Visual art first appeared in Europe about 35,000 years ago as part of a revolutionary transformation known as the Middle-Upper Paleolithic transition. This transformation coincided with the replacement of archaic humans (Homo sapiens neandertalensis) by modern ones (Homo sapiens sapiens). This article provides an overview of the emergence and evolution of Paleolithic art, and attempts to assess the adzaptive value of art in human evolution.
Surprisingly most art historians and many anthropologists remain blissfully unaware of the rich record of human artistic achievment prior to the painting of Lascaux and Altamira. This is because most introductory texts in art history and anthropology begin the discussion of the evolution of art with the famous painted caves of SW France and Northern Spain. Few recognize that by the time the first cave was painted shortly before 20,000 years ago, there had already existed in Europe a tradition of engraved and sculpted objects extending back 150 centuries to 35,000 years ago. Indeed, from the first representational art at about 35,000 years ago to the painting of Lascaux at about 17,500 years ago is a period of about the same length as that between Lascaux and Picasso...175 centuries. To ignore this early period is to ignore fully half of all art history! As a result, the discussion that follows considers the full sweep of artistic representation from about 35,000 years ago to the end of the Ice Age about 11,000 years ago.
Before proceeding with this more complete discussion of the art itself, we must consider a serious problem of ethnocentrism surrounding the use of the very term "art." The notion of a separate entity known as "art" is peculiar to western civilization. "Art" is a historical category of our own cultural tradition. Few other cultures have such a concept, and we can be fairly certain that Upper Paleolithic societies did not. In anthropology, representation, which is a more useful term, must always be understood in terms of its technological, economic, social and ideational context of creation and use. Conkey (1987) has noted that...it is now mandatory to view "Paleolithic art" as an extremely diverse and abundant repertoire of material culture that cannot be accounted for by any inclusive interpretive umbrella...This is merely to say that visual representation in the Upper Paleolithic cannot be treated as a monolithic entity, but must be understood in terms of the diversity of cultural contexts that generated it.
One of the defining characteristics of modern Homo sapiens sapiens is that we experience our world through complex conceptual frameworks that are often mutually unintelligible between cultures. While we tend to think of art as evocative, that which is evoked is heavily reliant upon participation in a mutually understood system of meaning, in other words a shared body of ideas, conceptions, and experience. Art, far from being a universal language, is culture bound.
The fact that Ice Age humans, using visual media, were conveying ideas and sentiments so complicated as to totally confound us indicates that the nature of the world to which humans adapted had begun to change. In a very real way humans had begun to produce their own world, a symbolic world that included imaginary creatures, and deities.
For a truly comprehensive discussion of Paleolithic art, the interested reader is referred to Bahn and Vertut (1988), Sieveking (1979), White (1986), Bosinski (1990), Vialou (1986), and French Ministry of Culture (1984). We will have to be satisfied here with answering a few critical questions: