How Art Saves Us

Our Art Odyssey Begins…

Human history has been marked by what I choose to call ‘monolith moments’. Only those who have seen the film, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), are likely to have an inkling of what I mean by that… The film opens with a scene of prehistoric Earth, and a troupe of apes that are to be the ancestors of the human race.

These apes are doing what apes might do: their best to survive harsh conditions, sheltering where they can, eating what they can find, competing with a neighbouring troupe and falling prey to predators. Then a new day dawns and a mysterious black ‘monolith’ has appeared among them. They nervously approach the towering alien object and eventually one of them musters enough courage to touch it. Then they all touch it, and from that moment they are changed.

Suddenly, the apes can take an unremarkable object and see its potential for some other use. In this case an old tapir jawbone that can be used to smash other bones open to access the marrow, or to smash the skull of a competitor. They discover tools and weapons and the evolution to modern human begins…

A monolith moment is a point in history when something ‘switches on’ in the human brain and from that point onward they are changed, the way they think is changed and the way they behave is changed. The art of the time is either part of the catalyst for this change or is the best reflection and record of it.

Mapping

For example, one of these early monolith moments was when early hominid species progressed from marking territories, as many animals do, to mapping territories. It is believed that some of the earliest mark-making on the cliffs and cave walls of Australia were methods of remembering stories that told symbolic journeys through the actual landscape as an aide-memoire, to help those people map paths and water sources. This indicates a three-dimensional concept of the lay-of-the-land, a sort of ‘from above’ concept which then enabled those people to plan for hunting as teams in order to catch food animals that were much faster than any individual human. “You creep up from this direction, we’ll chase them from over there and they’ll fall into that pit — the one we dug yesterday — over in that direction…”

All art represents, or refers to, something, if not an actual real-world object, then an emotion, idea or concept. To be able to represent something that is not actually visible is a valuable ability that sets humans aside from the rest of the animal kingdom (except for, perhaps, dolphins). It is linked to developing a way of mentally modelling a situation.

“I can see what you’re thinking!”

For example early humans could see an impassable ravine, and recall seeing a fallen tree that could span the gap before them, then they were able make a leap of imagination and visualise that fallen tree, and perhaps a few more like it, placed over the ravine to form… a bridge. From visualising something that was not there, they could solve problems that were insurmountable to other species and earlier human ancestors. This is what art does.

Every great culture of the past produced art. Of ancient societies, we often know little else apart from their art, and what we know of their ways of life, beliefs and values, we have learnt from their art. Of any great ancient and prehistoric peoples that may have existed but who produced no form of art — we know nothing.

Art survives the cultures that produce it, and is the way in which those cultures ‘live on’. It seems that art is essential to forming a society and developing a culture and is a very important factor in the longevity and ultimate survival or demise of those societies. This is a generally accepted and historically proven truth, but to claim that art is essential to the survival of the human race may seem a little bit of a leap, but the evidence bares this out again and again.

Making

Since humanity existed, we have made things, and some of those very first things could be considered to be art. The earliest known cave paintings are as old as 35,000 years, probably much older. Fragments of pigment and the primitive equipment for grinding and mixing pigment, discovered in Zambia, has been dated between 350,000 and 400,000 years old — it is thought that these were used for making body paint and ‘make-up’, possibly for ritual purposes, but no one knows for sure.

Simple stone hammers, and flakes of flint for cutting, were in use by pre-human species more that two-and-a-half million years ago. Carved stone glyphs and artefacts such as stone hand axes are thought to date back more that one million years! Because we are dealing with minerals and stone, which in themselves are millions of years old, it is very difficult to date much of this evidence accurately. Even if we give-or-take several millennia, it seems safe to say that where we find evidence of the earliest humans and related hominid species, we find artefacts, and possibly some form of art. These are things made by our ancestors and date so far back in time that many of them were actually used by our close ‘cousins’, such as the Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, Homo Neanderthalensis, and all the other Homo genus who have since become extinct.

Obviously, our own ancestors, the forebears of modern humans, did not become extinct, though historians, geneticists and archaeologists believe that during the last ice age, the total human population of Earth dropped to around 10,000. Some think that at one earlier point, up to 100,000 years ago, there may have been as few as 2,000 humans in the entire world! It is generally accepted, through genetic evidence, that the entire human race can be traced back to a single ‘mother’…

Migrants

It is during the latter centuries of the ice age that modern humans migrated up from Africa and through Europe, or Eastward to Asia. This coincided with the displacement and eventual demise of all the other hominid species. These migratory clans of early ‘modern human’, Homo Sapiens, were set aside from their competitors by more than just their ultimate survival. It was around this ‘make-or-break’ evolutionary bottle neck, when it would seem that ‘needs-must’ more than ever, that our ancestors were the first to fashion ‘non-functional’ objects.

To call these objects ‘non-functional’ is misleading as they appear to have had a key role to play in ensuring the survival of those peoples, and therefore must have served some social, psychological and/or metaphysical functions. So although these things were not necessarily tools, they seem to be either the by-product of, or the catalyst for, whatever characteristics our ancestors needed to survive. It seems that all human and humanoid species had some innate need to make art of some sort, hence the pigment and glyphs carved by many pre-human species, but it is the direct ancestors of modern humans that were the first to produce objects that we begin to recognise as art.

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How art placed the intangible in our hands and gave us hope to carry on…