Palaeolithic Cave Art

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts.

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 Friend 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.

Last time on, we were talking about medieval Irish history,

which I guess was a bit more in your wheelhouse, given your that I'm Irish, I guess, and that's where the list ends.

A little bit, a little bit.

What do you know about the Stone Age?

Do you know your last glacial maximum from your Pleistocene?

Oh, yeah, I'm always talking about it.

I've gotten them written on the back of my hand as we speak.

I'll be honest.

No, I'd say I have a limited knowledge of it, but I'm certainly very curious about that.

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.

Again, I have happened to watch a few YouTube videos about this topic in the past, but I find that quite interesting.

This is good knowledge, 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.

Cave art's popping up in films and TV shows.

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.

That stars Ray Fienes and Kristen Scott Thomas and very few Neanderthals.

If you're a proper film buff, you might have seen Werner Herzog's famous documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, which is wonderful and quite weird.

That's why he's looking at the prehistoric art in Chauvet Cave in France.

Maybe you've visited a cave on your holidays, somewhere 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 commas?

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.

Oh my gosh.

Because really, it's merely, 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.

That's how we start the Paleolithic period.

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.

I mean, so the lower Paleolithic is like just millions of years ago.

Middle Paleolithic is humans.

Okay.

So 300,000 years ago is where homo sapiens, us, show up.

Yes.

And then the upper is when all the the other species die out, right?

Neanderthals go.

Yeah, exactly.

So the upper Paleolithic period, the start of that is defined by Homo sapiens kind of entering Europe and spreading into 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 in 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 neanothals at this time.

Okay.

So it could just be that, I mean, they're part of us now.

Their population becomes part of the older Homo sapiens.

4% Neanderthal DNA, Sean.

Who told you that?

How did you?

I went through your ancestry.

Whoa, you really didn't.

They gave you a swap on the way in.

And yeah.

Well, you work fast.

Yeah, I did.

That's why you're a bit late.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we've got a lab in the back.

You stole our hairs on the way in.

Okay.

Broadly speaking, Izzy, I think Sean's done a good job, but what in terms of the art summarised, what we'll be talking about today?

We have lots of hand stencils from this period, but also a lot of animal depictions and some weird sort of abstract signs too that we find in cave art.

But it's not just art in caves that we find during this period.

We also have small figurines and carvings that they're making.

We call that portable art because they're probably moving it around and passing it and exchanging it.

And also, some sort of engraved stone and bone as well that are engraved with similar things that we see on the cave walls.

So you're talking animals and abstract signs, that sort of thing.

Abstract signs, you say?

Yeah.

Like road signs.

Honestly, when I see a road sign, it's like it's an arrow pointing backwards and left.

I'm like, I don't know what that means.

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 Cycle Le 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 being the first art from this period, but it was the first solid evidence that humans existed alongside these ancient animals.

It's very meta as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Wow, they're really getting several layers deep already.

Right.

And you said it must have been a human.

Well, what if it was a mammoth autobiography?

Like, what was it?

Self-portrait.

A mammoth killing a mammoth on a mammoth.

More mammoth levels.

Yeah.

Chris Nolan movie.

1864.

That's in the La Dodogne region of France, which I love saying because it sounds like someone bouncing.

But La Dadogne.

So that's Latte and Christie, these two Edouard Latte and Henri Christie.

Yeah.

And then we've also got figurines discovered around the time.

A few years later, we find female figurines, again from French sites such as Loterie Bass.

So these are carved from either bone or ivory.

We start to get more evidence emerging that humans are making art in this period, which is amazing.

It's beautiful.

So 1864, the first evidence.

In 1865, John Lubbock, everyone's favourite.

Oh, John Lubbock.

I'm always dying with Lubbock.

You know John Lubbock.

You don't have time, Greg.

Lovely Lubbock, yeah.

He coins the phrase Paleolithic in 1865.

So within a year, archaeologists are having to go, hang on a second, there's a thing here.

Absolutely.

Which is really interesting.

So a mammoth carved on mammoth.

Sean, 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?

Made of the thing that it's depicting.

Oh.

Mammoth on mammoth.

I'd probably take it to another level.

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

Nice.

Now I know you can't preserve that on a cave wall, but we're taking shepherding to brave new places.

