You might be interested to know that before cave painting were discovered, before science and archeology existed, artists speculated how art began.

Leon Batista Alberti (1404-1472), De Statua

"I believe that the arts which aim at imitating the creations of nature originated

in the following way: in a tree trunk, a lump of earth, or in some other

thing were accidentally discovered one day certain contours that needed only a

very slight change to look strikingly like some natural object. Noticing this, people

tried to see if it were not possible by addition or subtraction to complete

what still was lacking for a perfect likeness. Thus by adjusting and removing

outlines and planes in the way demanded by the object itself, men achieved what

they wanted, and not without pleasure. From that day, man's capacity to create

images grew apace until he was able to create any likeness, even when there was

no vague outline in the material to aid him.”

A figurine from Morocco, 400k years old. But hand axes

must be much older, and probably the early humans

tried to design beautiful ones.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3047383.stm

http://www.mpg.de/618278/pressRelease20100806

Regards,

Joachim

What distinguish our species from all other animal species is that we are cultural being, in other words we are artists. Asking why art have evolved is asking why civlilsation evolves from ecology.

art is innate to humans. Thus was born with man .

I also assume that art (or more presicely the ability to express oneself through the creation of artistic obejects) is innate to Hominidae.

Speaking about paleo-art we should keep in mind that is a strong sampeling bias toawards more resistant materials. Things like ostrich shell jewelry or stone tools are much more easyly preserverd then materials like painted skins/barks, grass (or other woven matrials) or body paintings.

Even clay not hardend by fire will not survive long (as long as no special conditions are met). I once left some freshly non hardend clay objects in the garden. The next morning there were almost gone, eaten up for the algae content by some slug of the genus Limax.

I personally think that very early cave paintings and ivory carving are are mostly known from europe for several reasons, some of them related to the durability of diffirent materials:

a) europe is more densely settelted and has a longer history of systematic archaeology than other parts of the world (eg. australia, africa etc.)

b) the iceage in europe could have been the reason for a shift of materials used for art not necessarly the developement of new form of art.

In paleolithic cultures the expression of art could have been greatly influrenced by the availability of different materials.

How do we define if a hominid artifact is artistically created? A crude hominid 1.8 million old stone tool does not look very artistic to me. What is the criteria to differentiate crude artefact from art? Decorative artifacts do not suffer the confusion but tool making was surely at some point an art form.

Dear Louis,

you ask when a tool made by a hominid can be considered as an artistic objekt.

I think that is a question of purpose. I don't know any good definition but I think if an object was created for more than just the purpose of manual work it is artistic. I think some clues can be given by the material used. For example the hand axe from spain made of rose quartz or another tool made from material that is harder to obtain than other materials but does not have any advantage (like beeing harder or more easy to manufacture) was made with some symbolistic intend for sure.

Another point that is harder to differanciate is the artictic value of a "normal" tool. I think we agree that at some point a fine manufactured item has more than just mundane value. But were can we draw the line in the sand between a finely manufactured microlith and a piece of art for example? At some point a tool is made with so much care that there is no gain in making it so fine. A rougher tool could do the same job but does not cost that much afford to make. But this distiction is really hard to make.

This video has some interesting suggestions regarding the origin of art:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PktUzdnBqWI&list=LLfRpB-5VbfkR_dFKBqpZLpw

It could be speculated that art evolved with the Homo genus. But not only in Homo sapiens; there is a speculation that neanderthals also painted the walls of caves. For a brief look into the speculation please check this link: http://www.livescience.com/20967-neanderthals-europe-cave-art.html . As to why or how can chimps have the capacity for art I don't have an answer. It could be as Mr. McClanahan said something that evolved from our last common ancestor or it could have been something they picked from their interactions with humans long ago.

There is relevant information in another thread on ResearchGate, regarding the earliest use of red ochre:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Where_and_when_does_the_use_red_ochre_first_appear_in_the_archaeological_record

Also related, albeit in a more remote way, is the thread on the origin of language, since both language and visual communication involve symbolic thinking and the use of signs:

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Who_first_started_to_develop_and_use_human_language

Popular whale songs reveal the first ever non-human cultural exchange

http://io9.com/5791944/popular-whale-songs-reveal-the-first-ever-non+human-cultural-exchange

Was sent in a "Voyager" to outer space along with human signs of being in order to attract extraterrestrial civilizations. Best Lüder Deecke Vienna

"It's possible unambiguous expressions of art probably didn't come about until an increase in our brain size gave us greater cognitive abilities."

