Cave Paintings

For reasons that are still not understood, we paused in southwestern Asia. Some experts like the Stanford anthropologist Richard Klein, believe this was the period when Homo sapiens sapiens acquired its full cognitive abilities. I believe they may be right. If they are, then the Cro Magnons who entered Europe were capable of complex reasoning, advance planning, and fully articulate speech. Their relationship with the world was defined as much by complex symbolism as by technological skills. The humans who pushed outward from southwest Asia were artists and shamans, super-predators, people capable of mastering any climate on earth. ~Page 19

Early scholars of Cro-Magnon art wrote of the paintings as “sympathetic hunting magic,” a matter of artists carefully observing their quarry and then painting or engraving it on cave walls far from the open air. Today, many experts believe Cro-Magnon art was a part of complex shamanistic rituals, that it was often drawn by shamans who had just emerged from altered states of consciousness in pitch-dark chambers far from daylight. Whatever the correct interpretation, no one doubts that the paintings reflect close spiritual relationships between the domain of the living and the forces of the supernatural cosmos. The hunter-artists treated their quarry as living beings with feelings. A supplicant could acquire spiritual power from animal painted on the rock, whose spirits lived behind the wall. Their hand imprints, outlined in paint, record their sacred acts for the first time in human existence, the powers of the supernatural played a central role in daily life -- coercing, encouraging, and defining human existence.

The supernatural impinged on all members of society, young or old, male or female, healthy or inform. Every band had its shaman, its individual of power, who mediated between the living and the dread forces that threatened or permitted survival. Shamans defined human existence in chant and song with oral traditions and familiar tales. … Page 20

The hunting societies relied heavily on large and medium-sized mammals -- autorchs, bison, mammoth, reindeer, wild horses, and other prey. Human life was connected to these beasts through powerful symbolism. The magnificent cave paintings of Altamira, Grotte de Chauvet, Laxicaus, Niaux, and many other sites bear testimony to the power of the Ice Age bestiary . There the people, places their hands against the rocky walls, apparently to acquire power from the animal spirits that lurked within. ` Page 64

. . . If living hunter-gatherer societies are any guide, spiritual life during the great warming was as powerful and sophisticated as it was in the heyday of the cave artists. Everywhere, men and women went about their daily lives surrounded by the unseen forces of the supernatural realm, which provided guidance and precedence, gave shape to human existence, and ordered a world that changed little from one short generation to the next. ~ Page 72