Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The First Drawing and Stone Age Boy - Episode 16
88 Plays7 years ago
Two children's picturebooks are the subject of episode 16 of Prehi/stories. Picturebooks may be the first contact children have with prehistory, so we're looking at how two of the best, The First Drawing by Mordicai Gerstein and Stone Age Boy by Satoshi Kitamura, represent the remote past. In this episode my guests are Ghislaine Howard, a painter of powerful and expressive means whose works chart and interpret shared human experience. Her drawing Pregnant Self Portrait 1987 was part of the British Museum's exhibition Ice Age Art: arrival of the modern mind in 2013. I also talk to Andrew Needham, Associate Lecturer in Palaeolithic Archaeology and Post-Doctoral researcher on the Templeton funded 'Hidden Depths: The Ancestry of our Most Human Emotions' project at the University of York.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction & Sponsorship
00:00:01
Speaker
you are listening to the archaeology podcast network the archaeology podcast network is sponsored by codify a california benefit corporation visit codify at www.codifi.com
Welcoming Listeners & Book Discussions
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Prehistories. I'm Kim Bedolph. If you've listened to the podcast before and you've come back for more, welcome and thank you very much. Do leave a message in the comments box below and tell me a book that you'd like me to talk about. If you haven't listened to the podcast before,
Archaeology in Prehistoric Books
00:00:47
Speaker
Basically I talk to guests who are often archaeologists but not always, like tonight, about the archaeology behind books set in the prehistoric human past. We can talk about where the evidence comes from, the interpretations of that evidence and what's left out as much as what's put in, but we can also talk about the power of fiction to go further than mere archaeology can.
00:01:11
Speaker
Today we are looking at two picture books for kids, Stone Age Boy by Satoshi Kitamura, and the first drawing by Mordekai Gershdy Nogershdyne. Yes, they're for kids, but stick around as it gives us a chance to talk about life in the Upper Palaeolithic and, more importantly, cave art.
Guest Introduction: Ghislaine Howard
00:01:45
Speaker
So talking to me today about these two picture books are Ghislaine Howard, an artist who collaborated with the British Museum on their Ice Age Art Exhibition several years ago. Hello, Ghislaine, how are you? Hello. Hello, how are you doing? Yeah, great, thank you very much. Lovely to be in conversation this evening.
00:02:08
Speaker
Yeah, it's lovely to finally talk to you. We've been talking about this for a few months, haven't we? And we've finally managed to get a date. Yeah, absolutely. I know you were in Australia last year, weren't you, for a while? Yeah, it's been a lot of travelling and exhibitions and so forth, yeah.
00:02:30
Speaker
Fantastic.
Creativity & Art in the Paleolithic Era
00:02:31
Speaker
And we're also joined by Andrew Needham of the University of York, whose research interests include the emergence of creativity in the Paleolithic and Paleolithic art in general. Hello, Andy.
00:02:45
Speaker
Hello. Yeah, thank you. It's lovely to make contact with you again. And I've seen you talk in a couple of tag, theoretical archaeology group conferences and found your research really interesting. You've been particularly working on Montastuc, is that right?
00:03:04
Speaker
That's right. Yeah. So French rocks. Yeah. The site of Matthew and Jay, it's about 15,000 years old, with a really great and portable art assemblage. So my specialty is the portable art assemblage. Yeah. Yeah.
Portable Art: Beads and Pendants
00:03:20
Speaker
So what is portable art? I mean, I know on the Archaeology Podcast Network, quite a lot of people who listen will know all of this stuff. But some people might not. So when we use terms like portable art, what do you mean? Yeah, so
00:03:42
Speaker
versus anything which is technically more viable. If it's on a small stone, if it's sort of bead or pendant, if it's male, if it's a bone, for example, if it can be moved quite freely, we call that portable art. And the tones themselves aren't necessarily strictly meaningful, but they are a way for us to sort of lump art together and give us some sense of sort of difference between different types.
00:03:53
Speaker
broadly, there's a distinction between what I might call parietal art, which would be art which is all fixed in place.
00:04:06
Speaker
Yeah, because portable art can include things that are clearly ornamentation and other things that might have some kind of ritual significance. And sometimes the art is on really utilitarian objects, isn't it? So it's... Yeah. So actually, I think this is one of the hardest questions for art, is how exactly we find it, how exactly we sort of, we create meaningful categories in lumps. Yeah. And still, we've quite reached that point where Edel would agree, actually,
00:04:37
Speaker
That is going to be a difficult question. We will get to a bit more in depth about that. But I wanted to hear a bit about your work and so on. And Ghislaine, your work came to be featured in the Ice Age Art Exhibition, which I took my daughter to it. She was two at the time. And I think she was the only child in there that went to see it, but she loved it.
Ice Age Art Exhibition Insights
00:05:03
Speaker
But obviously quite a lot of the first bit of the Ice Age Art Exhibition was the so-called Venus figurines, which are naked women, and possibly most of them are pregnant or post-pregnancy. It also sounds like you're having given birth. Yeah. Well, that was where my drawing is situated. Yeah. Yeah. And extraordinary.
00:05:32
Speaker
throw a piece on for me as an artist, and I was drawing myself pregnant. Right. It's charcoal on paper. You know, it seems a long time. And when I saw it in the exhibition, next to the little figurines that was old, it was a fantastic social and a sense of connectivity. And just the difficulty of conceiving of that timescale, but also realizing that the reason that I made the drawing in the birth
00:06:01
Speaker
person or to record something that was happening to me that was very important to me, that was a, you know, universal experience, but the whole something of that to energy, realize these little, little people, quite, you know, very, very moving. Yeah, experience.
