Fire, Shelter, and...Art? Paleolithic Painting as an Act of Early Survival
- ashleymingus1
- Jun 15
- 5 min read
Over thirty-thousand years ago, the first humans figured out that they needed a few essential things to survive life on this harsh planet. Most are self evident: a semi-dependable source of food and water, shelter from the elements, including the warmth of fire, and a tribe in which to move and protect one another.
But at this time in history, in our species' very infancy, our ancestors devoted precious time and energy they could hardly spare to another task: painting.
Stamping horses, furry bison, leaping deer --- these animals seem to quite literally jump off the walls of caves in modern-day Europe: Altamira, Spain, Lascaux, France, Chauvet, and many others worldwide boast still-tangible outlines of shapes impressed upon cave walls by human hands more than 30,000 years ago. For reasons we are still trying to deduce, early humans saw this practice ---taking materials from the earth around them to depict true-to-life forms --- as an essential one. And we are still doing it today. It seems creation is embedded into our DNA.
Here are three things you might not have known about Paleolithic painting:
Location, Location, Location
When you think of cave paintings, you might envision a vast, smooth stretch of stone covered in figures sitting right inside the mouth of a cave, the better to see by natural light and accessible to any who wished to participate in painting or studying the scene. What we find instead is that much of our ancestors' early work is vastly inaccessible. Someone who lived over 15,000 years ago near modern-day Lascaux, for example, decided to descend down a sixteen-foot shaft at the back of a dark cave armed with a single stone animal-fat lamp and a handful of pigment powder to paint a bird-headed man beside a bison.
What on earth was this man or woman thinking?
The remote nature of this painting is not unusual. Paleolithic painters seem to have sought out the most inaccessible parts of these areas for their artistic expression. Winding their way through near-total darkness, squeezing through narrow passages of craggy rock, and working by the flickering flames of small lamps hardly sounds like a job for the faint of heart. Their location, therefore, suggests that these images were not intended for common use or even meant for most people to see. Were they sites of esoteric ritual, perhaps? Did these inaccessible areas serve as a liminal space between the worlds of the living and the dead? Were only the most skilled, the bravest, allowed back in these prehistoric rooms?
And then there is the location of these images on the walls and ceilings themselves. At Altamira, early humans painted herds of stamping bison over 12,000 years ago, and not just on the flat part of the wall either. Paleolithic people used the physical topography of the cave walls to make their painted animals come to life. Outcroppings of rock serve to make some of the bison almost three-dimensional, even give texture to their painted hair. This amazing attention to physical detail is striking, especially considering that whenever humans are depicted next to animals in these scenes, they are simple stick figures. The animals take center stage along with their distinctive coats, their herd formations, even their mating practices.
Were humans depicting animals they hoped to hunt, as an act of sympathetic magic? While historians used to think that these paintings depicted a sort of "wishful thinking" for an abundance of food, further study revealed that most animals depicted were not those killed for meals --- woolly rhinoceros and horses, among others, were not part of the Paleo diet.
You can't go wrong with red.
Cave paintings were made with, as one could guess, pigments made from the most abundantly available materials in the area, namely black plant carbon or manganese oxide and red hematite iron ore. But something astounding is evidenced in these paintings: early humans didn't simply pick up a handful of minerals from the earth and smear them on the walls to see what stuck. Evidence shows the treatment of these minerals to form color that would better stick to the walls. People extracted these colors from the natural world, washing and refining them into powders that were then mixed with vegetable oils or animal fats before being applied carefully to their chosen sites in specific shapes that reflect startlingly accurate details of bison, bears, and other animal forms. Early painters show a considered, deliberate thoughtfulness and attention paid to their material and its staying power.
As a color, red is one of civilization's earliest and most primal. It is the color of both life and death --- the color of the blood that races through our veins or drains out of us, and the animals we rely on for sustenance. It is the color of fire, of warmth and life, of the sun, of our vital organs, of passion and fertility. In many cultures, the word for "color" has its roots in the name for "red" (Colorado, anyone?). Besides being an abundant pigment, was the color of these animals meant to invoke their life cycles which powered that of humans? Why were some figures done in reds and yellows while others are black?
Art as Time Travel
Not all the layers of images we see in the same cave were painted at the same point in time. According to dating practices, the spotted black horses at Pech Merle cave were made about 27,000 years ago while black outlines of human hands above their backs were added about 10,000 years later. This means that when the man or woman who stumbled upon this cave painting around 15,000 BCE saw the horses, they were already ancient. Did he or she leave their mark, in the form of the handprint, as a Paleolithic "I was here"?
When we engage with any sort of human language or sign-making by responding with work of our own (a process called ekphrasis), we are in essence communing with that artist in a shared statement of personhood. We are saying, "I see what you've done here, and I too wish to make my mark." Whether created today or 10,000 years ago, art allows us to reach out to each other across time in a shared experience of our deepest, most fundamental levels of humanity.
So, were cave paintings linked to early humans' survival?
It is tempting to see these images, as stated above, as scenes of "wishful thinking" on the part of Paleolithic hunters trying to depict an abundance of animals that they wished to find or follow. But the presence of non-hunted animals like horses, ibexes, and rhinoceros seem to refute this claim as a universal truth. Why then was it so important to depict them, and in such hard-to-reach places, when every ounce of human energy was going towards eating, making fire, fighting predators, populating the tribe, and generally not dying?
Why did our ancestors place painting on the level of life-affirming survival activities?
Were these images used in rituals or proto-religions? Are they instructions or educational tools? Were they meant to invoke animal spirits? Or is there simply some innate, human need to fashion the external world into something new that has not existed before? Whatever the reason, it's in our blood, our history, our very natures.
We are still painting, sculpting, creating to this day, some 27,025 years later.
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