In fact, and in several interesting passages, Leroi-Gourhan addressed this issue directly. He acknowledges that structuralism does lead to a hypothesis of unvarying form and function for caves as sanctuaries throughout the history of Paleolithic parietal art. But given this constancy of structure, he then argues, how could we untangle chronology except by the hope (and expectation) that styles used to paint the constant symbols will change in a systematic way through time? A bison may always represent the female moiety, and may always occupy the same position within a cave—but artists may learn to paint bisons better through time. Leroi-Gourhan writes:
The same content persists from first to last. The pairing of animal species with signs appears in the Aurignacian [the first period of cave art] and disappears in the terminal Magdalenian [the last period]. Consequently, the ideological unity of cave art rules out the guideposts that it might provide for us had there been changes in the basic themes. Only variations in the representation of this uniform subject matter are discernible in the course of a stylistic study.
Parietal art includes a complex array of figures and signs. The figures mostly depict the large mammals of ice-age Europe (various deer, horses, bison, mammoths, rhinos, lions, and several others), but we also find occasional humans (and the more frequent, and wonderful, handprints, often stenciled by placing a hand against the wall and blowing paint around it with some kind of Paleolithic spray can). In another category, rarely given as much attention but surely surpassing the animal figures in number (and perhaps in interpretive importance), a large variety of signs and symbols festoon the walls—some identifiable as pictures of weapons or body parts (often sexual), others as geometric forms, and still others quite mysterious.
In the progressivist chronologies of Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan, figures and signs show a superficially opposite directionality. Figures begin with crude and simple outlines and progress to more supple and complex realism, complete with dimensionality and perspective. Signs, on the other hand, become simpler and more symbolic, with identifiable pictures (of vulvas, for example) evolving to less variable, more symbolic, and often highly simplified geometric representation. Leroi-Gourhan wrote: “The animal figures . . . show a development in form towards a more and more precise analysis. The geometricization of the signs in contrast with the character of the animal figures is one of the interesting aspects of research into the meaning of the designs.”
But these apparently opposite directions of change for figures and symbols really represent—as Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan repeatedly emphasized—different facets of the same overall theme of progress as the basis of chronology. In painting figures, the artists were trying to do better in representing the animals themselves—and the supposed sequence of styles marks their continual improvement. But, in drawing signs, the same artists were knowingly developing a system of symbols—and symbols gain universality and meaning by becoming more abstract and reduced to a geometric essence. After all—and the analogy was not lost on these scholars—most alphabets derived their letters as simplified pictures of objects (while the same argument applies with even more force to the evolution of such character systems as Chinese).
Breuil initially proposed a system of five stages in a single sequence of greater realism and complexity for figures (his papers of the early 1900s make fascinating reading). He later developed his famous theory of two successive cycles, each with a complete history of progress to a pinnacle, followed by late decline. (Breuil continued to hold, despite mounting evidence to the contrary, that the first cycle could be recognized by drawings of animals in “twisted perspective”—that is, with more than one plane represented, as in a bison with a body seen from the side, but with a face pointing forward.)
Breuil’s two schemes are not so different as they appear—for his first notion of five sequential steps included a period of decline in the middle. I was particularly struck by his adjectives of judgment in supposedly objective descriptions of the stages. In an early article of 1906, he marks the animals of Stage 3 (later to become the decline at the end of the first cycle) as “of a deplorable design, and with a disconcerting lack of proportion.” He then praises the recovery of Stage 4 as one might describe a Renaissance artist trying to re-create the lost glories of an ancient Greece: “The artists sought to rediscover the model lost in the preceding stage. They obtained this result by polychromy [figures of more than one color]. These paintings are timid at first . . .” Breuil concluded his paper by stating: “Paleolithic art, after an almost infantile beginning, rapidly developed a lively way of depicting animal forms, but didn’t perfect its painting techniques until an advanced stage.”
Leroi-Gourhan, in contrast, developed a theory of four successive stages in a single series. But his sequence of progress scarcely differed from Breuil’s—though the older scholar wanted to run the story twice. Both schemes began with immobile animals stiffly carved in crude outlines with no interior coloration, and moved on to ever more accurate images, drawn with a much better feel for mobility, rendered in better perspective, and more richly colored. (The later artists, Leroi-Gourhan believed, reached such a state of perfection that their art stagnated a bit at the end, becoming rather academic in replication of excellence.)
Mario Ruspoli, a disciple of Leroi-Gourhan, epitomized the theory well in his 1986 book The Cave of Lascaux. “From the earliest images onward, one has the impression of being in the presence of a system refined by time . . . The development of Paleolithic cave art may be summed up as 15,000 years of apprenticeship followed by 8,000 years of academicism.”
Leroi-Gourhan recognized the essential similarity of his view with the earlier theories of Breuil. After a detailed (though respectful) critique of Breuil, and an extensive compendium of their particular differences, Leroi-Gourhan acknowledges the fundamental similarity in their common concept of progress as the key to a chronology of Paleolithic art:
The theory . . . is logical and rational: art apparently began with simple outlines, then developed more elaborate forms to achieve modeling, and then developed polychrome or bichrome painting before it eventually fell into decadence.