A plausible assumption, but I wonder how true it is. I am staggered by the beauty of ancient cave paintings, far superior to anything I could draw myself. I find the horse paintings far more like-like than those of Stubbs, for example. I am no art expert, but surely these are the works of advanced minds? I have located a Draw-a-Horse IQ test (analagous to the Goodenough's Draw-a-Man test) standardised on Pueblo Indians in the 1930's, and confirmed that the cave horse artists score in the superior IQ range. So, have our brains shrunk?

Anthony, prehistoric man had the same sized brain as we do. My comment was directed at all pre-Homo sapien species. For instance, the average brain size for early members of the genus Homo (c. 2 MYA) were about the same size as chimps.

Some bearing to the present topic has the comparison of Homo sapiens sapiens with Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. "The fact that neither language nor the temporoparietal association cortex are the supreme advance of recent man (Homo sapiens sapiens), but rather the higher development of the creative abilities of the prefrontal cortex, is evidenced by the lack of art with Neanderthal man. Living in the North under conditions of repeated ice-ages, and stemming from Homo erectus, Homo sapiens neandertalensis had, on the average, as much as 200 grams more brain than recent man, but had a smaller prefrontal brain (Kornhuber 1993) and, thus, did not develop an advanced culture. After 200, 000 years his stone tools were almost the same as at the beginning, and although he had speech and could master the fire, he did not develop the art of cooking and, therefore, kept a mighty set of teeth and strong chewing muscles. It could not have been the climate, for he was better adapted to cold than recent man, who had come from Africa, and under the same climatic conditions in Central Europe around 40 000 BC developed many new tools as well as arts (cave paintings of expressive naturalness, sculptures) and a logging system for the phases of the moon. The Neanderthal man, however, who had more temporoparietal association cortex, retreated to the South of the Iberian Peninsula and became extinct. The present state that there is only one species left from the genus Homo, is the result of the dangerous creativeness of man. But instead of there being several species of Homo there is now a great variety of personalities." cited from Kornhuber and Deecke, The will and ist brain: an appraisal of reasoned free will. ISBN 978-0-7618-5862-1 Bwest wishes Yours Lüder Deecke, Vienna

There seem to be two inescapable facts here.

1. Whoever drew the cave pictures was more intelligent than modern man.

2. There is a moderate but quite consistent correlation between IQ and brain size. I do not think there is any example of two groups differing in IQ where the lower IQ group had larger brains.

So what explanations are available for the cave art?

1. The artists were cleverer than modern man and had larger brains.

2. Homo sapiens sapiens intelligence has declined over the last 40,000 years.

Unless I have overlooked another explanation, the simplest one is that the Neanderthals were the elusive artists.

Until this paradox is resolved, any argument about size of brain or part thereof is misleading.

Anthony! Maybe one should read it carefully, it is not just having 200 g brain more, it is which parts of the brain are more, are better developed! Neanderthal man had more temporoparietal association cortex but homo sapiens sapiens had more prefrontal cortex. This is the brain region which can be called "the creativity cortex." It is the creativeness which made cro magnon man superior to Neanderthal man. So it is not just total brain weight or volume that matters. Look at cro magnon's high almost vertical front as opposed to the leaning front of Neanderthal man. Best wishes Yours Lüder Deecke, Vienna.

Anthony,

Do you think that this cave painter was better than Leonardo da Vinci?

What strikes me about the cave paintings is their uniformly high standard, so my estimate of the IQ of the artists did not depend upon cherry-picking the best one. For Leonardo, you have picked the whole treeful. This highlights another puzzle -- where are the amateur or practice drawings, such that I would have done. I am not sure if this is another example of cherry-picking, whereby all the poor cave drawings never found their way into the literature, but I don't think so.

I am not convinced about some of the claims in the quote by Kornhuber and Deecke .