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

So when were those first found?

We know that people were aware of cave art around this period too.

A guy called Félix Gaiagu visited Nau Cave, which is an amazing site in France, and he saw the beautiful sort of charcoal depictions on the wall and said, there are some paintings on the wall, what on earth can they be?

So they just couldn't conceive of what these paintings were.

But the first site that was kind of identified as Paleolithic was Altamira.

So this was discovered in 1879 by Marsilio Sanstez Sautula.

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

This is Spain.

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

And as he was doing this, his daughter was bored and playing and she ran into another part of the cave and

it's kind of probably a bit embellished now, but apparently she went into a part of the cave and then shouted, Papa, look, bison!

And she'd come across the bison, the famous bison ceiling of Altamera.

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

So 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 had 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.

One prominent guy at the time, Kartelek, he wouldn't even visit the site.

You know, it was like, this is obviously not authentic.

I'm not even going to grace it with my presence.

So he sends Hale.

Hale goes to the site with this, you know, idea that obviously it's a fake.

And he wipes his finger across the paint of the bison and goes, see, the paint's still wet.

And then writes this back and is like, yeah, see, it's obviously a forgery.

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

So, you know.

I understood the

best.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

It's basically my bad.

Yeah, my bad.

He accepts the legitimacy of Altamera.

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

But his little kid who found it probably did.

Yeah.

This is nice.

Exactly, yeah.

And I think she then took Kartelak on a visit of Altamera himself, I think.

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

Sean, what's the comedian's equivalent of that, of destroying something incredibly priceless?

Well, it's probably heckling, to be honest.

If somebody's done a very long set-up to a joke and then just going, no,

it's really hard to recover from that.

That's true.

Trust me.

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

Where else were they the major sites?

As Greg mentioned at the start of the podcast, we have Craswell Crags 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.

Don't wipe your finger through it.

That's priceless.

This is still wet, this paint.

Yeah, that's authentic Stone Age paint.

Yeah, and it's on the side of your mom's house.

It's a Paleolithic house.

Yeah, it's been in the family for a long time.

It's interesting Creswell Crags is the most northerly because Derbyshire is not that far north, is it?

No, but it's because Britain would have been covered by an ice sheet during the last glacial maximum.

So the art at Creswell Crags dates to only 13,000 years ago, so the very end of the Upper Paleolithic.

So as the ice sheet is retreating, we have populations moving further and further north, probably following migrating animals.

We only have kind of Derbyshire as the most northerly point because the rest rest of northern Europe's covered by this ice sheet.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Good old I say, Jane.

But we do actually have a much older example of drawing, not necessarily of symbolic art that shows a thing, but of just drawing.

And you mentioned it briefly in your introduction, but let's talk about it a bit more specifically.

Where is this sort of example?

It's South Africa, is that right?

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, so kind of hatched crisscross patterns, also kind of random lines too.

So it's not on a cave wall, it's this small piece of portable art.

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.

Yeah, we're seeing Homo safians engaging in some sort of art-making behaviour.

And Blumbos Cave was on the sea.

It was like a sort of really nice, warm spot.

Yeah.

It wasn't Ice Age at all.

You could do fishing.

People were enjoying themselves.

Lovely holiday spot.

Exactly.

Yeah, you could push by the sea, do some art.

Yeah, yeah.

And they're not just making these weird engravings too.

We also have some shell beads that they're ornamenting themselves with.

They're probably using the ochre to maybe paint their bodies too.

We don't know.

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.

Okay.

I'm trying to picture it, but yeah, yeah,

the kind of art that I can't really do.

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.

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?

Yeah.

All right.

This is, 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 Silaways Warty Warty Pig because it's little warty,

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, I think.

So it suggests a little bit that maybe people were already making art before they kind of spread out of Africa and making this kind of art potentially.

And they bring this with them.

Because we've also, I mean, 65,000 years ago is the peopling of Australia, so Aboriginal Australias, and is there evidence of early art there?

Yeah, so we have evidence of some ochre, some of these materials that people use to paint on cave walls.

We don't have any evidence of art quite that old.

We do have some Australian art that probably dates back this old.

There is some difficulties and politics with studying Aboriginal Australian art because it's, of course, very sensitive.

They still practice art making today.