This progressivist theory of increasingly complex and supple realism in Paleolithic painting dominated the field for decades. Writing of Leroi-Gourhan’s four-stage theory, Brigitte and Gilles Delluc (in Ruspoli’s book, cited previously) state simply: “The classification was fairly soon adopted by everyone.” And yet, I think everyone now realizes that the hypothesis of progressivism in Paleolithic art cannot hold. The march to greater and more complex realism doesn’t make any sense theoretically, and has now been disproven empirically at Chauvet and elsewhere.
Theoretical dubiety. I don’t want to use this essay as one more rehearsal for my favorite theme that Darwinian evolution cannot be read as a theory of progress, but only as a mechanism for building better adaptation to changing local environments—and that the equation of evolution with progress represents our strongest cultural impediment to a proper understanding of this greatest biological revolution in the history of human thought. Still, I can’t help pointing out that this prejudice must underlie the ready proposition and acceptance of such a manifestly improbable notion as linear progress for the history of parietal art from thirty thousand to ten thousand years ago.
But why do I label the progressivist hypothesis of Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan as “manifestly improbable”? After all, humans did evolve from apish ancestors with smaller brains and presumably more limited mental capacities, artistic and otherwise. So why shouldn’t we see progress through time?
The answer to this query requires a consideration of proper scale. The twenty-thousand-year span of known parietal art does not reach deep into our apish ancestry (where a notion of general mental advance could be defended). The earliest parietal art lies well within the range of our current species, Homo sapiens. (By best estimates, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa some 200,000 years ago, and had probably migrated into the Levant [if not into Europe proper
] by about ninty thousand years ago.) Therefore, the painters of the first known parietal art were far closer in time to folks living today than to the original Homo sapiens.
But a progressivist critic might still retort: “Okay, I now understand that we are only discussing a sliver of human history, not most of the whole story since our split from the common ancestor of chimpanzees and us. But the trend of the whole should also be manifest within the shorter history of individual species, for evolution should move slowly and steadily to higher levels of mentality.” Herein lies the key prejudice underlying our uncritical acceptance of the progressivist paradigm for the history of art. It just feels “right” to us that the very earliest art should be primitive. Older in time should mean more and more rudimentary in mental accomplishment.
And here, I think, we make a simple (but deep and widespread) error. Apparently similar phenomena of different scale do not become automatically comparable, but often (I would say usually) differ profoundly. Changes between species in an evolutionary sequence represent a completely different phenomenon from variation (spatial or temporal) within a single species. Humans have bigger brains than ancestral monkeys; these monkeys have bigger brains than distantly ancestral fishes. This increase in brain size does record a great gain in mental complexity. But a correlation of size and smarts across species does not imply that variation in brain size among modern humans also correlates with intelligence. In fact, normal adults differ in brain size by as much as 1,000 cubic centimeters, and no correlation has ever been found between size and intelligence (the average human brain occupies about 1,300 cc of volume).
Similarly, while evolution obviously produces change between one species and the next in a sequence of descent, most individual species don’t alter much during their geological lifetimes. Large, widespread, and successful species tend to be especially stable. Humans fall into this category, and the historical record supports such a prediction. Human bodily form has not altered appreciably in 100,000 years. As I stated earlier, the Cro-Magnon cave painters are us—so why should their mental capacity differ from ours? We don’t regard Plato or King Tut as dumb, even though they lived a long time ago. Remember that the distance from Plato to the parietal painters spans far less time than the interval separating these painters from the first Homo sapiens.
But defenders of progressivism in parietal art might still fall back upon one potentially promising argument: cultural change differs profoundly from biological evolution. We can admit biological stability and still expect an accumulative and progressive history of art or invention. The road has been both long and upward from Jericho and some scratch farming to New York City and the World Wide Web.
Fair enough in principle—but, again, the known timing precludes such an argument in practice. I will admit that if we happen to catch art at the very beginning, we would not expect full sophistication right away. But the oldest known parietal art, at thirty thousand years ago, lies well into the history of Homo sapiens in Europe—far closer to us today than to the first invasion from Africa. I don’t know why earlier art hasn’t been found (perhaps we just haven’t made the discovery yet; perhaps people only moved into areas with caves at a much later time). I doubt that Ugh, the first Cro-Magnon orator, spoke in truly dulcet tones. But we surely don’t regard Pericles as worse than Martin Luther King, Jr., just because he lived a few thousand years ago. Phidias doesn’t pale before Picasso, and no modern composer beats Bach by mere virtue of residence in the twentieth century. Please remember that the first known Cro-Magnon artist, at thirty thousand years ago, stands closer to Pericles and Phidias than to Ugh, the orator, and Ur, the very first painter. So why should parietal art be any more primitive than the great statue of Athena that once graced the Parthenon?
