Why did humans create cave paintings?

  • Thread starter flashgordon2!
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In summary: The astronomer hypothesized that the Native Americans were observing the sun's position and motion to predict when certain agricultural activities would be most successful.This hypothesis is supported by other rock art in the area, including petroglyphs of a maize plant that appear to have been painted to indicate the time of year when the plant would be in its peak growth.The astronomer believes that the paintings on the bluff may depict the positions of the stars and planets as they would have appeared at the time the paintings were created.Together, the studies suggest that more ancient groups than previously thought were able to understand the clock
  • #1
flashgordon2!
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People have wondered why humans made those cave paintings tens of thousands of years ago.

One thing I would think is for sure; that they did so because they discovered they could do it.

But, I feel I've found another reason; the pictures are monuments to their humanity like later architecture and artwork were made for. At that time, they hadn't thought to work with stone, clays, or even dirt. The later use of stone and clays to make temples and statues was a 'generalization' of the discovery of drawing artwork in caves. I'd site the drawing of their hands as proof of what these cave drawings are about.
 
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  • #3
http://www.artchive.com/artchive/C/cave.html

this website says some pretty interesting things about these cave paintings; paintings like twenty meters up covering the whole ceiling; certainly no mean feet.

The website also mentions abstract 'signs'!
 
  • #4
one feature I find curious is there doesn't seem to be much astronomical concerns portrayed in the cave paintings;
 
  • #5
flashgordon2! said:
one feature I find curious is there doesn't seem to be much astronomical concerns portrayed in the cave paintings;

Here's someone who did find
flashgordon2! said:
astronomical concerns portrayed in... cave paintings

When most people look at stone-age cave paintings, they see charging bulls, prancing reindeer and other animals.

Dr. Michael A. Rappenglueck also sees maps of the night sky, and images of shamanistic ritual teeming with cosmological meaning.

Rappenglueck, an independent, somewhat maverick researcher based in Gilching-Geisenbrunn, Germany, believes our ancestors were closely observing the stars as early as 16,500 years ago.

He has studied famous stone-age paintings in caves at Lascaux, France and elsewhere since the mid 1980s. To analyze the artwork, he projects it onto a grid, and compares it to maps of the night skies as our ancestors would have seen them.

Rappenglueck developed software that plots the night skies, as they appeared thousands of years ago.

"This software has to be very exact. It's not easy to have the right algorithms (formulas) to reckon the ice-age skies," said Rappenglueck.

continued here

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/cave_paintings_000810.html [Broken]
 
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  • #6
flashgordon2! said:
certainly no mean feet.
Or even 'mean feat'.:biggrin:

flashgordon2! said:
one feature I find curious is there doesn't seem to be much astronomical concerns portrayed in the cave paintings;
What would points in the sky have to have with buffalo migrations?
 
  • #7
crn wins more brownie points; not in reference to nannoh's contribution;
 
  • #8
flashgordon2! said:
crn wins more brownie points; not in reference to nannoh's contribution;
:confused: :confused:
 
  • #9
Why, indeed, should cave paintings have any astronomical significance?
Stonehenge certainly didn't have any such connection, whatever Fred Hoyle wants to believe.
Then, as for the most part now, knowledge of astronomy was utterly irrelevant in people's lives. Hunters followed where animals went, whereas farmers planted when the weather seemed favourable. The positions of the stars would at the most be incidental, more probably irrelevant in these people's lives.
 
  • #10
arildno said:
Why, indeed, should cave paintings have any astronomical significance?
Stonehenge certainly didn't have any such connection, whatever Fred Hoyle wants to believe.
Then, as for the most part now, knowledge of astronomy was utterly irrelevant in people's lives. Hunters followed where animals went, whereas farmers planted when the weather seemed favourable. The positions of the stars would at the most be incidental, more probably irrelevant in these people's lives.

A few more related articles where the cycles of the moon are recorded on cave walls and so on and so forth.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/251847.stm

http://ephemeris.com/history/prehistoric.html

Rock art paints picture of ancients attuned to heavens

By Alexandra Witze

AUSTIN-Rock art from places as widespread as Texas and Guam captures the astronomical significance of the sky.
Native American petroglyphs near Paint Rock, Texas, were created so that sunlight would fall on specific figures on the winter and summer solstices, a University of Texas astronomer thinks. And on the Pacific island of Guam, ground cave paintings may depict a 16- month calendar based on the stars rather than the moon.
Together, the studies suggest that more ancient groups than previously thought were able to understand the clocklike properties of the celestial sky, scientists said last week at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society
At Paint Rock, about 30 miles east of San Angelo, scientists have long known about the petroglyphs, or rock art, that decorate a half-mile-long bluff. The petroglyphs lie on private property, but the owners have worked to preserve the art, which includes figures of animals and scrawled names of some of the Native Americans who passed through. Some of the paintings are as old as 6,000 years; several groups used this area, including the Tonkawa and the Jumano at first, followed by the Apache, Kiowa and Comanche
Two years ago, the current owners asked Robert Robbins, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, to investigate some strange light movements they had seen along the bluff. A dagger-shaped wedge of sunlight appeared to move across a large petroglyph of a shield during the winter solstice, they said.
Such "solar markers" have been found elsewhere in Western rock art. They can range from light striking a circular glyph, to represent the sun, to light dancing across images of people and animals.

