Pod Insights You're Dead to Me Palaeolithic Cave Art (Radio Edit) About this episode Greg Jenner is joined in the Palaeolithic era by Dr Isobel Wisher and comedian Seán Burke to learn about cave art.
Tens of thousands of years ago, human ancestors all over the world began drawing and painting on cave walls, carving figurines, and even decorating their own bodies. Although archaeologists have known about Palaeolithic art since the late 19th century, cutting-edge scientific techniques are only now helping to uncover the secrets of these paintings and the artists who created them.
From a warty pig painted on a cave wall in Indonesia, to a comic strip-like depiction of lions chasing bison in France, this episode explores the global phenomenon of cave art, and asks why humans have always felt the need to express their creative side.
This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.
Hosted by: Greg Jenner
Research by: Jon Norman Mason
Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner
Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner
Audio Producer: Steve Hankey
Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands
Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse
Executive Editor: James Cook
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:15 Greg Jenner? Hello and welcome to You're Dent to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner, I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster, and today we are cracking out our crayons and journeying back tens of thousands of years into the deep past to learn all about the Paleolithic and cave art. And to help us paint an audio picture, we have two very special guests. In archaeology corner, she's a postdoctoral researcher at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she's researching the evolution of early symbolic behaviour. Usefully for us, she has a PhD from Durham University in Upper Palaeolithic Cave Art. It's Dr Isabel Wischer, welcome, Izzy.
1:49 Speaker 04 Hi, thank you for having me.
1:50 Greg Jenner? And in comedy corner, he's a rising star of sketch and stand-up. You may have seen his recent Edinburgh Fringe show, Burke in Progress, a fine title, or caught him on the hilarious sketch show, No Worries If Not, The Michael Fry Show or Hollywood Hijack. If you've got the internet, I recommend it, it's very good. You've probably seen one of his many viral comedy sketches, but you'll definitely remember him from our episode- On medieval Irish folklore, it's Sean Buck. Welcome back, Sean.
2:13 Speaker 05 Thanks for having me. It's lovely to be back.
2:15 Greg Jenner? It's lovely to have you back.
2:16 Speaker 05 Yeah.
2:17 Greg Jenner? You've grown a fantastic moustache.
2:19 Speaker 05 I did for the last episode as well. I just do it for this podcast.
2:22 Greg Jenner? Oh, I see.
2:23 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. So I need three months' notice before every episode appears, even though it's an audio format and it's completely wasted. But I need to know it's there.
2:33 Greg Jenner? I'm really grateful you've done it. What do you know about cave art? Have you seen any? Have you ever visited any or seen it in a movie?
2:41 Speaker 05 In films. Now, I'm sure I've visited something to that effect, presumably on a school tour as a kid. From what I know of it, it's recently, it's mainly from YouTube videos. There's lots of hands, usually some vague person shapes and maybe some animals as well. It's usually really delicate and needs to be well-preserved. Although when I make a hand painting and put it on the fridge, it's in the bin within days. So, okay. But yeah, I know it's fascinating and I know there's a few caves, a few in France. I have happened to watch a few YouTube videos about this topic in the past.
3:17 Greg Jenner? This is good knowledge, Sean.
3:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, is it?
3:19 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
3:20 Speaker 05 Okay, good.
3:20 Greg Jenner? Yeah, this is good.
3:21 Speaker 05 First question, what is a cave?
3:25 Greg Jenner? So, what do you know?
3:32 Greg Jenner? This is where I have a go at guessing what our listener will know about today's subject. And I reckon you've seen some cave art at some point somehow. At least you've spotted some in the background on the Flintstones. It's in everything from animated movies like the Ice Age franchise, which I absolutely love. It's in the Oscar-winning classic The English Patient, which I'd totally forgotten, but it is in there. Maybe you've visited a cave on your holidays, somewhere like Cresswell Cranks in Derbyshire or Lascaux in the south of France. But for how long have humans been showcasing their artistic talents? What sort of things did they paint on cave walls? Sean's already given us a summary, but there's more. And were cave people really the first comic book illustrators? Let us find out, shall we? Right, we'll start with some basics. Sean, do you know what we mean by the Paleolithic period? Give me a date range, start and finish.