And the other side of it is, unfortunately, a lot of these sites have been destroyed through mining.

So we've probably lost a lot, but we assume that some of this art also dates to very early.

Now, Sean, Izzy's been sort of giving dates for this art.

She's been saying $45,500, $13,000 for this.

How would you try and date a piece of cave art?

And don't say Stonehenge.

How would I try to date a piece of cave art?

Oh god, just

I mean, well, I wouldn't touch it, okay?

I'm smarter than that.

I'll probably see what kind of hairstyle the pig has in the photo because you know, for photos taken in the 80s, that's really obvious, really.

So that would be my go-to.

Okay, so you guys probably know better.

You're looking for a mullet,

usually the style leg warmers.

I can see four skinny legs there, so possibly.

Yeah.

And some sort of luminous, what's the Lycra style outfit?

The hypercool t-shirt, the change colour.

Exactly.

Hello, 1992.

What are the scientific techniques that you can deploy?

Sean's not super off with this.

Sometimes we can.

Some pigs do have mollusks, right?

Exactly.

I've been saying it for ages, though.

I'm not crazy.

Yeah, but sometimes we know the species.

For example, if mammoth are drawn on a cave wall, we know when they went extinct.

Mammoth is a poor example because they went extinct after the Paleolithic.

Yeah, they went extinct really recently didn't they?

Yeah more recently than you expect.

Cavefair.

Cavefairs went extinct about 20,000 years ago I think.

We can look at some of the species that they're depicting and we can make some assumptions like that.

So a sort of mullet style approach, right?

But we have a few other different scientific methods for dating art.

So when we find this portable art, that's much easier to date because we usually find that in an archaeological site.

We have different occupation levels at a site and we can radiocarbon date maybe another piece that is in the same layer and get a date that way.

And I mentioned radiocarbon dating.

That's another way that we can date this.

So

we can also do this for some of the cave art.

We can take samples where they helpfully use charcoal, take some samples of that charcoal and get a date that way.

This is really difficult and cave art is notoriously difficult to date because you have these very unstable cave caval environments and lots of contamination can happen and this changes the date of because Sean's been wiping his finger on air.

Exactly.

If I understand right, radiocarbon dating only works up to 50,000 years ago and then stops working.

Yeah.

Or it's really unreliable.

So you can't even get beyond 50,000.

And when you get close to that 50,000 year cutoff point, the error margins of the dates start getting wild.

So you start getting error margins of thousands of years, you know, plus minus a few thousand years.

So it gets really difficult to pinpoint

millennia.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But the other scientific method we have for dating cave art relies on taking samples from calcite flowstone that is growing over the art.

So we're not damaging the art itself.

That's also a problem with radiocarbon dating, is you have to take destructive samples.

So you take a sample of the flowstone over the top of the art and you can use something called uranium series or uranium thorium dating and you can get a date for the flowstone.

So that gives you a minimum age because you know the art must be older than the calcite that's grown over it.

Right.

So it's like Perspex over the Mona Lisa or whatever.

Exactly.

The protective layer on top.

Yeah.

You can date that.

Okay, so our scientific techniques are fascinating and extraordinary what they can do, but there is perhaps some challenges sometimes in the exactitude.

I mean, even with uranium-thorium, we don't know that the flowstone immediately grows over the top of the art, for example.

So sometimes that will give a very young date.

And it doesn't mean that the art is young, it just means that this flowstone grew more recently.

And we don't know exactly.

When you say flowstone, what is that?

Is that like the calcium?

Is that like stalactite?

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's this.

So it will like.

You could date the bottom of my kettle using that.

Yeah, there's quite a lot in there.

So it's good to know.

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.

But I suppose the interesting question is: is Neanderthal art at the same sophistication level as human art, or whether there's a sort of a step up?

But I mean, that's a bigger question.

I mean, we've done the Neanderthal episode before.

Who's to say, really?

I've seen some art in the tape that could be classed as

cave art.

So, Sean, you're a comedy sketch artist, but let's imagine you're a Paleolithic sketch artist.

Are you doing sketches?

What's your go-to

Sean Burke Art School?

I think I know straight away, not because I have really strong convictions, but because I can draw two things.

So for starters, I'd do that cool S that everyone knows.

