Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The great leap forward—not!
But what about the origins of advanced human culture? These same Euro-
centric paleoanthropologists had carefully documented a burst of cultural
advances that took place at the same time as the fi rst modern humans arrived
in western Europe, about 30,000 years ago. These dramatic advances have
been called the “great leap forward” by University of California, Los Angeles,
physiologist and ecologist Jared Diamond.
Sally McBrearty and Alison Brooks of the University of Connecticut
and George Washington University emphatically disagree with the idea of
a European great leap forward. They have used the growing archeological
record of sub-Saharan Africa to trace the real, and much older, origins of
these cultural inventions.
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It is true that there is nothing in sub-Saharan Africa that corresponds
to the detailed and expressive cave paintings of Altamira in Spain and of
Lascaux and Chauvet in France. But the Cro-Magnon paintings are primarily
of animals, many of them now extinct in Europe. There are almost no human
fi gures among those great herds of gracefully rendered Ice Age animals.
In contrast, even the oldest San rock paintings show many representa-
tions of human dancers and hunters. By this measure their art is much more
oriented toward their cultural lives than the pictures drawn by the Cro-
Magnons. Of course, most of the surviving examples of these San paint-
ings are far more recent than the European cave paintings. If we discount
the doubtful evidence from the Namibian cave, we simply do not know how
long ago the ancestors of the San began to paint this representational art on
the rock walls of the Karoo and the Kalahari. Did the San learn the idea of
representing the human form from other tribes, or did they invent the idea
independently? Again, we cannot answer that question.
Thus, the true origins of representational art, and the number of times
that the idea of drawing people and animals occurred independently to vari-
ous human groups, remain a great puzzle. But haunting suggestions of an
ancient origin of representative art continue to turn up.
