Origins of Art

The visual devices used by Tony Blair and George Bush to get themselves elected and maintain power, come not from modern times, but a world that is thousands of years old. How Art Made the World ventures back to the creation of Stonehenge and the reign of Alexander the Great to reveal how imagery became an indispensable weapon in every leader's political armoury.

This episode explores how art can be used as a persuasion device by those in power and when did we learn to use images, to create a powerful icon or symbol, this way?

The use of art as a tool for those in power, started at different times, in different cultures. Near Stonehenge the grave of the Amesbury Archer was discovered in 2002, the grave was different to those previously found near the site, as this one was not Roman, but much earlier, dating to when the first sarsen stones were erected. What made him interesting were his gold hair tresses, possibly the oldest dated gold objects in Britain, and the fact that he was a foreigner, from the region that is now Germany / Switzerland. The archer had completed an epic journey for the time, and the treasures in his grave show a man of status. Art for personal adornment, like these hair clasps, elevated him above his peers.

As time progressed, art became a political tool, kings competed for more dazzling adornments. As kingdoms got bigger the kings had to overcome communication issues. Darius the Great of Persia, ruled over 20 nations from Persepolis. As very few people could read, Darius had stone reliefs created that combined styles from all over the empire, the carvings showed each nation bring tributes to their king. This showed respect, and the carvings communicated that Darius admired and respected his people. Darius created a symbol for himself, that of the archer, symbolic to Persians of leadership and wisdom, central to the concept of kingship. Darius embossed this symbol on gold coins, which became the currency to trade within the empire.

Darius’ conqueror, Alexander the Great, took this concept further. From an early age, Alexander’s image was being made for him. In his fathers tomb, an Ivory head recognisable as Alexander’s was found, showing that his image had been made for him in advance of him becoming king. In Pompeii, a copy of an original Macedonian painting, shows Alexander the Great, fearless, fixated on his enemy and leading from the front. He is in the midst of battle with king Darius, shown fearful and panicking. Where Darius had used a symbol to communicate his power, Alexander used his face. On defeating the Persians, Alexander melted down all their coins replacing them with coins bearing his head. Tests have shown that people are more influenced by the image of the head and this technique has endured 2500 years and still used today.

This artistic power can be used for sinister purposes, to persuade us to see things a certain way or even deceive us. The earliest known use of this dates back to the Romans. In 40BC Rome was in crisis, the city state was split between royalists and republicans. You could tell people’s political allegiance by how they dressed. Octavian (Augustus) understood the power of art and used it to his advantage. He needed to persuade his opponents ,and used artists to create a less threatening image, one that won over the republicans. Although the image showed him as a powerful general, it didn’t show any military arms, and his gestures were more about humility than power. His armour breast plates show him accepting surrender of the Parthian Empire, with the gods looking on approvingly. The statue offered reassurance, but it was all a lie. While he portrayed himself as a peace maker, he was getting rid of the opposition; while he was preaching humility, he lived like corrupt royalty and while pretending to hand power to the people he reinstated himself as a king.

The leaders of past used paint and marble, today we use digital manipulation. But as humans we still remain vulnerable to the persuasive power of art.

The discovery of prehistoric cave paintings in the nineteenth century led to the shocking realisation that humans have been creating art for over 30,000 years. Episode two reveals how the very first pictures were created, and how images may have triggered the greatest change in human history.

To discover the first two dimensional paintings we need to look at the art created in caves such as Altamira, Chauvet and Lascaux; these were created roughly 35,000 years, the time Archeologists identify with a ‘creative explosion’.

The first of these cave paintings were discovered in Altemira by Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, and his 8yr old daughter Maria, in 1879. The paintings they discovered on the walls of the caves were of animals such as aurochs, a long extinct relative of the bison. As these matched similar stone-age images he had seen, Sautuola concluded they were prehistoric. When the caves were opened to the public, however, they were considered a hoax, and unfortunately despite trying to clear his name, his discovery was not scientifically accepted until long after his death. Following this the caves of Lascaux and Chauvet came to light, and it is said that when Picasso saw images of the caves he declared “we have learned nothing”.

Today artists create images of every aspect of life, but back then the images were almost exclusively of animals,  in particular horses, bison and reindeer. The expert Henri Breuil believed the paintings to be linked to rituals that increased the chances of a successful hunt, however more recent archeology has shown that the animals depicted were not those eaten by the people of the time. In addition some of the paintings were in very hard to reach areas of the caves and featured dots and lines. However, it is easy to take a modern view such as this and miss the point completely, that being how did we learn to project our 3D world into 2D.

There are very similar paintings to be found in the Drakensburg Mountains of South Africa, however unlike their European cousins, these were not produced thousands of years ago, but much more recently. These images were produced by the San “bush men” and although they do not produce paintings like this today, Professor David Lewis Williams discovered papers from the late nineteenth century by a German settler that documented the life and rituals of the San people. It became clear to Williams that their religion was based around traveling in a trance state to a spirit world and that they documented in these pictures their experiences of the trance. Often these transitory states involved animals, and the animals depicted were normally large or powerful, such as the Eland, that were respected by the San people. Williams also noticed another similarity with their European counterparts, that of the dots and lines.