00:06:21
Speaker
I'm sorry, your audio keeps on cutting out a little bit, which is really annoying because we are getting the gist of what you're saying, but every now and again, it just goes silent a little bit.
Debate: Origin of Art in Europe?
00:06:33
Speaker
So very sorry. No, I think it might be something about the connection, but we'll keep on going because I really want to talk to you about this.
00:06:43
Speaker
So the tagline of that exhibition was the arrival of the modern mind, which is interesting, isn't it? In a sense, that's what our books are saying to the books that we're going to talk about. That's what they're saying, particularly one of them, the first drawing by Mordecai Gerstein is basically saying that a child about 30,000 years ago invented art.
00:07:12
Speaker
But to what extent is that, I mean, this obviously opens up this big question that you already posed, Andy, about what do you call art? What is art? And, you know, is it fair to say that Homo sapiens invented it in Europe 30,000 years ago? Or 40 or 43 or 45 or whatever? What do you think, Andy? It follows very
00:07:41
Speaker
And that would be the classic interpretation, I think it'd be fair to say. And so in that sense, Gerstein's book is sort of there or thereabouts, but I actually think in recent decades, the shape of art has changed substantially. It's changed on two fronts. I think the clear
00:08:07
Speaker
It's about 30 to 40,000 years old. It's probably too young now. And that is specifically Western European. And the single species phenomenon are probably, again, probably underestimates as well. So there's recent evidence that would suggest that the moment humans sort of spring from Africa about 100,000 years ago, depending on which dates you believe, came with them. So for me, I think the moment you get humans,
00:08:37
Speaker
And by humans, I would mean sort of anatomically human, but also perhaps behaviorally and cognitively human, which I would date to about 100,000 myself.
00:08:46
Speaker
you do see evidence for art. So sites such as Deep Blue Cave in South Africa, and Bloombos Cave, perhaps especially, is perhaps the most famous. People have really complex evidence for sort of engraved pieces of orca, engraved pieces of orca, eggshell. I think this is just as complex as these famous cave paintings here in Europe. You see now
00:09:12
Speaker
evidence for pariah class, that sort of art on the cave wall, if you like, edit and painted in Southeast Asia, about 40,000
Reevaluating Art History with New Evidence
00:09:21
Speaker
years. So that's only found in the last two years. And from Australia, from anywhere from 40 to 60,000 years ago, evidence was part of pendant, from sharp teeth, possibly the use of bone for inserts of the gnomes with orca, the sort of like powdered red fine dust that they use.
00:09:42
Speaker
So it seems wherever you find humans, you find this evidence for complexity of behavior, some sort of artistic expression, how you might want to sort of define that, that particular type of art. And it looks, there's some more aspects run ahead of the the parietal. So that seems to be sort of a gist of it at least for humans as far as I'm aware.
00:10:05
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. I mean, that raises so many issues about, you know, this symbolic behaviour, body adornment and things like that. And I was talking to Matthew Pope and Becky Scott about the inheritors in the last podcast, and about the representation of Neanderthals. And of course, there's recent evidence that they were engaged in symbolic behaviour as well with taking feathers from raptors and corvids and so on for decoration.
00:10:34
Speaker
I mean, the major strand, I think, which has happened with Neanderthals, I found really fascinating is, I would say in the last five years, we've had a bit of a revolution in how we think about Neanderthals, linked ultimately to changes in how we understand DNA.
00:10:48
Speaker
So once we thought they were a completely different species, and now it looks like we have some evidence of human and Neanderthal interaction in speaking into breeding there. And that's really changed what we allow them to have in terms of cognitive capacity, social capacity, and similar. And so I think a lot of art that was maybe around before has now been taken seriously. And we start to find more and more of it continues upon the creation.
00:11:17
Speaker
1980s onwards, it was popular that Neanderthals might have made some artistic objects, but probably that they learned from humans from Europe. Whereas now, I think there's new data and evidence, and then with this sort of new genetic evidence, we're starting to see increasing claims that they can make it independently.
Neanderthals and Symbolic Art
00:11:35
Speaker
And the last sort of golden barrier, if you like, between the classes of Neanderthals and the humans was parietal art, which we always think are the most complex. And again,
00:11:46
Speaker
In 2014, a team at Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar have made the case that they've found independent collection of pariahs large by the endotiles. So again, probably to collapse this division of what we think makes us specialists of species, well actually, our closest ancestors in the endotiles seem to have been able to match us in that capacity. But yeah, the pictures really changed rapidly in the last five years, especially I was thinking.
00:12:12
Speaker
What do you think, Elaine, about the origin of art? Presumably cave walls or little objects, we call that art because it's similar to the art that we have today. Would you call changing one's body art? Because wouldn't that be almost like the first medium
Art as Communication & Expression
00:12:35
Speaker
to express yourself? What do you think?
00:12:41
Speaker
we are essentially visual creatures, you know, we observe, we deserve remember, we collaborate, and we want to leave traces. And I suppose, you know, as, as long as as things are left on cave walls, or beings leaving places behind themselves, things that are not necessarily useful for living or hunting. But actually, I was here. Yeah, leaving something of yourself or
00:13:08
Speaker
leaving your mark, which is still what we want to do today. Yeah, and it would, I mean, this is the the idea, isn't it? What is art? Is it is tattooing yourself, or painting yourself or making a hole in yourself? Is that? Can we can we limp, lump that all in together? Because art is usually I mean, there is art in but essentially art is
00:13:37
Speaker
is art that reaches out to other people that sort of the imagination encounter to remember them but then it's about communication as well I think and about you know reaching out beyond yourself you know yeah like a poem yes absolutely somebody else reads it
00:13:56
Speaker
Yeah. With the first drawing, it is in the back, the author does say explicitly that he was inspired by the finding of Chauvet Cave, which is also known as the Cavern du Ponderac.
