On September 12, 1940, cave paintings were found in the famous Lascaux cave in France, which is called the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric painting. There are several other places where you can find impressive art of primitive people.
Lascaux Cave, France
This is one of the largest and most important paleontological monuments on the planet. There are so many rock paintings in no other cave. In addition to the impressive number of inscriptions, what is also surprising is how well they are preserved. The subjects of the cave are standard for painting of that period: these are drawings of animals, people, and tools.
The cave is included in the UNESCO World Heritage List and is closed to tourists. The fact is that due to the presence of people in Lascaux, the fragile natural balance was disrupted, which allowed these inscriptions to exist for many millennia. Now scientists process the walls of the cave every few weeks, eliminating constantly multiplying bacteria and algae from the rock. For tourists to visit, the Lascaux 2 cave has been created, located two hundred meters from the original cave and consisting of reproductions.
Kapova Cave, Russia
The cave is located on the territory of the Republic of Bashkortostan in the Shulgan-Tash nature reserve and has a length of about three kilometers. It was formed in limestone, in a karst massif. A small lake flows into the cave, the water in which is not suitable for drinking and is used exclusively for healing baths.
The drawings on the walls of the Kapova Cave were discovered in the mid-fifties by the Soviet zoologist Ryumin. They were applied using ocher and are about eighteen thousand years old. This colossal number is difficult to imagine: creativity and the desire to create something new forced a person to draw even before the existence of civilization, religion, science, and language. The place, unlike the Lascaux Cave, is completely accessible to tourists.
Altamira Cave, Spain
This cave, discovered in 1789, is also quite famous for the fact that, like Lascaux, it uses the technique of polychrome painting: that is, the drawings have color. An interesting nuance is that the natural contours of the walls are used to create a three-dimensional effect.
By the way, you can find drawings not only on the walls, but also on the ceiling. After several closures of the cave due to the fact that mold had appeared in the drawings from dampness, visits were resumed again in 2011.
Tamgaly tract, Kazakhstan
In this place in the Anrakai mountains, 170 kilometers from Almaty, there was once a sanctuary of ancient people. Here you can see images of deities, animals and people: married couples, warriors, hunters.
There are about two thousand drawings in total. Scientists attribute most of the inscriptions to the Bronze Age. Another UNESCO World Heritage Site is located in the open air and is open to the public.
Newspaper Rock, USA
This place is located in the southeast of Utah; its name literally translates as “newspaper stone.” Its special feature is the collection of petroglyphs, which were created by the Indians in the prehistoric period. It still remains unclear why such a large number of petroglyphs were painted on such a small area.
Any person endowed with a great gift - feel the beauty the surrounding world, feel harmony lines, admire the variety of shades of colors.
Painting- this is the artist’s perception of the world captured on canvas. If your perception of the world around you is reflected in the artist’s paintings, then you feel a kinship with the works of this master.
The paintings attract attention, fascinate, excite imagination and dreams, evoke memories of pleasant moments, favorite places and landscapes.
When did they appear first images created by man?
Appeal primitive people to a new type of activity for them - art - one of the greatest events in human history. Primitive art reflected man’s first ideas about the world around him; thanks to it, knowledge and skills were preserved and passed on, and people communicated with each other. In the spiritual culture of the primitive world, art began to play the same universal role that a pointed stone played in labor activity.
What gave a person the idea to depict certain objects? Who knows whether body painting was the first step towards creating images, or whether a person guessed the familiar silhouette of an animal in a random outline of a stone and, by cutting it, gave it a greater resemblance? Or maybe the shadow of an animal or a person served as the basis for the drawing, and the imprint of a hand or a step precedes the sculpture? There is no definite answer to these questions. Ancient people could come up with the idea of depicting objects not in one, but in many ways.
For example, to the number the most ancient images on the walls of Paleolithic caves include human hand prints, and a random interweaving of wavy lines pressed into the damp clay by the fingers of the same hand.
Works of art from the Early Stone Age, or Paleolithic, are characterized by simplicity of shapes and colors. Rock paintings are usually the outlines of animal figures, made with bright paint - red or yellow, and occasionally - filled with round spots or completely painted over. Such ""paintings"" were clearly visible in the twilight of the caves, illuminated only by torches or the fire of a smoky fire.
In the initial stage of development primitive fine art didn't know laws of space and perspective, as well as composition, those. intentional distribution of individual figures on a plane, between which there is necessarily a semantic connection.
In living and expressive images stands before us history of the life of primitive man the Stone Age era, told by himself in rock paintings.
