[muawiyah]

This stuff was discovered some time ago. THere's even a book about it.

Art hit the ground running. There appear to be no amateur, tenative, halting steps ~ there was no art, and then there was.

This is a result of some sort of genetic change that occurred in Europe first.

[blam]

"Art hit the ground running. There appear to be no amateur, tenative, halting steps ~ there was no art, and then there was."

I don't believe that. We just haven't found or the 100,000 year old art hasn't survived.

[Barset]

What an interesting theory. It holds true, though, in all the discovered cave art. There are no preliminary sketches, or practice walls. And there is perspective, and foreshortening of animals preparing to leap, which was absent from European art until the early Renaissance.

I wonder how this came to be. How would it have been genetic? How did it happen, this impulse to record the outer world?

I know the Charente region; there are caves along the river near St. Onge, just a dirt path between the caves and the trees and bushes on the riverbank. There are few tourists in the Charente, it is not that easy to get to driving, but it is one of the loveliest, to me, parts of France. It must have been paradise for our ancestors as the ice age receded.

Thank you both for your posts.

[Moonman62]

Art hit the ground running. There appear to be no amateur, tenative, halting steps ~ there was no art, and then there was.

This is a result of some sort of genetic change that occurred in Europe first.