Come on, that's going straight up there.

And then next to that, I used to draw a sort of 3D looking cube on my copy books, fancy shading and everything.

So I'm introducing perspective to the equation here as well.

Amazing.

Then, after that, probably stick my Instagram handle on it as well.

Maybe a few details of my next gig.

Yeah, if I've learned anything, it's the more time you have to promote a gig, the better.

So, if that means hundreds of thousands of years,

then even better.

Schoenberg on tour

carved into the stone.

Are people doing promotional tour posters, Izzy?

Maybe.

No,

some of the stuff that we get is this kind of of abstract

art.

So this S, yeah, it could be

really cool.

Yeah, so that could be some of these abstract signs that we see in cave art that we just don't understand what they were used for.

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.

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

let's say wolves.

Okay, um

yeah, that kind of area.

Okay, terrifying animals.

So you think predatory animals.

Yeah.

Big scary predatory animals.

I think that's a very common response.

Yeah.

And surprisingly, that is not 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 got that one.

Teeth.

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.

She's absolutely enormous.

Right.

Wow.

I thought cows were already pretty big, Greg.

Mega cow, Sean.

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 so it's I mean yeah I can show it to you

here you are and hand you a bit of paper thank you this one I think is absolutely gorgeous wow that is pretty cool that's like a that's a whole group of what are they lions no

lions chasing big things kind of like a terrifying herd really

this is a rare representation of predatory animals.

Yeah, so we very rarely get lions depicted, apart from this really beautiful rendering of lions.

Also, I'm seeing some hairstyles here.

You know, y'all laughed at me earlier, but these look like high tops.

You know, this is so I could date these pretty accurately.

Pretty sweet fades on them.

They took care of themselves.

Yeah.

I think, Sean, 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.

I mean,

almost, yeah, never depicted.

Just observing, like, 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's just, it's a bit, it might take a bit longer, but it's like, you'll never guess what I saw last weekend to share with your friends.

But I think it's interesting, isn't it?

We can assume a sort of functionality to art.

Like, art is practical.

Like, here's what you need to hunt.

It's almost like, you know, in World War II, people were issued with Spotter's guide for, is this a German plane or a British plane over your head?

You know, do you need to hide or do you need to cheer?

And similarly, is it like, if you see a lion, run away.

If you see a deer, try and eat it.

Is there something practical or is this more about worship of the animal kingdom or just simply observation of nature?

Yeah, so there have been a lot of different interpretations over the decades of studying Paleolithic art and a lot of these kind of, yeah, very functional interpretations.

So there have been interpretations, yeah that this was you know like a hunting guide or this is some sort of part of some hunting magic ritual we draw a bison and that means that we'll then go and out and hunt a bison because what i'd say is i i've looked at the photo and i still wouldn't trust myself hunting a lion yeah you know what i mean even if i had a few days with this i'd still be like hmm could you show me how to use a spear

bit more specific i've watched the flint stones and i believe what you actually have to do is you you employ the lion.

Oh, give it a job.

In fact, the whole animal kingdom, you turn them into cameras and all sorts of things, and they did a dishwashing.

I think that's how it works.

Yeah, that's famous for being the most accurate cartoon ever, really, as well.

Sean, in terms of, I mean, you mentioned there's almost no art showing humans hunting.

There is something in Indonesia showing something

human-ish.

This one's really amazing.

Again, it's a very recent discovery, and it seems to show exactly what we've been saying for years isn't depicted in cave art.

It seems to show this kind of hunting scene.

So it looks like there are these kind of stick figures and they're chasing a big animal.

But what's interesting about it is there's a slight hybridity to it, isn't it?

The human form is not entirely human.

Yes.

And the word we have for this, Sean, is terrianthrope.

Okay.

Yeah.

Now I was just yeah, thank you for confirming what I suspected.

I can show you some terriantropes.

Yes, please.

Is he?

I say therianthropes.

Okay.

I actually don't know.

I think it's it's one of those words that people are.

Let's call it therianthropes.

You have the PhD, and I don't.

I'm going to hand you a piece of paper with two therianthropes on it.

What can you see?

I see.

He looks so mischievous, is what I say.

I'm seeing sort of like a deer or a horse body,

but a beard and a face that's sort of looking to the camera to say, oh,

who me?