4:16 Speaker 05 1975 to 1989. No, I'm gonna say thousands of years ago. And I don't think I can be more precise than that. Am I in the right ballpark?
4:30 Greg Jenner? You're kind of not, actually.
4:34 Speaker 05 My god.
4:35 Greg Jenner? Because really, it's what, 3.3 million?
4:39 Speaker 05 Oh, way off.
4:40 Speaker 04 Exactly. So the start of the Paleolithic, this period that we call the Paleolithic, is around 3.3 million years ago. So that's defined by when our hominid ancestors first start using stone tools. And then it goes all the way until 12,000 years ago. So it's a huge stretch of time. And we split that into three chunks. So we talk about the lower Paleolithic period, this is 3 million-ish years ago, to about 300,000 years ago. Then we have the middle Paleolithic period, that goes from 300,000 years ago to about 50,000 years ago. And then the upper Paleolithic period, from about 50,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago. So we're talking about chunks of really long periods of time. Almost all
5:22 Speaker 04 of the art that we know about comes from that end period, the Upper Paleolithic. The Upper Paleolithic period, the start of that is defined by Homo sapiens kind of entering Europe. And then Neanderthals are starting to die out in this period, between 50,000, maybe 40, 35,000 years ago, where Neanderthals are kind of declining in population.
5:42 Speaker 05 And we don't know why? Did we just annoy them into disappearing?
5:46 Speaker 04 I mean, there's lots of different theories about this. Everything from climate change to, you know, Homo sapiens being superior. My personal theory is that it's just, we start to get a lot of interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals at this time. So it could just be that, I mean, they're part of us now. Their population becomes part of the broader Homo sapiens.
6:08 Greg Jenner? You have 4% Neanderthal DNA, Sean.
6:09 Speaker 05 Who told you that?
6:12 Greg Jenner? I went through your ancestry.
6:13 Speaker 05 Wow, you really do your research.
6:15 Greg Jenner? I gave you a swab on the way in. And, yeah.
6:18 Speaker 05 Well, you work fast, Greg.
6:19 Greg Jenner? Yeah, I do.
6:20 Speaker 05 That's why you're a bit late.
6:21 Greg Jenner? Yeah, we've got a lab in the back and just, you know.
6:24 Speaker 04 He stole our heads.
6:26 Greg Jenner? Okay. The idea of the Stone Age is 200 years old. So the idea, the concept of it was sort of coined in kind of the 1820s, something like that. But when was cave art first discovered? Is it the Victorians?
6:38 Speaker 04 Before we discover cave art, the first kind of evidence of art from this Period that we find is from eighteen sixty four.
6:46 Greg Jenner? Okay.
6:46 Speaker 04 So it comes from a site called La Medline in France, and it was discovered by Latte and Christie. And it's this piece of mammoth ivory that has like a beautiful kind of engraving of a mammoth on it. And this was not only exciting for being the first art from this period, but it was the first solid evidence that humans existed alongside these ancient animals.
7:07 Greg Jenner? So a mammoth carved on mammoth, Sean, if, I mean, you're a sketch artist in a comedy sense. But if you were a sketch artist in an artistic sense.
7:15 Speaker 05 Sure.
7:15 Greg Jenner? What would be your best artwork made of the thing that it's depicting?
7:18 Speaker 05 Maybe the shape of a sheep with a flock of sheep.
7:21 Greg Jenner? Nice.
7:22 Speaker 05 Now, I know you can't preserve that on a cave wall. We're taking shepherding to brave new places.
7:28 Greg Jenner? Let's talk about cave paintings, because I think that's probably what listeners are really imagining in their head. So when were those first found?
