Читать книгу Art History For Dummies - Jesse Bryant Wilder - Страница 68

IN THIS CHAPTER

Deciphering the world’s oldest paintings

Cozying up to a Stone Age fertility symbol

Grappling with New Stone Age architecture like Stonehenge

During the last great Ice Age, a vast sheet of ice buried much of the world. In about 120,000 BC, Homo sapiens sapiens (the doubly wise — sapiens means “wise” — known today as humans) appeared on this frozen stage. They’ve stolen the show ever since.

Humans shared the scene with herds of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, aurochs (extinct horned oxen), saber-toothed cats, bison, horses, and deer, which roamed much of the planet. The first humans survived in this glacial wilderness as nomadic hunter-gatherers. We don’t know much about them because they left no written records, no art, and no permanent settlements.

The earliest surviving art came into the picture about 90,000 years later in the Paleolithic period, or Old Stone Age, which lasted roughly from 40,000 BC to 8000 BC. This “primitive” art was already highly developed in 30,000 BC — at the peak of its game, as if the prehistoric artists who made it studied their craft in some Stone Age art school. More likely, their skills were handed down from master to apprentice and honed over thousands of years. They painted highly accomplished depictions of wild animals in the world’s first art galleries, the walls of caves. More cave art continues to be discovered; the oldest thus far was found in Sulawesi, Indonesia, dating from at least 40,000 BC. To date, the most advanced cave art may be in the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet in southern France and Altamira in northern Spain. Their pictures of woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, and aurochs are the most accurate images we have of these extinct species.

In this chapter, I introduce you to the earliest artists — those who lived in the Stone Age and New Stone Age.