Dance. Lleid painting. Spain. With a variety of movements and gestures, a person conveyed his impressions of the world around him, reflecting in them his own feelings, mood and state of mind. Crazy jumping, imitation of animal habits, stamping feet, expressive hand gesturescreated the preconditions for the emergence of dance. There were also war dances associated with magical rituals and the belief in victory over the enemy.
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Composition in the Lascaux cave. France. On the walls of the caves you can see mammoths, wild horses, rhinoceroses, and bison. For primitive man, drawing was the same “witchcraft” as spells and ritual dances. By “conjuring” the spirit of a drawn animal by singing and dancing, and then “killing” it, a person seemed to master the power of the animal and “defeat” it before hunting.
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And these are petroglyphs. Hawaii
Murals on the Tassili-Ajer mountain plateau. Algeria.
Primitive people practiced sympathetic magic - in the form of dancing, singing or painting animals on the walls of caves - to attract herds of animals and ensure the continuation of the race and the safety of livestock. Hunters acted out scenes of a successful hunt to attract energy into the real world. They turned to the Mistress of the Herds, and later to the Horned God, who was depicted with the antlers of goats or deer to emphasize his primacy over the herds. The bones of animals were supposed to be buried in the ground so that animals, like people, were reborn from the womb of Mother Earth.
This is a cave painting in the Lascaux region of France from the Paleolithic era.
Large animals were the preferred food. And Paleolithic people, skilled hunters, destroyed most of them. And not just large herbivores. During the Paleolithic, cave bears completely disappeared as a species.
There is another type of rock paintings, which has a mystical, mysterious character.
Rock paintings from Australia. Either people, or animals, or maybe both...
Drawings from West Arnhem, Australia.
Huge figures and small people next to them. And in the lower left corner there is something incomprehensible.
Here is a masterpiece from Lascaux, France.
North Africa, Sahara. Tassili. 6 thousand years BC Flying saucers and someone in a spacesuit. Or maybe it's not a spacesuit.
Rock art from Australia...
Val Camonica, Italy.
and the next photo is from Azerbaijan, Gobustan region
Gobustan is included in the UNESCO heritage list
Who were those “artists” who managed to convey the message of their time to distant eras? What prompted them to do this? What were the hidden springs and driving motives that guided them?..Thousands of questions and very few answers...Many of our contemporaries love it when they are asked to look at history through a magnifying glass.
But is everything really so small in it?
After all, there were images of gods
In the north of Upper Egypt is the ancient temple city of Abydos. Its origin dates back to prehistoric times. It is known that already in the era of the Old Kingdom (about 2500 BC) in Abydos, the universal deity Osiris enjoyed widespread veneration. Osiris was considered a divine teacher who gave the people of the Stone Age a variety of knowledge and crafts, and, quite possibly, knowledge about the secrets of the sky. By the way, it was in Abydos that the oldest calendar was found, dating back to the 4th millennium BC. e.
Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome also left a lot of rock evidence that reminds us of their existence. They already had a developed written language - their drawings are much more interesting, from the point of view of studying everyday life, than ancient graffiti.
Why is humanity trying to find out what happened millions of years ago, what knowledge did ancient civilizations have? We look for the source because we think that by revealing it, we will find out why we exist. Humanity wants to find where the starting point is, from which it all began, because it thinks that there, apparently, there is an answer, “what is all this for,” and what will happen in the end...
After all, the world is so vast, and the human brain is narrow and limited. The most complex crossword puzzle of history must be solved gradually, cell by cell...
September 12, 1940 Four French teenagers accidentally stumbled upon a narrow hole created by the fall of a pine tree, which was struck by lightning. They decided that this was the exit from an underground passage leading to the nearby ruins of a castle, and hoped to find treasure there. But when they got inside and saw huge drawings on the walls, they realized that this was not just an underground passage, and reported their discovery to the teacher. This is how the Lascaux cave was discovered. 
All the walls of the cave were completely covered with amazing drawings of animals - bulls, bison, rhinoceroses, horses, deer, even a unicorn, drawn with ocher, soot and marl (a rock like clay) and outlined in dark outlines. Some of the drawings were life size!
The scientist A. Breuil spent several months in this cave, making all kinds of measurements and studying primitive painting. At first, art historians doubted the authenticity of the drawings, but a thorough examination rejected all suspicions of fakes, and the age of the images was estimated at 15 thousand years.