7:34 Speaker 04 The first site that was kind of identified as Paleolithic was Altamira. So this was discovered in eighteen seventy nine by Marcelio Sansa Sartola. He was kind of excavating and recording parts of the cave.
7:49 Greg Jenner? It's a stone, isn't it?
7:50 Speaker 04 In Spain, yeah, sorry, yeah, in Spain. And as he was doing this, his daughter was bored and playing and she'd come across the bison, the famous bison ceiling of Altamira. So this is really beautiful polychrome, so they're using multiple colors, depictions of bison that are on the ceiling of Altamira. Sansa Sartola had this amazing discovery at Altamira Cave. And he wrote this up in eighteen eighty. And then Filenova I Piera, who was a professor at the University of Madrid, he then presented the discovery at a conference in, I think, eighteen eighty one. And when he does that, people just can't believe that this was Paleolithic. They'd been warned about people making forgeries and wanting to debunk this idea of the Paleolithic being a period.
8:36 Speaker 04 So they wouldn't accept that this was Paleolithic.
8:38 Greg Jenner? So there's one guy called Haleo.
8:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
8:40 Greg Jenner? Who visited this site. What do you think he did to disprove its ancientness?
8:45 Speaker 05 Did, did he draw something himself? Did he? Because that's the idea. I'd be like, I can do that.
8:52 Greg Jenner? Just get out a Sharpie. There you go, mammoth, what do you want?
8:55 Speaker 05 Yeah.
8:55 Greg Jenner? He did the opposite. He wiped his finger across it and smudged it through.
9:00 Speaker 05 What does that prove? That it's incredibly delicate.
9:03 Speaker 04 And it wasn't until 1902 and more kind of discoveries of cave art were emerging at this time, that eventually Emile Cartelac writes this apology called "Me a culpa, I'm skeptic", so, you know.
9:16 Speaker 05 I understood those.
9:17 Speaker 04 Yes, exactly.
9:19 Greg Jenner? It's basically, "My bad."
9:20 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:21 Speaker 04 Yeah, my bad. He accepts the legitimacy of Altamira. Unfortunately, this was after Sans D'Artola had passed away, so he never got to see his sign accepted as authentic.
9:32 Greg Jenner? Priced his artwork, rubbed his finger through it, nearly destroyed it. Shaun, what's the comedian's equivalent of that?
9:37 Speaker 05 Probably heckling, to be honest. If somebody's done a very long setup to a joke and then just going, "No, that way through." It's really hard to recover from that.
9:47 Greg Jenner? That's true.
9:47 Speaker 05 Trust me.
9:48 Greg Jenner? All right, so we've done southern France, we've done Altamira in Spain. Where else were the major sites?
9:53 Speaker 04 We have Kreuzaukraigs in Derbyshire. That's actually the northernmost example of cave art that we have. And we also find other examples of Palaeolithic art from other sites as far east as sort of Ukraine and Russia, throughout Europe, actually.
10:08 Speaker 05 Is there any in Ireland, by any chance?
10:10 Speaker 04 Not that I know of, unfortunately.
10:12 Speaker 05 So I'll have to make a forgery.
10:14 Speaker 04 Yeah.
10:16 Greg Jenner? But we do actually have a much older example of drawing.
10:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, so the oldest example we have of Homo sapiens making art comes from Blombos Cave in South Africa. And it's a small piece of ochre. So ochre is usually used for drawing on cave walls, right? But it's just a piece of ogre that is engraved with patterns of lines. And we have a few examples of these, and they date from between 100,000 years ago to 75,000 years ago from this site.
10:44 Greg Jenner? So really early.
10:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, really early.
10:46 Greg Jenner? Okay, so that's 100,000 years ago, the earliest human art that we have in terms of drawing. Let's move on to representative art. This is art that looks like a thing. So Shaun, in the past few months, literally in the past few months, scientists have announced the discovery of the oldest ever painting depicting a real thing.
11:02 Speaker 05 Okay.