00:14:12
Speaker
in the Ardรจche in 1994 and yet the paintings in it, I don't know if you noticed Andy, you probably did, I'm sure you did, are not really similar to the ones in Chauvet are they? There is a conflation of cave art, of parietal art in that. Yes, I think there is. Is that a problem or is it not really, does it matter?
00:14:40
Speaker
I'm trying to think about the target audience in this book as well. So my start point with the reading of these books was that I was really genuinely excited to see some books about aspects of the polylithic that, you know, growing up, they just didn't exist, you know, really.
00:14:59
Speaker
you know, so I was really excited about that in the first instance, regardless of their sort of specific content. So I really want to sort of give them both massive credit. Yes. For just sort of existing actually. So I'm trying to sort of like see in those terms, maybe for, you know,
00:15:19
Speaker
So maybe we can forgive some aspects of factual accuracy only in the interest of being able to get some enthusiasm and engagement in a young audience. So I think for me, there's two prongs to this. The specialist in reality wants to sort of attack this and critique it and
00:15:41
Speaker
I'm trying to see the big victory too, which is that the big victory here is getting young people engaged and views and interested in the politics. So if it achieves that, I would be quite happy to let any sort of factual errors slide to a degree.
00:15:55
Speaker
Yeah, fair enough. I mean, I sound really critical of them, but I love them. I think, again, like you, I think they're absolutely amazing. As you said, I think we're back there. In ideal world, this is where we start to emerge, hope we can start to find
Ancient Musical Instruments
00:16:12
Speaker
a middle ground between factual accuracy and then that capacity to engage that maybe an academic audience couldn't necessarily do strictly. Yeah. Well, because the panel of the Lions in Chauvet would be absolutely amazing for kids to see and get engaged with, I think. Absolutely. I mean, I was really excited by the first drawing book because it is so imaginative and it is so engaging.
00:16:41
Speaker
it does give that sense, it's appealing to children who are at that very stage really of imagining things and making sense of the world through imaging it. And you know, abstract age of the curtains or whatever, that same kind of excitement, people excitement is making a big stick, you know, it's... Yeah, it is, it's wonderful and I think...
00:17:07
Speaker
If I can just read an extract from the first drawing, so there's this one child, and we'll talk about how it's set up a little bit later, but this one child always sees animals in everything, in the clouds, in stones that he or she finds at the side of the river.
00:17:32
Speaker
And I'm going to read a little bit from it. At night wrapped in deer skins you see shadow images of all the animals again in the firelight flickering over the bumps and hollows of the cave walls and they seem to move. Look mama, galloping horses. What horses? Go to sleep. Papa, grandpa, they're on the ceiling. Elk. There are no elk. Go to sleep.
00:17:55
Speaker
and so on and so on until the little child can make them see what he or she can see. But what I love in the drawings as well is that there are a few who can see and you can tell from the looks on their faces. They are seeing and they're all the youngest children, which is fascinating.
00:18:15
Speaker
Do you think children had a, could children have invented art or indeed, you know, invented all sorts of things? How far can children, it's very difficult to find them in the record, but what, you know, surely they could be drivers of innovation as well? Well, I mean, certainly every child, every child will.
00:18:37
Speaker
you know, any three-year-old and four-year-old. Absolutely. And sadly, and it's the way we make sense of the world, how we order it. Sadly, that was, that cut out quite a lot during that bit. It's really annoying. So three, I mean, yes, three and four-year-olds, they do draw, do they? Is that a universal thing?
Children's Role in Art Creation
00:19:00
Speaker
It absolutely is. I mean,
00:19:03
Speaker
the world are abstracting, they're doing the most complicated sort of, and then really by the age of six or seven, you know, now, we have a way of drawing that separates, that they're not very good at drawing or that, you know, art has become separated from life. And I think what's lovely about, particularly for me, about the artists connecting with life as actually, you know, coming to terms with it, and really just engaging
00:19:33
Speaker
which, if it sends children, you know, sends people back. And a little bit sad really was that the drawings, there weren't any of any actual Paleolithic art in the book, or it's one little time. And the drawings in the book, although they're lovely, they don't have that immediacy and elegance and power of
00:19:57
Speaker
you know, some of the cave art that they're about. Yes, I suppose that's true. I mean, it's very difficult, isn't it, to find children in the archaeological record, isn't it, Andy? Especially in the Palaeolithic, presumably. I mean, so in terms of, say, the skeletal record, I mean, imagine, you know, the smaller and more delicate the bones, the more likely they are to be
00:20:22
Speaker
the loss in the archeological record. So in terms of raw preservation of young individuals, they're very unlikely to preserve or stop. But in terms of their actions, again, what I really like about this book is the footage of Britain's centre, rightly or wrongly, but it had them there as a presence. And I think we probably think guilty,
00:20:43
Speaker
previous decades, and maybe not thinking all that much about children and art, was actually really good. In recent decades, I'll suggest that they played quite a prominent role in our creation, at least in some topics. So, some hand stencils, for example, where both are all black paint around the hand or use a handtop stamp on the wall. Small enough to suggest they're made of children, sometimes quite young. So, so it's all under the age of say 10. Yeah. You see,
00:21:10
Speaker
footprints sometimes in caving, including in shoving. And also, and what we call finger fluting, so you might have got some soft mud or some soft clay. If you run your fingers through that, that leaves sort of a characteristic sort of rake mark. And they're quite common in the pose. They can find them in quite a lot of pose that cave out sites. A lot of those were made by children. And so if you measure the finger width and the sizes of those,
00:21:37
Speaker
that can give you a rough sense of, again, the age profile of the person concerned. So it does seem like, across a whole range of sites, you get some evidence for the young being associated with art and then sort of the creation of some type of art. And also, within the post-black assemblage, most sites you see, there's actually a range of skill evidence that's not
00:22:10
Speaker
And this would perhaps tally the evidence you get from the stone tool assembly with a real range of skills.
