Art and Early Humans: Shamans At Work

On seeing a piece of art, we consciously or unconsciously attempt to transport ourselves into the world of the person who made it, trying to understand the specific creative impulses, motivations and social environment that encouraged them to express themselves in this manner. In the case of prehistoric civilisations that have left behind very little documentary evidence, their art and artefacts become important clues to interpreting what their lives and thought processes were like. For example, a vulture bone flute recently found in a cave in Germany, dating back to the Modern Palaeolithic era and the origins of Homo sapiens as a species, seems to indicate that early humans valued music as a means of communication and social bonding. 

Cro-Magnon humans of this historical era were also the originators of the mysterious cave art across rock walls in places like Lascaux and Altamira in Europe, after their drift from out of Africa. In fact, as David Lewis-Williams writes in his book The Mind in the Cave, music, art and culture seem to have been the main factors that separated Cro-Magnons from their Neanderthal neighbours who may have also seen these more advanced elements of Homo sapiens culture, but lacked the capacity to understand them fully. 

The question is, what were the specific psychological and historical circumstances that combined in early humans' artistic abilities? For many years this was studied from a behaviourist approach, and from the perspective of early human society. Some archaeologists suggested that humans had developed various aspects of culture merely because they were pleasing to the senses, and this pleasure had provided positive reinforcement for them to continue with these practices. For example, one person might have blown into a hollow bone one day and found the sound pleasing, leading to the widespread development of bone flutes like the one found in Germany. The explanation of art for art's sake has also been suggested by archaeologists such as John Halverson.

Another viewpoint was that these artistic creations were instrumental to larger economic concerns of the group, such as a successful hunt. Thus, it was suggested, people may have drawn aurochs and bison on the walls of Lascaux as a votive offering, praying that the hunt would be successful and they would actually be able to capture these animals. Art may also have promoted social cohesion.

However, in The Mind in The Cave, Lewis-Williams presents a somewhat different hypothesis, based on the neurological evolution that occurred in Homo sapiens relative to the Cro-Magnons. He cites examples of cave art among the San tribe in Africa, and other cave paintings in the Western U.S., to show that these cave paintings were perhaps shamanistic in origin. 

While in trances or dreamlike states, the shamans had visions that they recorded on the walls of the caves, which represented the boundary or the membrane between reality and the world they had seen in the trance. The Homo sapiens artists and shamans were, thus, like the philosophers in Plato's cave, who had seen the world beyond and were now attempting to draw what they saw, for the benefit of themselves and others. 

The representations of the animals were not just sketches of the world around them or votives for a successful hunt. Each of them had a specific symbolic meaning, related to beliefs surrounding these shamanic states; for example, the Numic shamans in Western America were said to have killed themselves when they entered the shamanic realm, and this was reflected in the rock art they made, in which the shaman's representation, a bighorn sheep, had its tail erect in death. Shamanic images also included hallucinations of flight or being underwater.

With regard to this, Lewis-Williams raises the interesting possibility that the development of art in Cro-Magnon people was the result of evolution of the brain and the visual cortex. The impact this had on humans' ability to create art was extraordinary. They were able to enter into various states of consciousness, such as trances and dreams, that were unavailable to their ancestors, and had the capacity to record, remember and reproduce images and scenes they had seen in these trances. This reproduction was also selective, indicating that they could filter out various visual stimuli based on social cues.

For example, among indigenous people of what is now Southern California, boys and girls went through an initiation ceremony during which they entered a trance with the help of hallucinogens, ran to a rock and made various paintings on it. While both genders must have experienced similar visual phenomena, the girls were taught to selectively draw zigzags and diamonds, and the boys circles and curved lines. In this manner, they were taught to filter out those stimuli that were not relevant to their social position. This, in itself, showed significant neurological development in comparison to the Neanderthals. Lewis-Williams also adds that this development was supported by the development of spoken language and by human migration.

While this theory of the development of art and symbolic representation is certainly interesting, it has been countered by others. The art historian E.H. Gombrich argued that art is linked to tradition and cannot have been created by an ‘innocent eye’ or an ‘original genius,’ which means that the first people who made cave art cannot have been acting solely on the basis of visions; they must have had some previous experience of art and artistic expression to guide them. Furthermore, any study of the history of art must confine itself to those materials that still exist, and it is likely that the pictures that hold the origins of art may have been done not on imperishable rock, but on less durable materials that have long since been lost to time.

Image credits: By © Traumrune / Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65512017