Lately I find myself hung up on prehistory, absorbed in the "evolution" of humankind, not in the biological sense so much as in the cultural. Clearly the two cannot be separated, and I would disagree with Colin Renfrew (see earlier posts) that humans were "set" in their genetic endowment by the time they migrated out of Africa. If I can speak as a layperson, perhaps certain "human tendencies" were embedded in the genotype.
This week I have been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is hosting an exhibition entitled "Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky." (How brave to use the word "Indian"!). Several of the works reminded me of the early cave art of Europe. For instance, compare the shield at left with the image below of a similar animal from Lascaux.
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| Horned animal at Lascaux |
I will post the images here and let folks draw their own conclusions. (Click on links below images for Metropolitan Museum information on the works.)
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| Lascaux hunting scene |
Many millennia separated the two artistic manifestations, but the Indian examples would seem to be evidence of transmission of cultural products through time. What I find of interest is that Indian artists, as they developed and moved away from the early "naiveté," remained with the same artistic idiom, but went on to apply techniques that have been learned through contacts with "whites." They have become as "sophisticated" as European artists. Below are two examples.
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