Very soon, many tourists began to come to the Lascaux cave and soon scientists noticed that the drawings were slowly beginning to collapse. This was due to the excess carbon dioxide exhaled by people visiting the caves. Soon tourists were no longer allowed into the Lascaux cave and it was mothballed, and a copy of it was created next to it - Lascaux II. It is a concrete structure, inside which rock paintings of selected parts of Lascaux have been accurately reproduced.
Osya and I really liked that on the official website you can take a virtual tour of the cave. In some places you can stop, zoom in on the drawing, look at it and read a short text about it (there is no Russian language on the site, but there is English). Here is the website: http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/#/en/02_00.xml
The figures of animals are drawn mainly in profile, in motion. It’s interesting that when several animals, of different sizes and different colors, accumulate in one scene at once, and at the same time they are drawn so that one figure overlaps another, then the feeling of a cartoon is created if you move the window on the website. Probably, the same effect will happen if you move next to these drawings with a flashlight in your hands, it’s a pity that we can’t check it :)
On the walls of the cave there is only one image of a person: here you can see four figures combined into one compositional space - a bison pierced by a spear, a lying man, a small bird and a fuzzy silhouette of a retreating rhinoceros. The bison stands in profile, but its head is turned towards the viewer. The person is depicted schematically, as in children's drawings. Everything is drawn with a thick black line and is not filled with color. Scientists are still arguing about what exactly is shown in this picture: did the bison kill the man, and did the horse inflict a mortal wound on the bison? Or is it the other way around?
I showed Osya this picture and told him that the paints were mineral back then. The black paint was based on manganese, and the red paint was based on iron oxide. Pieces of minerals were ground into powder on stone slabs or on animal bones, for example, on the shoulder blade of a bison. This colored powder was stored in hollowed out bones or leather bags that were worn on the belt.
In this picture you can see the image of a huge bull. The figure of the right bull is the largest rock art in the world, its length is 5.2 meters.
To make it clearer what five meters is, we measured this distance in the apartment and estimated how huge the bull was.
Interestingly, in the Lascaux cave there is an image of a mythical animal - a unicorn:
But this big black bull, 3.71 meters long, is interesting because it was painted with paint sprayed through a special tube:
What you can do if your child is interested in these drawings:
- you can take craft paper, crumple it properly (we didn’t figure it out right away, but when we came across a crumpled piece of wrapping paper, Osya himself noticed that it turned out more textured and the surface resembled the surface of a stone) and hang it on the wall to draw memorable memories on it figures in charcoal, sanguine or multi-colored pastels. Or you can use paints if the child doesn’t want to get his hands dirty. The main thing is not to forget to cover the floor around it.
Or you can make natural paints - from clay and berries, and paint animals with them. And then make an outline separately with charcoal.
You can also try painting with homemade brushes. Offer your child a small stick, some grass/flower stems, and some string. Will he guess what can be done with them? And if you cut off the top layer of a sponge for washing dishes, you can play that it is an animal skin that ancient people used to paint over a large area of the picture. Shall we try?
To draw pictures, you can simply sit on a table or on the floor, or you can imagine that we are in a cave and draw on its walls and arches. Once, when we were playing at primitive people, we covered the area under the table with paper, and Osya left rock carvings while lying on his back.
This time we hung the drawings under the desk, then Osya blocked the entrance to the “cave” with pillows from the sofa, and we played as if we ourselves were walking and unexpectedly found such a treasure - a cave with ancient rock paintings. In the evening, when it was already dark, we turned off the light and climbed into the cave with flashlights and candles and looked at the images on the walls.
Most scientists believe that ancient people appeared over two million years ago. Archaeologists have found traces of their existence in East Africa. The conditions here were favorable for primitive man: a hot climate, plenty of edible roots and fruits, and places to hide from bad weather and predators. The life of ancient man depended on nature. Primitive history lasted hundreds of thousands of years. During this time, people populated all continents except Antarctica. They appeared on the territory of our country about half a million years ago.
The emergence of primitive art
Even then, ancient art existed. The oldest images were discovered in Spain, in the south of France, in Russia in the Urals.
Primitive art has been known since time immemorial. The oldest images on cave walls include imprints of a human hand. Almost 150 years ago, a cave was discovered in Spain with drawings on the walls and ceiling. Later, more than 100 similar caves were discovered in France and Spain.
There are several periods in the development of cave art:
First period (XXX thousand years BC). When the surface inside the outline of the design was filled with black or red paint.
The second period (up to X thousand years BC) is marked by the transition to oblique parallel strokes. This is how fur began to be depicted on animal skins. Additional colors were introduced (various shades of yellow and red) for spots on the skins of bulls, horses, and bison.
