ICE AGE
During the last Ice Age, anatomically modern humans spread throughout the world. They arrived in South-western Europe, around 40,000 years ago, bringing with them technological innovations and an extraordinary progress in the arts.
The seasonal variability of plant and animal resources required a nomadic lifestyle to ensure survival. Caves and huts served as temporary shelters, and hunting and gathering provided food.
Nature also offered materials to produce tools, clothing and ornaments. A new tool, the spear thrower, and the gradual improvement of the spears made hunting more efficient.
Cold-weather animals (bison, mammoths, bears, reindeer, cave lions or woolly rhinos) and temperate animals (horses, aurochs, deer and goats), refugees in these lands and hunting prey, would soon become inspirational elements for their creativity.
Cave art
In the spread of modern humans around the world and in their adaptation to new landscapes, climates and other human groups (such as Neanderthals in Europe), the seed is sown for a new creative twist in the evolution of symbolic thinking: the emergence of figurative art.
Between 36,000 and 11,700 years ago, the arts experienced unprecedented developments in South-western Europe. Deep caves, rock shelters and open-air boulders made natural canvases for drawings, engravings and paintings, in which the beauty and naturalism of the animals, and the importance of the signs, contrasts with the low number of human representations.
What did the motifs depicted mean? Why were they painted? Scientific research debates several theories, but the disappearance of the artists has left these artworks surrounded in mystery.
Musical creation
Music, songs and dances are universal cultural expressions with little archaeological visibility. The presence of musical instruments indicates that they appeared at least 40,000 years ago. Flutes are the most documented, but in Europe we also find whistles, bullroarers and musical bows throughout the Palaeolithic.
The flutes were made of bird bones and the holes allowed several tones to be made. The bullroarers, used by many human groups around the world, are oval in shape and are made of bone, ivory or wood. They emitted a characteristic deep sound when they were swirled around thanks to a string tied to one of its ends.
The Palaeolithic Palette
Palaeolithic art was produced both on rock walls and other portable media. Stone, bone, antlers, ivory, animal teeth and other potential perishable materials such as wood served as media for engraving, painting and carving.
There was no improvisation in the artistic production as it required an investment of time to collect materials, prepare tools and pigments, select locations and surfaces, and plan the designs. Men and women drew and painted with natural pigment materials, such as charcoal or manganese (black) and iron oxides (red). They mixed powdered pigments with natural binders (animal fats or plant extracts).
The paint was applied with the fingers, with brushes, with pads or spitting it directly from the mouth.
Inside the caves, the flickering flames of torches and animal fat lamps accompanied the artistic creation bringing to life the stories told in light of the images.
Where were the humans?
Palaeolithic artists emphasized the animal world in their artworks paying less attention to humans. The few known explicit references to humans include complete but very simplified and idealized figures, human-animal hybrids, and even certain isolated anatomical parts, such as heads, sexual attributes and hands.
The presence of small hands could be attributed to both young individuals and women. But partial representations of male and female sexual attributes (penises, vulvas and breasts)
give both sexes a prominent role, reminding us that women were also present in prehistory.
The most realistic human representations are the famous statuettes known as Venus. Were they idols, goddesses, amulets, toys? Did they have a symbolic, sexual or maybe gynaecological purpose? The debate among the specialists is still very much on-going.
A Mediterranean art
The eastern side of the Iberian Peninsula offered a temperate environment during the last glacial era thanks to the influence of the Mediterranean Sea. Species depicted in caves,
rock shelters and other rock surfaces confirm this. Here, horses, aurochs, deer and wild goats, painted and engraved, dominate.
The largest set of pieces of this territory comes from Parpalló cave (Gandia), the most prolific and enduring school of Palaeolithic art, with more than 5,600 slabs showing the evolution of art between 32,000 and 14,000 years ago.
Other exceptional findings are located in Catalan lands. The shelter of Molí del Salt (Vimbodí) has provided what could be the first map of a hunter-gatherer camp dating some 13,800 years ago.
At Hort de la Boquera site (Margalef de Montsant) an extraordinary engraving captures the interaction between humans and birds (unusual in European Palaeolithic art), which foreshadows the advent of narrative art.
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