954 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
worldviews could not have been more different. (In fairness, no techniques of
absolute dating were available to these scientists, so they used the traditional
methods of art history in attempting to establish chronology by a series of
developmental stages. But for human art in historical times, we can back up such
aesthetic theories with known dates of composition, so the argument does not
become intrinsically circular.)
The Abbe Breuil viewed the paintings functionally as a form of hunting magic
(if you draw them properly, they will come). He accepted the linearly progressivist
view of evolution that his late 19th century education had inculcated, and that his
religious convictions about human perfectability also favored. He therefore
conceived the chronology of cave art as a series in styles of improvement, leading
to rigidification and a final "senile" decline. In an early article of 1906, he wrote:
"Paleolithic art, after an almost infantile beginning, rapidly developed a lively way
of depicting animal forms, but didn't perfect its painting techniques until an
advanced stage."
Leroi-Gourhan, a devoted follower of Levi-Strauss and his functionalist
school, embraced the opposite concept that cave art embodies timeless and
integrative themes of human consciousness, based on dichotomous divisions that
define our innate mental style of ordering the complex world around us. Thus, we
separate nature from culture (the raw vs. the cooked in Levi-Strauss's famous
metaphor), light from darkness, and, above all, male from female. Leroi-Gourhan
therefore read the caves as sanctuaries where the numbers and positions of animals
(with, for example, horses as male symbols, and bisons as female) reflected our
unchanging sense of natural order based on a primary sexual dichotomy—with an
appended set of symbolic, and similarly dichotomized, attributes, including the
conventional and sexist active vs. passive, and rational vs. emotional.
Given his view of cave art as representing the unchanging structure of human
mentality, Leroi-Gourhan might have emphasized an implication of stasis for the
duration of this form of expression. In fact, matching Breuil in commitment to the
notion of gradualistic progress, Leroi-Gourhan contrasted a stability in conceptual
intent with continual improvement in fidelity of artistic rendering for images of
unchanged significance—that is, a gradual progression in overt phenotypes (the
only aspect of change that an "evolutionist" might note and measure) contrasted
with a constancy in symbolic meaning. Leroi-Gourhan wrote in 1967: "The theory
... is logical and rational: art apparently began with simple outlines, then developed
more elaborate forms to achieve modeling, and then developed a polychrome or
bichromate painting before it eventually fell into decadence."
This scenario sounds eminently reasonable until one subjects the argument to
further scrutiny, with an explicit effort to identify and question gradualistic biases.
After all, we are not examining a lineage of enormous geological extent spanning a
range of phenotypic complexity from amoeba to mammal, or even from one
species to another. We are tracing about 20,000 years in the history of a single
species, Homo sapiens that remained anatomically stable