The history of human beings

The history of human beings

The history of human beings

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The history of human beings on this planet is, geo-logically speaking, very short. The history of their coming together in groups for their common good is even shorter, covering a span of perhaps 25,000 to 50,000 years on a planet that scientists estimate to be between 4 and 5 billion years old. We call these groups, as they become more and more sophisticated, civilizations. A civiliz ation is a social, economic, and political entity distinguished by

the ability to express itself through images and written lan- guage. Civilizations develop when the environment of a region can support a large and productive population. It is no accident that the first civilizations arose in fertile river valleys, where agriculture could take hold: the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus on the Indian subcontinent, and the Yellow in China. Civilizations require technologies capable of supporting the

The Ancient World and the Classical Past P r e h i s t o r y t o 2 0 0 c e

Nebamun Hunting Birds, from the tomb of Nebamun, Thebes, Egypt (detail). ca. 1400 bce (see Fig 3.2 in Chapter 3).

P A R T O N E

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principal economy. In the ancient world, agriculture was supported by the technologies related to irrigation.

With the rise of agriculture, and with irrigation, human nature began to assert itself over and against nature as a whole. People increasingly thought of themselves as mas- ters of their own destiny. At the same time, different and dispersed populations began to come into contact with one another as trade developed from the need for raw materi- als not native to a particular region. Organizing this level of trade and production also required an administrative elite to form and establish cultural priorities. The existence of such an elite is another characteristic of civilization. Finally, as the history of cultures around the world makes abundantly clear, one of the major ways in which socie- ties have acquired the goods they want and simultaneously organized themselves is by means of war.

If a civilization is a system of organization, a culture is the set of common values—religious, social, and/or politi- cal—that govern that system. Out of such cultures arise sci- entific and artistic achievements by which we characterize different cultures. Before the invention of writing sometime around the fourth millennium bce, these cultures created myths and legends that explained their origins and relation to the world. As we do today, ancient peoples experienced the great uncontrollable, and sometimes violent, forces of nature—floods, droughts, earthquakes, and hurricanes. Pre- historic cultures understood these forces as the work of the invisible gods, who could not be approached directly but only through the mediating agency of shamans and priests, or kings and heroes. As cultures became increasingly self- assertive, in the islands between mainland Greece and Asia Minor, in Egypt, in China, on the Indian subcontinent, and on the Greek mainland, these gods seemed increasingly knowable. The gods could still intervene in human affairs, but now they did so in ways that were recognizable. It was suddenly possible to believe that if people could come to understand themselves, they might also understand the gods. The study of the natural world might well shed light on the unknown, on the truth of things.

It is to this moment—it was a long “moment,” extending for centuries—that the beginnings of scientific inquiry can be traced. humanism, the study of the human mind and its moral and ethical dimensions, was born. In China, the for- malities of social interaction—moderation, personal integ- rity, self-control, loyalty, altruism, and justice—were codified in the writings of Confucius. In Mesopotamia and Greece, the presentation of a human character working things out (or not) in the face of adversity was the subject of epic and dra- matic literature. In Greece, it was also the subject of philos- ophy—literally, “love of wisdom”—the practice of reasoning that followed from the Greek philosopher Socrates’ famous dictum, “Know thyself.” Visual artists strove to discover the perfections of human form and thought. By the time of the rise of the Roman Empire, at the end of the first millen- nium bce, these traditions were carried on in more prac- tical ways, as the Romans attempted to engineer a society embodying the values they had inherited from the Greeks.

