Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit)

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Hello, and welcome to Your Dentomy, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner.

I'm a public historian, author, and broadcaster, and today we are cracking out our crayons and journeying back tens of thousands of years into the deep past to learn all about the Paleolithic and cave art.

And to help us paint an audio picture, we have two very special guests.

In Archaeology Corner, she's a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she's researching the evolution of early symbolic behaviour.

Usefully for us, she has a PhD from Durham University in Upper Paleolithic cave art.

It's Dr.

Isabel Wisher.

Welcome, Izzy.

Hi, thank you for having me.

And in Comedy Corner, he's a rising star of sketch and stand-up.

You may have seen his recent Edinburgh-fringe show, Burke in Progress, a fine title, or caught him on the hilarious sketch show, No Worries If Not, The Michael Fry Show or Hollywood hijack.

If you've got the internet, I recommend it.

It's very good.

You've probably seen one of his many viral comedy sketches, but you'll definitely remember him from our episode on medieval Irish folklore.

It's Sean Burke.

Welcome back, Sean.

Thanks for having me.

It's lovely to be back.

It's lovely to have you back.

Yeah.

You've grown a fantastic moustache.

Yeah, I did for the last episode as well.

I just do it for this podcast.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, yeah.

So I need three months' notice before every episode appears, even though it's an audio format and it's completely wasted.

But I need to know it's there.

I'm really grateful you've done it.

What do you know about cave art?

Have you seen any?

Have you ever visited any or seen it in a movie?

In films.

No, I'm sure I visited something to that effect, presumably on a school tour as a kid.

From what I know of it, it's recently, it's mainly from YouTube videos.

There's lots of hands, usually some vague person shapes and maybe some animals as well.

It's usually really delicate and needs to be well preserved.

Although, when I make a hand painting and put it on the fridge, it's in the bin within days.

So, okay.

But yeah, I know it's fascinating.

And I know there's a few caves, a few in France.

I have happened to watch a few YouTube videos about this topic in the past.

This is good, not it, Sean.

Yeah, is it?

Yeah.

Okay, good.

Yeah, this is good.

First question: what is a cave?

So, what do you know?

This is where I have a go at guessing what our listener will know about today's subject.

And I reckon you've seen some cave art at some point somehow.

At least you've spotted some in the background on the Flintstones.

It's in everything from animated movies like the Ice Age franchise, which I absolutely love.

It's in the Oscar-winning classic The English Patient, which I totally forgotten, but it is in there.

Maybe you visited a cave on your holidays.

Someone like Cresswell Crags in Derbyshire or Lasko in the south of France.

But for how long have humans been showcasing their artistic talents?

What sort of things did they paint on cave walls?

Sean's already given us a summary, but there's more.

And were cave people really the first comic book illustrators?

Let us find out, shall we?

Right, we'll start with some basics.

Sean, do you know what we mean by the Paleolithic period inverted comics?

Give me a date range.

Start and finish.

1975

to 1989.

No.

I'm going to say thousands of years ago, and I don't think I can be more precise than that.

Am I in the right ballpark?

You're kind of not, actually.

Yeah, surprisingly.

Oh my gosh.

Because really,

it's what, 3.3 million?

Oh, way off.

Exactly.

So the start of the Paleolithic, this period that we call the Paleolithic, is around 3.3 million years ago.

So that's defined by when our hominin ancestors first start using stone tools.

And then it goes all the way until 12,000 years ago.

So it's a huge stretch of time.

And we split that into three chunks.

So we talk about the lower Paleolithic period, this is 3 million-ish years ago to about 300,000 years ago.

Then we have the middle Paleolithic period that goes from 300,000 years ago to about 50,000 years ago.

And then the Upper Paleolithic period from about 50,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago.

So we're talking about chunks of really long periods of time.

Almost all of the art that we know about comes from that end period, the upper Paleolithic.

The upper Paleolithic period, the start of that is defined by Homo sapiens kind of entering Europe.

And then Neanderthals are starting to die out in this period.

