Idle Minutes

Lindsay up in Chicago Land is the recipient of number five. Thanks for reading Idle Minutes Lindsay…I hope you have a Merry Christmas!

I’ve been studying the art of our ancestors lately. The earliest art known to man is about 30,000 to 40,000 years old. They are images created on the walls of caves. The oldest of them exist in Europe. America has ancient art too but it’s younger…belonging to early Indians.

The card I’ve created is a memory dump of the many images I’ve seen in books and on the web. In general, most of the cave art is of animals and many of them overlap. The interesting thing to me is why they drew.

Of course we’ll never know for sure. But no historian believes they were for decoration. In fact, art for decoration is a fairly recent concept in the great span of time. Drawing was both communication and a sort of magic for the mind. It is thought that drawing a bison somehow made it real in the minds of our early, primitive ancestors. Sort of like poking needles in voodoo dolls to inflict pain on someone, early man drew animals in hopes that they would appear. Perhaps it gave them a sense of control over them as well.

I don’t do justice to the theories behind early man’s reasons for drawing. There are books on the subject and websites too. It is fascinating stuff. The history of art is quite a story that anyone would enjoy. It makes for a great education about humanity.

A great book is The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich. 6,000,000 copies sold makes it pretty clear that it’s a good resource. I highly recommend it.

For a great book specific to the cave art of our ancestors, try this one. Again, highly recommended.