11:02 Greg Jenner? It was found in Sulawesi, which is in Indonesia, on an island.
11:06 Speaker 05 Right.
11:06 Greg Jenner? What do you think it shows?
11:08 Speaker 05 Probably a beach ball.
11:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with beach ball.
11:14 Greg Jenner? Beach ball?
11:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
11:15 Greg Jenner? Yeah. Well, we, we can show you what it was. I'll hand it to you. There you go.
11:19 Speaker 05 Thank you.
11:20 Greg Jenner? What can you see?
11:21 Speaker 05 A very well-fed pig.
11:23 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
11:23 Speaker 05 Is it?
11:24 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
11:24 Speaker 05 Alright.
11:25 Greg Jenner? It's an incredible pig, isn't it?
11:26 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. He looks happy and healthy, if you ask me.
11:30 Greg Jenner? Izzy, this is very exciting for, for numerous reasons. A, it's the oldest ever representative art.
11:35 Speaker 04 Yes.
11:35 Greg Jenner? Secondly, art outside Europe?
11:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:38 Greg Jenner? So tell us about it.
11:39 Speaker 04 Yeah, so, um, this is known as the Silewesi warty pig. Because it has little walls. I know.
11:48 Speaker 05 Okay, wow.
11:49 Speaker 04 Right. It's from Silewesi in Indonesia, and it's been dated to at least forty-five and a half thousand years ago. But we haven't had anything quite like this from anywhere else in the world. It changes how we understand kind of the beginnings of art.
12:06 Greg Jenner? Is art something that's invented once and spreads? Or is it a human instinct that shows up constantly in different places? Because each new group of humans is going, I've got an idea.
12:17 Speaker 04 Yeah. My personal feeling is that it's exactly like you said, Greg. It's these multiple origins, like it's something innate in us that likes to create, likes to make things. And the other evidence that suggests that it's not just a single origin, but possibly a few multiple different origins, is we're not the only species to be making art. We now know that Neanderthals were doing it too. So we have evidence of Neanderthals also producing cave art, ornamenting their bodies, they're making shell beads too, and probably painting their bodies as well.
12:49 Greg Jenner? I think listeners are thinking, what, so talk about the bison, talk about the, so what kind of animal? Well, actually, I'll ask you, Sean, what kind of animals, apart from bison? Because that would be cheating. Uh, what are you imagining on the wall?
12:59 Speaker 05 Deer, um, mammoths, because we've mentioned them already. I wanna say cats and dogs, but I feel like that's.
13:08 Greg Jenner? Oh, no.
13:08 Speaker 05 Let's say wolves.
13:10 Greg Jenner? Okay.
13:11 Speaker 05 That kind of area, terrifying animals.
13:13 Greg Jenner? So, so you think predatory animals?
13:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:16 Greg Jenner? Big scary predatory animals. I think that's a very common response.
13:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:19 Greg Jenner? And surprisingly, that's not common at all, is it?
13:21 Speaker 04 No, the most common animals that people are drawing are the ones that they're hunting. The most common are deer, so you got that one.
13:29 Greg Jenner? Ting!
13:30 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:32 Speaker 04 Bison, Ibex, so mountain goat, that sort of thing.
13:35 Greg Jenner? Horses, I think.
13:36 Speaker 04 Horses, yeah, I knew I was missing one.
13:38 Greg Jenner? Yeah, and wild cattle called Aurochs, which are terrifying. They're mega cows.
13:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:43 Speaker 05 Mega cows.
13:44 Greg Jenner? Imagine a cow, imagine a cow charging towards you.
13:48 Speaker 05 Yeah.
13:48 Greg Jenner? Mega cow.
13:50 Speaker 05 Okay, I got it. I'm running, I'm running.
13:52 Greg Jenner? Absolutely enormous.
13:53 Speaker 05 Right, wow. I thought cows were already pretty big, Greg, I'll be honest.
13:56 Greg Jenner? Mega cow, Sean. I don't think you're getting it. Mega cow.