00:22:20
Speaker
And people like Nick Jordan, in 1990, suggested that you had some sort of degree of apprenticeship and learned it happened to be an experienced and inexperienced people, probably suggested both young and old, and probably that to a degree in the art record too. So again, if everybody's just, you know, as many as exactly cares that much as people like to be in sort of encoded into the production stuff from tools, not going to be encoded into the creation of art.
00:22:48
Speaker
So yeah, I think that's the reason we have to get this depth of the unit of children old enough, despite the fact rightly, as you said, they're probably the most difficult people to find in the archaeological record. That's great. There's a lot more than I thought there was then. So that's fantastic. And we're just going to take a little break now, so that you can hear some messages from our sponsors. And then we'll be back in a couple of minutes.
00:23:16
Speaker
Would you like to get more involved with archaeology? Are you looking for volunteer or internship opportunities? Are you already working on community or personal archiving projects and could use some helpful hints? Check out the Ideas Portal, sponsored by Codify. Visit ideas.codify.com, a free and open community tool, and share your ideas, knowledge, and advice on select topics that will lead to vibrant opportunities and initiatives for all aspects of archaeology.
00:23:39
Speaker
from fieldwork to public service. All ideas are welcome, so visit ideas.cutify.com today and make your voice heard. That's ideas.codifi.com.
00:23:56
Speaker
Hello, welcome back from the break. So we are looking at two books today, so we have talked quite a lot about the first drawing and art, but in Stone Age Boy by Satoshi Kitamura, while there is art, it seems to be mostly secondary really, and you learn a lot more about the lifestyle of people in the Paleolithic.
00:24:20
Speaker
So what I quite liked about it was that although the Stone Age boy, who is actually a modern boy who goes back to the Stone Age, falls into a cave, he leaves the cave and that's where he finds people. He finds them in the open air. Could cavemen have lived not in caves, Andy? Very basic question.
00:24:44
Speaker
Yeah, 100%. So I noticed in this one, and I really, really loved this one, actually, I really loved it, that you sort of shifted time focus slightly from sort of short there primarily got 30,000, 36,000 with the first drawing to
00:24:59
Speaker
the Magdalenean. So we've got to be past the last political maximums, I'll call it 20,000 years ago, where it's super, super cold, that humans
Daily Life in the Paleolithic Era
00:25:08
Speaker
have retreated. I mean, I'll move back out into human, re-colonised, into open, step-like environments. Yeah. With this rich, rich fauna that you might see in the Magdalenean world. And it's great to be factual, but it's still quite visual. Yeah. I think, yeah, I mean, I've noticed as well that it's, that
00:25:30
Speaker
There's a note saying thanks to Alice Roberts from the Art Modern Museum for sort of help and guidance on the arc of the book. And I think you can really tell it's very sharp on detail, but has that, that flair of a real writer. So I think that really like between an archeological fact,
00:25:51
Speaker
meet a little bit of imagination. So I thought, yeah, I was very strong, very strong as well. Yeah, I know, I loved it. I mean, there's a particular kind of two-page spread where, I mean, it looks like all the research has really gone on to those two pages.
00:26:07
Speaker
doesn't it? Where the boy who finds himself with this group of people in the Magdalenian and he lists everything that he's seen and there are little pictures to illustrate all of those. So making fire, making tools, making ornaments,
00:26:26
Speaker
making clothes and making food and there's just so much detail in there. I read this to my daughter again today actually. She saw it was out and she said, oh can you read that to me? And we spent ages looking at all the different things and obviously because she's my daughter she knows quite a lot about
00:26:48
Speaker
how this all works. But it's a fantastic, particularly just to look at that double page spread to talk kids through what life would be like. Yeah. What are you saying, Andy?
00:27:10
Speaker
I thought it felt I thought it felt quite natural. So it's sort of it's embedded in the story. Well, sort of a chunk of fat to be like, I mean, it's actually quite engaging still within the broad narrative. But yeah, I think it's like this take away value there. I thought
00:27:30
Speaker
as much as the first trauma of our imagination and ideas and trying to get children to think about being in the past and what it might have been like. This gave you very much sort of a day in the life, or what it would be like to be at a hunter's gathering a thousand years ago. And I thought, yeah, it felt quite dynamic in that respect, quite clever.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, but it does also have, I mean, they do go into a painted cave later, don't they? But it also has a page after the hunt where they're dancing and making music. So it's lovely that it kind of doesn't just show a group of people just surviving on the edge of the tundra. It is a very rich culture that they've got.
00:28:18
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I tried to scrutinise it, which is a course with a sort of an archaeological art. But we've been quite clever, I think, in incorporating aspects which are embedded in the archaeological records. So a young girl on is the sort of the
00:28:35
Speaker
the other character with the young boy, she plays a flute. And we have evidence of flutes in an archaeological record from about 40,000 years ago, right away through the palace. The choice of instrument is quite clever in the story. Yeah.
00:28:55
Speaker
So, again, it demonstrates a good level of research. Yes. I mean, they would be made out of bone, wouldn't they? And so you get, as you say, as often bird bone, isn't it, that's used for flutes, like vultures and stuff? Exactly. Yeah, like really quite large. Yeah. And then you can see the merging of wing bones and use those and use your sort of, I mean, heart.
00:29:21
Speaker
perforate the holes and then you just ask them to glue them back together. It usually gives you your your flute. Yeah but as I say it's almost certainly mostly bird bone that they use. If they hollow it out they need ivory but as I say I could cut it in half to hollow out the sense that with bird bones naturally hollow and it's their job so usually it's bird bone not their target.