Research into altered states, such as the trances of the San people, show that on entering these states, visual disturbances similar to migraine aura that involved lines and dots occur. Furthermore, these images can also be produced through sensory deprivation, for example from being placed deep in a cave for a long time. Prehistoric people, it appears, had hallucinations , which took the form of things that were close to them, such as the horses, bison and aurochs. These hallucinations were remembered and prehistoric people then recreated them on the walls of their caves.

Returning to the European palaeolithic caves, it seems that 12,000 years ago people stopped painting. We don’t know why, but the discovery of Göbekli Tepe, in Southern Turkey may hold the answer.  When excavated the site revealed monolithic pillars built around 12,000 years ago, dated to just the time that the paintings in caves seem to stop. These stone pillars feature carvings of animals such as those in the caves. The effort in creating these stone pillars would have required considerable  labour and organisation, the workers for example, all needed feeding. Recent research has shown that modern wheat can be traced to wild wheat that grows within 20 miles of this site, which has lead scholars to speculate that this was the birthplace of agricultural farming and, in turn, complex society,'civilisation', itself.

One image dominates our contemporary world above all others: the human body. How Art Made the World travels from the modern world of advertising to the temples of classical Greece and the tombs of ancient Egypt to solve the mystery of why humans surround themselves with images of the body that are so unrealistic.

The main theme of this episode is how people rarely created images of the body that are realistic. By understanding this we  also understand something about our bodies, and human nature in general.

The Venus of Willendorf, in the Natural History Museum in Vienna, is a small Venus figure with exaggerated breasts, hips and sexual organs. These exaggerations are symbolic of fertility,  what is significant is that the artist ignored other parts of the body, such as her face and arms. Similar Venus figures with similar exaggerations and omissions have been found all over Europe and Russia. Professor Ramachandran explains why features were exaggerated. By making comparisons to research with Herring Gulls showing how their chicks, which are stimulated by the red stripe on their parents beaks, can be over stimulated by simulating a beak with additional stripes. He suggests that the same neurological process stimulated early man, explaining why they exaggerated these features of fertility over others.

Moving forward several thousand years. The Egyptians, who valued consistency and order in their society, abandoned the exaggerations of their ancestors and chose to use a mathematical approach to creating images of the body. They chose to show each part of the body from it’s clearest angle, developing their recognisable style and then preserving this style for thousands of years. When the Ancient Greek’s culture came into contact with the Egyptians, this ignited an artistic revolution across the Greek city states. The Greek culture wanted a more realistic representation of the figure for their temples, and as with the Kritios Boy, they measured and reproduced the body to exact dimensions in their sculptures. A generation later, however, the Greeks abandoned this ultra realism preferring exaggerated representations of the body based on the aestetic theories created by Polykleitos, such as the Riace Bronzes. Prof Ramachandran explains that art needs this exaggeration to be interesting.

The programme concludes with what we choose to exaggerate, saying this  “is where the magic comes in”. The choice of what to exaggerate has changed over the centuries to match changing human values.

This paper starts out by offering an analysis of three highly topical and influential evolutionary approaches for the origins of art: The first goes back to Darwin and suggests that art, like the peacock’s tail, was shaped by sexual selection to attract the opposite sex. The second proposal suggests that the main adaptive function of art is to attract and share attention, thereby promoting social cohesion and increasing the overall fitness of the group. The third model advances that throughout evolution, visual art has helped organize mental structure and enhanced cognitive abilities – e.g. memory and learning. By contrasting these models against evidence of artistic behaviour from the archaeological record of the Upper Pleistocene – 127-10,000 years before present, and especially from 100-30,000 BP, it becomes evident that none of them can fully account for the emergence and development of visual art as it is reflected in the archaeology.
Based on that analysis the present work argues that: 1) Many important issues regarding the evolution of visual art in particular have not been attended by existing models, for which an account that is compatible the archaeological record is still lacking. 2) It might be fruitful to pursue an alternative evolutionary scenario for visual art, in which this trait is conceived of as a communication signal in the form of stylistic variation in material culture. 3) An evolutionary model based on communication, material culture, and style can generate preliminary predictions for the emergence and development of visual art in the Pleistocene, some of which will be outlined.

The corpus of art from the Pleistocene has grown substantially in recent decades, and with it, the earliest evidence of visual art has become much older than previously anticipated, going back over 100,000 years. This new information has rendered some traditional ideas about the recent origins of visual art obsolete. Existing archaeological and evolutionary models that aim to explain the emergence of visual art should now be reassessed in light of current data. That is the aim of this book. First, it reviews the earliest examples of different forms of visual art in two important archaeological periods of human artistic innovation, the height of the African Middle Stone Age, and the European Early Upper Palaeolithic. It then takes a critical view at three influential origins-of-art models, namely, the sexual selection model, the social cohesion model, and the cognitive evolution model. Finally, it offers an alternative proposal that redefines visual art as a communication signal and, using the archaeological evidence, relates its emergence and development to the evolution of human cooperation strategies. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the debate of the origins of art and the evolution of modern human cognition, behaviour, and culture.

