40,000 Years Ago
THE PLAQUE IS BASED on cave painting from the Cave of the Horses, Barranco de Valltorta, Spain. Between 40,000 and 35,000 years ago, art appears for the first time in human communities as far apart as Australia, India and Europe. Though we can never know much about the spiritual life of our prehistoric forbears, this does seem to imply some sort of awakening of the human spirit in widely separate communities.
The people who made these beautiful images and those in the Chauvais and Lascaux caves, lived a simple hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Hunter-gatherers are always on the move, rarely building anything more than temporary shelters, which melt back into the landscape. The arrival of farming led to a settled lifestyle, and for the first time, permanent monuments in the landscape. Farming didn’t appear for a further thirty thousand years, and that is the subject of the next station.
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to know what the purpose of the early art was, but they clearly express a profound respect for animals which are often minutely observed. People, by contrast, are usually more stylised where depicted at all. The images also appear in caves that were not living spaces as such but reserved for this activity, which must often have been done by fire light. This implies that the images are not decorative, but ceremonial, and were made in the context of some sort of religious practice.
It is impossible to look at them without feeling that they were created out of a deep spiritual life.