00:29:45
Speaker
There is, on the double page spread, there is a little bit about the portable art. This is where there's a tiny, tiny bit. There's the head from Brassenpuy. I think that's, sorry for anyone listening in France, if I haven't said that right. Which is actually disputed, isn't it, that head? It's kind of, it's one of the few with an actual face. Yes, the real one after this one. Yeah.
00:30:15
Speaker
10th, it's a little earlier than this, this Magdalene spring that's been built on this thing. But it was found by Edouard Pia at the turn of the century, so in the very early 20th century, during the excavations at Vrassenpore. He found a whole collection of them from that site. Many of them were fragmented at the site.
00:30:40
Speaker
workmen were paid by the find. So you can question quite whether they were finding an object and maybe sort of helping it along and smashing it up a bit. You know, in pieces. But the level of note to record in there, when it's very pretty contemporary
00:30:59
Speaker
So a book by Randall White, even though he was a global philosopher from 2006. And he's currently suggested that it could be real, based on microscopic analysis of working marks and traces. He suggests that the two marks probably are made by stone tools, probably purines. They're almost, they look a bit like a pencil, but they have a very firm, hard, solid pot, which would let you sort of make quite deep marks.
00:31:28
Speaker
And for that, he suggested that they are real. As of that, if it is a forgery, it's a very, very clever forgery for the pine, where potentially redstone tools have been used. So still, as you say, very questionable. But I think at the moment, people may be tipping more towards might be real.
00:31:44
Speaker
But a genuine oddity in that, it's sort of detailed in the face. Whereas the face is the thing that's usually quite obscure relative to everything else. And usually, you do know facial features, maybe some hair might be depicted. But usually, you may say that relatively lacking details compared to the rest of the anatomy. And in fact, some of them don't even have heads, do they? Or they've got just little button kind of things instead of heads. Yeah. And as you move and start centering these in Europe, it's common.
00:32:13
Speaker
they're typically sort of made out of, I don't know, a nurse, which is like a soft stone, or ivory, usually mammoth-like.
Mystery of Fragmented Figurines
00:32:20
Speaker
And it's quite typical of what will intentionally break the head off, and maybe break the foot up too. So yeah, really peculiar pattern in how their youth didn't throughout their life. And these art mechanisms were a visual type of material culture, they've been used in very particular ways.
00:32:39
Speaker
There's a central European site called Don Li Vestinici. It looks like a figurine were made intentionally to augment in a kiln structure. So they're made from a large, they're wetted and they're hooked together, much like a little clay figurine. Thrown into a fire.
00:32:58
Speaker
But they were intentionally wetted before they were thrown into the fire with the idea that they would fragment once that those sort of water molecules were excited in them with the heat of the fire. So yeah, there was all the intensity of fragmenting, which is a very curious thing to do with that really.
00:33:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you also mentioned that in the first drawing, there isn't really a great deal of life. It's all very focused on the only thing that you see people doing in the first drawing is going collecting stones to make stone tools.
00:33:30
Speaker
But the child in there does have a wolf as a pet. And the author does mention at the back that the evidence of a wolf print at Chauvet. But even 30,000, 36,000, however old Chauvet is, because it is disputed, isn't it? Or did they have dogs at that point already?
00:34:00
Speaker
fascinating area of today, which is certainly in the last 10 or 15 years has been really vibrant actually in the Africa community. And I think probably more people would now probably agree that the domestication of the dog is probably the first domesticated species, probably as early as about the mid 30s, 36,000 perhaps.
00:34:25
Speaker
The major body of evidence comes from Goya Kid in Belgium, studied primarily by Jim Enplay, a Belgian researcher.
00:34:37
Speaker
And based on sort of the anatomy of what we originally thought were wolves, that would have been recovered from sites, probably they're now thought to be dogs. And genetically, it looks like we have increasingly strong evidence for dogs. And sort of multiple phases of domestication too. So I would argue probably
Early Domestication of Dogs
00:34:59
Speaker
it would be more appropriate in the first drawing to depict a wolf-like dog rather than strictly a wolf. I imagine wolves were probably quite scary in the pilot as they are today. You're just sort of thinking about in the first drawing there not being much about actual life and admittedly there is because the Stone Age boy is so full of factual, wonderful factual drawings. Yeah.
00:35:26
Speaker
details about every day of life. But there isn't, what there is, I think, in the first drawing is a sense of danger, a sense of, yeah, sort of, then that encounter with the woolly mammal. I love that bit, yeah. It's fantastic, isn't it? And that really
00:35:49
Speaker
work very well together. Because the stamina is all rather at a distance. And there's a kind of a safety about it. You know, they go hunting, but it's obviously it's care.
00:36:09
Speaker
exercise, it is much more sense of the grittiness and the danger. Absolutely. I do think they complement each other very well. And I like your how you hadn't really clocked that the scale of the people changes and the way you're situated viewing these people or viewing the animals.
00:36:28
Speaker
changes in the first drawing and it's much more dynamic and yet in Stone Age Boy, you're right, you're always at a distance from the people and they're always in the middle distance, aren't they? And they're all the same size, more or less. That's a really interesting thing. Although there is a little bit of danger at the end, isn't there, with the cave bear coming in, but then it's not as dangerous as it could be. Although I do... Going into the screen.
