Seán Burke
Appearances
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
This is a very common misconception about cave art is that it's always depicting hunting scenes and you might imagine little stick figures with their spears sort of chasing after animals that might be behind what we've got on the image here. But that's actually not what a lot of cave art is. Humans are very rare in Paleolithic art.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Yeah, so I think what they're doing is trying to capture kind of animal behaviours and something about the animals that communicates some sort of meaning or importance to their society.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
What they tend to be using is ochre and ochre comes in a few different shades. So we have red ochre is a very common one, yellow ochre, browns and sort of purple hues too. And then they're using charcoal as a black pigment and also manganese oxide as well as a black pigment. But that is kind of it.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Yeah. What they are using is sort of water or clay to kind of mix this into a paint. Also animal fat to create a thicker sort of paint mixture that then they will mix it up and then put it on the walls. They can also just use it without that, like a crayon and just draw directly on the walls.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Yeah, stick on the cable better, but also it makes your pigment go further too. And possibly saliva is the only bodily fluid that we know that they're probably using in this. So some of the hand stencils that we mentioned earlier, the way that they're made is by spraying ochre from the mouth. Oh. onto the hand. Sometimes they might have used a tool, like a little tube, a bird bone or something.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Yeah, or just directly from the mouth. So there's some ideas that maybe they're just putting the powder in their mouths, mixing it with saliva to create the paint and then spitting it on their hands.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Absolutely. And if you'll indulge me, we can enter a cave. Imagine ourselves in a cave. Yeah, there we go. Tens of thousands of years ago. So we start to notice these unusual echoing acoustics to the space around us. We're in complete darkness and we hear this flicker of our firelight that's illuminating the space around us.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So the firelight's sort of dancing across the walls, lighting up these unusual stalagmites and stalactites and undulating surfaces. And we might even tactically engage with the space around us, feel the sort of smooth flowstone or the rough surfaces of the cave wall.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So all of these sensory experiences would have been embedded in the making and experience of this art. And recently in archaeology, we've been appreciating these sensory experiences in what's kind of a sensory turn in our interpretation.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So we're trying to appreciate how these different dynamics, the acoustics, the firelight, the tactile interactions would have enriched the art that they're making. And for me, especially firelight is really an amazing way of imagining this art in a new light. So I didn't intend to have a pun there. So this unpredictable light source is probably kind of animating the art in some way.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
If we look back on the panel of the lions here, we can imagine as the flickering light is dancing across this. We see one lion and then the next and it creates this sort of animation effect to the art. And this warm light also makes us feel more sociable, comfortable as well. So all of this is really, like, enriching this experience of the art and the art making.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon of seeing meaningful forms in random patterns. And this is something that everyone experiences. So it's that phenomenon of if you look at a cloud and you see it looking like a face or a rabbit or a dog or whatever, that's all pareidolia. What some of my research has focused on is trying to understand how pareidolia influenced the making of cave art.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So we think that maybe the flickering sort of firelight enriched this experience of pareidolia and then they're drawing sort of what they're seeing on the cave wall.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
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
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
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.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
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.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So you have different populations of people coming together. And then they're producing art. Maybe that's like
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
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
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
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.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Yeah, well, it's kind of Sean's first interpretation. They were just bored and doing it. It's what we call this art for art's sake approach. idea. So maybe it didn't mean anything. They're just bored and doodling on the walls. I don't agree with that one. I think it's a lot to invest. If you're just bored, you can do other things, right? And not go into a deep cave.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
There's lots of ideas about shamanism and ritual. Yeah, that's a very common interpretation.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So we've talked a lot about the people who made cave art, how they lived, where they lived, and maybe even what they used the art for, right? And we've discussed that maybe other species were engaging in making cave art too. But when we imagine a cave artist, what do we see? We tend to imagine these were adults engaging in this behavior.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