A meta-pattern-analysis of the mitochondrial DNA phylotree and current distribution of language families indicates that over the last 200,000 years there are robust correspondences between mtDNA haplogroups and language macrofamilies. This study is a thought experiment, a top-down derivation of the Homo sapiens sapiens (‘Proto-Human’, ‘Proto-World’) language phylotree, which can be tested against bottom-up prehistoric linguistic reconstructions. It establishes a relative chronology for dating the emergence and branching of the global array of language macrofamilies. The language phylotree is crosschecked against archaeological data and fossil mtDNA studies, which support many of the correlations. Results imply L3M and N dispersed out-of-Africa at around 80,000 years ago with both Afrasian and Nile-Sudanic languages and mythological systems. After a 3-to-5000-year pause in SW Asia three Borean language superfamilies emerged, Borean-N (Dené-Caucasian), Borean-M (Eurasiatic) and Borean-R, the latter including language families of SW Asia and Europe as well as SE Asia and Sahul. Alternative short-chronology hypotheses for language evolution, dating of sapiens sapiens out-of-Africa and a ‘southern route fast track’ from SW Asia to Sahul do not appear supported by either mtDNA genetics or archaeology. A hypothesis aligning all language families to the mtDNA phylotree yields a more differentiated and different chronology to the dyadic out-of-Africa dispersion model proposed in Fleming, Zegura, Harrod, Bengtson & Keita (2013).

This revision includes new mtDNA dating for San in Rito et al (2019) and its inference that Khoisan language family originated in southern Africa with later migration into East Africa. I revised the dates, though I have some doubts about the robustness of the overall origin inference. Also the low date for L3 ooA seems contradicted by arrival of sapiens sapiens in Australia 65,000 years ago. Whole genome dates are earlier and more compatible with the archaeology.
Since I have a current project on East Asian/NE Siberian and southern Siberian mtDNA migration pathways leading to Clovis in northeastern US and Canadian Maritimes I added more data on some tribal populations in the Americas.

This is a revision of Supplementary File Table : mtDNA Database for Archaeogenetic-Linguistics-Archaeology-Mythostratigraphy for Harrod (2014) .
200,000 year Chronological List of mtDNA Haplogroups, TMRCAs, Populations with Exemplary Hg Frequency Samples, Languages, Geographic Regions and Proposed Hg and Language Family, Archaeological Site and Mythostratigraphy Correlations.
This is a work constantly being revised as new findings are reported and revisions will be posted periodically. If you use this database for your research please cite iand give James Harrod credit/acknowledgement.

Over the past three decades, hypotheses that aim at explaining the origins of art from an evolutionary perspective have thrived. Proving particularly popular are those which put forward sexual selection, social cohesion, or cognitive enhancement as the primary selective contexts in which visual art prospered throughout human evolution. Such proposals, while interesting in themselves, have seldom been assessed in terms of their fit with the archaeological record. In this chapter, I look at each of these hypotheses’ key predictions and compare them to the evidence of early art available from archaeology. The analysis shows that there is an overall discrepancy between the hypotheses and the archaeological data, generating some reflections on the future of Pleistocene art research.

This paper argues that visual art coevolved with typically human ways of social organization and cooperation strategies. My argument, in brief, is that Late Pleis-tocene human groups became organised in band societies that established net-works of indirect reciprocal cooperation, which favoured cultural strategies of in-dividual recognition such as social markers, e.g. styles of personal ornamentation. These early forms of visual art, by conveying information about social identity, became important in recalling and assessing individual interactions in cooperative networks. I also argue that as a cultural strategy, visual art could have been adap-tive by reducing risk of aggression and increasing resource acquisition through exchange. As other evolved cultural traits, like tool-making and cooking, visual art too could have had an important impact on shaping modern human cognition and behaviour.

In this paper I suggest that music and dance of an artful kind could pre-date the emergence of our species by several hundred thousand years. Our progenitor, H. heidelbergensis, had the necessary physiological resources and social capacities. And she inherited older modes of moving and vocalizing that could have laid the foundations for dance and music. Admittedly, for her, these artistic activities would have been more about sharing and expressing emotions than about symbolizing abstract ideas or conveying complex thoughts. But that is something for which song and dance are ideally suited. Accordingly, the common assumption made by many

This article examines the connection between Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking of images and his radical ontology of the singular plural. It shows how Heidegger's conception of Dasein becomes operative in Nancy's understanding of the visual and examines the implications which Nancy's critique of Heidegger carries for a new ontology of the image. The article's central concern is the question of what it means for a philosophy of the visual to embrace the singular plural? In what senses is the singular plural the foundation of an image's being? How should the singular plural play itself out in a thinking of the image? Focusing on Nancy's interpretation of painting's origins, the article questions the manner in which the ethical consequences of Nancy's ontology are brought to bear on his understanding of art.