Did I really just do that?

So that's pretty cool.

And the other one's a bit harder to make out.

Oh, it looks like a man who's falling over and there's a duck underneath him.

This is great radio.

It's sort of like a bloke and there's kind of a duck thing.

Is he, what on earth are we looking at?

It's a very good question.

So I'll start with the first image.

This is a very famous sketch by Henri Broy.

He called it the sorcerer from a cave in France called Le Trois-Frè.

It's supposed to show this kind of deer-human hybrid figure.

But what's interesting is this is a sketch Broy made of this depiction and he interpreted this.

And it's probably not what's actually drawn

on the cave wall.

He's kind of seen this sort of weird animal-human hybrid.

It might just be a badly drawn deer that looks a little bit more.

Maybe he's just bad at drawing.

Maybe I've just been bad at drawing.

Not Broy, the cave artist.

Yeah, I mean.

The other thing I have to ask is, and I don't want to lower the tone.

Quite large penises.

Very subtly put there, Greg.

Sorry.

Yeah, so not in the first one.

That's very modest, right?

But yes,

in the second image, we have this bird-headed man that seems to have...

He was in the middle of something when he fell over.

Yeah.

As far as I can tell.

Yeah, exactly.

This is not uncommon in Paleolithic art drawing.

This scene is from Lasko.

It's actually very...

So if you know or have heard of Lasko, you think of these beautiful halls of amazingly detailed animals.

This is in a separate part of the cave called the shaft, where they probably had to climb down into this area.

And yeah, it depicts this bird-headed man kind of falling over, and then this bison or auroch that's attacking him that also seems to have been speared.

So you can, this possibly represents his guts kind of spilling out of the bottom here.

And you see this spear at the bottom.

I think that's a beach ball.

I thought that's a beach ball.

You see it's all coming together.

Right.

And then this duck with a very long leg, which we now interpret as maybe a spear thrower.

So we have these tools in the Paleolithic called spear throwers.

Yeah.

That's what it says on the tin.

But they're often very ornately carved.

So they often have animals where you sort of hook the spear into.

So that could be mammoth.

So it's it's a projectile weapon, you kind of load it and then you flick it with the wrist and the kind of the spear shoots through the air like a dart.

Yes.

So yeah, good to know.

So some people have interpreted this duck with a long leg as maybe being that.

Yeah.

Okay.

We've also got terriotropes and figurines in this portable art.

And the most famous one is called the Lion Man from

Holtzensteinstadtel?

My German's not good.

Tell us about the Lion Man.

Yeah, so this is an amazing, very famous figurine that's carved out of ivory and it seems to have the head of a lion and then kind of the body of a person, of a man.

So it's showing this kind of human-animal hybrid quite clearly.

What's cool as well is there's some carvings on the arms of the lion-man, which some people might have interpreted as maybe tattoos or like a body painting.

It's an amazing example of this sort of animal-human hybrid.

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Sean, let's talk art supplies.

Okay.

They couldn't pop down to WF 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?

We've heard a couple of examples already, actually.

Like bits of like

rock and charcoal you've mentioned.

Anything with any semblance of colour, I guess, will do.

Whatever's to hand.

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 okra earlier?

Yeah, 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 it's 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 burden of straw, like a straw,

or just directly from the mouth.

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

Wow, that feels quite counterintuitive.

Spit on my own hand.

Anything for the art.

Exactly.

You've got to suffer for your art.

Yeah, I appreciate the commitment.

I respect it.

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, the layout?

Are you aware of what the audience is perceiving in terms of light and dark and sound and all that?

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 a 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, a crowd of cavemen, you know, probably some toilet humor, that's their kind of ballpark.

That's fine,

but yeah, very much so.

And I think,

well, 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 I wanted you to be 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 a odd 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 no, I 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, 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 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.

Because we're gathered around the fire, aren't we?

Yeah, and we're experiencing this art, possibly incorporating it into some storytelling.

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 theatre performer's dream, you know, really helps you project, you know, tell the story.

So that's ideal.

Yeah, exactly.

Friends, Romans, actually.

Yeah, that'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 paradolia means?

I'll be honest, no.

Do you want to have a guess?

Yeah, is it the study of beach balls?

