The First Pictures of Roses. Part I.

Chauvet Cave, south-west France. The painting are c.35,000 years old.

Roses have been around for millions years, but when did they first start attracting human interest as well as bees? When did they become worthy subjects for pictures?

The  first recorded paintings were made by Upper Paleolithic  humans in the darkness of caves around 40,000 years ago, and they give some idea of what interested Ice Age humans. From the evidence, they drew both abstract signs, often ‘geometric’, and realistic depictions of animals. 

But the consensus is that there are no obvious images of plants or trees, or indeed of any landscape features.  Why should this be? After all, the survival of these humans absolutely depended on their intimate understanding of the entire biological and geographic environment.  These were small groups of nomads that survived by hunting game and gathering plants.  They must therefore have been very intimately involved with plants, which they used as foodstuff, tools, and ornaments, and also perhaps as medicine, hallucinogens, and grave offerings. 

But there are no  obvious pictures of flora, in the way that there are images of fauna. The horses, lions, bison and so on, are not even depicted running along the ground, and move as if existing in some kind of horizonless habitat liberated from the vegetal and geological setting. Paleolithic humans focused their attention intensely on animals, and their paintings display a very accurate knowledge of their form and behaviours.   

We also find lion-men (or men-lions) but never tree-men (or men-trees).  Ice Age humans didn’t seem to link  knowledge of  the vegetal world to knowledge of the human social world, but they did make such a connection in relation to the animal world. When one looks at the horses and lions in Chauvet cave – the oldest known cave-paintings in Europe – one has a powerful  sense that the animals have been personalized. Humanized. Anthropomorphized.

One possible reason for the absence of realistic pictures of plants is prosaic. In the Ice Age plants were far less bountiful and varied than now. Outside the caves in which Paleolithic humans painted, the  vegetal environment  was  barren. There would have been hardly any trees, for example, and certainly there would have been no roses growing in Europe, where most of the cave-paintings are located, although roses already existed in warmer climes. The Ice Age landscape would have looked rather like the Siberian steppes. Fauna, by contrast, was plentiful and  roamed freely across the  vast open spaces. In other words, perhaps  Paleolithic era plants simply weren’t that interesting to paint.  But this doesn’t seem like a convincing explanation.

Evidently, plants were also not very interesting to ‘think’, to use a concept of the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. If, as psychologist now believe, one of the most significant aspects of the human mind is the capacity to learn from  mimicking others – human and non-human -  then the origins of art may lie in the desire to contemplate what it was worth mimicking in other animals.    Art’s origins lie in mimesis - imitation - in the sense of copying something as an image, but this practice was worthwhile only because of the importance of copying the animals behaviour and desires. Making images allowed humans to transmit messages across time concerning valued animal behaviours, so that they could be better consolidated culturally as modes of imitation. Humans imitated each other, but also horses, lions, etc. to learn who they were as humans through recognizing their similarities and differences from these animals.

This mimicry was also capable of being elaborated. It seems Ice Age people copied, for example, the actions of another some-time biped, the cave bear, who scratched on the wall of the caves they hibernated in. Many human paintings seem to have been deliberately made over such clawing, such as these in Chauvet Cave:

They then extrapolated from the cave bear markings using their far more sophisticated mental capacities which involved thinking across different cognitive domains. In other words, they used their imagination.

But it seems possible that this initial mimicking action in relation to cave-bear scratchings led off in two directions: towards relatively similar forms of graphic marking, that is, to an abstract sign system, and also, much more radically, towards realistic pictures.

Interestingly, one of the aspects of animal life that seems to have especially preoccupied Upper Paleolithic humans was the ability of animals to move. The painters came up with a remarkable vocabulary of visual tricks for mimicking movement in static images, using the irregularities of the cave walls, the play of torch light, and even painted legs and heads as if seen at different moments in time, like time-lapse photography. Their acute responsiveness to movement  suggests an obvious interest in something animals have in common with humans,  who are relatively slow moving bipeds when compared to the four-legged lions and horses that were a common subject of cave-paintings. The ability to make a static shape mimic not only an animal form but also its movements demonstrates the amazing power of the human imagination to transform something into something else. The human-animal figures, known as therianthropes, for example, clearly suggest that Ice Age humans   were able to imagine things that did not exist in the world. This ability to imagine the impossible, the fictional, is surely one of humanity’s most important strengths - in terms of natural selection, a truly unrivaled advantage.

So while animals were significant in relation to affirming the values of human life  through the establishment of clear relationships of sameness and difference, plants existed apart, in a realm in which transfers of meanings did not so readily occur. In other words, humans are fauna, not flora. So they lack the same obvious commonalities, which made it easy for humans to mimic other animals.  

But let’s consider the abstract signs that are also prevalent in cave-painting sites. There are 32 distinct types of these symbols that were re-used over a period of 30,000 years. Could some be landscape features, and even flora?

Take a look at this example:

It is in El Castillo Cave in Spain. Here you can see what is known in paleoarcheology as a ‘penniform’ (Latin for “feather”) sign in black. It is surrounded by five bell-shaped signs in red. Doesn’t it look like a tree or a typical plant-like morphology?

Here are some more signs in La Paseiga cave in Spain. Could they be seed pods, flowers, or leaves?

In her book ‘The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols’ (2016) Genevieve von Petzinger catalogues the signs she discovered:

How many of these could be signs for plants based on schematic renderings of their morphologies, seed forms, flowers, and leaves?

But not a rose. For, as I mentioned, there would have been no wild roses growing in Ice Age Europe.

What is fascinating about the abstract signs in the caves is that they are a form of graphic communication that is proto-writing. What they share with the realistic images of animals (and rarely, humans) is that they transmit messages across time. But while the messages sent by the animals seem relatively receivable to us, the abstract signs are not.

Even if the abstract signs are plants, what did they mean? It seems clear they weren’t just decorative. Unfortunately, we will probably never know.

In a future post I will consider the arrival of plants as an important subject in the art of the Agricultural Revolution.

NOTES

Genevieve von Petzinger 2016 book is  The First Signs: Unlocking the Mysteries of the World’s Oldest Symbols.

You can watch the author giving a TED talk here: https://www.english-video.net/v/en/2377