Representational art, when it first emerges in the archaeological record between 30,000 – 40,000 years ago, is seen as a watershed. It is upheld as one of the defining characteristics that makes us ‘human’, argued as the ‘gold standard’ by which cultural modernity is measured and identified and intimately linked with the development of language. In the past decade it has been suggested that the emergence of representational art in prehistory and the concomitance of language are assumptions that may need reviewing. This enquiry looks to recent neuroscientific research, particularly in the area of neural connectivity that may provide some valuable insights between drawing and language. The significance of neural interconnectivity in this enquiry is that the emotional content of our lives may lie at the core of what makes us unique in the animal world and a significant contributory factor to our cognitive evolution, particularly in terms of cultural development.

Each year over seven billion people across the world are drawn to see the latest feature films at the cinema. This episode reveals how the most powerful storytelling medium ever created exploits visual techniques invented by artists in the ancient world.

The investigation starts with the oldest recorded story, that of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk. The story tells the tales (and adventures) of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.  One scene from the story, in particular, captured the imagination of Bronze Age people, and that was the slaying of a pride of lions. The story inspired the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal, in around 645BC, to cast himself in the leading role of Gilgamesh in a series of carved friezes for his throne room. The success of these lead Ashurbanipal to depict the battle against the Elamites and in particular visualised the prisoners grinding their ancestors bones to make their bread. Although mankind had discovered the power of the protagonist, in particular that of a hero, Ashurbanipal’s stories lacked emotion and so are hard to engage with.

Jumping forward several hundred years to the Ancient Greeks, we find the next missing element crucial to storing telling. In the grotto of the Villa de Tiberius in Spurlonga, Italy, a collection of sculptures were found that depict Odysseus‘s encounter with the cyclops. The statues show Odysseus getting the cyclops drunk and then tricking him, and driving a stake though his eye. By depicting the emotions in the scene we, as the viewer, get a greater connection with the story. If we care about the characters, we care about what happens next.

The Romans refined this process more when Emperor Trajan, celebrated his conquest of the Dacians, and created Trajan’s column in the heart of Rome. The 35m high marble column has the story of the event, spiraling around the column, from the base, right to the very top. Admired by Napoleon and Mussolini, it depicts an Epic with Trajan as the protagonist hero and the Dacian king Decebalus as the antagonist. The sculptors used many visual techniques still used today such as cut scenes, and birds eye and low views to add drama. The whole story can be summarised by looking up the western axis of the column. Although this captivated viewers there was still something missing.

The final piece in the jigsaw can be found in Australia which has some of oldest known painted images, some known to be over 40k years old. The aborigines still draw gods and spirits the same way their early ancestors did, for example images of barramundi fish. This consistency has lead to these images becoming symbols, triggering the viewer to recall well known stories passed down generation to generation. The real magic happened when the Aborigines came together to celebrate these stories, they recounted them adding drum beats, rhythm and chanting. Now two senses were being stimulated, the eyes and the ears.

When the pioneers of the nineteenth century created the first moving images, they were silent, but as soon as cinematographers added sound, cinema as we know it today took off.

Current archaeological evidence indicates that Later Acheulian peoples used a repertoire of intentional marking motifs.  Later Acheulian markings are not random, but display stereotypical patterns and a limited number of motifs, which are combined in aggregates and pairs. This indicates a semiotic competence.  A review of occurrences of motif pairs suggests that there is an underlying semiotic armature which includes the differential features of paired motifs and their common marking strategy, both technique and medium.  This paper lays out principles for their decipherment and applies these principles to the cupule-and-meander petroglyph at Auditorium Cave, Bhimbetka, India.

Darwin famously proposed that sexual competition and courtship is (or at least was) the driving force of “art” production not only in animals, but also in humans. The present book is the first to reveal that Darwin’s hypothesis, rather than amounting to a full-blown antidote to the humanist tradition, is actually strongly informed both by classical rhetoric and by English and German philosophical aesthetics, thereby Darwin’s theory far richer and more interesting for the understanding of poetry and song.

The book also discusses how the three most discussed hypothetical functions of the human arts—competition for attention and (loving) acceptance, social cooperation, and self-enhancement—are not mutually exclusive, but can well be conceived of as different aspects of the same processes of producing and responding to the arts.

Finally, reviewing the current state of archeological findings, the book advocates a new hypothesis on the multiple origins of the human arts, posing that they arose as new variants of human behavior, when three ancient and largely independent adaptions—sensory and sexual selection-driven biases regarding visual and auditory beauty, play behavior, and technology—joined forces with, and were transformed by, the human capacities for symbolic cognition and language.

