Chris Vanginkel
Professor Elena Johnson
Art 101.
7/24/2017
ART TERM PAPER.
The Chauvet caves offer insight into the prehistoric man and their battles with nature and his ever growing sense of personal worth. From the multitude of dangers, prehistoric man had to survive Animals, volcanic eruptions, we can also see the growth of man as they come to see their own place in the world. These caves can be dated back to around 36,000, BCE, which makes the Chauvet Cave paintings in France some of the oldest known cave paintings ever discovered in world history. Discovered in December of 1994, the caves instantly gained interest in both the scientific and the historical art communities due to their pristine preserved condition and insight into how prehistoric…show more content… The Chauvet cave paintings in France are some of the oldest, grandest, and the most elaborate ever discovered. The cave has over 1000 different paintings made painted by over a dozen known painters. These paintings challenge our current knowledge of human cognitive evolution. The paintings now show that art became a mainstream part of human experience over a 1000 years sooner than we previously expected. We as spectators can follow the cave paintings like a time line from the basic formations in the beginning of the cave all the way to the end of the cave were human depictions and abstracts make their appearance. At the beginning of the cave, a wall of human hand prints in red can be seen. At first, all the hands look similar as if this…show more content… We can see the growth and struggles they had adjusting to the ever changing climate of the world. We can see how they grew and adapted to the flora and fauna that became available at different generations that grew up around the caves. We can see that as time went on the prehistoric peoples minds began to grasp the ideas of abstract thoughts and representation. This abstractness can be traced into the modern language where we use words and pictures to represent our surrounding environment. We can even see at the end of the cave when prehistoric people began to look at their own images due to the 2 human paintings in the caves. These caves are a wonder and a major part of human history that we as a people need to protect and preserve for millennia to come. Who knows in the future we might discover even more about the caves that as of yet we don't understand and can only speculate