14:01 Greg Jenner? So, we do have one famous scene.
14:04 Speaker 04 Yes.
14:04 Greg Jenner? It's called the panel of the lions.
14:06 Speaker 04 It is, yeah.
14:07 Greg Jenner? Where is it?
14:07 Speaker 04 It's from Chauvet Cave in France.
14:10 Greg Jenner? I can show it to you, Sean. Here you are, I'm handing you a bit of paper.
14:13 Speaker 05 Thank you.
14:14 Greg Jenner? This one, I think, is absolutely gorgeous.
14:15 Speaker 05 Wow, that is pretty cool. That's a whole group of, what are they, lions? No, a few things.
14:21 Greg Jenner? Lions chasing big things.
14:23 Speaker 05 Kind of like a terrifying herd, really.
14:25 Speaker 04 Mm-hmm.
14:26 Greg Jenner? The first image I get on this is it looks like a scene from a kind of comic book or something. It's got a very interesting overlapping.
14:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, you can almost sense the movement of it as well, genuinely. Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, it's like Lion King, the prequel.
14:42 Greg Jenner? It's fair to say we would assume that's a hunting scene, right?
14:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
14:45 Greg Jenner? That panel of lions. Is that what we're seeing here? Are these depictions of, you won't believe what I did last week, lads. I went out and I hunted this many lions and this is what it looked like. What is this for?
14:57 Speaker 04 This is a very common misconception about cave art is that it's always depicting hunting scenes. And you might imagine, you know, little stick figures with their spears, sort of chasing after animals that might be behind what we've got on the image here. But that's actually not what a lot of cave art is. Humans are very rare in Palaeolithic art.
15:15 Speaker 05 Just observing, like, stuff, really?
15:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, so I think what they're doing is trying to capture kind of animal behaviours and something about the animals that communicates some sort of meaning or importance to their society.
15:27 Speaker 05 This is their version of an Instagram story, really. You know, it just, it might take a bit longer, but it's like, you'll never guess what I saw last weekend. Share it with your friends.
15:35 Greg Jenner? Sean, let's talk art supplies.
15:37 Speaker 05 Okay.
15:38 Greg Jenner? They couldn't pop down to W F Smith's for their sort of paintbrush set and their, my first art palette. What do you think they're using to make all this art?
15:45 Speaker 05 Whatever's to hand, you know, because that's art, you know? It's not about being right, it's just about having fun.
15:51 Speaker 04 Right.
15:52 Speaker 05 And using whatever's to hand. And from what I know throughout history, a lot of it, like art supplies are often like pretty nasty stuff. I'm not going to speculate, but we can all imagine whatever's available. Did you say okra earlier? Yeah, that kind of thing?
16:08 Speaker 04 What they tend to be using is okra, and okra comes in a few different shades. So we have red okra is a very common one, yellow okra, browns and sort of purple hues too. And then they're using charcoal as a black pigment and also manganese oxide as well as a black pigment. But that is kind of it. So there's a very-
16:28 Speaker 05 Black and brown. Those are your choices.
16:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
16:32 Greg Jenner? Black, brown, red and yellow, a little bit of white.
16:34 Speaker 04 Yeah. What they are using is sort of water or clay to kind of mix this into a paint, also animal fat to create a thicker sort of paint mixture that then they will mix it up and then put it on the walls. They can also just use it without that, like crayon and just draw directly on the walls.
16:53 Greg Jenner? So there's a slight emulsive quality to adding the fats in, right? Makes it slightly thicker and-
16:57 Speaker 04 Yeah, stick on the cable better, but also it makes your pigment go further too. And possibly saliva is the only bodily fluid that we know that they're probably using in this. So some of the hand stencils that we mentioned earlier, the way that they're made is by spraying okra from the mouth onto the hand. Sometimes they might have used tool, like a little tube, a burp bone or something, like a straw, yeah. Yeah, or just directly from the mouth. So there's some ideas that maybe they're just putting the powder in their mouths, mixing it with saliva to create the paint and then spitting it on their hands.