As a final point, why should areas as distant as southern Spain, northeastern France, and southeastern Italy go through a series of progressive stages in lockstep over twenty thousand years? Regional and individual variation can swamp general trends, even today in a world of airplanes and televisions. Why did we ever think that evolution should imply a primary signal of uniform advance?
This general line of criticism has been well articulated by Paul G. Bahn and Jean Vertut in their 1988 book Images of the Ice Age. (I am pleased that they found our paleontological theory of punctuated equilibrium useful in constructing their critique.)
The development of Paleolithic art was probably akin to evolution itself: not a straight line or ladder, but a much more circuitous path—a complex growth like a bush, with parallel shoots and a mass of offshoots; not a slow, gradual change, but a “punctuated equilibrium,” with occasional flashes of brilliance . . . Each period of the Upper Paleolithic almost certainly saw the coexistence and fluctuating importance of a number of styles and techniques, . . . as well as a wide range of talent and ability . . . Consequently, not every apparently “primitive” or “archaic” figure is necessarily old (Leroi-Gourhan fully admitted this point), and some of the earliest art will probably look quite sophisticated.
Empirical disproof. Theoretical arguments may be dazzling, but give me a good old fact any time. The linear schemes of Breuil and Leroi-Gourhan had been weakening for many years as new information accumulated and old certainties evaporated. But one technical advance truly opened the floodgates. Thanks to a new method of radiocarbon dating—called AMS, for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry—only tiny amounts of charcoal need now be used, and paintings may therefore be analyzed without removing significant material.
In late 1994, three French explorers discovered a wonderful new site, now called Chauvet Cave. The animals at Chauvet, particularly the magnificent horses and lions, match anything else in Paleolithic art for sophistication and accuracy. But the radiocarbon dates, multiply repeated and presumably accurate, give ages in excess of thirty thousand years—making Chauvet the oldest of all known caves with parietal art. If the very oldest includes the very best, then our previous theories of linear advance must yield. In his epilogue to a gorgeous book, published in 1996, on this new site, Jean Clottes, a leading expert on Paleolithic art, writes:
The subdivision of Paleolithic art proposed by Leroi-Gourhan, in successive styles, must be revised. His Style I, in which Chauvet Cave should be placed, was defined as archaic and very crude without any definite mural depictions, and is obviously no longer adequate. We now know that sophisticated techniques for wall art were invented . . . at an early date. The rendering of perspective through various methods, the generalized use of shading, the outlining of animals, the reproduction of movement and reliefs, all date back more than 30,000 years . . . This means that the Aurignacians, who coexisted with the last Neanderthals before replacing them, had artistic capabilities identical to those of their successors. Art did not have a linear evolution from clumsy and crude beginnings, as had been believed since the work of the Abbé Henri Breuil.
Let us not lament any lost pleasure in abandoning the notion that we now reside on an ever-rising pinnacle of continuous mental advance, looking back upon benighted beginnings. Consider instead the great satisfaction in grasping our true fellowship with the first known Paleolithic artists. There but for the grace of thirty thousand additional years go I. These paintings speak so powerfully to us today because we know the people who did them; they are us.
In a famous paradox, Francis Bacon wrote: antiquitas saeculi, Juventus mundi (or, roughly, “the old days were the world’s youth”). In other words, don’t think of the Paleolithic as a time of ancient primitivity, but as a period of vigorous youth for our species (while we today must represent the gray-beards). Paleolithic art records our own early age, and we feel a visceral union with the paintings of Chauvet because, as Wordsworth wrote, “the child is father of the man.” But we should also note the less frequently cited first verse of his poem:
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man”
We have loved the rainbow for thirty thousand unbroken years and more. We have struggled to depict the beauty and power of nature across all these ages. The art of Chauvet—and Lascaux, and Altamira, and a hundred other sites—makes our heart leap because we see our own beginnings on these walls, and know that we were, even then, worthy of greatness.
9
A LESSON FROM THE OLD MASTERS
THE MOST FAMOUS LITERARY TALE OF A HUMP INVOKES AN EVOLUTIONARY theme of sorts. “In the beginning of years,” Rudyard Kipling tells us in his Just-So Stories, “when the world was so new and all, and the animals were just beginning to work for Man, there was a camel, and he lived in the middle of a Howling Desert because he did not want to work.” Instead, when urged to service by the horse, dog, and ox, the recalcitrant camel merely snorted, “Humph.” So the most powerful of resident Djinns, converting utterance to substance, put a hump on the camel’s back to make up for three lost days of work at the beginning of time: “‘That’s made a-purpose,’ said the Djinn, ‘all because you missed those three days. You will be able to work now for three days without eating, because you can live on your humph.’”
Kipling ripped off the camel to preach a sermon for children about old-fashioned virtues of work, and the perils of idleness—for his accompanying poem abandons the charm of the tale itself for a heavy moral disquisition couched in doggerel: