Figure 4. Australian aboriginal handprints (www.angelfire.com/ id/ croon/ australia/ handprints.jp^ g)Many of these ‘gestures to the cave’ are collective palimpsests maintained
over millennia and suggest that painting was taught by one painter to another,
perhaps as a ritual activity. Such superimposing or recontouring in Palaeolithic art
also suggests not only that the act of making or remaking in the same place was as
important as the images themselves, but also that the formula of drawing in a
certain way persisted because it was part of broader patterns of behaviour, perhaps
shamanism. I f the painters were shamans, as many suspect (Lewis-Williams, 2002;
Hancock, 2005; Pearson, 2002; and Summers, 2003) then continuity of the style
must have had a meaning very different from that of art depicting immediate
experiences of nature.
The Palaeolithic cave pictographs, specifically those in south-western France
and Spain, have to be examined also in terms of their arrangement and distinctive
content and it is really from them that the question arises of the objective of the
artists and the intended effect on those who would view them. The sophistication
of the images refutes the notion of a linear evolution of art from simple to complex
forms; the Chauvet Cave art was produced at the beginning of the Upper
Palaeolithic (32,000 BCE), that is, during the Aurignacian period, the time when
anatomically modern people first began to replace Neanderthals in western Europe.
The pictographs at Chauvet are compositionally more intricate than in any of the
other caves, consisting of intentionally complex overlapping and interspersing of
animals, as well as groups of animals represented, pictorially, as receding in space.
The visual sophistication of Chauvet is especially stunning when one considered that
it is more than twice as old as Lascaux. With more than ten thousand years
elapsing between Chauvet and Lascaux, one may well ask how could an artistic
style maintain such uniformity over such a period of time? At Lascaux we have to
infer a narrative from the iconography: in one section a wounded bison, its entrails
spilling out, lowers its head to gore a male hunter who is rendered as a crude stick