovely engravings of animals and birds, as well as geometric signs, were carved on rock walls about 14,000 years ago.
Moving onto pictographs, we looked at many beautiful paintings of animals in the caves at Altamira, Spain, from 22,000 years ago, and at Peche Merle, France, from 25,000 years ago. From the island of Sulawesi,Indonesia, dated to 44,000 years ago, comes a possible first example of a narrative scene, telling a story of hunters killing a very large, in relation to the human figures, animal.
Mike talked about the research that had been done, trying to find meaning and purpose in prehistoric art. Many Venus figures had been studied with regard to fertility and education, as had the apparently female and male signs found at Lascaux Cave, France.
We looked at a diagram entitled ‘The Geometric Signs of Ice Age Europe’. These 32 signs; circles, quadrangles, spirals, triangles, etc., as well as more complex signs such as penniforms, scalariforms, and tetriforms, were drawn on cave walls over a period of 30,000 years. These non-figurative images each had their own pattern of use, suggesting that they were drawn with purpose, and had meaning to their creators. The 32 von Petzinger signs have since been found all over the world, possibly suggesting early humans had a common language and/or a proto-writing system.
In January 2023, a paper with the intriguing title of ‘An Upper Palaeolithic Proto-writing System and Phenological Calendar?’ was published online by Cambridge University Press. Briefly, dots, lines and Y- signs painted near particular animals, were thought to give seasonal information about these species, which could be of use to people coming to live and hunt in the area in the future. Lines and dots were thought to represent lunar months counting from late spring, and together with the animal depictions, were thought to be ‘the first known writing in the history of Homo sapiens.’
Gargas Cave, France, containing 114 negative handprints with missing digits, is well known, and there have been many bizarre suggestions for the cause of the so-called ‘mutilated’ hands. However, a recent study showed that of 32 possible digit patterns, just 10 are represented in the cave, all of which can be made by simply bending the fingers down on a raised hand, suggesting that they represented a sign language. The many examples at Gargas Cave may have been created for educational purposes, possibly as a teaching aid.
Mike suggested possibilities for the purposes of Ice Age art, such as ‘decoration, sympathetic magic, depicting reality, teaching aid, recording history, initiation, fertility, religion’ or reasons ‘beyond our comprehension’. I look forward to further research to find evidence of how our ancestors lived and communicated with each other.
report by Joan Burrow-Newton