PART ONE TIMELINE

30,000 bce Art created in the Chauvet Cave

10,000–8000 bce Emergence of agricultural civilizations in Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China

1792–1750 bce Hammurabi’s Law Code

1500–322 bce Vedic period in India; origins of Hinduism

3200–2000 bce Development of pictographic writing systems in Mesopotamia, India, Egypt, China

2500 bce Pyramids in Egypt

1200 bce Mesopotamia: Epic of Gilgamesh

1200 bce Earliest use of Phoenician phonetic alphabet

1300 bce Emergence of Olmec culture in Mesoamerica

800–600 bce Etruria: Origins of Roman culture

563–483 bce Lifetime of Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) in India

551–479 bce Lifetime of Confucius in Zhou dynasty China

469–399 bce Lifetime of Socrates, Greek philosopher

461–429 bce Pericles, Socrates, Sophocles Parthenon on Athens’s Acropolis

1000 bce King David reigns in Israel

800 bce Acropolis (citadel) and agora (market) Homeric epics: Iliad and Odyssey

27 bce Octavian becomes Emperor Augustus

20 bce Augustus of Primaporta

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3

THINKING AHEAD

1.1 Discuss the ways in which cave art and small sculptural figurines in the Paleolithic era have been interpreted.

1.2 Explain how the art and architecture of the Neolithic era reflect changing cultural concerns.

1.3 Understand the function of myth in prehistoric culture.

1.4 Describe the role of sacred sites in prehistoric culture.

On a cold December afternoon in 1994, Jean-Marie Chauvet and two friends were exploring the caves in the steep cliffs along the Ardèche River gorge in southern France. After descending into a series of nar- row passages, they entered a large chamber. There, beams from their headlamps lit up a group of drawings that would astonish the three explorers—and the world (Fig. 1.1).

Since the late nineteenth century, we have known that prehistoric peoples, peoples who lived before the time of writing and so of recorded history, drew on the walls of caves. Twenty-seven such caves had already been discov- ered in the cliffs along the 17 miles of the Ardèche gorge (Map 1.1). But the cave found by Chauvet and his friends transformed our thinking about prehistoric peoples. Where previously discovered cave paintings had appeared to mod- ern eyes as childlike, this cave contained drawings compa- rable to those a contemporary artist might have done. We can only speculate that other comparable artworks were pro- duced in prehistoric times but have not survived, perhaps because they were made of wood or other perishable materi- als. It is even possible that art may have been made earlier than 30,000 years ago, perhaps as people began to inhabit the Near East, between 90,000 and 100,000 years ago.

At first, during the Paleolithic era, or “Old Stone Age,” from the Greek palaios, “old,” and lithos, “stone,” the cultures

of the world sustained themselves on game and wild plants. The cultures themselves were small, scattered, and nomadic, though evidence suggests some interaction among the vari- ous groups. We begin this book, then, with the cultures of prehistoric times, evidence of which survives in wall paint- ings in caves and in small sculptures dating back more than 25,000 years.

Fig. 1.1 Wall painting with horses, Chauvet Cave, Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, Ardèche gorge, France. ca. 30,000 bce. Paint on limestone, height approx. 6′. Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles de Rhône-Alpes. Service Régional de l’Archéologie. In the center of this wall are four horses, each behind the other in a startlingly realistic depiction. Below them, two rhinoceroses fight.

The Rise of Culture From Forest to Farm

100 miles

100 km

4 miles

4 km

Bayol

Niaux Réseau Clastres

Fontanet

Chauvet

Vacheresse

Ebbou Le Colombier

Tête-du-Lion Les deux-Ouvertures

Chabot Le FiguierOulen

Le Portel

Gargas

Altamira Les Trois Freres`

Jovelle

Gabillou

Rouf€gnac Lascaux

La Mouthe Pech Merle Cougnac

La Baume-Latrone

Cosquer

Ardeche `

Ardeche `

Marseilles

Lyons

Toulouse

Major Paleolithic caves in France and Spain

Cahors

Bordeaux Isle

FRANCE

SPAIN

ARDECHE REGION

`

ARDECHE REGION`

ATLANTIC

OCEAN R

hô ne

Garonne

Dordogne Lot

Map 1.1 Major Paleolithic caves in France and Spain.

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4 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

THE BEGINNINGS OF CULTURE IN THE PALEOLITHIC ERA

In what ways has the role of art in Paleolithic culture been discussed?