http://www.geocities.com/cvas.geo/paintrock.html

Oldest Astronomical Megalith Alignment Discovered In Egypt By Science Team

An assembly of huge stone slabs found in Egypt's Sahara Desert that date from about 6,500 years to 6,000 years ago has been confirmed by scientists to be the oldest known astronomical alignment of megaliths in the world.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/04/980403081524.htm

There seems to be plenty of evidence to support the idea that there was a study and understanding of astronomy thousands if not 10s of thousands of years before Copernicus or Galileo. And much of the evidence is on "cave" walls.
 
  • #11
arildno said:
Why, indeed, should cave paintings have any astronomical significance?
Stonehenge certainly didn't have any such connection, whatever Fred Hoyle wants to believe.
Then, as for the most part now, knowledge of astronomy was utterly irrelevant in people's lives. Hunters followed where animals went, whereas farmers planted when the weather seemed favourable. The positions of the stars would at the most be incidental, more probably irrelevant in these people's lives.
Well, it became pretty important when agriculture came along. Farmers that simply planted when the weather seemed favourable would not be very good farmers for long.
 
  • #12
DaveC426913 said:
Well, it became pretty important when agriculture came along. Farmers that simply planted when the weather seemed favourable would not be very good farmers for long.

One more note about this is that when there were eclipses or other infrequent astronomical occurances they were recorded out of reverence or fear or plain astonishment - on cave walls - by the people of the time. For the most part these records are on the North American continent and are found in petroglyphs and pictographs on and between the eastern and western coasts.

flashgordon2 said:
one feature I find curious is there doesn't seem to be much astronomical concerns portrayed in the cave paintings;

Probably because you haven't looked.
 
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  • #13
nonnoh said:
flashgordon2 said:
one feature I find curious is there doesn't seem to be much astronomical concerns portrayed in the cave paintings;

Probably because you haven't looked.

Honestly, many of the artifacts now identified as astronomical don't look like anything a layperson would recognize as astronomical. For that matter it took generations before such identifications were made, even in the professional community. So it isn't just "dirty eyes" but a genuine cognitive problem.
 
  • #14
selfAdjoint said:
Honestly, many of the artifacts now identified as astronomical don't look like anything a layperson would recognize as astronomical. For that matter it took generations before such identifications were made, even in the professional community. So it isn't just "dirty eyes" but a genuine cognitive problem.

This is true. And I would not have seen any significance in the drawings as they relate to astronomical configuration if it weren't for the clarifying experience of looking it up on google.com.
 
  • #15
flashgordon2! said:
...the pictures are monuments to their humanity like later architecture and artwork were made for.

If the Ice Age cave paintings were meant as monuments to humanity, wouldn't there be grand depictions of people rather than animals? The very few depictions of humans are simple stick figures which in no way compare to the self-glorifying, super-realistic sculptures of classical Greece.

The European cave artists were Stone Age hunter/gatherers whose religion or worldview, if historical examples are any indication, involved the necessity of drawing power from other animals. That suggests that they didn't have a very lofty view of themselves within their world, certainly not like we do today. It's more like they were glorifying the animals on which they depended.

Also, many paintings overlap and partially cover previous paintings which suggests a more temporal and pragmatic purpose, such as ensuring success in that season's hunt or indoctrinating that year's adolescent boys into adult hunting society.

As for the painted hands, most of them are missing one or more digits. That doesn't argue much for self-glorification.
 
  • #16
Tojen said:
If the Ice Age cave paintings were meant as monuments to humanity, wouldn't there be grand depictions of people rather than animals? The very few depictions of humans are simple stick figures which in no way compare to the self-glorifying, super-realistic sculptures of classical Greece.

The European cave artists were Stone Age hunter/gatherers whose religion or worldview, if historical examples are any indication, involved the necessity of drawing power from other animals. That suggests that they didn't have a very lofty view of themselves within their world, certainly not like we do today. It's more like they were glorifying the animals on which they depended.

Also, many paintings overlap and partially cover previous paintings which suggests a more temporal and pragmatic purpose, such as ensuring success in that season's hunt or indoctrinating that year's adolescent boys into adult hunting society.

As for the painted hands, most of them are missing one or more digits. That doesn't argue much for self-glorification.
Hm. This is food for thought. I had not thought about ways to determine what they felt was important.