Yeah, if only it was.

It's actually the study of parasols, 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.

It's a product of our visual system trying to fill in the blanks when it's given sort of ambiguous visual cues.

And we think that this is influencing some of the art making.

And this is especially 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 their 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 paradolia.

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.

And psychologists have tried to understand this, whether, you know, there's something evolved in our brains where faces are special and we treat faces differently to other sort of visual stimuli, or is it just that we see faces all the time?

So, I like to think of it as we just live in these very sociable, highly dense populations, and faces are important to us, so we see faces all the time, that means we see faces when there aren't faces.

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 tracking, 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, that is, yeah.

that's surprisingly, the one thing I learned in university that I remembered is sort of what we were just talking about.

There was one module that was like behavioral studies or something like that.

And it was about how we put these images together, the kind of and because, well, the lecturer's idea was that it was based on these split-second decisions that needed to be made, you know, often assessing danger and things like that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I was supposed to be studying marketing.

That's all I got from that.

So

three years downstream.

Second marketing decision.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Do I sell this brand?

How do I sell it?

That's very helpful.

So that's really, I mean, Paradolia is fascinating.

You're taking a kind of psychological approach to interpreting how art might have been created, which is amazing.

I'm going to drag us back towards 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?

Something to do, really.

I mean, as I said earlier, I mean, come on, what are you going to do in the evening?

Just stare at a cave wall.

Okay.

Might as well make it.

So you're very much team passing the time.

There's nothing.

You know, it's the ice age outside.

It's freezing cold.

Yeah, come on.

Nothing better to do.

I mean, I think, you know, I think the obvious one Izzy is when you walk into a chicken shop and you see the menu of all the things on top.

So my first thing is going, burger, bison, yes, please.

Quarter pound of a cheese.

But also, 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?

Yeah, 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.

Maybe you speak Bison, we 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?

But that changes our understanding of the Stone Age, I think, because the idea of movable people, of peripatetic groups, sorry, that's a pretentious word, isn't it?

Of wandering groups who encounter each other and the first instinct might be to try and kill each other.

And then someone goes, lads, lads, lads,

we're all the same.

Let's have a little cave off.

Have you seen the hairstyles on bison these days?

Come on, what's that about?

Exactly.

There's also 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 yeah, they're using art as one way of kind of being like, yeah, that's some seal in Germany.

Like, have you seen them?

Yeah.

So, okay, so I'm pushing the kind of communication functionality.

Are there any other theories that you want to name check, even if you don't agree with them?

Anything you?

Yeah, that's, well, it's kind of Sean's first interpretation.

They were just bored and doing it.

It's what we call 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 sort of

ideas about shamanism and ritual.

Yeah, that's a very common interpretation.

So you're going into a cave, you're in maybe a trance state, you're a shaman, and you're tying this to maybe hunting magic, or you're just seeing things on the wall because you've ingested a lot of mushrooms, or the environment is sort of making you see things.

So, 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, yeah, interesting stuff.

So, Sean, we've sort of chucked a lot at you.

Yeah.

How are you feeling about cave art now?

Are you ready to go out and do some?

I'm really, yeah.

I just want to get back out there into the caves and create it.

The nuance window!

All right, well, we've had a lovely old chat about cave art, but it's time now for 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.

So my stopwatch is ready.

Take Take it away, Dr.

Izzy.

Thank you.

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 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.

But sometimes it's just children doing their thing for the sort of tactile enjoyment of making 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.

Yeah, my daughter's about to turn five and she loves making art.

And if she was allowed to, she would paint all over our wall.

We very much would like her not to.

Maybe buy her lots of art supplies so she uses them on the table.

But like, kids love to paint.

Yeah.

Do they like to put their hands on things and measure themselves and get messy and smear over the walls?

Yeah.

That's amazing.

Beautiful.

I love it.

Thank you so much.

I think we can say that kids were doing art in the Stone Age.

Of course they were.

So what do you know now?

This is our quickfire quiz for Sean to see how much he has learned.

Sean, we have covered comfortably 50,000 years, probably 100,000 years, give or take.

How are you feeling?

Did it all go in?