17:34 Speaker 05 Wow.
17:36 Greg Jenner? Okay, let's talk about the canvas, or rather the caveness, I mean, the actual physical space we're talking about. Sean, when you're writing a comedy show, do you ever think about the physical space you're performing in? So the lights, the sound, the acoustics?
17:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, definitely. Actually, I think, no joke, I think a cave would be a great place for a stand-up comedy night, because nice and dark, you probably just have one light source, which is the fire, because you want there to be as few distractions as possible. So that's a spotlight on me on the stage. In the centre of the room, ideally with a crowd there as well. That's one thing I do think of as well.
18:09 Greg Jenner? A crowd of cave bears.
18:10 Speaker 05 A crowd of cavemen, you know, probably some toilet humour, that's their kind of ballpark, that's fine. I did a show last night and I had a PowerPoint presentation in there. As far as I know, they didn't have that technology back then.
18:21 Greg Jenner? Probably not.
18:22 Speaker 05 But I want to, you want it nice and big, nice and clear. It's just very important that everyone understands exactly what's going on, in my experience.
18:30 Greg Jenner? That's nice. So Izzy, do we get a sense of the cave as a art space?
18:35 Speaker 04 Absolutely. And if you'll indulge me, we can enter a cave.
18:39 Speaker 05 Ooh.
18:40 Speaker 04 Imagine ourselves in a cave.
18:42 Speaker 05 Whoa.
18:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, there we go. Tens of thousands of years ago. So we start to notice these unusual echoing acoustics to the space around us. We're in complete darkness and we hear this flicker of our firelight that's illuminating the space around us. So the firelight's sort of dancing across the walls, lighting up these unusual stalagmites and stalactites and undulating surfaces. And we might even tactically engage with the space around us, feel the sort of smooth flowstone or the rough surfaces of the cave.
19:17 Greg Jenner? Have a fondle, Shaun, have a fondle.
19:18 Speaker 05 Wow. Oh no, I've destroyed an ancient piece of art. This was Greg's idea, I swear.
19:24 Speaker 04 So all of these sensory experiences would have been embedded in the making and experience of this art. And recently in archaeology, we've been appreciating these sensory experiences in what's kind of a sensory turn in our interpretation. So we're trying to appreciate how these different dynamics, the acoustics, the firelight, the tactile interactions would have enriched the art that they're making. And for me, especially firelight, is really an amazing way of imagining this art in a new light. So I didn't intend to have a pun there, in a new light.
20:02 Speaker 04 So this unpredictable light source is probably kind of animating the art in some way. If we look back on the panel of the lions here, we can imagine as the flickering light is dancing across this. We see one lion and then the next, and it creates this sort of animation effect to the art. And this warm light also makes us feel more sociable, comfortable as well. So all of this is really like enriching this experience of the art and the art making.
20:28 Greg Jenner? Beautiful.
20:29 Speaker 05 Yeah, absolutely. The whole echo as well is like a theatre performer's dream. You know, it really helps you project, you know, telling the story. So that's ideal.
20:37 Greg Jenner? Yeah. Friends, Romans, exactly. Yeah, it's great, isn't it? Let's leave the cave for now, because that was charming, but it's quite damp in there.
20:47 Greg Jenner? So that's fascinating. The idea of illustrating the, you've got static art, but it's illustrated by the flicker of the flames. It's a fascinating animating technique. Shaun, do you know what the word paradolia means?
20:56 Speaker 05 I'll be honest, no.
20:59 Greg Jenner? Do you want to have a guess?
21:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, is it the study of beach balls?
21:04 Greg Jenner? If only it was. It's actually the study of parasols, you know, the umbrellas. Oh, so gross, so gross. Now, Izzy, what is paradolia?