Although
many paintings overlap and partially cover previous paintings
could be explained by the continual vacancy and reoccupation of caves by different tribes
 
  • #17
DaveC426913 said:
[Overlapping paintings] could be explained by the continual vacancy and reoccupation of caves by different tribes

That could be, and it probably did happen at times. I was really just thinking out loud, but I do think that STone Age hunter/gatherers didn't place themselves above other creatures in the animal heirarchy. If anything, they considered themselves lower since they felt they had to take the power of another animal to succeed in life. When your survival depends on animals that are bigger, stronger or faster than you are, you would know them more intimately and would tend to have more respect for them.

I once spent one evening around a campfire with a group of Indians, young men and a few women in their late teens and twenties. They lived in a fairly remote community with most modern conveniences but still depended to some extent on hunting, fishing and trapping for their livelihood. For about an hour, they talked about the different animals they encounter and discussed in detail their various attributes and strengths. There was no bravado over shooting the biggest or the most (which was the only contribution I could make to the conversation so I soon shut up). My impression was that they considered themselves an equal member of the world they lived in, not a superior species with domination over all other animals, and therefore had no reason to glorify themselves. I don't think that came until we cut our ties with wild animals and didn't need them for survival anymore.

I just thought of the Venus figurines. They were made around the same time as the cave paintings and are quite realistic compared to the stick figures in the caves, at least in the parts that mattered to them. Usually the faces and arms and feet are very simply represented or omitted altogether. Again, I think that shows they had a specific purpose and weren't meant as monuments to their makers' humanity as the OP suggested.
 
  • #18
Old school graffiti, of course. :)
 
  • #19
Folks,

A lot of you seem to be missing one rather cruicial detail. Astronomy, even at the most basic level, is a precise science. The oldest cave paintings are thought to be over 30,000 years old. That's about 24,000 years before the earliest signs of a coherent number system.

Astronomy or, more preciesly, astrology was invented by religious elites in comparatively afluent early urban societies. They had a secure roof over their head and a steady food supply. Moreover, the division of labour was such as to allow them the time to take regular careful measurements, which would, in turn, allow them to predict the one thing that is, despite appearances, quite predictable - the stars. Of course, if you can predict the STARS, you've got to be able to predict trivial earthly matters such as failing crops and success in battle.

As for the hand paintings, the way they are though to have been done was by taking a mouthful of whatever paint they were using and spraying it over your hand. Now consider whether you could paint any other part of your body using this method, or whether you would be able to find a willing "model" to stand in front of the rock, while you cover them in your spittle. A handprint, on the other hand is quick and convenient way of leaving an "I was here". If you look carefully, it says "for a good time call on Mighty Mammoth's missus" just underneath.
 
  • #20
If yopu want to know "Why Cae Paintings" go and ask somebody who does them.
Australian Aborigini's are still cave painting. It is a method of illustrating the verbal histories "Dream Time" to an illiterate population. Until western immigrants impacted so devastatingly on their culture the older paintings had no value so new paintings were put over the top as they had for thousands of years. Very detailed descriptions of the meanings of the various symbols which are similar to European cave paintings are available.
As for astronomical data, there are a number of examples of art work relating to the path of principle stars and the sun/moon. These were important in determining the seasons for crop planting in early agricultural societies, well before counting systems and calendars were available.
 
  • #21
Panda said:
If yopu want to know "Why Cae Paintings" go and ask somebody who does them.
Yeah, go ask the Geico caveman! :rofl: Though I bet he gets offended...
 

1. Why did humans create cave paintings?

There are a few theories as to why humans created cave paintings. Some believe that they were created as a form of communication or storytelling. Others think they may have been used for religious or spiritual purposes. Another theory is that they were created as a way to document or record important events or experiences.

2. When were cave paintings first created?

The oldest known cave paintings are estimated to be over 40,000 years old, but the exact time period in which they were first created is still debated among scientists. Some believe they may have been created as early as 64,000 years ago.

3. How were cave paintings made?

The most common method used to create cave paintings was by using natural pigments such as charcoal, clay, or minerals mixed with animal fats or plant oils. These were then applied to the cave walls using fingers, brushes, or blowing techniques. Some paintings may have also been made by carving or engraving into the cave walls.

4. Where are cave paintings found?

Cave paintings have been discovered all over the world, with the most famous examples found in Europe, Africa, and Australia. The majority of these paintings are found in deep, dark caves, which suggests that they may have been created in a ritualistic or sacred space.

5. What can we learn from cave paintings?

Cave paintings provide valuable insights into the lives and cultures of our ancient ancestors. They can tell us about their beliefs, customs, and daily activities. They also serve as a reminder of the incredible artistic abilities of early humans and their desire to communicate and express themselves through visual art.

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