00:36:58
Speaker
It seems a little bit, a little bit, you know, just the case doesn't seem that dark. No, it's not. And because there's scaffolding around, yeah, it doesn't really, it doesn't seem to be quite so. But then I guess, I guess that this is quite young, you know, but it's
00:37:19
Speaker
perhaps more of a classroom book, you know, or with young children with a carer with them explaining things, you know, and the other one is more of a imaginative storybook. Yes. But as you say, I think they work together well. And I think you could get some good philosophical discussions out of
00:37:35
Speaker
the first drawing about what about like we've been having about what is art and you know when did when was it invented and and who could be involved in that invention so yes I mean one thing about in the in the painted cave in Stone Age Boy is that Om who is actually the only named character in the entire book as well
00:37:56
Speaker
who is the friend who is a girl from the Magdalenia to the Stone Age boy who had gone back in time, draws a picture of him on the wall. And that's one of the things that there is this kind of distinction between what's drawn on walls, which is generally animals. If you do get any kind of human figures, they're slightly fantastical.
00:38:18
Speaker
apart from at Lasko in the pit where there's a birdheaded man. But with the portable art you've got so many people, admittedly without faces like you were saying, but they're real people depicted. It is and I wonder why there was that
00:38:44
Speaker
there's definitely different there's different reasons why people are making cave art as opposed to the portable art there obviously for different things although of course there are lots of animals in portable art as well so yeah i mean we don't know do we i mean we can you know there's lots of different speculation
00:39:03
Speaker
about why they were made. The problem that I have got when I talk to teachers or I hear teachers talking to their children and they're talking, oh the kids tell me why people made cave art. They come up with ideas like they didn't speak to each other so this was the way of communicating which
00:39:25
Speaker
I know it's like oh god no that's not why they did it um all that these were the animals i just i just have to tell them you know no that's not why they do it um all these were the animals they were hunting and they were showing each other how to hunt these animals but um uh although they were telling stories with them and these are the three main um uh kind of explanations that the kids come up with and i think possibly the storytelling might be more on
00:39:53
Speaker
their right lines. I mean, the fact that the animals were so important to their lives, I suppose, weren't they? I mean, that's one of the obvious things. But the fact that the cave paintings seem so alive and seem so extraordinary to us isn't just because they're drawn so beautifully. It's that they absolutely breathe with feeling, don't they? And in a sense, it's what
00:40:24
Speaker
struck me about the little pregnant figures is that they have a sense of embodiment and inhabiting of those. And I don't even remember where it was. But there was, we walked down some tracks, it was supposed to be some carvings, rock carvings. And we came to an over in the cliff. And there were three horses down there.
00:40:55
Speaker
the smell of damp vegetation, you know, warm vegetation. And it took a second or two to realise the causes, our causes out of the rock. Gosh. So yeah, read the first story of the breathing quality of the rock with the... Yes. All the drawings. Yeah, I mean, they're so accomplished.
00:41:19
Speaker
with what they were doing and taking advantage of the natural formation of rocks that they were using. Now we're going to have to take a break again and then we'll be back in a couple of minutes to talk a bit more because it's getting very exciting now.
00:41:32
Speaker
I'm Jessica Equinto and I'm the host of the Heritage Voices podcast. Heritage Voices focuses on how CRM and heritage professionals, public employees, tribes, and descendant communities can best work together to protect their heritage through tribal consultation, collaborative ethnography, and indigenous archaeology. Now back to the show.
00:41:56
Speaker
Hi we're back and we're still talking about the first drawing and Stone Age Boy. So I really haven't given much of a precie of the books really have I which is a bit remiss of me. They both have a kind of a parallel way of getting into the Stone Age but slightly different. So in the first drawing
00:42:17
Speaker
You start with a modern child and the author asks you to imagine you are going back more than 30,000 years and all the way through he continues to use the second person so it's always you love to watch animals, you live in a cave with your parents, you see animals on the wall and so
Engaging Narratives in 'The First Drawing'
00:42:47
Speaker
you never find out whether the child is a boy or a girl. And I think that was the intention is to make it quite open so that any child reading it could think of themselves as that person. Do you think that he succeeds with that? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think I think it's maybe what maybe to bring back the finite game as well. But
00:43:12
Speaker
In reading this, I felt like more of a fly on the wall and more like I was actually there. Whereas in The Stone Age Boy, I felt like more like it was after the fact I was having a conversation with the boy with glasses. It already happened. Whereas, yes, I think maybe the first one was more of an invitation.
00:43:37
Speaker
give you more of an intimate sense of maybe sort of interpersonal relationships and that sort of family dynamics. So I think maybe, yeah, maybe more successful in that respect. As you say, it didn't necessarily pull out the gender of the person in question.
00:43:58
Speaker
and immediately made a decision about what it was. It probably reflects on me. No, but I don't think it does because my six-year-old daughter thinks it's a boy as well. And I think it's just that sadly, there's an assumption that the main character in the story is going to be a boy.
00:44:18
Speaker
And I think that is carried. There is evidence for that in lots of picture books. I do want to do a little bit of work on that myself, but I have a feeling that, sadly, girls generally play second fiddle in storybooks. I don't know if you've got an opinion on that, Ghislaine. Well, it's absolutely true.
00:44:46
Speaker
I'm not sure. I'm kind of, I didn't really think about it that hard, except I thought it was a boy. But looking at, still a boy, because she's got such a close top on her hair, whereas the, you know, it seems she is actually a big girl. And I think girl, and of course, in the first point, the figure is androgynous, but slightly stocky. So I think maybe that's why
00:45:15
Speaker
you know, we still think it's a boy. Yeah, I think. Yeah, it's funny. I think Om is definitely depicted in quite a modern way for a girl, to be honest. So but but I guess I guess Satoshi Kitamura probably had to do that to make it clear that so he had, even though the main protagonist is a boy, Om is very active. So that's good.
00:45:40
Speaker
So the way that the Stone Age boy works is that the boy actually goes into the woods and he falls down into a cave and when he falls down into this cave he's gone back in time to the Paleolithic and I quite liked the way that he did that because wasn't Lasko found, the Lasko cave, found by boys falling down a cave?