Learn more: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/evolutioncognitionarts/aesthetics-after-darwin

Today people see fewer real dead bodies than at any time in history. Yet in the modern world we seem almost obsessed with images of death. In an investigation encompassing ancient Jericho, Aztec America, and classical Italy, How Art Made the World discovers what it is that has compelled human beings to surround themselves with images of death for thousands of years.

Death captured the mind of early man, and since then it has driven us to create some of the most powerful images in the world.

The episode starts in Jericho (in the Jordan Valley) where in the 1950 Cecil Western, the British Archeologist, discovered decorated skulls with a reconstructed nose and shells as replacement for eyes. The skulls were found in the walls of homes and it appears they had been placed in specially made alcoves. Since their discovery, other decorated skulls have cropped up all over the Middle East.

All animals have an instinct to avert their own death, it’s a basic survival mechanism. Humans, however, are the only creatures that understand the inevitability of  death. Psychologists understand that there is a way to overcome the fear of death, and that is by creating images of our ancestors. Professors Solomon and Greenberg have done experiments with two groups of students. Using subliminal images they persuaded students to thinks of death. They then showed both groups images of dead celebrities. The subjects were given the choice of how long to look at pictures, and those who were made to think about death wanted to look at images for longer ( Solomon and Greenberg explain this is for reassurance ). In Jericho, in the 1st millennia BC, the average life expectancy was 24. The prospect of death would have terrified them and these artistic representations would have allowed them to keep their ancestors alive.

Reassurance, however, is only part of story. Some have used images of death for opposite effect, to exploit our fear of death. The French painter Jacques Louis David used the image of Marat (the leader of the revolution) murdered in bath to gain support for their cause. The SS used images of the skull and cross bones on their uniforms to strike fear in their victims. The Peruvian Moche created the Waca Da Luna temple to honor their human sacrifices. The walls of this temple show horrific images of death, featuring spiders with human faces and fangs, lizards that have been decapitated and the pottery found their shows people having their eyes pecked out by birds. A mass human grave was found nearby and many of the bodies had been both decapitated and dismembered, the bodies were those that had been sacrificed by the Moche. The neighboring Aztecs, however, did human sacrifice on an industrial scale. In one four-day event, over forty-thousand people were sacrificed. Archeologists believe that the mass sacrifices of the Aztecs were to repay the debt of their sun god, who used his own blood to keep the sun alive. If his debt was not repaid with their most highly prized gifts (their lives) then the sun would go out. This is one of histories most successful regimes of terror, that kept a tight grip on their people, thankful to be Aztec rather than the victims of the sacrifices.

Solomon and Greenberg have collected evidence which shows, that by reminding people of their own death, it drives them to support those that share their values and oppose those who don’t. It’s a universal instinct across time. When we think about death we become more invested in our own belief system (Solomon and Geeenburg). This has been used through out history and one that Christians can relate to best is the image of Christ on the cross, or simply the cross. A symbol of a man oozing blood, dying a terrifying death.

The Etruscans are not as well known as the Romans, but they laid the foundations of Rome, most things we remember of the Romans were in fact traditions from the Etruscans. The main archeological record we have are their tombs, and these contain vivid images of the afterlife. The tombs were designed as houses for the dead with carvings of all they would need in the afterlife. Thousands of years after traces of the Etruscan civilisation had vanished overground, their dead cities surfaced. In 1985 a pipeline for Tarquinia was being laid and during the excavation a new tomb was discovered. Archeologists used cameras to look into the tomb and what they first saw was unexpected. At first they saw the reassuring images they expected, but then they turned the cameras around and on opposite wall were disturbing images of blue demons, rotting flesh, snakes, and a winged devil. The tomb dates back to 420BC and these are the oldest surviving image of hell. In the 200 years leading up to this, the Etruscans created images promising a happy afterlife, but threatened by the rise of the Romans, these tombs acted as a call to arms. Damned or saved these reminded them of what awaited, if they failed in defending against Romans. This is the earliest know use of conflicting images being used together: Redemption images.

Later in AD1500, in Orvieto, the Estrucian capital, the Christians built a cathedral, they painted frescoes showing on one wall the damned going to Hell and the opposite wall the saved going to heaven. Uncannily similar images to those of the tomb and the devils are depicted in a green / blue. The Etruscan legacy, that redemption can lead people to look forward to death, rather than fear it.

When we no longer fear the inevitability of death, not only are we prepared to give up life for a greater good, we do so knowing that we are remembered for it, a heroic death.

Data for the dating of the earliest human art from cave sites at Maros in Sulawesi, Indonesia; Lascaux, Pech Merle, and Chauvet in southern France, and Altamira and El Castillo in Spain are reviewed. Arguments that western Europe was the locus for the development of artistic expression are evaluated and challenged in the light of the dates obtained for Maros cave. The weight of evidence now points to the widespread presence of parietal art across the Eurasian continent from c.40,000 BP, the ultimate origin of which may lie in the African continent c.60,000 BP. This contradicts the Eurocentric notion that a creative explosion took place uniquely in western Europe c.40,000, leading to the establishment of human culture. A further consequence of the dating evidence from Maros cave is to undermine the theory that Neanderthals were the creator of the earliest cave art. As the distribution of Neanderthals was limited to Europe they cannot be relied upon to explain paintings in Asia, which either predate or are contemporary with those found in Europe.