Between 50,000 to maybe 40,000, 35,000 years ago, where Neanderthals are kind of declining in population.

And we don't know why?

Did we just annoy them into disappearing?

I mean, there's lots of different theories about this.

Everything from climate change to, you know, Homo sapiens being superior.

My personal theory is that it's just we start to get a lot of interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals at this time.

Okay.

So it could just be that, I mean, they're part of us now, that their population becomes part of the outer Holy Spirit.

4% Neanderthal DNA, Sean.

Who told you that?

How did you?

I went through your ancestry.

Whoa, you really need to do that.

They gave you a swap on the way in.

And yeah.

You work fast.

Yeah.

I do.

That's why you're a bit late.

Yeah, we got a lab in the back.

You stole our hairs.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

The idea of the Stone Age is 200 years old.

So the concept of it was sort of coined in kind of the 1820s, something like that.

But when was cave art first discovered?

Is it the Victorians?

Before we discover cave art, the first kind of evidence of art from this period that we find is from 1864.

So it comes from a site called La Madeleine in France, and it was discovered by Latte and Christie.

And it's this piece of mammoth ivory that has like a beautiful kind of engraving of a mammoth on it.

And this was not only exciting for for being the first art from this period, but it was the first solid evidence that humans existed alongside these ancient animals.

So a mammoth carved a mammoth.

Sean, if I mean, you're a sketch artist in a comedy sense, but if you were a sketch artist in an artistic sense, what would be your best artwork made of the thing that it's depicting?

Maybe the shape of a sheep with a flock of sheep.

Nice.

Now, I know you can't preserve that on a cave wall.

We're taking shepherding to brave new places.

Let's talk about cave paintings, because I think that's probably what what listeners are really imagining in their head.

So, when were those first found?

The first site that was kind of identified as Paleolithic was Altamira.

So, this was discovered in 1879 by Marsilio Sanstez Sartula.

He was kind of excavating and recording parts of the cave.

This is Spain, isn't it?

In Spain, yeah, sorry, yeah, in Spain.

And as he was doing this, his daughter was bored and playing, and she'd come across the bison, the famous bison ceiling of Altamira.

So, this is really beautiful polychrome, so they're using multiple colours, depictions of bison that are on the ceiling of Altamera.

Sensor Sautola had this amazing discovery at Altamera Cave and he wrote this up in 1880 and then Filanova y Piera, who was a professor at the University of Madrid, he then presented the discovery at a conference in I think 1881.

And when he does that, people just can't believe that this was Paleolithic.

They'd been warned about people making forgeries and wanting to debunk this idea of the Paleolithic being a period.

So they wouldn't accept that this was Paleolithic.

So there's one guy called Halei who visited this site.

What do you think he did to disprove its ancientness?

Did he draw something himself?

Did he?

I'd be like, I can do that.

Just get out of Sharpie.

There you go, mammoth.

What do you want?

He did the opposite.

He wiped his finger across it and smudged it through.

What does that prove?

That it's incredibly delicate.

And it wasn't until 1902 and more kind of discoveries of cave art were emerging at this time that eventually Emil Kartelak writes this apology called Mia Colpa de unskeptique.

So, you know.

I understood fuel told you.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

It's basically my bad.

Yeah.

Yeah, my bad.

He accepts the legitimacy of Altamera.

Unfortunately, this was after Sanste Sartulla had passed away, so he never got to see his site accepted as authentic.

Priced this artwork, rubbed his finger through it, nearly destroyed it.

Sean, what's the comedian's equivalent of that?

Probably heckling, to be honest.

If somebody's got a very long zed-up to a joke and then just going, no, sounds very true.

It's really hard to recover from that.

That's true.

Trust me.

All right, so we've done southern France, we've done Alzamiro in Spain.

Where else were they the major sites?

We have Creswell Craigs in Derbyshire.

That's actually the northernmost example of cave art that we have.

And we also find other examples of Paleolithic art from other sites as far east as sort of Ukraine and Russia throughout Europe, actually.

Is there any in Ireland by any chance?