00:46:07
Speaker
Yeah, so that's a very nice parallel I thought. And Andy, what I really liked at the end was that he turns into an archaeologist. I loved that page. It was brilliant. Yeah, that was brilliant. I thought it was a really good switch actually. Again, especially because obviously you've added in pages there with some
00:46:28
Speaker
sort of factual overtones, which are giving you, you know, a little bit of a bump about the period. And then it ends on that strong note of, and you can sort of make a career with this. So that was quite an invitation for young minds, you know, there were other sufficient levels of interest that, you know, this can do. Yeah, you know, think about it. So I thought that was a very welcome addition. Yeah, and I think, Elaine,
00:46:59
Speaker
What I really liked at the end of the book of the Stone Age Boy was the timeline. Yeah. Actually, I just found that. It's a really nice one. It was. Oh, it's a lovely one. I've seen some Broadway living with airplanes and so forth. It's so recent. So very, very visual. And even the hidden so forth, it really sets it in context.
00:47:25
Speaker
Yeah, it's very useful to have. And as you say, although it does only go back to 15,000
00:47:30
Speaker
BC. So I guess that's where he's setting it really. But that's, but even then it does really show, you know, that the most most of human history was actually the Paleolithic. And yeah, as you say, it's got lovely little drawings all along. And it will be a lovely timeline to blow up and have in a classroom, wouldn't it? It'd be wonderful. Absolutely great. Well, results. I think I agree. The bigger building is a really good addition at the end there. Yeah.
00:48:00
Speaker
The books then are, there are issues with the accuracy, maybe a little bit, but they kind of do provide so much
00:48:16
Speaker
to talk about and in many ways when teachers use or when parents are reading these to their kids they should really be a way to kind of start off those conversations and they really do that. I mean for me as an archaeologist obviously I can have quite in-depth conversations with my daughter but you would hope that with that extra information at the back that parents or teachers would be able to do that too.
00:48:49
Speaker
Well, and what I would hope really about the Stone Age boy, there are some quite nice drawings of, you know, a cave bear and a mammoth. Stone Age. But they're fairly just quite nice soft drawings. You know, they're not anything like as powerful as Stone Age boy might come across in the cave.
00:49:13
Speaker
So you'd hope that they're a really useful tool just to be the entry point.
00:49:25
Speaker
Yeah, because mammoths and so on, mammoths and sabre-toothed cats are really the things that all kids know. So to have those, you know, those are the hooks really to get them into thinking about lots of other things in this period, aren't they?
00:49:49
Speaker
and obviously if the Stone Age boy is based on Lasko there weren't any mammoths on the cave there but there are in other caves and so on and there is just something quite amazing about a mammoth
00:50:06
Speaker
And in the first drawing, you mentioned this earlier, didn't you, Ghislaine, where the child meets that mammoth. I mean, I remember my daughter when she first saw it being actually terrified of that page because you really see the mammoth up close. And the text is nice there as well, isn't it? It says, it snits you with its trunks and stands perfectly still. You're afraid to move and it's like a fur-covered mountain with eyes that look into yours.
00:50:36
Speaker
So the text I think works really well as well on that page. Yeah, it's beautiful. It's very, very striking.
00:50:44
Speaker
And as you say, it's almost like it's the contrast between the real of the mammoth, even though we know it's a drawing, and the mammoth on the cave wall, which, as you say, doesn't quite have the same aliveness and essence of the cave paintings that we know are there.
00:51:10
Speaker
So but it is it is magic isn't it? This is another nice bit out of the first drawing where when the child makes the first drawing, which is a mammoth because obviously it has to be,
00:51:25
Speaker
the rest of his family are terrified and they can finally see what you see and say I can see it Gaspiafather this is magic and then the child looks at and you look at what you've done you have made the world's first drawing yes you say it is magic and it is I think that's a lovely one really is lovely isn't it yeah it is it is
00:51:52
Speaker
One of the things that I really like on the Alistair is drawing from stick, because that's how Matisse tried to put... But Matisse was an artist looking back to this simplicity and the gracing.
00:52:18
Speaker
and trying to get that back without the kind of blocks that we have of all the knowledge of being so forth. So, you know, it's a wonderful thing. Using, you know, a long stick to try and recreate something of sense.
00:52:37
Speaker
no way of the boy's boy and the boy or the girl. That's really interesting so I mean obviously that was something else that came out of the exhibition was that that clear inspiration that the the discovery of this amazing Paleolithic art was had on on the art world and with Matisse like you say but Picasso as well
00:53:03
Speaker
and an inspiring basically modern art and do you feel like you kind of come out of that tradition yourself? Do you go back to the Paleolithic art ever or have you moved on? Well in a sense yeah I mean when I was very young I saw
00:53:27
Speaker
of some cave art. And I remember drawing, we used to draw with pastels and there was stuff down on the museum where the classes were. And I remember really trying to get something of that speed and life into my drawings. And I believe that art is about, I've wanted to debate art about shared human experience, about the fact that all human, we all feel things in similar ways, sorry,
00:53:59
Speaker
which are broadly similar and you know we live a life on this planet and in a sense being in that exhibition the I Say Dark show next to those little sculptures for me the making of my drawings is very much about embodiment and about reaching out to all sorts of people and making a very accessible art and I thought
00:54:30
Speaker
completely, a sense of connection with these people who were like us, that sense of connection. But that is one of the things that makes us feel part of, you know, it makes us feel those connections and it's continually evolving. It changes, but essentially, the people making that art were not
00:54:58
Speaker
it was not primitive art. I mean, it is, it's as sophisticated, it really is anything. And that's why artists like Picasso and Matisse and Braque, you know,
00:55:09
Speaker
I mean I think that that is the whole point of my career is to try and get people particularly because I work with kids a lot and teachers to see that people in prehistory were just like us and I think these books these books do do that.
