let's talk about prehistoric cave paintings you've seen them before we've discovered hundreds of caves decorated with prehistoric art all across the world on every continent except Antarctica the oldest cave paintings have been dated back over 40,000 years they were painted by early Homo sapiens and possibly other now extinct species of human like neanderthals and denisovans cave paintings should provide us an amazing insight into the lives of these people and they do but if these were made by h
umans there are some things we would expect to see especially with hundreds of examples but we don't see them and we don't know why they're not present and it's kind of creepy firstly let's take a brief look at the things we do see one of the most common forms of cave art are hand stencils where human put their hand on the wall and covered the surrounding area with ochre or charcoal or whatever other pigment they had available to them you've probably seen these before but have you ever seen some
of the more unusual ones these hand stencils were found in cost cave in France notice anything strange some of the hands are missing fingers unfortunately the people who did this are no longer available for comment so we can only speculate as to why it seems like so many of them look like they don't much care for the the no feeding rule at the petting zoo it's theorized the artists may have belonged to a culture that practiced ritualistic mutilation and may have cut their fingers off as some fo
rm of sacrificial offering or to achieve some strange beauty standards there are plenty of people today who don't mind mutilating themselves or even their children so it doesn't seem that far-fetched until you consider that fingers are actually pretty useful and you probably wouldn't want to lose them in a survival setting so maybe they lost their fingers by accident maybe it was just much more common to lose a finger or two back then I mean you had all the wild animals uh frostbite was probably
a big concern and do you feel like screaming at the video yet of course these stencils don't necessarily imply the people making them were missing fingers they could have just curled some fingers up before they started painting this seems more likely and missing fingers only ever appear in these negative imprints we've never found a positive handprint with missing fingers so why would they do this the simple answer is for fun you can achieve a greater diversity of shapes by manipulating your di
gits so maybe they were just adding variety to their collection of art there is another theory though some believe early language was a combination of vocalization and bodily gestures or signals so these hands might be displaying an early form of sign language so this art might actually be a written message there's decent reason to believe this too think about how many shapes you can make with your hand if we assume that each finger can only have two position positions up or down then there are
32 permutations of hand positions if they were just randomly curling their fingers to add variety to their art then we could reasonably expect to find all permutations however in gargas cave also in France researchers found 114 hand stencils of the 32 possible hand positions only 10 were represented suggesting that they weren't just doing this at random there might be some meaning behind it and the 10 shape were all ones that can be easily made without support of a surface or another hand no one
's doing this and this would be pretty easy to do with your hand braced against the wall for painting but not so easy to do during the course of communication via your hands so maybe these are only hand signals they used for communication if that's the case we still don't know what any of it means so let's move on even more common than hand stencils are paintings of wildlife of course wild animals had a huge significance in the lives of cavemen their meat was a source of food their pelts were a
source of clothing their bones were a source of tools and their teeth and Claws were a source of death and don't forget there were a lot more animals roaming around tens of thousands of years ago than there are now take a look at this 20,000 year-old painting from Colombia it's thought this figure represents the now extinct giant ground sloth with a baby by its side and a few members of the local welcoming committee but this is a fairly crap drawing no offense grunk let's have a look at chave Ca
ve in France wow these paintings are over 30,000 years old but they're still impressive by today's standards someone who does a little art myself I can tell you that the artists who drew these pieces were very talented look at how the form is depicted with these beautiful swooping lines you can tell where the bone presses against the flesh where the fat hangs off it really makes me wonder if they had animal carcasses in the cave with them for reference or if they just drew them from memory that
would be really incredible but you know what's really weird there are no humans you might say of course there are humans depicted in cave paintings and you're right there are but very little Beyond stick figures if the artists of Chau cave could paint these creatures in such beautiful naturalistic detail why didn't they paint themselves or each other in the same way if they could draw the faces of these animals so recognizably why did no one ever draw a human face there's no human faces displayi
ng happiness sadness anger or fear no depictions of hairstyles or clothing actually there's basically no depictions of humans in chave cave despite the vast array of animal paintings researchers think there are some vague depictions of human features mixed in with the animals but well just look at the picture there are some more detailed depictions elsewhere in the world these Rock paintings from Australia might be some of the most detailed prehistoric depictions of humans we've ever found and t
