Word: caves
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Mind evolves. Date of these cave paintings is about 30,000 B.C.-the Paleolithic or Early Stone Age. It was a glacial epoch: the last continental ice sheet, retreating from northern Germany and Britain, still covered Scandinavia. The Alpine and Pyrenean glaciers shouldered far out into the adjoining plains; all Europe was cold, ranged over by reindeer, mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses (see cut, p. 50). Here, arriving probably by migration from North Africa, homo sapiens first appeared in Europe. The Cro-Magnon race inherited or seized the valleys of the small-brained, beetle-browed, long-armed, chinless and nigh speechless homo...
...Neanderthalers had no art. The first artists were the Cro-Magnon men, whose earliest culture-period is called the Aurignacian. The newfound cave at Montignac represents this glimmering dawn-culture on the vastest scale yet found. Its significance, says U.S. Prehistorian George Grant MacCurdy, is that the appearance of art "marks a distinct epoch in mental evolution." The Abbe Breuil calls the Montignac cave "the Sistine Chapel of Aurignacian...
...pictured animals are always game, supremely important to a folk in a cold climate, ignorant of agriculture, crudely weaponed and without means of storing food. Commonest beast in cave murals is the horse, and bones in prehistoric garbage dumps show the horse was the chief game animal. In all cave art, male figures are far outnumbered by female figures, which were introduced only as symbols of fecundity to insure increase among the deer, bison and mammoths as well as women...
Technique. The earliest cave pictures were not painted but scratched on walls with sharpened flints. Profiles were absolute with but single fore and hind legs, and lacking were such details as hooves, eyes, hair and nostrils. But as Aurignacian scratching developed into painting, remarkable sophistication of draftsmanship appeared. In the Montignac group, stiffness of profile has relaxed and action abounds - the beasts run, leap, browse, swim, lie down, chew their cuds. The head of an ancient long-horned cow (see cut) displays an excellent eye and nostril, subtle shading and dappling. To the Paleolithic artist, the more realistic...
...painting the cave surface was prepared by scraping; then the figure was scratched in. By flickering lamplight the painters then went to work with three colors - black, red and yellow oxides of iron and manganese. Insoluble in water, the pigments were mixed with grease. Grouped figures are seldom compositions; they merely represent use of all possible wall space...