IN HIS poem The Conundrum of the Workshops, Rudyard Kipling imagined an early human pausing to admire a drawing he had scratched in the dirt, only to hear a voice whispering: 鈥淚t鈥檚 pretty, but is it Art?鈥�
Archaeologists know a bit about scratching in the dirt, and when their excavations reveal a beautiful ancient object, they find themselves asking the very same question. They are motivated by a desire to step inside the minds of our prehistoric ancestors. In many cases, they want to understand if and when ancient hominins began to create art, as we explore in our feature 鈥�The archaeological finds that show art is far older than our species鈥�.
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Consider the Neanderthals. For decades, we thought of them as brutish, subhuman creatures lacking in creativity. Recent archaeological finds, including a painted fossil shell that was carried 100 kilometres by a Neanderthal, suggest otherwise. What鈥檚 more, a growing collection of evidence suggests that earlier hominins may have possessed an artistic sensibility, potentially pushing back the origins of art by millions of years.
Only potentially, though, because ancient artefacts often throw up 鈥渋nterpretive tensions鈥�. To understand what they meant to their creators, archaeologists have to make inferences. There is a danger of taking that too far, of course, and any claims that an artefact was intended as a work of art should be treated with caution, considering all alternative possibilities. But herein lies the joy of all this: we have to use our imaginations to figure out how our ancestors saw the world.
That doesn鈥檛 preclude a scientific approach. The West Tofts hand axe is a good example. A 300,000-to-500,000-year-old tool created from a piece of flint containing a fossil shell, it looks like a work of art. By analysing exactly how the tool had been made and used, however, archaeologists showed that the fossil鈥檚 prominent position is a mere coincidence.
There can be no doubt that art has a long prehistory. But to truly unravel its origins, and to understand how ancient hominins thought, requires a meeting of rigorous science and imagination.