hey do depict clothing this art has been estimated to be around 12,000 years old however due to the nature of their environment accurate dating proves difficult and even if they are that old apart from the clothing they're not that much different from what we're used to seeing from prehistoric art the only representations of humans seem to be very vague they don't have distinguishable features they're just stand-ins that could represent anybody rather than specific people as significant as anima
ls were to prehistoric man surely prehistoric man was also a pretty significant to other prehistoric men why wouldn't you also paint yourself or your family or the people that helped you paint all these animals or the people that helped you hunt all these animals wouldn't they be just a significant to you you wouldn't want to represent them as a bit more than stick men or Silhouettes was there some reason humans just did not want to draw detailed depictions of humans we really don't know but the
re are a number of theories we first have to recognize that we're evaluating this art through a modern lens when the entire concept of art probably meant something completely different to these people or nothing at all they may have seen it as just another tool and what we today think of as art may have been purely functional for them these could have been tools for learning a young child would grow up to be a hunter someday but it might not be safe to expose a child to a wild animal so a pictur
e might have to suffice until they come of age some animal paintings are found with unusual markings across their bodies and it's thought these may be indications of the animals reproductive Cycles in relation to a lunar calendar so maybe these were just for information and there was no need to waste your time and energy drawn a human the paintings Also may have had a religious or magical connotation for early man maybe they were part of some ritual and by creating lots of images of animals and
events they hoped this would have some impact on the world like okay I drew this on the wall as long as this is here the world will be like this I've locked it in and if they thought there was some Supernatural element to Art then maybe they thought drawing distinguishable humans rather than vague depictions of events involving humans was bad mojo if they had a real religious belief and art then maybe drawing an image of a human was considered profane or offensive or maybe it was just a taboo fo
r some cultural reason another thing to consider is today we have a very strong sense of IND individualism and also a self-obsession how many pictures of yourself do you have on your phone maybe cavem men just didn't care all that much about an individual's thoughts and feelings maybe they only really cared about human activity and that's why we only see depictions of them doing things with no indication as to how they're feeling about these things it's more like grunk kill animal not grunk see
animal and was scared then grunk find inner determination and slay Beast this give grunk self-reflect ction grunk right sad poem for animal remember these people lived in a totally different world than us today the world is very human Centric and it's been like that for a long time but back then there weren't that many of us and there were a lot more animals and as far as any human would have known the world might as well have been infinite in the grand scheme of things they were nothing everyth
ing today revolves around our self-importance we've had a long time to really consider our place as the masters of the planet and develop our sense of introspection and self-obsession maybe these artists lived in a time where these human Centric Concepts just didn't exist they just didn't think of themselves in the same way that we obsess over ourselves today being a human maybe just didn't matter nearly as much as it does now and I'm calling early humans cavemen but that's somewhat of a misnome
r the percentage of people who lived in caves was probably quite small they were hard to navigate and you needed a torch to see anything so maybe it's more about the cave than the AR like maybe they drew faces on everything trees rocks dirt but when it came to the caves maybe they were like look let's just draw the informational material say a prayer and go the caves were perhaps a place they only went to for a purpose and drawing a face could have been considered frivolous then because the art
in the caves is naturally shielded from the elements that's what survives until today while the faces on the trees rocks and dirts are lost to time none of these points are really satisfying though and they're all fairly flimsy I mean at the end of the day they were still humans they were creating art all across the world for tens of thousands of years there were all different people that probably had all kinds of different views of the world and not a single one of them drew a human face ever m
aybe there's caves out there with detailed humans on the walls that we just haven't discovered yet and I'd love to see them but it seems weird we don't have any examples from the hundreds of decorated caves we're already aware of if we do find paintings of human faces there's still the question of why are these the only ones why are they such a small percentage of the art if you're like me these unanswered questions are like an itch you can't scratch it's extremely unsatisfying so let me allevia