Not that I know of, unfortunately.

I'll have to make a forgery.

But we do actually have a much older example of drawing.

Yeah, so the oldest example we have of Homo sapiens making art comes from Blombos Cave in South Africa.

And it's a small piece of ochre.

So ochre is usually used for drawing on cave walls, right?

But it's just a piece of ochre that is engraved with patterns of lines and we have a few examples of these and they date from between 100,000 years ago to 75,000 years ago from this site.

So really early.

Yeah, really early.

Okay, so that's 100,000 years ago, the earliest human art that we have in terms of drawing.

Let's move on to representative art.

This is art that looks like a thing.

So Sean, in the past few months, literally in the past few months, scientists have announced the discovery of the oldest ever painting depicting a real thing.

Okay.

It was found in Sulawesi, which is in Indonesia on an island.

What do you think it shows?

Probably a beach ball.

Yeah,

I'm going to stick with beach ball.

Beach ball.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Well, we can show you what it was and we'll hand it to you.

There you go.

Thank you.

What can you see?

A very well-fed pig.

Yeah.

Is it?

All right.

It's an incredible pig, isn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It looks happy and healthy, if you ask me.

Izzy, this is very exciting for numerous reasons.

A, it's the oldest ever representative art.

Yes.

Secondly, art outside Europe.

Yeah.

So tell us about it.

Yeah.

So

this is known as the Silawayze warty pig because it's little warty.

It's doing its best, I know.

Okay, wow.

Right.

It's from Silawazi in Indonesia, and it's been dated to at least 45,500 years ago.

But we haven't had anything quite like this from anywhere else in the world.

It changes how we understand kind of the beginnings of art.

Is art something that's invented once and spreads?

Or is it a human instinct that shows up constantly in different places because each new group of humans is going, I've got an idea.

Yeah.

My personal feeling is that it's exactly like you said, Greg, it's these multiple origins.

Like it's something innate in us that likes to create, likes to make things.

And the other evidence that suggests that it's not just a single origin, but possibly a few multiple different origins, is we're not the only species to be making art.

We now know that Neanderthals are doing it too.

So we have evidence of Neanderthals also producing cave art, ornamenting their bodies.

They're making shell beads too, and probably painting their bodies as well.

I think listeners are thinking, talk about the bison.

Talk about the...

So, what kind of animal?

Well, actually, I'll ask you, Sean, what kind of animals, apart from bison, because that would be cheating,

what are you imagining on the wall?

Deer,

mammoths, because we've mentioned them already.

I want to say cats and dogs, but I feel like that's

let's say wolves.

Okay, that kind of area, terrifying animals.

So, you think predatory animals?

Yeah, big, scary, predatory animals.

I think that's a very common response.

Yeah.

And surprisingly, that's not common at all, is it?

No, the most common animals that people are drawing are the ones that they're hunting.

The most common are deer, so you've got that one.

Bison, ibex, so mountain goat.

That sort of horse.

Horses, I think.

Horses, yeah.

I knew I was missing one.

Yeah, horses.

And wild cattle called aurochs, which are terrifying.

They're mega cows.

Yeah.

Mega cows.

Imagine a cow.

Yeah.

Imagine a cow charging towards you.

Yeah.

Mega cow.

Okay, I got it.

I'm running.

I'm running.

Absolutely enormous.

Right.

Wow.

I thought cows were already pretty big, Greg.

Mega cow, Sean.

Okay.

I don't think you're getting it.

Mega cow.

So we do have one famous scene.

Yes.

It's called The Panel of the Lions.

It is, yeah.

Where is it?

It's from Chauvet Cave in France.

I can show it to you, Sean.

Here you are.

I'm handing you a bit of paper.

Thank you.

This one, I think, is absolutely gorgeous.

Wow, that is pretty cool.

That's a whole group of, what are they?

Lions?

No.

A few things.

Lions chasing big things.

Kind of like a terrifying herd, really.

The first image I get on this is it looks like a scene from a kind of comic book or something.

It's got a very interesting overlapping

feel.

