The Paleolithic Age

The Paleolithic Age

The notion that Paleolithic man was a cave man is preposterous. They were physically the same us people today, we are now and were than Homo sapiens. Society than was fairly complex, people lived in communities, they had art and music, they also believed in more than just the physical plane of existence in which they lived, even made tools. The common place location of a community was in valleys in France. Primary sources of food were hunting and gathering, from the rich forests surrounding them. They caves surrounding inhabited locations were filled with paintings and artifacts not signs of being a home. They paintings showed the underworld, the earth and the heavens. They had drums, dancing, and singing. The tools they made were more advanced than anything before their time, flint blades were used and they even fished. Surely these some of these tools were used for the sculpting Venus figurines. Paleolithic man was much more advanced than people give credit too.

Caves were a very sacred place to Paleolithic man. This can be seen by the frequency of cave paintings on inaccessible places of the walls, fossilized foot prints of families, even alters carved out of formations in the floor. The cave was alluring to man for the basic element of shelter from: the elements, predatory animals, and most natural disasters. Paleolithic man stumbling upon a cave would be an amazing find. While they didn't have the resources or technology to build a fully enclosed rock shelter they could just find them. In the article "Sacred Places" Witcombe said "the cave has been identified as the womb of Mother Earth." This adds another attractive feature to the cave since man respected and almost certainly viewed the earth as sacred. These caves are very important to anthropologists today, where else would they be able to find intact paintings and artifacts from twenty thousand B.C.?

Cave paintings are an important artifact left by Paleolithic man. The paintings show what was respected or important. For instance there are many depictions of large animals like deer, horse, and bulls. The bull was and still is a symbol of strength, fertility, and power. Since man had these inclinations towards the bull it would only make sense that it is one of the most depicted subjects in cave paintings rather than say an animal with a much smaller physical prowess as say a squirrel. These paintings must have been of great importance; otherwise they would not be in rather inaccessible places; as good deals of them are. Some are a quarter mile deep in caves; others are twenty feet off of the floor. This demonstrates the fact that much effort and care went into them. If they were about something pedestrian or mundane they would be in a very accessible place and most likely not be around today. The most famous and best cave paintings can be found in Lascaux France. The entire cave is covered of paintings in this style. They are in remarkably pristine condition considering their date from twenty thousand B.C. Many of these paintings show a bull or a similarly large animal being shot and impaled with an arrow. Were they painting these works in hopes that they themselves would achieve the feat depicted? A modern tribe of the pygmies did this as described in the "Pygmy Hunt" by Frobenius, "I saw that what had been drawn on the ground was an antelope, some four feet long: and the arrow was stuck in its neck. .... The hunters caught up with us that afternoon with a beautiful buck. It had been shot with an arrow through the neck." After that the pygmies went back to their drawing of the antelope and erased it appalled the arrow out of the ground. If this practice is being observed within the last hundred years I think it's fair to infer that these paintings had similar purposes.

Shaman are the wise men, medicine men, and witchdoctors of their tribes. The shaman for a tribe would be chosen either by succession of bloodline, being called to it, or going on a vision quest and they would speak with nature, see visions, go into trance, and hopefully survive. Being able to have visions and induce trances is very important for a shaman. During this time the shaman is in a trance his spirit can freely leave his body. There are numerous ways in which a trance be induced such as meditating, drumming, singing, dancing, and taking hallucinogenic substances, these means have become sacred to the tribes. The drum is perhaps the oldest musical instrument. Shaman almost always have drums to help induce a trance. Their drums had special paintings on them that would help them