Practice question · Select all that apply
What does the placement and content of cave art tell us?
Hints
- Placement, species choice and hand size all carry information.
- Nobody paints deep underground to decorate a living space.
Show the answer
- A. Hand stencils suggest many artists were women
- C. The painted species do not match the animals actually eaten
- D. It was made deep in caves where nobody lived, requiring lamps and long crawls
Why
Nobody paints a bison a kilometre underground to brighten a room. The art is deliberate, remote, ritually charged, and, from the hand proportions, substantially made by women, which quietly demolishes the artist-hunter cliché.
Practise The Upper Paleolithic Revolution
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More questions on The Upper Paleolithic Revolution
- Order the symbolic record, oldest first.
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