I mean, I've crammed for exams before, so I think I can, yeah, 50,000 years in about an hour, no problem.

we've got 10 questions for you here we go question one in which modern country was the earliest known example of human abstract drawing found abstract drawing yeah the earliest human example think of the beach Spain

think of Africa South Africa yes South Africa very good and it's Lombas Cave question two name one of the three main reasons that experts in the 1890s were skeptical that paintings found at Altamira were stone age because

one of the main three reasons yeah because uh he he wiped his finger through it yeah and it came off as if that proves anything yeah exactly

destroyed this someone made this on tuesday yeah yeah absolutely you could always have it was a recent forgery or that um they just didn't believe primitive people could make art question three What did archaeologists find carved onto a piece of mammoth, ivory, at La Madeleine?

It was a mammoth.

It was done by a mammoth, I contend.

Question four.

I've seen Ice Age.

That's a documentary.

Question four.

Can you name one of the scientific techniques that Izzy mentioned that archaeologists use to date cave art?

Oh, it was

radiocarbon dating?

Yeah, very good.

Or you could have uranium series dating as well, looking at the flowstone.

Yeah, something scary sounding.

Question five, what animal was painted on a cave wall in Indonesia 45,500 years ago and is the oldest representative art yet found?

That beautiful warty pig.

Yes, no body shame.

It is a beautiful water pig.

Question six, how were hand stencils made on the cave walls?

By putting their hand on the wall and getting some mixture in their mouth and then spitting on their hand.

Yeah, very good.

Lovely.

Messy art.

Question seven, describe one of the human-animal hybrids, I think we call them a therian tropes, depicted in Paleolithic art.

Oh, there was one of the portable arts you described.

It was a guy's body and a lion's head.

Very good, yeah, the lion man.

Very nice.

You could have had this sorcerer bird-headed man with a strange penis, but there's plenty of options.

Question eight, what is pareidolia?

Oh, that's when we see shapes and figures.

We perceive them

by looking at something.

That's right.

Question nine, what is surprising about the panel of lions from Chauvet Cave in France in terms of the animals it shows?

What is surprising in that there's a mix of animals?

What kind of animals are there?

Oh, then that in that it's showing predators.

That's right, that's right.

It's showing predators where normally it would be the delicious lunch options.

Question 10, this for a 10 out of 10.

Name generous 10 out of 10.

A generous 10 out of 10, but you know, still it counts.

Name two popular theories for the functional purpose of cave art, if it was functional.

We literally just talked about this

for like storytelling.

Wanted to pass on information

and also shamanistic kind of ritual-based stuff.

Very good.

I'm giving you 10 out of 10.

Wow.

Well done, Sean.

Hugely impressive.

Thank you.

And thank you, Dr.

Izzy, for the excellent lecture and the lesson and taking us into a cave.

That was very atmospheric.

You pleased, Sean, with 10 out of 10?

I'm delighted.

I'm chuffed.

I'm going to go and draw my hand on the nearest wall I can find.

Please leave the building first.

Okay, okay.

Thank you so much, Sean.

Thank you, Izzy.

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 manganese oxide mammoths all over the local coffee shop.

Bye!

This episode of Your Dead to Me was researched by John Norman Mason.

It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Nagoose, and me.

The audio producer was Steve Hankey, and our production coordinator was Ben Hollins.

It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me, and senior producer Emma Nagoose, and our executive editor was James Cook.

Your Dead to Me is a BBC Studios audio production for BBC Radio 4.

Nature.

Nature Bang.

Hello, hello, and welcome to Nature Bang.

I'm Becky Ripley.

I'm Emily Knight.

And in this series from BBC Radio 4, we look to the natural world to answer some of life's big questions.

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And what can an octopus teach us about the relationship between mind and body?

It really stretches your understanding of consciousness.

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I'm actually always very comfortable comparing us to other species.

Philosophers.

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You know, that big bargain detergent jug is 80% water, right?

It doesn't clean as well.

80% water?

I thought I was getting a better deal because it's so big.

If you want a better clean, Tide Pods are only 12% water.

The rest is pure concentrated cleaning ingredients.

Oh, let me make an announcement.

Attention shoppers.

If you want a real deal, try Tide Pods.

Stop paying for watered-down detergents.

Pay for clean.

If it's got to be clean, it's got to be Tide Pods.

Water content based on the leading bargain liquid detergent.