te at least some of the burden there are detailed depictions of humans from prehistory they're just not cave paintings the so-called Venus figurines are AR sculptures that are taught to be some sort of fertility symbol so they probably represent a goddess or an ideal rather than a specific person but they're still probably the most detailed depictions of human figures that we're currently aware of the Venus of vill andorf was carved from ultic Limestone about 30,000 years ago due to its portable
nature we're not sure exactly where it came from but somewhere in Europe it even has some sort of braided hairstyle or maybe it's a headdress still no face though the Venus of do vestan was made from ceramic about 25,000 years ago also in Europe there's a child's fingerprint on the statue that was preserved in clay when it was fired although it's thought the maker was an adult who just handed it to a child to look at before it was turned to ceramic the sculpture has slits where the eyes should
be but again the rest of the face is featureless however at the same site this was discovered archaeologists found the remains of a middle-aged woman woman who appeared to have been given a high status burial 25,000 years ago which would indicate she was well respected and she may have been some sort of Shaman her skull was found with deformities to the left side of the face that suggest some traumatic injury that occurred during childhood and left her with some facial disfigurement guess what e
lse was found at the same site an ivory carving of a female face and it's asymmetrical like the skull so not only do we have a prehistoric image of a human face but we think it's a depiction of an actual person and that's not the only face we found the Venus of Brom Pui is another Ivory carving made around 25,000 years ago that depicts a female face it looks like it broke off a larger figure at some point and we can't tell if it has hair or a wig or a headdress but it's undebatably a face so we
did make detailed depictions of humans somewhere out there there's got to be caves full of paintings of of human faces right there has to be right if we found these small easily lost examples surely we'll be able to find examples that have literally been stuck in the same place for tens of thousands of years if people could carve detailed sculptures of human faces surely they were painting them on walls in much greater numbers right well I've actually been lying to you this whole time because I
am indeed aware of at least one cave with very detailed depictions of humans facial expressions hair clothes everything in lash cave Jesus these prehistoric Frenchmen were mad into the art there are over a thousand images etched into limestone 155 of which are humans the images are kind of hard to make out because a lot of them are literally etched on top of each other but there are humans with smiles on their faces beards some of them are obese they look like they might represent real people th
ese drawings are supposedly 15, th years old but they're a far cry from anything else we've seen from this era they look more like modern art and that's why I left it until now to bring it up because a lot of people think they are modern art there is a lot of controversy surrounding the Lamar cave drawings and their authenticity some people think they're forgeries some organic material found at the site like an engraved reindeer antler was studied and found to date back around 15,000 years but t
he etchings are not as easy to date the site was excavated in 1937 and the findings were widely met with skepticism with some outright accusing the researchers of forging the drawings today nearly 90 years later it seems like the scientific consensus is leaning more towards the drawings being authentic but as far as I can tell there's no definitive proof and there may never be unless we find another site with similar images that can be dated more precisely so did cavemen draw detailed depictions
of themselves maybe the Venus figurines are probably our best indications that they didn't have a problem with it or at least some of them didn't but they might have been the exception to the rule when we're talking about so many people over such a long period of time we have to recognize that there were a lot of rules and a lot of exceptions history has shown that if humans are capable of doing something then inevitably some of them will do it when we consider that we should expect to see more
human faces in prehistoric art right our best guess as to why we don't is that maybe our sample size isn't large enough but if we found every surviving prehistoric artwork tomorrow would we see that detailed depictions of humans actually do make up a significant portion of them maybe even a majority of them like we might expect we can only comment on the sample size we do have and that comment would be there are barely any human faces depicted in prehistoric art and that's pretty weird okay let
's go then oh Jesus they don't have disting distinguishable you can tell where the bone Precious Precious you can tell where the bone prees prees stop doing that press where the bone presses you can tell where the f I think that's the best take every time what I fail every [ __ ] time Common forms of cave art are hand stencils where a [ __ ] put what the [ __ ] and a few members of the local we [ __ ] God damn it was good up until that maybe they were just like look [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] b
ollocks I am human and I need to just like everybody else does however at the same site this was discovered archaeologists found the remains of a middle-aged ah you're [ __ ] CA okay that's probably enough then oh I'm getting old
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