And this is really a problem in archaeology more broadly, but especially when we're dealing with this period. But we know, or we should know, that children were around at this period too. And so we must be seeing some children's behaviours in the archaeological record as well.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So there have been some studies looking at the anatomical measurements of hand stencils or traces left by the fingers, we call those finger flutings, that have demonstrated that children were there alongside adults making this art. So this adds a whole new dimension to understanding cave arts.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So what we thought was actually an adult activity exclusively, we know that children are actively participating in and probably been taught the importance of this as a way to preserve knowledge in the society. But in my recent research, I've also shown some evidence of children kind of doing their own thing with cave art, which I think is really cool, too.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So I looked at a panel from Las Monedas Cave in Spain. And this is a group of drawings that was previously interpreted as a panel of enigmatic signs, which is archaeology speak for we don't know, but it's very weird. It's quite low to the ground, the original Paleolithic cave floor. It consists of lots of sort of concentric circles and random lines that intersect each other.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
And this is all characteristic of very young children's marks. So I've made the argument that this is children, very young children making this art.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Oh, way off. Exactly. So the start of the Paleolithic, this period that we call the Paleolithic, is around 3.3 million years ago. So that's defined by when our hominin ancestors first start using stone tools. And then it goes all the way until 12,000 years ago. So it's a huge stretch of time. And we split that into three chunks. So we talk about the lower Paleolithic period.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
This is 3 million-ish years ago to about 300,000 years ago. Then we have the middle Paleolithic period that goes from 300,000 years ago to about 50,000 years ago. And then the upper Paleolithic period from about 50,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago. So we're talking about chunks of really long periods of time.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Almost all of the art that we know about comes from that end period, the upper Paleolithic period. The Upper Paleolithic period, the start of that is defined by Homo sapiens kind of entering Europe. And then Neanderthals are starting to die out in this period between 50,000 to maybe 40,000, 35,000 years ago, where Neanderthals are kind of declining in population.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
I mean, there's lots of different theories about this. Everything from climate change to, you know, Homo sapiens being superior to... My personal theory is that it's just we start to get a lot of interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals at this time. So it could just be that, I mean, they're part of us now. Their population becomes part of the broader Homo sapiens.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Before we discover cave art, the first kind of evidence of art from this period that we find is from 1864. So it comes from a site called La Madeleine in France, and it was discovered by Latté and Christie. And it's this piece of mammoth ivory that has like a beautiful kind of engraving of a mammoth on it.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
And this was not only exciting for being the first art from this period, but it was the first solid evidence that humans existed alongside these ancient animals that
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
The first site that was kind of identified as Paleolithic was Altamira. So this was discovered in 1879 by Marsilio Sanz de Sautula. He was kind of excavating and recording parts of the cave. It's a stain, isn't it? In Spain, yeah, sorry. Yeah, in Spain. And as he was doing this, his daughter was bored and playing, and she'd come across the bison, the famous bison ceiling of Altamira.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
So this is really beautiful polychrome, so they're using multiple colors, depictions of bison that are on the ceiling of Altamira. Sansa Sautola had this amazing discovery at Altamira Cave. And he wrote this up in 1880. And then Filanova y Piera, who was a professor at the University of Madrid, he then presented this discovery at a conference in, I think, 1881.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
And when he does that, people just can't believe that this was Paleolithic. They'd been warned about people making forgeries and wanting to debunk this idea of the Paleolithic being a period. So they wouldn't accept that this was Paleolithic.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
I don't know. And it wasn't until 1902 and more kind of discoveries of cave art were emerging at this time that eventually Emile Cartelac writes this apology called Mia Culpa ad un Skeptic. So, you know.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Yeah, my bad. He accepts the legitimacy of Altamira. Unfortunately, this was after... Sans de Sartre had passed away, so he never got to see his sign accepted as authentic.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
We have Kresol Crags in Derbyshire. That's actually the northernmost example of cave art that we have. And we also find other examples of Paleolithic art from other sites as far east as sort of Ukraine and Russia, throughout Europe, actually.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Yeah. So the oldest example we have of Homo sapiens making art comes from Blombos Cave in South Africa. And it's a small piece of ochre. So ochre is usually used for drawing on cave walls, right? But it's just a piece of ochre that is engraved with patterns of lines. And we have a few examples of these. And they date from between 100,000 years ago to 75,000 years ago from this site.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Yeah, so this is known as the Sulawesi warty pig. Harsh. I know. Okay, wow.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
It's from Sulawesi in Indonesia, and it's been dated to at least 45,500 years ago. But we haven't had anything quite like this from anywhere else in the world. It changes how we understand kind of the beginnings of art.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
Yeah. My personal feeling is that it's exactly like you said, Greg, it's these multiple origins. Like it's something innate in us that likes to create, likes to make things. And the other evidence that suggests that it's not just a singularity.
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
origin but possibly a few multiple different origins is we're not the only species to be making art we now know that Neanderthals were doing it too so we have evidence of Neanderthals also producing cave art ornamenting their bodies they're making shell beads too and probably painting their bodies as well
You're Dead to Me
Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)
No, the most common animals that people are drawing are the ones that they're hunting. The most common are deer. So you got that one. Tink. Yeah. Bison. Ibex, so mountain goat. That sort of thing. Horses, I think. Horses, yeah. I knew I was missing one.