00:55:32
Speaker
I mean obviously the art that we see is for all sorts of reasons. Andy, I was saying earlier that I often get these three, and we kind of didn't include you in that discussion, sorry, but I get these three explanations of Paleolithic art from children, i.e. that it was their language, that it recorded which animals that they hunted, or that it was used for storytelling.
00:55:57
Speaker
are any of those actually I mean obviously not that it was language because people could speak they had a very fully functioning language I think we can probably say that with a great deal of confidence but what do you think it's for? It's interesting that what you said about what children naturally gravitate towards in terms of explanation
00:56:26
Speaker
in some cases are genuine explanations for art. So the one about these might be animals for hunting was the predominant argument for Pฤlika Kฤla in the early parts of the 20th century. So certainly it was about the 1920s that was the dominant interpretation of Pฤlika Kฤla. And that, you know, it might be some sort of language. I mean, as you rightly say, everything leads to absolutely sure that they could, how you not very much have spoken language.
00:56:56
Speaker
if we build that more as a information exchange, so that you can try and communicate information stylistically between. So if you were going to say, if you paint them out in one way, and you paint them out in another way, you can try and tell a story or communicate information with that. That was very popular in architectural circles in the 1980s, inspired by, especially by work by Paul Weiszka from, yeah, the Bible records, so looking at the Bible records. So actually, a lot of what
00:57:26
Speaker
young people would say, tried and tested ideas. The only one they don't come up with is that they were visions of shamans, which of course is another theory that's come out, hasn't it?
00:57:40
Speaker
is from maybe sort of the dominant position at the moment that this might role a set-up out-of-body experience of people being whisked away to another place through a trance-like experience and then you sort of paint and depict what you might have experienced in that trance using the native shape of the cave and you would have been working in low light conditions, you might have been quite hungry or tired or quite cold, working in a very dark and adopted environment to enhance the
00:58:09
Speaker
of the emotional valency of the work. That's become very popular, certainly in the last 30 years, especially. And maybe it's over until now that it has started to receive more practical attention, I think. And there's been a shift increasing it towards just how our neurological system works, how it didn't work, how brain works, into what we might broadly call a more strictly cognitive archaeology.
00:58:39
Speaker
and seeing how that then sort of mirrors aspects of the artist's depiction. In terms of maybe sort of what I think of what art might mean. So yeah, I think that's, it's such a difficult question to answer. And I think this is partly from what people don't do enough in archaeology is that we try and create a monolithic interpretation of what art has always been.
00:59:08
Speaker
None of them necessarily try to think about different times, different places, different people, different types of art, and think about the myriad meanings that might bring up from that, whether you're the person who made it, whether you're the person who wears it, whether you're the person who is looking at it from afar. You might have very different perspectives.
00:59:27
Speaker
I think if we could walk into an art gallery today, we couldn't strictly say read the meaning of a painting that had been made only yesterday by a contemporary artist. I think we could probably add something to that interpretation of what that art means by being there, looking at the art, having an opinion about it. Which of the artists might add up to your involvement in the make of it. That's a very long winded word we say, not really.
00:59:57
Speaker
have to play a sense of what's the strict meaning of this is. I think it's very much about people. It's about young people, it's about booing people, it's about the interrelationship of communities and how people learn and stuff. And evidently it's about the world as well, it's drawn on a deep appreciation of animals, biologically, anatomically and behaviorally as well as looking at the show. And ultimately, I think it's
01:00:26
Speaker
come to the very depths of humanity, what makes us what we are. So as much as we certainly have some artistic capacity, it's not something like what humans have always done. So for me to ask the question of what is the mean of art is to ask the question of what is the mean of humanity, what's the mean to be human. I think this is such a main person to quandary to try and answer that question. I think it goes to the very heart of what art
01:00:55
Speaker
what we're about as a species. Yeah. Yes. Go ahead, Ghislaine. All of the world to try and make safe what is rather terrifying and to try and possess it. And I mean, I suppose when people first started making cave art, when they first started seeing themselves as sort of
01:01:25
Speaker
of nature or as a defined group. I don't know, it's where perhaps the first drawing strikes home because you imagine people in the long dark evenings, in whatever reason, they made the cave art. It would certainly be something to talk about, to define yourself with, just like people go to galleries today.
01:01:54
Speaker
to be fascinated by and to reinterpret. And interpret, yeah, it is about, yes, there's always gonna be so many different ways to look at it, doesn't there? Have you, presumably some artists have taken the whole taking psychedelic substances to make their art, to imbue their art with new ideas as well. Not that I'm suggesting that you do that, obviously.
01:02:26
Speaker
Well, I think, yes, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. We could go on for ages, but I think we're going to bring it to a close now. We have been talking for about an hour and we have evenings to enjoy, all of us, don't we? So thank you so much, Andy and Ghislaine, for joining me tonight. It's been brilliant talking to you. I think we can thank you.
01:03:13
Speaker
So thank you very much to my guests, Ghislaine Howard and Andy Needham. I think we agree that these books are very good together to give a more rounded view of Upper Paleolithic life, but also to use as the basis of a philosophical discussion about what is art, particularly with children, of course. But I think even as adults, these books deserve a read.
01:03:36
Speaker
Over the next few months, I'm going to be talking about the graphic novel Mezalith and Rosemary Sutcliffe's Warrior Scarlet amongst other topics. But do give me some comments, some ideas of any books that you'd like me to cover and listen again soon.
01:04:01
Speaker
So
01:04:47
Speaker
? ?
01:05:04
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com