# Prehistoric Art

History I · Art and History · https://tryals.app/learn/history-i/prehistoric-art

## Images Before Writing

The oldest art poses the hardest interpretive problem: superb images with not one word of explanation. Method matters most here because the temptation to project our own ideas is strongest.

| Site / form | Date (approx.) | Significance |
|---|---|---| 
| **Blombos Cave ochre** | 75,000 BP | Engraved cross-hatching: abstraction, not depiction |
| **Sulawesi & Borneo** | 45,000+ BP | Figurative painting outside Europe |
| **Chauvet** | ~36,000 BP | Masterful lions, rhinos; oldest great painted cave |

This art is not **primitive**: Chauvet's lions use shading, perspective, and motion, and it is twice as old as Lascaux, disproving steady progress. The story is global: Sulawesi proves the "European revolution" was never solely European.

## What Was It For?

Every generation reads its own preoccupations into the caves, creating major interpretive theories.

- **Art for art's sake**: Fails because images sit in dark, dangerous, inaccessible chambers.
- **Hunting magic**: Fails because painted species rarely match the eaten bones found in middens.
- **Shamanism**: Fits deep-cave placement and geometric motifs, but is very hard to falsify.

**The honest position**: People went to great effort in the dark, repeatedly, for tens of thousands of years. Any interpretation fitting **all** art from Spain to Siberia across 30,000 years is too loose to be wrong.

## Practice questions

8 of this lesson's 13 practice questions, with answers. The full set is in the app.

### 1. Order these landmarks of early art from oldest to youngest.

**Answer:**

1. Blombos Cave engraved ochre (~75,000 BP)
2. Sulawesi figurative cave painting (~45,000 BP)
3. Chauvet’s lions and rhinos (~36,000 BP)
4. Lascaux’s great bulls (~17,000 BP)
5. Altamira’s polychrome bison (~15,000 BP)

**Why:** Note the shape of this sequence: abstraction precedes depiction, Indonesia matches Europe, and the technically dazzling Chauvet is twice as old as Lascaux. Art history’s first chapter is not a progress narrative.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/prehistoric-art/order-these-landmarks-of-early-art-from-oldest-to-youngest

### 2. Some of the oldest known figurative cave art is in Indonesia, not Europe.

**Answer:** True

**Why:** True. Uranium-series dating of cave paintings in Sulawesi has produced figurative images at least as old as the European ones, and a Sulawesi hunting scene has been dated to about 44,000 years. The 'Europe first' picture reflected where archaeologists had looked hardest, not where the art was.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/prehistoric-art/some-of-the-oldest-known-figurative-cave-art-is-in-indonesia-not

### 3. The animals painted at Lascaux do not match the animals whose bones fill the site's rubbish. What does that mismatch do to the 'hunting magic' interpretation?

A. It shows the bones were deposited by a later occupation
B. It confirms it, since magic would target the hardest animals to catch
C. It undermines it: they ate reindeer and painted horses
D. Nothing; painted and eaten species need not correspond under any interpretation

**Answer:** C. It undermines it: they ate reindeer and painted horses

**Why:** The theory predicts a correlation and the record shows a mismatch, reindeer dominate the diet and barely appear on the walls. Option 2 is the move that saves the theory by making it unfalsifiable, and noticing that is why Leroi-Gourhan's structural readings displaced sympathetic magic.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/prehistoric-art/the-animals-painted-at-lascaux-do-not-match-the-animals-whose-bones

### 4. Sort each claim about cave art: **supported by evidence** or **projection**?

**Answer:**

- Supported by the evidence: People made repeated, difficult journeys into deep chambers, Painted species often differ from the animals eaten, Some images use shading and overlap to suggest depth
- Modern projection: The painters worshipped a horned fertility god

**Why:** Effort, mismatch, technique, and chronology are all measurable. Gods and galleries are our furniture, carried into their dark and left there.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/prehistoric-art/sort-each-claim-about-cave-art-supported-by-evidence-or-projection

### 5. Roughly how many years ago were the Chauvet paintings made? **Set the slider.**

**Answer:** 36000 (within ±5000)

**Why:** About 36,000 years, the oldest great painted cave, and the one that destroyed the tidy story of art improving over time.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/prehistoric-art/roughly-how-many-years-ago-were-the-chauvet-paintings-made-set-the

### 6. Match each site or form to what makes it significant.

**Answer:**

- Blombos ochre → Abstraction long before figurative art
- Sulawesi paintings → Figurative art as old outside Europe
- Chauvet → Oldest great painted cave; shading and motion
- Venus figurines → Portable art from the Pyrenees to Siberia

**Why:** Each entry breaks a comfortable assumption: abstraction is old, Europe is not first, technique is not cumulative, and the tradition is continental in scale.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/prehistoric-art/match-each-site-or-form-to-what-makes-it-significant

### 7. Which observations support the shamanistic interpretation of cave art?

A. Images cluster in deep, sensory-deprived chambers
B. Some figures blend human and animal features
C. Geometric motifs resemble entoptic patterns from altered states
D. Every painted species was a staple of the diet

**Answer:** A. Images cluster in deep, sensory-deprived chambers; B. Some figures blend human and animal features; C. Geometric motifs resemble entoptic patterns from altered states

**Why:** Deep placement, entoptic geometry, and therianthropes all fit Lewis-Williams’s model, its weakness is not lack of fit but excess of it: a theory that fits everything is hard to test. The diet claim is simply false.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/prehistoric-art/which-observations-support-the-shamanistic-interpretation-of-cave-art

### 8. Hunting magic, shamanism and information storage have all been proposed for cave art. Why has finding more caves not settled between them?

A. Because each theory concerns a different region and they never overlap
B. Because no new decorated caves have been found since Breuil
C. Because all three predict the same physical evidence
D. Because the paintings cannot be dated at all

**Answer:** C. Because all three predict the same physical evidence

**Why:** A hypothesis is tested only by evidence it predicts differently from its rivals. These three do not, which is why the argument runs on ethnographic analogy and neuropsychology instead of on excavation.

Page: https://tryals.app/practice/history-i/prehistoric-art/hunting-magic-shamanism-and-information-storage-have-all-been