In the third period (from the 10th millennium BC) - cave art became very voluminous with the use of multi-colored paints
First paints.
What are paints? In the explanatory dictionary of S. I. Ozhigov the following definition is given:
Paint is a homogeneous colored substance that gives a particular color to objects. Widely used in the national economy, everyday life, as well as in painting.
Of course, ancient man did not have colors in the modern sense of the word. He used natural materials for his drawings.
The first paint was clay. It can be different: yellow, red, white, blue, greenish. The ancient artist carved a design into the rock, and then rubbed clay mixed with animal fat into the recess. Ancient artists often used ocher, a red, yellow and brown paint found in nature in the form of clay or crumbly small lumps. The cave paintings were made with coal, which was always at hand, as well as black soot and soot.
Paints from minerals, plants and animals.
Our ancestors also painted with paints obtained from rocks. Blue dye was extracted from the mineral lapis lazuli, green from malachite, and red from a mineral called cinnabar.
Over time, people learned to extract and make many different paints. The purple crimson color was especially valued. In Ancient Rome, only the emperor wore clothes of purple and crimson colors. This paint was very expensive, it was extracted from the shells of snails living in the Mediterranean Sea. To obtain 1 gram of such paint, 10 thousand shells had to be processed. They even made paints from insects. Tropical insects called cachinelles were the source of a red dye called carmine.
Bright and long-lasting colors were obtained from plants. In ancient times, plant paints were used by humans to decorate weapons, clothing, and homes. At first it was the juices of bright petals, leaves, and fruits of plants, then people learned to prepare special dyes from plants.
For example, yellow paint was obtained from the bark of barberry, alder, and milkweed.
Onion peels, oak bark and henna leaves from this Lawsonia plant produced a brown dye.
Many different paints were extracted from plants in Ancient Rus'. Blue dye was obtained from the root of the knotweed, yellow from the roots of horse sorrel, cherry dye from the lichen of the steppe goldenrod, and with the help of blackberries and blueberries they dyed fabrics purple.
During excavations of the Egyptian pyramids, blue fabrics dyed with indigo, a dye from the leaves of the indigofera plant, were found.
Plants have been found from which paint of several colors could be obtained. For example, red, yellow and orange dyes were obtained from the St. John's wort plant. And yellow, green and black paint was obtained from the cuff plant. A particularly wide color palette was provided by a plant such as madder. Famous for the brightness of colors and multicolored Dagestan carpets, they were woven from wool dyed with a substance obtained from madder roots.
Conclusion.
Observation results.
I conducted an observation.
Many times I saw how my grandmother and mother painted Easter eggs with onion skins. They produced a very rich burgundy color.
For the holiday, my mother often bakes a cake and decorates it with cream, to which she adds beet and carrot juice. She produces red roses and orange flowers.
Experiment results.
I conducted an experiment myself and tried to first draw a picture with charcoal, and then color it with beet and carrot juice. I added a decoction of the yarrow plant to my new paints. I made a color drawing “Flowers”.
Thus, from all the paints discussed above that the ancient artist used, we can conclude:
1) Of course, ancient man did not have colors in the modern sense of the word. He used natural materials for his drawings.
2) The color was used for coloring, although it was not very different from natural. It was conditional in nature, to highlight more important objects in the drawing.
3) Painting was carried out with mineral paints, paints from the flora and fauna
4) Paints made from natural materials were available and harmless.
5) Recipes for making some paints from natural materials have survived to this day, such as: brown from onion peels, burgundy from beets and orange from carrots and many others.
From my research I concluded: the hypothesis I put forward that ancient people found colors in nature was completely confirmed.
On December 18, 1994, the famous French speleologist Jean Marie Chauvet discovered a cave gallery with ancient images of animals. The find was named in honor of its discoverer - Chauvet Cave. We decided to talk about the most beautiful caves with rock paintings.
Chauvet Cave
The discovery of the Chauvet Cave in the south of France near the town of Pont d'Arc became a scientific sensation that forced us to reconsider the existing understanding of the art of ancient people: it was previously believed that primitive painting developed in stages. At first, the images were very primitive, and more than one thousand years had to pass for the drawings on the walls of the caves to reach their perfection. Chauvet's find suggests the opposite: the age of some images is 30–33 thousand years, which means that our ancestors learned to draw even before moving to Europe. The discovered rock art represents one of the oldest examples of cave art in the world, in particular, the drawing of black rhinoceroses from Chauvet is still considered the most ancient. The south of France is rich in such caves, but none of them can compare with the Chauvet Cave either in size, or in the preservation and skill of the drawings. Mostly animals are depicted on the walls of the cave: panthers, horses, deer, as well as woolly rhinoceros, tarpan, cave lion and other animals of the Ice Age. In total, images of 13 different species of animals were found in the cave.