You can sense the movement of it as well, genuinely.

Oh, that's really cool.

Yeah, it's like Lion King, the prequel.

It's fair to say we would assume that's a hunting scene, right?

Yeah, yeah.

That panel of lions.

Is that what we're seeing here?

Are these depictions of...

You won't believe what I did last week, lads.

I went out and I hunted this many lions, and this is what it looked like.

What is this for?

This is a very common misconception about cave art, is that it's always depicting hunting scenes, and you might imagine, you know, little stick figures with their spears sort of chasing after animals that might be behind what we've got on the image here.

But that's actually not what a lot of cave art is.

Humans are very rare in Paleolithic art.

Just observing stuff, really.

Yeah, so I think what they're doing is trying to capture kind of animal behaviours and something about the animals that communicates some sort of meaning or importance to their society.

Just as their version of an Instagram story, really.

You know, it might take a bit longer, but it's like, you'll never guess what I saw last weekend.

Yeah.

Share it with your friends.

Sean, let's talk art supplies.

Okay.

They couldn't pop down to W.F.

Smith's for their sort of paintbrush set and their my first art palette.

What do you think they're using to make all this art?

Whatever's to hand.

Yeah.

You know, because that's art.

You know, it's not about being right.

It's just about having fun.

Right.

And using whatever's to hand.

And from what I know throughout history, a lot of it, like art supplies, are often like pretty nasty stuff.

I'm not going to speculate, but we can all imagine whatever's available.

Did you say ochre earlier?

Was that kind of thing?

What they tend to be using is ochre, and ochre comes in a few different shades.

So we have red ochre is a very common one, yellow ochre browns, and sort of purple hues too.

And then they're using charcoal as a black pigment, and also manganese oxide as well as a black pigment.

But that is kind of it.

So there's very black and brown.

Those are your choices.

Yeah.

Black and brown, red, and yellow.

A little bit of white.

Yeah.

What they are using is sort of water or clay to kind of mix this into a paint, also animal fat to create a thicker sort of paint mixture that then they will mix it up and then put it on the walls.

They can also just use it without that, like a crayon, and just draw directly on the walls.

So there's a slightly emulsive quality to adding the fats in, right?

It makes it slightly thicker and

stick on the cable better, but also it makes your pigment go further too.

And possibly saliva is the only bodily fluid that we know that they're probably using in this.

So some of the hand stencils that we mentioned earlier, the way that they're made is by spraying ochre from the mouth onto the hand.

Sometimes they might have used a tool, like a little tube, a burb.

Like a straw, like a straw, yeah.

Yeah, or just directly from the mouth.

So there's some ideas that maybe they're just putting the powder in their mouths, mouths, mixing it with saliva to create the paint and then spitting it on their hands.

Wow.

Okay, let's talk about the canvas, or rather the caveness.

I mean, the actual physical space we're talking about.

Sean, when you're writing a comedy show, do you ever think about the physical space you're performing in?

So the lights, the sound, the acoustics?

Yeah, definitely.

Actually, I think, no joke, I think a cave would be a great place for a stand-up comedy night.

Because nice and dark, probably just have one light source, which is the fire.

Because you want there to be as few distractions as possible.

So that's the spotlight on me on the stage in the center of the room, ideally with a crowd there as well.

That's one thing I do think of as well.

A crowd of cave fairs.

A crowd of cavemen.

You know, probably some toilet humor.

That's their kind of ballpark.

That's fine.

I did a show last night and I had a PowerPoint presentation in there.

As far as I know, they didn't have that technology back then.

Probably not.

But you want it nice and big, nice and clear.

It's just very important that everyone understands exactly what's going on, in my experience.

That's nice.

So Izzy, do we get a sense of the cave as an art space?

Absolutely.

And if you'll indulge me, we can enter a cave.

Sort of

imagine ourselves in a cave.

Yeah, there we go.

Tens of thousands of years ago.

So we start to notice these unusual echoing acoustics to the space around us.

We're in complete darkness and we hear this flicker of our firelight that's illuminating the space around us.