21:12 Speaker 04 So paradolia is a psychological phenomenon of seeing meaningful forms in random patterns. And this is something that everyone experiences. So it's that phenomenon of if you look at a cloud and you see it looking like a face or a rabbit or a dog or whatever, that's all paradolia. What some of my research has focused on is trying to understand how paradolia influenced the making of cave art. So we think that maybe the flickering sort of firelight enrich this experience of paradolia. And then their drawing sort of what they're seeing on the cave wall.
21:48 Speaker 05 I'm glad I have a word for it now, because I see it on social media all the time. When somebody's like, oh, this house looks like a face.
21:54 Speaker 04 Yeah.
21:55 Speaker 05 Or this coat hanger looks like a drunk octopus that wants to fight you. I think that's the best one.
22:00 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
22:01 Speaker 04 That's all paradolia.
22:02 Greg Jenner? But what's so interesting, I think, is that paradolia, if I understand it, is you, you're more likely to see the thing that you're accustomed to seeing.
22:09 Speaker 04 Yes.
22:09 Greg Jenner? So if you spend your days in the dark looking at animals, you're more likely to see animals. Is that right?
22:16 Speaker 04 Yeah, kind of. So we experience a lot of face parodolia. So we see faces everywhere. But if you imagine that you're a hunter gatherer living in the Paleolithic, you're not encountering many other humans that are living in quite sparse populations. But what you are focusing your attention on is animals. So you're tracking migrating herds across the landscape. You have to be attuned to sort of if a bison's going to leap out and attack you or something, you have to really be paying attention to these subtle visual cues of animals. So my little pet theory is then where we see faces all the time, they're seeing animals all the time. And that might account for why animals are such a dominant theme in Palaeolithic art.
22:58 Greg Jenner? Fascinating, isn't it?
22:59 Speaker 05 Yeah.
23:00 Greg Jenner? I'm going to drag us back a little bit more towards form and function, a little bit of like, why might this art have been so important to people? Shaun, I mean, we've already talked about like hunting manual. Are there any other theories you might want to chuck out as to why people would spend such time and effort doing art?
23:16 Speaker 05 Something to do, really.
23:19 Greg Jenner? I think the one I would I would pitch more seriously would be when you get people around a campfire and they start telling stories. And I've had this on an archaeology dig. You get people around a campfire from different backgrounds. They don't all speak the same language. Sometimes art is quite useful. So is there anything in that?
23:36 Speaker 04 I definitely think so. And this is actually one theory that people have had, particularly about these very big caves and the famous caves like Lescov or Altamira, is that maybe these are aggregation sites. So we're dealing with mobile hunter gatherer populations. And for most of the year, they're sort of off doing their thing. But maybe they come together seasonally, aggregate in one spot. So you have different populations of people coming together. And then they're producing art. Maybe that's like a way of reinforcing sort of community bonds and connecting with these people that you haven't seen in a long time. Or yeah, it could be that they need a common language and that's bison, you know, we don't know.
24:18 Speaker 05 Wow.
24:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:19 Speaker 05 That's great. Well, it's visual storytelling, you know?
24:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly.
24:22 Speaker 05 It's a show, don't tell, truly.
24:24 Greg Jenner? Sure.
24:25 Speaker 05 It's a very ancient principle, it turns out.
24:27 Greg Jenner? Isn't it?
24:27 Speaker 05 Yeah.
24:28 Speaker 04 There's also this idea that it's a way to exchange information, you know? Some people have been off in Germany and they've seen something there and they need to communicate it efficiently.
24:37 Greg Jenner? So, okay, so I'm pushing the communication functionality. Are there any other theories that you want to name check, even if you don't agree with them? Anything you?
24:45 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's, well, it's kind of Sean's first interpretation, as they were just bored and doing it. It's what we call this art for art's sake idea. So maybe it didn't mean anything, they're just bored and doodling on the walls. I don't agree with that one. I think it's a lot to invest if you're just bored, you can do other things, right? And not go into a deep cave. There's lots of ideas about shamanism and ritual.
25:10 Greg Jenner? Yeah.
25:10 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's a very common interpretation.
