“The Mind in the Cave” by David Lewis-Williams
As an artist, I find it a fascinating question how art first began. Did phylogeny recapitulate ontogeny, with early mankind going through the steps an individual takes toward making sophisticated art - scribbles, crude drawings, then stylized ideograms before fully representational art? Did some prehistoric genius spark a revolution in image-making? Did sculpted works lead to two-dimensional art or vice versa? What seldom occurs to us in asking these questions is that the human mind itself had to evolve to be able to perceive images as meaningful, for most animals can’t. How and why did this happen? Do we wonder at Leonardo da Vinci and Donatello because of a fluke of evolution that could easily never have happened, or is image-making tied up with the creation of language and our essential humanity?
This book attempts an ambitious answer by looking at Paleolithic cave art, the astonishing work that appeared in Europe from about 40,000 to 10,000 years ago. It is no surprise to learn that early discovers of cave art were accused of fraud, since scholars refused to believe that primitive people could have produced such amazing art. Where are the scribbles and the stick figures we intuitively think must have predated these masterpieces of observation and fluid draftsmanship?
The photographs in the book show some of the most famous images of cave art from Lascaux, Altamira, and lesser known caves. I look at them in real awe. I can try to break it down and point to beautifully delineated muscles, a masterful grasp of animal motion, fluid and expressive linework, the interaction of images with the rock surface - but my artist’s eye wants to simply say that great artists were at work here. It is no mistake the the Great Hall of Lascaux is called the Sistine Chapel of Paleolithic art.
The author cautions, though, that to appreciate these images with our love and knowledge of art is one thing, but to project our ideas about art into a search for the origin of these images is unwise. To investigate this story we have to unlearn many assumptions, beginning with the words “art” and “artist” and the accompanying belief that these images meant to their creators and viewers anything like what we mean by art. Lewis-Williams turns, with good justification, to the place of art in shamanism, looking in particular at the extensive rock art of the San people of Africa and Southwest American Indian groups to give us a framework for the use of images in mystical practices.
It seems highly likely that magical/spiritual practices were involved with cave art, and many researchers have proposed this approach before. Lewis-Williams wants to do more - his goal is to pull together a theory of the evolution of the modern human brain with a hypothesis of underlying neural structures that led intrinsically to certain mystical experiences, with these experiences finding a natural expression in cave art. He posits, based on the work of cognitive researchers, that the structure of the brain includes certain byproducts (or meaningful products, depending on your outlook) of evolution, among them the universal tendency to experience non-ordinary consciousness in stages from geometric shapes to hallucinatory images and sensations in an autistic state (closed to exernal experience). Certain features of these states are commonly experienced as observing floating two-dimensional images, flying, and going through a hole (or tunnel or entrance depending on your cultural framework). He links these stages to neural activities including dream states and random firings of the optical nerve and other sense apparatuses.
Modern humans have largely relegated mystical experiences to an unreal part of the spectrum of experience, but the author points out that prehistoric people probably had no basis on which to do this, and experienced mystical states as just as real (or perhaps more so) as awake states. He pictures prehistoric people experiencing non-ordinary consciousness, based on the unique structure of their brains, and building early religious and shamanistic practices upon them.
Can we go from this theory to the origin of cave art? Lewis-Williams wants to take us down one of these mystical openings into the chambers of Lascaux and Altamira, with the idea that caves and cave surfaces were the analog of mystical experiences prehistoric people had - first, going down holes or through an entrance into another world, and second, seeing and remembering floating images in space. He does not see any great leap required to begin to make images, but rather believes that prehistoric people were already experiencing neural-based images and giving them great significance; it was a natural step to place them on rock surfaces in the underground realm whose analog they seemed to be experiencing in trances.
These particular ideas of the neural basis of mystical experiences are largely new to me, and I didn’t get a clear view from the book about how controversial they are (probably highly, since they implicitly propose a biological origin for human religion). I find them personally appealing, artistically viable, but highly speculative. (For example, the idea that floating two-dimensional images are one of the elements of non-ordinary consciousness is central to the author’s thesis, but this is based on modern test subjects with extensive experiences of two-dimensional images and movies. Extrapolating from that to prehistory is somewhat problematic.) Lewis-Williams does not strike me as nearly as good at seeing gaps and holes in his own analysis as in others’ - probably another ancient neural trait of humans.
Yet I find his ideas compelling and fruitful for an understanding of art, if only in a poetic sense. I find the best evidence for looking harder at these ideas is the (previously unknown to me) presence of numerous geometric symbols in cave art similar to symbols that neural researchers identify as characteristic of first-stage non-ordinary consciousness. I find the least compelling evidence in his grand but poorly justified statements about the inferiority of the neanderthal brain relative to ours.
How does an artist look at this approach? I still have to ask why many of these images are so masterful even by modern artistic standards, a question Lewis-Williams does not address. Even if they came from mystical experiences, how did people translate them onto rock surfaces as more than crude representations? We could posit the lone genius whose work created a legacy of draftsman(or woman)ship. This romantic idea is undercut by the great distances between different caves with the likelihood that isolation would cause a reversion to more primitive representation. I think that if we propose large changes in brain structure and capacity in the era leading up to Paleolithic art, we should admit the possibility that Paleolithic brains may have actually been better than ours in ways that explain these abilities - perhaps the existence of “photographic” memory in a larger part of the population. There will never be an answer to such a question, but I don’t think it’s possible to ignore the astonishing quality of cave art in any meaningful explanation. The mind in the cave could really paint, a rare thing even in our world overrun with humans.