So the firelight's sort of dancing across the walls, lighting up these unusual stalagmites and stalactites and undulating surfaces.

And we might even tactically engage with the space around us, feel the sort of smooth flowstone or the rough surfaces of the cave.

Have a fondle, Sean.

Have a fondle.

Wow.

Oh god, destroyed an ancient piece of art.

This was Greg's idea, I swear.

So all of these sensory experiences would have been embedded in the making and experience of this art.

And recently in archaeology, we've been appreciating these sensory experiences in what's kind of a sensory turn in our interpretation.

So we're trying to appreciate how these different dynamics, the acoustics, the firelight, the tactile interactions, would have enriched the art that they're making.

And for me, especially firelight is really an amazing way of imagining this art in a new light.

So I didn't intend to have a pun there in a new light.

So, this unpredictable light source is probably kind of animating the art in some way.

If we look back on the panel of the lions here, we can imagine as the flickering light is dancing across this, we see one lion and then the next, and it creates this sort of animation effect to the art.

And this warm light also makes us feel more sociable, comfortable as well.

So, all of this is really like enriching this experience of the art and the art making.

Beautiful, yeah, absolutely.

That whole echo, as well as like a theater performer's dream, you know, really helps you project, you know, telling the story.

So that's ideal.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Friends, Romans.

Exactly.

Yeah, it's great, isn't it?

Let's leave the cave for now, because that was charming, but

you know, it's quite damp in there.

So that's fascinating.

The idea of illustrating the you've got static art, but it's illustrated by the flicker of the flames.

It's a fascinating animating technique.

Sean, do you know what the word pareidolia means?

I'll be honest, no.

Do you want to have a guess?

Yeah, is it the study of beach balls?

If only it was.

It's actually the study of parasols, you know, the umbrellas.

Oh, so close.

So close.

Now, Izzy, what is pareidolia?

So, pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon of seeing meaningful forms in random patterns.

And this is something that everyone experiences.

So it's that phenomenon of if you look at a cloud and you see it looking like a face or a rabbit or a dog or whatever, that's all pareidolia.

What some of my research has focused on is trying to understand how pareidolia influenced the making of cave art.

So we think that maybe the flickering sort of firelight enriched this experience of pareidolia and then they're drawing sort of what they're seeing on the cave wall.

I'm glad I have a word for it now because I see it on social media all the time.

When somebody's like, oh, this house looks like a face.

Yeah.

Or this coat hanger looks like a drunk octopus that wants to fight you.

I think that's the best one.

Yeah.

It's all pareidolia.

And what's so interesting, I think, is that pareidolia, if I understand it, is you're more likely to see the thing that you're accustomed to seeing.

Yes.

So if you spend your days in the dark looking at animals, you're more likely to see animals.

Is that right?

Yeah, kind of.

So we experience a lot of face pareidolia.

So we see faces everywhere.

But if you imagine that you're a hunter-gatherer living in the Paleolithic, you're not encountering many other humans.

They're living in quite sparse populations.

But what you are focusing your attention on is animals.

So you're trekking, migrating herds across the landscape.

You have to be attuned to sort of if a bison's going to leap out and attack you or something.

You have to really be paying attention to the subtle visual cues of animals.

So my little pet theory is then where we see faces all the time, they're seeing animals all the time.

And that might account for why animals are such a dominant theme in Paleolithic art.

Fascinating, isn't it?

Yeah.

I'm going to drag us back a little bit more towards form and function, a little bit of like why might this art have been so important to people.

Sean, I mean, we've already talked about like hunting manual.

Are there any other theories you might want to chuck out as to why people would spend such time and effort doing art?

It's something a deal, really.

I think the one I would pitch more seriously would be when you get people around a campfire and they start telling stories.

And I've had this on an archaeology dig.

You get people around a campfire from different backgrounds.

they don't all speak the same language.

Sometimes art is quite useful.

So is there anything in that?

I definitely think so.

And this is actually one theory that people have had, particularly about these very big caves and the famous caves like Lascaux or Altamera, is that maybe these are aggregation sites.

