Lascaux cave, France.
www.scienceheather.com,
Public domain.
The old idea that rock art was produced in places influenced by the presence of echoes has resurfaced in a new manifestation. "For years, researchers have
known that rock artists didn't paint their bison, bears, lions and other images
in random locations. Art tends to show up on places where echoes in rocky
grottos and caves bounce back to listening human ears. That suggests there's
something about the acoustical landscape of caves that may have inspired or
focused ancient artists. Archaeologists have even used the pattern as a way to
find new cave art"
(Fessenden 2018)
"Inspired by this pattern, MIT
linguistics professor Shigeru Miyagawa and a team of researchers from Tokyo and
Brazil came up with an idea. What if cave art represented a way that early
humans tried to communicate about the sounds they heard by visually
representing what the echoes sounded like." (Fessenden 2018)
I have
written elsewhere (March 10, 2010, Echoes at Rock Art Sites, and October
14, 2012, Echoes at Rock Art Sites - Revisited) about my skepticism
toward this theory. Rock art is generally produced on the smoothest,flattest, surfaces
available, exactly the same surfaces that produce the best echoes. Yes, rock
art and echoes often go together, but that is a coincidence, not evidence of an
intentional relationship. Many years ago, at the Grand Gallery in Horseshoe
Canyon, Utah, I observed a strange young man running around tapping on the
rocks in front of the rock art panel and recording the resulting echoes (he was
inordinately proud of his mallet which he explained was made from elk antler).
Indeed, I have been at rock art sites which produce marvelous echoes, the Grand
Gallery being one, but I am still skeptical about there being an intentional
correlation. How many wonderful rock art sites do not produce strong echoes?
Perhaps, as
Miyagawa posited, there are some cave paintings meant to visually represent
what echoes sound like. (Fessenden 2018) But that is certainly not what most of
them are about.
Chauvet cave, France.
www.sacred-texts.com,
Public domain.
"Some specific features of cave
art may provide clues about how our symbolic, multifaceted language
capabilities evolved, according to a new paper co-authored by MIT linguist
Shigeru Miyagawa."
(Dizikes 2018)
"A key to this idea is that
cave art is often located in acoustic "hot spots," where sound echoes
strongly, as some scholars have observed. Those drawings are located in deeper,
harder-to-access parts of caves, indicating that acoustics was a principal
reason for the placement of drawings whithin caves. The drawings, in turn, may
represent the sounds that early humans generated in those spots." (Dizikes 2018)
"In the new paper, this
convergence of sound and drawing is what the authors call a
"cross-modality information transfer," a convergence of auditory
information and visual art that, the authors write, "allowed early humans
to enhance their ability to convey symbolic thinking." The combination of
sounds and images is one of the things that characterizes human language today,
along with its symbolic aspect and its ability to generate infinite new
sentences." (Dizikes 2018)
Rouffignac cave, France.
Public domain.
"Cave art was part of the
package deal in terms of how homo sapiens came to have this very high-level
cognitive processing," says Miyagawa, a professor of linguistics and the
Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT. "You have
this very concrete cognitive process that converts an acoustic signal into some
mental representation and externalizes it as a visual" Cave artists were not
just early-day Monets, drawing impressions of the outdoors at their leisure.
Rather, they may have been engaged in a process of communication." (Dizikes 2018)
The last
couple of sentences above shows how dangerous it can be for someone to make
statements about something that he knows nothing about. The idea that Monet was
not aware that he was engaged in the process of communication displays a depth
of ignorance about art in general, and Monet's impressionism in particular,
that throws all of the other assumptions about art's role in this theory into
doubt. Monet approached his Impressionism in very much the same way that a scientist approaches his subject. Monet was studying, and trying to reproduce, the effects of light on various surfaces, and then convey that effect to the viewer. That cave art was "part of
the package deal in terms of how homo sapiens came to have this very high-level
cognitive processing" is obvious, and should not have to be spelled
out.
Chauvet cave, France.
www.wikipedia.com,
Public domain.
On May 21,
2016, I wrote on RockArtBlog, in Rock
Art, and the Development of Intelligence, that "the creation of this rock art not only
signaled a certain level of cognitive development, it actually contributed to
that development, and the different types of creations made different contributions
to that development."
(Faris 2016) A recent study had proven that the process of making stone tools
actually led to changes in the brain that could be seen in brain circuitry
scans, and I postulated that the same process would be found in the creation of
rock art. Indeed, as the creation of different types of tools caused different
changes in the brain, so too would the creation of different types of art.
"The results of our own imaging studies on stone
toolmaking led us recently to propose that neural circuits, including the
inferior frontal gyrus, underwent changes to adapt to the demands of
Paleolithic toolmaking and then were co-opted to support primitive forms of
communication using gestures and, perhaps, vocalizations. This protolinguistic
communication would then have been subjected to selection, ultimately producing
the specific adaptations that support modern human language." (Stout 2016:35)
In other
words, like any muscle in the human body, these abilities would be improved by
using them. The process of doing so actually enhanced the brain in a way that
increased these abilities. Some of the assumptions in Miyagawa's theory would
seem to bear this out, that producing cave art was a vital step in the
cognitive development of homo sapiens. In this, I agree that Miyagawa got some
of this right, but notice that Stout's study did not mention echoes.
So to cut
to the chase, did the selection of sites for rock art have anything to do with
echoes heard in caves? Probably - in some cases. Did the production of rock art
have anything to do with cognitive development in early homo sapiens?
Definitely. Is all rock art dependent upon the acoustic properties of its
location for meaning? Definitely not.
NOTE: Images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for
public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public
domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner
will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should
read the originals at the sites listed below.
REFERENCES:
Dizikes,
Peter,
2018 New Study Links Ancient Cave Art Drawings and
the Emergence of Language, February 22, 2018, https://scitechdaily.com/new-study-links-ancient-cave-art-drawings-and-the-emergence-of
-language.
Faris,
Peter,
2016 Rock Art, and the Development of Intelligence,
May 21, 2016, https://rockartblog.blogspot.com.
Fessenden, Marissa
2018 Did Cave Acoustics Play a Role in the
Development of Language? February 26, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/did-cave-acoustics-play-role-art-and-language-180968252/
Stout, Dietrich
2016 Cognitive
Psychology: Tales of a Stone Age Neuroscientist, pages 28-35, Scientific
American, Volume 314, Number 4, April, 2016.
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