KEYWORDS
PLEISTOCENE, UPPER PALAEOLITHIC, ORIGINS OF ART, PARIETAL ART, CAVE ART, MAROS CAVE, LASCAUX CAVE, PECH MERLE CAVE, CHAUVET CAVE, ALTAMIRA CAVE, EL CASTILLO CAVE, NEANDERTHAL, CREATIVE EXPLOSION, COGNITION

Art, communication and wellbeing In this paper the Authors are considering that deep echoes might possibly exist betrt een prehistoric and today's man. They base their hvpothesis upon their observations made during long sessions of micropsychoanalysis, especially on transfer-ence/counter-transference dvnamics, and on the study of rock Art. From an analytical point of view, such echoes refer to representations and affects linked with self-preservation and adaptation. In some of their previous studies, D. Gariglio and D. Lysek had assumed that some evervdal, life factors, both prehistoric and present-dav, could express some evidence of unconscious tracks of r,r,ellbeing experiences. These tracks coulcl be reactivated whenever psvchic fluidity exists. This could tl-ren promote an elaboration and a rearrangement of the information stored in the psyche. In addition, after a recent journer. to prehistoric Perigord, it seems reasonable to suppose, even in pre-lettered societies, some dynamics linked to wellbeing experiences. Such hypothesis might add a connection between us and our distant ancestors.

Abstract
The discussion of whether or not Homo habilis or rudolfensis engaged in symbolic behavior during the Oldowan period is ongoing. This study aims to bridge the sometimes disparate approaches of art and science to palaeoart studies, to develop more robust analytical procedures to reconstruct Oldowan symbolic competence, and to determine what symbolic competencies are evident in the grooved and pecked cobble from Olduvai Gorge, FLK North, dated around 1.8 mya and associated with the Classic Oldowan tool industry. First, I extend Wynn’s method for looking at visuospatial features in Oldowan tools to Oldowan palaeoart. I expand this by identifying Oldowan ‘body techniques or elementary actions on matter’ (Joulian 2005; Leroi-Gourhan 1971, 1965) and show how they imply a total conceptual worldview for the palaeoartist, and extrapolating further I reconstruct an Oldowan phonological-lexical-semantics that corresponds to both the Oldowan visuospatial features and Oldowan body techniques. Here I build on the phememe theory of Mary LeCron Foster (1996, 1994, 1992, 1990, 1983, 1978) and her reconstruction of spoken Oldowan phememes. Second, coming from the opposite direction I develop and apply an art-theoretic approach to the artifact looking for the artist’s application of basic design principles. First I review neuroscience brain imaging studies on Oldowan toolmaking and identified functions for the full range of neural nodes in these studies. To reduce the degree of projection bias and reconstruct Homo habilis capacities for design, I map the neural network for Oldowan toolmaking onto paleoneurology endocast studies of the Homo habilis brain (Tobias 1987; Falk 1983; Holloway and Post 1982; Holloway 1981, 1978, Bruner and Holloway 2010). Next I develop a comprehensive list of design principles and their corresponding neural substrates. I synthesize correlations between design principles posited by Macnab (2012) and the Stout toolmaking studies adding in the only two existing brain imaging studies of art-making (Miall, Gowen and Tchalenko 2009; Solso 200, 2001) and the only study of the making of something like ‘glyph-like’ markings, a study on the act of Japanese kanji-writing (Nakamura, Honda, Okada et al 2000). This yields 19 basic design principles with their respective brain activation locations. I then compare this to the checklist of 19 design principles and their neural substrates. This yields the hypothesis that Homo habilis possessed a competence for at least 14 of the 19 design principles. Finally I suggest that visual analysis of the Olduvai Gorge grooved and pecked cobble provides evidence for the application of these 14 design principles

Evolutionary Aesthetics is a bourgeoning and thriving sub-field of Aesthetics, the main aim of which is “the importation of aesthetics into natural sciences, and especially its integration into the heuristic of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.” Scholars working in the field attempt to determine through the adoption of an interdisciplinary research methodology whether and to what extent Darwinian evolution can shed light on our capacity to have aesthetic experiences, make aesthetic judgments (both of art and natural beauty), and produce literary, visual, and musical artworks. Notwithstanding Evolutionary Aesthetics’ growing popularity in the past two decades, a look into the state of current research suggests a significant degree of haziness in the field from both epistemological methodological and theoretical points of view. The main aim of the present paper is to make a first step towards a revision and extension of the discipline by assessing the role and potential of epigenetics in evolutionarily inspired aesthetic research. Epigenetics is among the youngest and most fascinating research fields in contemporary biology. But one of the most significant occurrences of the word “epigenesis” (the closest “ancestor” of contemporary “epigenetics”) is in Immanuel Kant’s third Critique, his aesthetic masterpiece. What might be the relationship between epigenetics and aesthetics? What is the role of epigenetic mechanisms in the development and functioning of aesthetic behavior in humans?