We do not have positive evidence that the Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis had a language (or more likely the languages, as the distribution of Neanderthals was from siberia to the levante and iberia). But we also have no evidence that Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis did not speak. There are several minor findings that point toward the existence of language in Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis. I personally think they had a complex language. I think some of the ideas about the origin of speech are to focused on indoeuropean languageas. One does not even need complex control of the lips or the pharynx to to modulate speech. Other sounds (like clicks or whistling for example) can have the same complexity. So even a lack of control of complex lip motions or a differently shape pharynx (which was as modern evidence suggest virtually identical to those of modern humans) would not necessarily render the Neanderthals speechless.

Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis was was more suited for cold climates than Homo sapiens sapins but Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis lived also in much warmer climates. The genetic heritage of Neanderthals would be present in all modern Humans outside of Africa without those Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis living in the Near East. They evidently were living in different climates and responded to them by adopting their lifestyle.

I do not know any evidence that suggest that Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis lacked the ability to cook food. I know there are two different schools of thought about the invention of cooking. One states that it was a very recent development (10 ka- 40 ka ago), which would mean that Homo sapiens sapiens did not cook either for most of its existnece, the other 8I dare say a majority) claims that cooking was invented at least 400 ka ago when the usage of fire spread in the genus Homo.

There is also no univocal for a lack of artistic ability and creativity in Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis. The possibility that some of the earliest cave painting were made by Neanderthals was already discussed above by Pedro J. Matos Silva (http://www.livescience.com/20967-neanderthals-europe-cave-art.html and http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthal-culture-old-masters-1.12974). There is also evidence for body painting in Homo sapiens neanderthaliensis (Zilhao et al. 2010, Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals. PNAS 107 (3): 1023–1028 http://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/1023)

Anthony Gordon, you say “What strikes me about the cave paintings is their uniformly high standard, so my estimate of the IQ of the artists did not depend upon cherry-picking the best one. “

Why do you assume that addressing the cave paintings you are not cherry picking the best artists? I do strongly doubt that every member of a tribe was allowed to make cave paintings (whatever their cultural meaning is). So you could be cherry picking the palaeolithic equivalents of Leonardo, Rafel, Michelangelo, Botticelli etc. without getting any idea about the “average” member of one the cave painting culutures.

Dear Jens, I try to be short. Language was not the main argument of ours, creativity was. But speech in Neanderthal man is not really to be doubted. Speech was already with homo habilis, a plausible theory is that language developed as the way of communication with social hunting. Homo habilis probably possessed a Wernicke's area (Holloway 1983 citation in our book; and Tobias 1987, ebda.) If homo habilis was able to speak already with only half the brain weight of homo sapiens, it is not very plausible that Neanderthal man should n o t have had language. The differentiated cooperation of early man (social hunting!) obviously led to the selection within the species re intelligence and creativeness and, therefore, to these astonishing quick advances. The significant result, however, was not just "more speech", it was creativeness. By the way with his creativeness man became also dangerous to man and now to the whole planet (specially as he was now tied down less by instincts) and, thus, he needed human morals, but this is another story [to be found on pp. 40, 41 and 42 of the boook The will and ist brain].. - Cooking with Neanderthal man: He had enormous teeth an chewing muscles much more than Cro Magnon man (H. sapiens sapiens), so to explain this is that he remained a raw meat and a raw fish eater and other stuff. I know there is a movement "to be for the underdog" what Neanderthal man is concerned. Maybe we (or better our ancestors) are his killers and genociders. We will see from the Geno 2.0 project of National Geographic, how strong was the "contamination" (bad word) of Neanderthal man in our H. sapiens sapiens genom. Best wishes Lüder Deecke Vienna.

Can someone who knows the literature better than myself, and perhaps who has been in the caves, settle Jens' point about cherry-picking by reporters of cave art? We can probably all agree that the best cave art is indeed astounding, but I go further to say that its mean and median standard was also exceptionally high. Where are all the duff drawings? And how did anyone know who the good cave artists were without having to inspect the work of hundreds of bad artists (think Pop Idol)? Where were the artists doing their 10,000 hours of practice?

Dear Anthony Gordon,

you say "Where are all the duff drawings? And how did anyone know who the good cave artists were without having to inspect the work of hundreds of bad artists (think Pop Idol)? Where were the artists doing their 10,000 hours of practice?"

