Reflections of life in art, Pleistocene into Holocene (Part I).

R. Dale Guthrie's "The Nature of Paleolithic Art" is quite compelling in its implications about our past and for our future. His overwhelming theme is how art reflects and is reflected in the culture of humans throughout various time periods. I believe art does provide significant insight into a culture, while still it is merely a stylized view of that culture.

The art of the Pleistocene was decidedly naturalistic, with the majority of images being large mammals (large ladies included), and some sprinkling of game fish and birds. Since the Pleistocene, humans' entire culture revolved around hunting, and their art focused, logically, on this same theme. As Guthrie states, "Survival depended on exquisite attention to one's natural surroundings"(Guthrie 404), and that preoccupation with nature found its way directly into their artwork. The lack of symbolism in Pleistocene artwork also attests to the strictly survivalist, naturalistic nature of the people at that time. Their demanding lifestyle left little room for abstract or symbolic thought, though they certainly had the capacity for it (just as modern humans do).

The climate during the Pleistocene and into the Holocene greatly affected the culture of humans in those times. In the Pleistocene, the frigid, dry, barely livable conditions assured that "Paleolithic people never regularly obtained sufficient resources to sustain individual bands of large size or any but the thinnest regional density of bands"(Guthrie 406). This isolation from other bands resulted in the Pleistocene people having an underdeveloped sense of self-image, which was inherent in their lack of detailed human figures in their artwork.

Though Pleistocene people had the capacity for spiritual thought, their culture as a whole would have been at a distinct disadvantage (from an evolutionary survival perspective) if they had pursued much abstract thinking. Instead they remained focused on logical methods for hunting and survival, evident in the majority of the recovered art from that time period.

I feel like living in a time when humans were a part of nature, rather than a distinct, outside, destructive force on it, would be a refreshing challenge. We humans have gradually separated ourselves from the rest of the world, and are finally realizing our hugely destructive power and attempting (in some sense) to return to an equilibrium (of some sort). Based on how much has changed in our past, I wonder how religion will change over the next thousands of years?