Now the cave is closed to tourists, as changes in air humidity can damage the images. Archaeologists can only work in a cave for a few hours a day. Today, the Chauvet Cave is a national treasure of France.
Caves of Nerja
The Caves of Nerja are an amazingly beautiful series of huge caves near the city of Nerja in Andalusia, Spain. They received the nickname "Prehistoric Cathedral". They were discovered by accident in 1959. They are one of the main attractions of Spain. Some of their galleries are open to the public, and one of them, which forms a natural amphitheater and has excellent acoustics, even hosts concerts. In addition to the world's largest stalagmite, several mysterious drawings were discovered in the cave. Experts believe that seals or fur seals are depicted on the walls. Fragments of charcoal were found near the drawings, the radiocarbon dating of which gave an age between 43,500 and 42,300 years. If experts prove that the images were made with this charcoal, the seals of the Nerja Cave will turn out to be significantly older than the cave paintings from the Chauvet Cave. This will once again confirm the assumption that Neanderthals had the ability for creative imagination no less than that of Homo sapiens.
Photo: iDip/flickr.com, scitechdaily.com
Kapova Cave (Shulgan-Tash)
This karst cave was found in Bashkiria, on the Belaya River, in the area of which the Shulgan-Tash nature reserve is now located. This is one of the longest caves in the Urals. Cave paintings of ancient people from the Late Paleolithic era, the likes of which can only be found in very limited places in Europe, were discovered in Kapova Cave in 1959. Images of mammoths, horses and other animals are made mainly with ocher, a natural pigment based on animal fat, their age is about 18 thousand years. There are several charcoal drawings. In addition to animals, there are images of triangles, stairs, and oblique lines. The most ancient drawings, dating back to the early Paleolithic, are in the upper tier. On the lower tier of the Kapova Cave there are later images of the Ice Age. The drawings are also notable for the fact that human figures are shown without the realism inherent in the animals depicted. Researchers suggest that the images were made in order to appease the “gods of the hunt.” In addition, cave paintings are designed to be perceived not from one specific point, but from several angles of view. To preserve the drawings, the cave was closed to the public in 2012, but an interactive kiosk was installed in the museum on the territory of the reserve for everyone to look at the drawings virtually.
Cueva de las Manos cave
Cueva de las Manos (“Cave of Many Hands”) is located in Argentina, in the province of Santa Cruz. Cueva de las Manos became world famous in 1964 thanks to the research of archeology professor Carlos Gradin, who discovered many wall paintings and human handprints in the cave, the oldest of which date back to the 9th millennium BC. e. More than 800 prints, overlapping each other, form a multi-colored mosaic. So far, scientists have not come to a consensus about the meaning of the images of hands, from which the cave got its name. Mostly left hands were captured: out of 829 prints, only 36 were right hands. Moreover, according to some researchers, the hands belong to teenage boys. Most likely, drawing an image of one’s hand was part of the initiation rite. In addition, scientists have built a theory about how such clear and clear palm prints were obtained: apparently, a special composition was taken into the mouth and forcefully blown through a tube onto a hand attached to the wall. In addition to handprints, on the walls of the cave there are depictions of people, rhea ostriches, guanacos, cats, geometric figures with ornaments, hunting processes (the drawings show the use of bolas - a traditional throwing weapon of the Indians of South America) and observations of the sun. In 1999, the cave was included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Lascaux Cave
The cave received the nickname “Sistine Chapel of primitive painting”; it has no equal in the quantity, quality and preservation of rock paintings. It was discovered in 1940 by four teenagers near the city of Montignac, France. The paintings and engraved drawings that are located here do not have an exact dating: they appeared around the 18th-15th millennium BC. e. and depict horses, cows, bulls, deer, bears. In total, there are about six hundred drawings of animals and almost one and a half thousand images carved on the walls. The drawings are made on a light background with shades of yellow, red, brown and black. Scientists claim that ancient people did not live in this cave, but used it exclusively for drawing, or the cave was something of a cult place. The Lascaux Cave was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1979.
Andrey Matveev worked on the article
Materials used: http://smartnews.ru/articles/14122.html