In a chapter titled "The Tyranny of Figures," in the recent fesschrift for David Lewis-Williams, Knut Helskog (2010:172) highlights a need for recording the relationships of the figures depicted in rock art to the surfaces that bear them. His contention is that our tendencies to focus on the compelling images that are found on stone surfaces constrain what we see and bias how we interpret it (Helskog 2010:172). Studies of rock art in Argyll, Scotland, where petroglyphs are simple dots, circles, and spirals, have revealed a series of changing landscape practices in which rock art is a part of a process of re-envisioning the landscape that begins in the Neolithic and continues into the Bronze Age (Jones and Riggott 2011). The simplicity of the carvings freed the researchers from the "tyranny of figures" and encouraged them to investigate how the art was used as a part of a suite of landscape practices that also included cutting stone and re-placing it in the landscape. This allowed a new understanding of social practices to emerge that included the art but was not limited to it.

Pokud se týká prvních etap vývoje lidstva, vyvolává užívání pojmu "umění" určité rozpaky. V průběhu paleolitu se člověk se svými duševními schopnostmi teprve vyvíjel. Je tedy zřejmé, že na nižších vývojových stupních nemohl vytvářet taková díla, která bychom my dnes -kdybychom je vytvořili sami -byli ochotni považovat za umění. S tímto vědomím považují archeologové za jisté pra-umění všechny projevy, kterými tito předchůdci lidí dnešního typu (Homo sapiens) přesáhli naplňování praktických požadavků každodenního života, tedy tzv. projevy "neutilitární". Nejde však jen o úpravu podoby přírodnin, ale i o jejich výběr, byť pak zůstaly neupravené, a taky o jejich kompozici, resp. rekompozici. Tím vším se toto počáteční "umění » přibližuje širokému pojetí umělecké tvorby několika posledních desítek let. Přitom nám samozřejmě unikají všechny aspekty dějové, které by byly současnému umění ještě bližší (jak uvidíme, např. paleolitické malířství bylo do značné míry "akční"). Tyto neutilitární aspekty se ovšem projevovaly i na artefaktech praktického významu. Stejně jako proces antropogeneze připojil ke geneticky nabytým vlastnostem urychlený vývoj mozku a tím i samostatného myšlení, připojily se k funkčním vlastnostem nástrojů i dimenze stylistické. Již téměř před dvěma milóny lety otloukali lidé typu Homo ergaster ("člověk dělník") kameny do tvaru koulí, jejichž účel nedovedeme vysvětlit (Willoughby 1985). V Olorgesillie v Keni (isaac 1977) se tyto artefakty vyskytovaly i ve skupinách po třech, jakoby tvořily součást boly -házecí zbraně se zátěžemi na konci provazů. Upevnění kulatých předmětů k provazu (příp. liáně apod.) ovšem vyžaduje značně pokročilé šití, a jako zátěž může přece posloužit kdejaký přirozený kámen. Největší oštípané kamenné koule ze severní Afriky měly až 30 cm v průměru a vážily 10 kg, takže by je nikdo daleko nedohodil. V alsaském Achenheimu se v acheulénském souvrství našla skupina hliněných (!) koulí o průměrech mezi 3,5 až 8,5 cm (Wernert 1957, 207). Vedle koulí se v Africe před více než 1,5 milióny lety objevily symetrické pěstní klíny, připomínající obrys lidské ruky. Jejich opracování se postupně zdokonalovalo do té míry, že bylo na závadu praktické funkci (ostří po celém obvodu řezalo i do ruky, tenký průřez hrozil přelomením). Ve středním paleolitu se pak pěstní klíny často zhotovovaly ze zvláštních surovin, např. z čirých křišťálů, citrínů (j. Kůlna) či pestrých radiolaritů a jaspisů (Fontmaure v jz. Francii, lorblanchet 1999, 84-87). U těchto prvních pravidelně formovaných výtvorů šlo zřejmě o napodobování geometrických tvarů a vlastností, známých z okolní přírody (koule, kruh, pojem symetrie, přímost, rozbíhavost a sbíhavost). Existují důkazy, že člověk si takové mimořádné předměty, ať už vyrobené nebo jen sebrané, umísťoval do zvláštních situací (spojených patrně s významným dějem) a asambláží. Lidské zbytky H. heidelbergensis, uložené před 300 tis. lety do propástky Sima de los huesos ve Španělsku,

The corpus of art from the Pleistocene has grown substantially in recent decades, and with it, the earliest evidence of visual art has become much older than previously anticipated, going back over 100,000 years. This new information has rendered some traditional ideas about the recent origins of visual art obsolete. Existing archaeological and evolutionary models that aim to explain the mergence of visual art should now be reassessed in light of current data. That is the aim of this book. First, it reviews the earliest examples of different forms of visual art in two important archaeological periods of human artistic innovation, the height of the African Middle Stone Age, and the European Early Upper Palaeolithic. It then takes a critical view at three influential origins-of-art models, namely, the sexual selection model, the social cohesion model, and the cognitive evolution model. Finally, it offers an alternative proposal that redefines visual art as a communication signal and, using the archaeological evidence, relates its emergence and development to the evolution of human cooperation strategies. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the debate of the origins of art and the evolution of modern human cognition, behaviour, and culture.