A culture encompasses the values and behaviors shared by a group of people, developed over time, and passed down from one generation to the next. Culture manifests itself in the laws, customs, ritual behavior, and artistic produc- tion common to the group. The cave paintings at Chauvet suggest that, as early as 30,000 years ago, the Ardèche gorge was a center of culture, a focal point of group living in which the values of a community find expression. There were oth- ers like it. In northern Spain, the first decorated cave was dis covered in 1879 at Altamira. In the Dordogne region of southern France to the west of the Ardèche, schoolchil- dren discovered the famous Lascaux Cave in 1940 when their dog disappeared down a hole. And in 1991, along the French Mediterranean coast, a diver discovered the entrance to the beautifully decorated Cosquer Cave below the waterline near Marseille.

Agency and Ritual: Cave Art Ever since cave paintings were first discovered, scholars have marveled at the skill of the people who produced them, but we have been equally fascinated by their very existence. Why were these paintings made? Most scholars believe that they possessed some sort of agency—that is, they were created to exert some power or authority over the world of those who came into contact with them. Until

recently, it was generally accepted that such works were associated with the hunt. Perhaps the hunter, seeking game in times of scarcity, hoped to conjure it up by depicting it on cave walls. Or perhaps such drawings were magic charms meant to ensure a successful hunt. But at Chauvet, fully 60 percent of the animals painted on its walls were never, or rarely, hunted—such animals as lions, rhinoceroses, bears, panthers, and woolly mammoths. One drawing depicts two rhinoceroses fighting horn-to-horn beneath four horses that appear to be looking on (see Fig. 1.1).

What role, then, did these drawings play in the daily lives of the people who created them? The caves may have served as some sort of ritual space. A ritual is a rite or ceremony habitually practiced by a group, often in religious or quasi- religious contexts. The caves, for instance, might be understood as gateways to the underworld and death, as symbols of the womb and birth, or as pathways to the world of dreams experienced in the dark of night, and rites connected with such passage might have been con- ducted in them. The general arrangement of the animals in the paintings by species or gender, often in distinct chambers of the caves, suggests to some that the paint- ings may have served as lunar calendars for predict- ing the seasonal migration of the animals. Whatever the case, surviving human footprints indicate that these caves were ritual gathering places and in some way were intended to serve the common good.

At Chauvet, the use of color suggests that the paint- ings served some sacred or symbolic function. For instance, almost all of the paintings near the entrance to the cave are painted with natural red pigments derived from ores rich in iron oxide. Deeper in the cave, in areas more difficult to

Fig. 1.2 Wall painting with bird-headed man, bison, and rhinoceros, Lascaux Cave, Dordogne, France. ca. 15,000– 13,000 bce. Paint on limestone, length approx. 9′. In 1963, Lascaux was closed to the public so that conservators could fight a fungus attacking the paintings. Most likely, the fungus was caused by carbon dioxide exhaled by visitors. An exact replica called Lascaux II was built and can be visited.

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CHAPTER 1 The Rise of Culture 5

reach, the vast majority of the animals are painted in black pigments derived from ores rich in manganese dioxide. This shift in color appears to be intentional, but we can only guess at its meaning.

The skillfully drawn images at Chauvet raise even more important questions. The artists seem to have understood and practiced a kind of illusionism—that is, they were able to convey a sense of three-dimensional space on a two- dimensional surface. In the painting reproduced at the beginning of this chapter, several horses appear to stand one behind the other (see Fig. 1.1). The head of the top horse overlaps a black line, as if peering over a branch or the back of another animal. In no other cave yet discovered do drawings show the use of shading, or modeling, so that the horses’ heads seem to have volume and dimension. And yet these cave paintings, rendered over 30,000 years ago, predate other cave paintings by at least 10,000 years, and in some cases by as much as 20,000 years.