25:13 Greg Jenner? Maybe religious elements, this early phase of what we might call ritual behaviour that, you know, it's no longer simply just survive, but it's now like, here are some ideas we have about, maybe there's a sky god or a reindeer god.
25:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
25:26 Greg Jenner? The nuance window!
25:33 Greg Jenner? This is the part of the show where Sean and I put down our paintbrushes and sit quietly by the fire for two minutes for some storytelling, while Dr Izzy takes centre stage to tell us something we need to know about Palaeolithic art. Take it away, Dr Izzy.
25:45 Speaker 04 So we've talked a lot about the people who made cave art, how they lived, where they lived, and maybe even what they used the art for, right? And we've discussed that maybe other species were engaging in making cave art too. But when we imagine a cave artist, what do we see? We tend to imagine these were adults engaging in this behaviour. And this is really a problem in archaeology more broadly, but especially when we're dealing with this period. But we know, or we should know, that children were around at this period too. And so we must be seeing some children's behaviours in the archaeological record as well. So there have been some studies looking at the anatomical measurements of hand stencils or traces left by the
26:27 Speaker 04 Fingers, we call those finger flutings, that have demonstrated that children were there alongside adults making this art. So this adds a whole new dimension to understanding cave art. So what we thought was actually an adult activity exclusively, we know that children are actively participating in and probably been taught the importance of this as a way to preserve knowledge in the society. But in my recent research, I've also shown some evidence of children kind of doing their own thing with cave art, which I think is really cool, too. So I looked at a panel from Las Monedras Cave in Spain, and this is a group of drawings that was previously interpreted as a panel of enigmatic signs,
27:11 Speaker 04 which is archaeology speak for we don't know, but it's very weird. It's quite low to the ground, the original Palaeolithic cave floor. It consists of lots of concentric circles and random lines that intersect each other. And this is all characteristic of very young children's marks. So I've made the argument that this is children, very young children, making this art.
27:33 Greg Jenner? Wonderful. Thank you, Izzy. Shaun.
27:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, how about that? So it's their equivalent of the photos on the front of the fridge, I guess.
27:41 Speaker 04 Exactly.
27:42 Greg Jenner? Beautiful. I love it. Thank you so much. Listener, if you want more from Shaun, of course you do, check out our episode on medieval Irish magic. Also, some animal stories in that, some quite weird things in there.
27:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, it gets weird.
27:53 Greg Jenner? For more prehistoric stories, listen to our episode about the Neanderthals with Tim Minchin. That was a fun one. And if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In history corner, we have the incredible Dr. Izzy Wisher from Aarhus University in Denmark. Thank you, Izzy.
28:13 Speaker 04 Thank you.
28:14 Greg Jenner? And in comedy corner, we have the spectacular Shaun Burke. Thank you, Shaun.
28:16 Speaker 05 Thank you very much for having me.
28:18 Greg Jenner? And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we uncover another lost historical masterpiece and try not to smudge it with our finger. But for now, I'm off to confuse future archaeologists by painting mammoths all over the local coffee shop. Bye.
28:40 Speaker 06 Hello, I'm India Axon and I just want to quickly talk to you about witches. In this series from BBC Radio 4, simply titled Witch, I'm going to explore the meaning of the word today. It is a twisting, turning rabbit warren of a world, full of forgotten connections to land and to power, lost graves, stolen words and indelible marks on the world. Because the story of the witch is actually the story of us all. Come and find out why, on Witch, with me, India Axon. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
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29:50 Speaker 05 It's the film that convinced Americans the Second World War was worth fighting.
29:55 Speaker 03 A reason to be in Hollywood that is really quite a terrifying situation.
30:00 Speaker 05 And its production is an extraordinary story in itself.
30:03 Speaker 02 Ronald Reagan had been named as the potential lead.
30:07 Speaker 05 Join me, Misha Glenny and three expert guests for a special live edition of In Our Time, where we discuss Casablanca. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
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