So we're dealing with mobile hunter-gatherer populations and for most of the year they're sort of off doing their thing.

But maybe they come together seasonally, aggregate in one spot.

So you have different populations of people coming together.

And then they're producing art.

Maybe that's like a way of reinforcing sort of community bonds and connecting with these people that you haven't seen in a long time.

Or yeah, it could be that they need a common language and that's Bison, you know.

We don't know.

Did you speak Bison?

Right.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's great.

Well, it's visual storytelling.

You know,

it's show, don't tell, truly.

Sure.

It's a very ancient principle, it turns out.

Isn't it?

Yeah.

There's also this idea that it's a way to exchange information you know some people have been off in germany and they've seen something there and they need to communicate it efficiently so okay so i'm i'm pushing the the kind of communication functionality is there are there any other theories that you want to name check even if you don't agree with them anything you yeah there's well it's kind of um sean's first uh interpretation this they were just bored and doing it is what we call as this art for art's sake idea so maybe it didn't mean anything they're just bored and doodling on the walls i don't agree with that one.

I think it's a lot to invest.

If you're just bored, you can do other things, right?

And not go into a deep cave.

There's lots of ideas about shamanism and ritual.

Yeah, that's a very common interpretation.

Maybe religious elements, the sort of early phase of what we might call ritual behavior that, you know, it's no longer simply just survive, but is now like, here are some ideas we have about maybe there's a sky god or a reindeer god.

Yeah.

The nuance window.

This is the part of the show where Sean and I put down our paintbrushes and sit quietly by the fire for two minutes for some storytelling while Dr.

Izzy takes centre stage to tell us something we need to know about Paleolithic art.

Take it away, Dr.

Izzy.

So, we've talked a lot about the people who made cave art, how they lived, where they lived, and maybe even what they used the art for, right?

And we've discussed that maybe other species were engaging in making cave art too.

But when we imagine a cave artist, what do we see?

We tend to imagine these were adults engaging in this behaviour, and this is really a problem in archaeology more broadly, but especially when we're dealing with this period.

But we know, or we should know, that children were around at this period too, and so we must be seeing some children's behaviours in the archaeological record as well.

So there have been some studies looking at the anatomical measurements of hand stencils or traces left by the fingers, we call those finger flutings, that have demonstrated that children were there alongside adults making this art.

So this adds a whole new dimension to understanding cave arts.

So what we thought was actually an adult activity exclusively, we know that children are actively participating in and probably been taught the importance of this as a way to preserve knowledge in the society.

But in my recent research, I've also shown some evidence of children kind of doing their own thing with cave art, which I think is really cool too.

So I looked at a a panel from Las Monadas Cave in Spain, and this is a group of drawings that was previously interpreted as a panel of enigmatic signs, which is archaeology speak for we don't know, but it's very weird.

It's quite low to the ground, the original Paleolithic cave floor.

It consists of lots of sort of concentric circles and random lines that intersect each other.

And this is all characteristic of very young children's marks.

So, I've made the argument that this is children, very young children, making this art.

Wonderful.

Thank you, Izzy, Sean.

Yeah, how about that?

So it's their equivalent of the photos on the front of the fridge, I guess.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Beautiful.

I love it.

Thank you so much.

Listener, if you want more from Sean, of course you do check out our episode on medieval Irish magic.

Also, some animal stories in that, some quite weird things in there.

Yeah, it gets weird.

And for more prehistoric stories, listen to our episode about the Neanderthals with Tim Minchin.

That was a fun one.

And if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to your Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode.

I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests.

In History Corner, we have the incredible Dr.

Izzy Wisher from Aarhus University in Denmark.

Thank you, Izzy.

Thank you, and in Comedy Corner, we have the spectacular Sean Burke.

Thank you, Sean.

Thank you very much for having me.

And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we uncover another lost historical masterpiece and try not to smudge it with our finger.

But for now, I'm off to confuse future archaeologists by painting mammoths all over the local coffee shop.

Bye!

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You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

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