One of the few cave paintings that depicts a human figure is found at Lascaux. What appears to be a male wear- ing a bird’s-head mask lies in front of a disemboweled bison (Fig. 1.2). Below him is a bird-headed spear thrower, a device that enabled hunters to throw a spear farther and with greater force. (Several examples of spear throwers have survived.) In the Lascaux painting, the hunter’s spear has pierced the bison’s hindquarters, and a rhinoceros charges off to the left. We have no way of knowing whether this was an actual event or an imagined scene. One of the paint- ing’s most interesting and inexplicable features is the dis- crepancy between the relatively naturalistic representation of the animals and the highly stylized, almost abstract reali- zation of the human figure. Was the sticklike man added later by a different, less talented artist? Or does this image suggest that man and beast are different orders of being?

Before the discovery of Chauvet, historians divided the history of cave painting into a series of successive styles, each progressively more realistic. But Chauvet’s paintings, by far the oldest known, are also the most advanced in their realism, suggesting the artists’ conscious quest for visual naturalism, that is, for representations that imitate the actual appearance of the animals. Not only were both red and black animals outlined, their shapes were also modeled by spreading paint, either with the hand or a tool, in grad- ual gradations of color. Such modeling is extremely rare or unknown elsewhere. In addition, the artists further defined many of the animals’ contours by scraping the wall behind so that the beasts seem to stand out against a deeper white ground. Three handprints in the cave were evidently made by spitting paint at a hand placed on the cave wall, result- ing in a stenciled image.

Art, the Chauvet drawings suggest, does not necessar- ily evolve in a linear progression from awkward beginnings to more sophisticated representations. On the contrary, already in the earliest artworks, people obtained a very high degree of sophistication. Apparently, even from the earliest

times, human beings could choose to represent the world naturalistically or not, and the choice not to represent the world in naturalistic terms should not necessarily be attributed to lack of skill or sophistication but to other, more culturally driven factors.

Paleolithic Culture and Its Artifacts Footprints discovered in South Africa in 2000 and fossilized remains uncovered in the forest of Ethiopia in 2001 suggest that, about 5.7 million years ago, the earliest upright humans, or hominins (as distinct from the larger classification of hominids, which includes great apes and chimpanzees as well as humans), roamed the continent of Africa. Ethiopian excavations further indicate that sometime around 2.5 or 2.6 million years ago, hominid populations began to make rudimentary stone tools, though long before, between 14 million and 19 million years ago, the Kenyapithecus (“Kenyan ape”), a hominin, made stone tools in east cen- tral Africa. Nevertheless, the earliest evidence of a culture coming into being are the stone artifacts of Homo sapiens (Latin for “one who knows”). Homo sapiens evolved about 100,000–120,000 years ago and can be distinguished from earlier hominids by the lighter build of their skeletal struc- ture and larger brain. A 2009 study of genetic diversity among Africans found the San people of Zimbabwe to be the most diverse, suggesting that they are the most likely origin of modern humans from which others gradually spread out of Africa, across Asia, into Europe, and finally to Australia and the Americas.

Homo sapiens were hunter-gatherers, whose survival depended on the animals they could kill and the foods they could gather, primarily nuts, berries, roots, and other edible plants. The tools they developed were far more sophisticated than those of their ancestors. They included cleavers, chisels, grinders, hand axes, and arrow- and spear- heads made of flint, a material that also provided the spark to create an equally important tool—fire. In 2004, Israeli archeologists working at a site on the banks of the Jordan River reported the earliest evidence yet found of controlled fire created by hominids—cracked and blackened flint chips, presumably used to light a fire, and bits of charcoal dating from 790,000 years ago. Also at the campsite were the bones of elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and small species, demonstrating that these early hominids cut their meat with flint tools and ate steaks and marrow. Homo sapiens cooked with fire, wore animal skins as clothing, and used tools as a matter of course. They buried their dead in ritual ceremonies, often laying them to rest accompanied by stone tools and weapons.