In this paper I attempt reconcile two apparently opposed views: artworks are embedded in culturally relative art-historical contexts and cannot be fully understood without an awareness of these contexts, yet artworks trade in themes that are universally and perennially of human interest, such as war and peace, and shape these to cater to shared, biologically based perceptual systems. The first explains some of the difficulties we face in understanding and appreciating art cross-culturally. The second indicates why, nevertheless, a degree of cross-cultural artistic appreciation is possible. As well, our grasp of the challenges and possibilities of the media from which art is constructed help us to comprehend the art of other cultures. It is possible to improve one's understanding of the art of another society by reading about it, and to go yet further via more radical cultural immersion. Because of our ignorance of its wider context, the cave art of the Upper Paleolithic is an extreme, case: we can locate the art and some of its content but are denied a deeper, more appreciative grasp of it.

In this article, I put forward a theoretical way to conceive of the problem of the origin of art. Did art arise in the time of the prehistoric caves or rather in the concept of representation originated in Ancient Greece or is it just an eighteenth-century idea through which a great deal of previous artifacts have been retrospectively appropriated? To answer these questions, I consider the tradition of the histories of art as a literary genre; the tradition of analytic aesthetics (Levinson; Dickie; Stecker; Carney; etc.), and the tradition of the history of ideas.

Importanti acquisizioni della ricerca archeologica preistorica documentano comportamenti e produzioni soddisfacenti bisogni non vitali in seno alle forme umane pre-sapiens. Raccolte di fossili e oggetti " curiosi " ; strumentazioni litiche che inglobano intenzionalmente fossili; altre composte da minerali di consistenza e colori particolari e/o di aspetto insolito; uso di coloranti per corpi e/o altro; oggetti perforati indici potenziali di parures; utilizzo ornamentale di penne di uccelli; speleofatti in grotte; probabili strumenti musicali in osso; segni grafici non figurativi incisi su ossa e pietre; incisioni e segni grafici pigmentati non figurativi in grotte; probabili " proto figurine " ovvero blocchi naturali di pietra con ritocchi; cura e mantenimento di individui malati e vecchi; trattamento dei cadaveri e relative sepolture rituali: tutto ciò costituisce la base concreta per sviluppare alcune riflessioni sull'origine e l'evoluzione del pensiero, della comunicazione e dell'arte. L'approccio pluridisciplinare è costituito dalla sinergia dell'archeologia con la psicologia, le neuroscienze e la fisiologia. Ogni comportamento umano è utilitaristico: bisogni e pulsioni alterano gli equilibri " omeostatici " che possono essere ripristinati mediante il " sistema della ricompensa ". Come gli animali anche gli uomini, non ricordano i sogni tranne alcuni frammenti sincroni con la loro interruzione. Il controllo del fuoco ha prodotto una maggiore possibilità di rilassamento al risveglio, che significa più tempo disponibile per la loro rievocazione ed elaborazione. Ciò ha consentito lo sviluppo di sentimenti ed emozioni condivisi: i ponti verso la consapevolezza riflessa sono la simbolizzazione ed il processo decisionale. Percezione e comunicazione hanno fatto evolvere il pensiero verso i riflessi inconsci, da cui emergerà la coscienza riflessa. Le cure ai vivi disabili e la cura dei defunti sono esclusivamente umane. Ogni altro comportamento (empatia, corteggiamento, insegnamento, gioco, collezioni, manufatti " artistici " , anche non utilizzabili) si è sviluppato parallelamente lungo milioni di anni in molte specie animali (mammiferi e non solo).

What “sort” of mind is required in order to be able to engage in aesthetic experiences? What are the marks of the aesthetic mind and which features distinguish aesthetic mental states? As humans, we are able not only to produce cognitions, feel emotions, use symbols, but also to engage in aesthetic and artistic experiences. How did our aesthetic mind arise over the course of evolution? Is it a by-product, or a side effect, of the development of our symbolic-linguistic competences or, on the contrary, is precisely our aesthetic ability that allows the development (both in a phylogenetic and in an ontogenetic sense) of human language and symbolic thought? What is the relationship between the emergence of human modern mind and the origin of art?
These are some of the challenging issues addressed during the International Conference The Aesthetic Mind and Origin of Art, held at the University of Florence, Department of Education, from January, 23rd to January 25th 2014. The essays collected in the present issue of «Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico» mostly stem from talks originally delivered at the conference by leading researchers and international scholars across a wide range of disciplines.