The cave paintings of Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc captivate me. Our ancestors were making art in depths of the last ice age, long before they domesticated food. It takes all kinds of hubris and reductionist deconstruction to imagine why they were doing it, so I’d rather just let it be and enjoy the fact that they did it.
The news of the day (hat tip to some smart wire editor at my morning paper) is a find in Vilhonneur forest – a 27,000-year-old cave painting of a human face with a skeleton. It’s said to be, possibly, the earliest artistic representation of a human face.
can’t remember the anthropologist’s name – eminent – at UNM who theorized that the human ability to conceptualize, thus form complex groups as well as paint images, apparently arose for unknown reasons — like insertion in brain of a new computer program — about 30k years ago.