The Paleolithic era is the period of Homo sapiens’ ascendancy. These people carved stone tools and weap- ons that helped them survive in an inhospitable climate. They carved small sculptural objects as well, which, along with the cave paintings we have already seen, appear to

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6 PART ONE The Ancient World and the Classical Past

played a central role in Paleolithic culture. Most likely, they had considerable religious and spiritual influence, and their preponderance in the imagery of the era suggests that Paleolithic culture may have been matrilineal (in which descent is determined through the female line) and matri- local (in which residence is in the female’s tribe or house- hold). Such traditions exist in many primal societies today.

The peoples of the Upper Paleolithic period followed herds northward in summer, though temperatures dur- ing the Ice Age rarely exceeded 60 degrees Fahrenheit (16 degrees Celsius). Then, as winter approached, they retreated southward into the cave regions of northern Spain and southern France.

THE RISE OF AGRICULTURE IN THE NEOLITHIC ERA

How do Neolithic art and architecture reflect the era’s changing cultural concerns?

As the ice covering the Northern Hemisphere began to recede around 10,000 bce, the seas rose, covering, for instance, the cave entrance at Cosquer in southern France (see Map 1.1), filling what is now the North Sea and English Channel with water, and inundating the land bridge that had connected Asia and North America. Agri- culture began to replace hunting and gathering, and with it, a nomadic lifestyle gave way to a more sedentary way of life. The consequences of this shift were enormous, and ushered in the Neolithic era, or “New Stone Age.”

For 2,000 years, from 10,000 to 8000 bce, the ice covering the Northern Hemisphere receded farther and farther northward. As temperatures warmed, life gradu- ally changed. During this period of transition, areas once covered by vast regions of ice and snow developed into grassy plains and abundant forests. Hunters developed the bow and arrow, which were easier to use at longer range on the open plains. They fashioned dugout boats out of logs to facilitate fishing, which became a major food source. They domesticated dogs to help with the hunt as early as 11,000 bce, and soon other animals as well—goats and cat- tle particularly. Perhaps most important, people began to cultivate the more edible grasses. Along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, they harvested wheat; in Asia, they cultivated millet and rice; and in the Americas, they grew squash, beans, and corn. Gradually, farming replaced hunt- ing as the primary means of sustaining life. A culture of the fields developed—an agri-culture, from the Latin ager, “farm,” “field,” or “productive land.”

Agricultural production seems to have originated about 10,000 bce in the Fertile Crescent, an area arch- ing from southwest Iran, across the foothills of the Taurus Mountains in southeastern Turkey, then southward into Lebanon. By about 8000 bce, Neolithic agricultural societies began to concentrate in the great river valleys of the Middle East and Asia (Map 1.2). Here, distinct centers of people

be the first instances of what we have come to call “art” (see Materials & Techniques, page 7). Among the most remarkable of these sculptural artifacts are a large number of female figures, found at various archeological sites across Europe. The most famous of these is Woman, the limestone statuette of a woman found at Willendorf, in present-day Austria (Fig. 1.3), dating from about 22,000 to 21,000 bce and sometimes called the Venus of Willendorf. Markings on Woman and other similar figures indicate that they were originally colored, but what these small sculptures meant and what they were used for remains unclear. Most are 4 to 5 inches high and fit neatly into a person’s hand. This suggests that they may have had a ritual purpose. Their exaggerated breasts and bellies and their clearly delineated genitals support a connection to fertility and childbearing. We know, too, that the Willendorf Woman was originally painted in red ocher, suggestive of menses. And, her navel is not carved; rather, it is a natural indentation in the stone. Whoever carved her seems to have recognized, in the raw stone, a connection to the origins of life. But such figures may have served other purposes as well. Perhaps they were dolls, guardian figures, or images of beauty in a cold, hostile world where having body fat might have made the differ- ence between survival and death.

Female figurines vastly outnumber representations of males in the Paleolithic era, which suggests that women

Fig. 1.3 Woman (Venus of Willendorf), found at Willendorf, Austria. ca. 25,000–20,000 bce. Limestone, height 4″. Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna. For many years, modern scholars called this small statue the Venus of Willendorf. They assumed that its carvers attributed to it an ideal of female beauty comparable to the Roman ideal of beauty implied by the name Venus.