That is what Picasso said after he saw the paintings done by ancient man in the caves at Lascaux. We know nothing. Of course he was referring to art. See this goes back to my theory about prehistoric man, he was not a dumbass like many of us think. Prehistoric man has gotten a stereotype that may never go away. It kinda give me hope when I see shows like Caveman on ABC, but in trying to change the stereotype, they just perpetuate it. See prehistoric man knew what was going on around him. Maybe he didn't want to advance as far as we did, or maybe they did in their own way. Who knows for sure how far they came? I know they were not the idiots we think of them as. They had complex thought, they used imagination, they developed a language, and they were astonishingly good artist. The painting at the top of this post was found in northern Syria and has been radiocarbon dated to be around 11,000 years old. Older than the Bible, older that the great flood, the pyramids of Egypt, even older than any of the written tablets found in Bulgaria or Egypt. Freakin old. Just look at the detail, the complexity of it.
The article says the archaeologist on site compared that painting with the work of Paul Klee and I have to agree. This is one of Klee's paintings called "The Highway" and there is a striking similarity. It really is funny cause artist strive to paint in originality and want to invent new ways to depict the world around us. Thats what its all about. Expression and individuality. Just think if we could have had prehistoric mans knowledge of art and painting passed on to us, think of how much farther we would be. Instead we are slowly relearning our past because in essence, we know nothing.
3 comments:
wow, that's wild!
Prehistory is so intriguing. Not only do we know nothing; we've lost most of it. Even most of the recent past. Western Europeans wiped out most of the culture in the "new" world before we became interested in preserving, studying, or recording it. It was the same with the ancient Roman forays into western Europe at an earlier period.
As a kid growing up in New Hampshire, I was always fascinated by the Algonquin place names dotting our map - to realize that only a few hundered years earlier, the landscape around me was the old, familiar home of a people that had been there for such a long time. It staggered me to consider the "here and goneness" of a whole people whose presence still haunts the place verbally.
I believe mankind, collectively, has forgotten far more than we think we know now . . .
The fact that some of us realize this gives me hope for our future . . .
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