What about all the "bad art" of the renaissance? Think of the caves as galleries if the palaeolithic. Were is the "bad art" (and by what means do you define surch "bad art"? By it's lack of naturralism? I can enjoy certain forms of very abstract art (eg. Kandinsky) but others dislike this type of art. I would lean toward the claims that art can only be understodand evaluated in context of culture.) in the gallaries and palazzos of the renaissance?

Earlier in the discussion I speculated about the presence of art on not very durable material (bark strips, unburned clay, etc.). What if the "artists" (and remember we do not know who in the tribe or cultures that made cave paintings paintedthem and what purpose they had (if any) in context of their culutues) practised on surch not very durable material? That would create a strong sampling bias toward the "masterpices" of art.

By good art, I mean naturalistic, I am not trying to make value judgements about style. Bad renaissance art by any definition would probably not survive, the artists themselves would paint over it, or others would not bother to preserve it. I possess many paintings that I have rescued from skips! If in fact the cave artists were practicing on non-durable material, then the question as to when art first originated is unanswerabIe.

The answers so far, or lack of them, seem to confirm my point that cave art was of a uniformly high standard.

Cave art was applied art! In painting a buffalo, the hunters trained themselves with their spear or bow and arrow. Also some Magic thinking may have been involved. I mean to provoke the good outcome of the hunting that Comes after the Magic act. Best wishes!

Yours Lüder Deecke Vienna

Oldest ever engraving discovered on 500,000-year-old shell and made by homo-erectus.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/12/141203142453.htm

Thank you, Louis! This is a very interesting discovery. Of course "art" is a modern Western concept that doesn't line up exactly with the ways other cultures have thought about visual expression, but there do seem to be some common denominators. As this find seems to indicate, abstract visual expression is, as far as we know, older than figurative representation. The age of the engraved shell, and the fact that it was made by Homo erectus, support the idea that visual expression on material objects evolved gradually, as language seems also to have done (see Deacon, Terrence W., The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain, New York/London, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997).

In this figure, from the article in Nature where this new find was originally published, one can see other early abstract engravings, all of which were probably made by modern Homo sapiens:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/fig_tab/nature13962_SF10.html

Here is the link to the abstract of the article in Nature, including access to the images:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature13962.html

Thanks David,

For the evolution of language, I vote for 

http://www.amazon.ca/The-Singing-Neanderthals-Origins-Language/dp/0674025598

That looks like a very interesting book, Louis.

Deacon (op. cit., pp. 370-372) thinks that Neanderthals had sophisticated linguistic capabilities.

Whether we look at music, visual communication, or language, new evidence and interpretations increasingly show that modern Homo sapiens was not as different from his relatives in the genus Homo as we used to believe.

We do seem to have developed more complex systems of symbolic and aesthetic communication, however.

At any rate, considering the recent evidence for a gradual emergence of these systems, I think we can reasonably assume that determining when art developed depends largely on how we define the concept of "art."

I would not be surprised if figurative art from the Middle Paleolithic (ca. 300,000-50,000 B. C.) were to be found in Africa, although to date we have only abstract motives, shell necklaces, and paint kits, as well as lithic objects that seem to exhibit some aesthetic and perhaps symbolic intent.

David,

I personally think that our primate ancestors had almost all that we have to become us but did not had conscious access to it.  The communal practice that gave them access to what I call self-enactment was communal singing-dancing: our first religion and from that first communal art all others came.  All these self-enactments already existed for our primate but where used subconsciously as part of their perceptual processes.  Pre-music self-enactment was developed early in mammalian brain for interpreting animal sounds and in order to do that they harnessed their motor control system by self-enacting it for maching sound to the type of rythms that they used to move their own body.  Birds and some marine mammals went further and used this pre-music self-enactment for communal emotional control with musical expression and body movement and for female courtship etc. Dance is intimatly linked to it.  The history of the use of music in cinema, in animation re-discovered the importance of music for us to understand emotionally and for us to really perceive movement.  Walt Disney had understood that it was critical for his animation movie for the whale.  Look at all these shamanic dancing practices all around the world and singing and dancing as it used to be is well alive. And all the major social revolutionary movement are centered on communal dancing singing together. So it is as true today as when it created us. The story is getting too long.   Regards

Discovery of the earliest drawing

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180912133531.htm

Article An abstract drawing from the 73,000-year-old levels at Blomb...