Primitive people painted animals with several legs and heads on stones and placed these images near
“Perhaps it was like watching TV, where they sit by the fireplace, chatting, warming their hands by the fire and painting,” says Andy Needham, an archaeologist at the University of York.
Needham and his colleagues believe that primitivepeople drew around the fire at night for a reason. The authors suggest that the flickering flame improved the artist’s work and helped to correctly perceive his work - in dynamics.
What is the new study about?
In a study published in PLOS ONE,the team created exact 3D replicas of the 15,000-year-old carvings, searing them with fire. This helped "revive" the drawings of ancient animals engraved on the stone. Proximity to the fire makes the figures move - horses and other images began to dynamically move along the rock.
Needham and his colleagues examined 50 limestonetablets - roughly the size of an iPhone to an iPad - found in the Montastruc rock shelter along the Aveyron River in southern France. As the last Ice Age waned, about 15,000 years ago, the artists living here began using flint and stone blades to carve geometric patterns and motifs into the surface of the rocks, as well as ancient animals. Horses, mountain goats, reindeer, red deer, bison - their designs often appeared on stone fragments.
Who created the original animation?
The artists were representatives of the Magdaleniancultures, hunter-gatherers who lived in Europe from approximately 23,000 to 14,000 years ago. The Magdalenians, who lived at the end of the last Ice Age in a cold but gradually improving climate, created much art, from decorated tools to engraved bones and famous cave paintings.
In addition to the tablets in the Lascaux cave, in France, they foundstone arrowheads and tools, and some famous artwork, including the famous Floating Reindeer, a 13,000-year-old mammoth tusk sculpture depicting two reindeer, nose to tail.
How did scientists decide that fire helped bring the drawings to life?
Thousands of Magdalenian tablets have been found onthe territory of modern Spain, Portugal and the Channel Islands of Great Britain, as well as France. These stones show thermal cracks, as well as pink discolored streaks: they appeared as a result of exposure to fire. Because of this, researchers began to wonder under what circumstances the stones interacted with fire. Was this an integral part of the creative process or did it appear later, for example due to a fire.
It wasn't easy to figure this out.Now the tablets are stored in the British Museum, where they can be viewed online. This means that the archaeological context, namely the place where they were found, is lost. Therefore, the authors turned to experimental archeology to learn more about their history.
The team first created new engraved plaques made from limestone and experimented with them to understand how fire could create those distinctive pink heat marks.
They buried some artificial tablets andlit a fire around them to simulate random exposure to fires. Others were fired as if they were being used to control the fire. And the rest was placed next to the fire so that its light illuminated the drawings.
The team then applied the software,to edit the images and compare the fire-treated copies with the original. The results show that the heat marks on the stones were not due to an accidental fire. Although several bone horn artifacts show such damage. The authors concluded that, most likely, the drawings were made to look at them near the fire.
How did the drawings come to life?
Researchers believe that lighting from a fireplacewas an integral part of the creation and "consumption" of art. The flickering light creates a mesmerizing effect on the carving, which is very different from what is seen under steady light.
“You can see, for example, a sign withseveral horses, and as the light flickers, shapes begin to appear and disappear. It creates a kind of storytelling about horses moving on the surface of the rock, ”says author Izzy Visher, a graduate student at Durham University.
Vischer and her colleagues studied how it wasThe fire is directed according to the thermal damage on the stones. Next, she used virtual reality to create a flickering fire and arrange 3D models around it. In this way, it is possible to restore the approximate conditions under which primitive people looked at their drawings.
Due to irregular lighting, a person sees only brief, ambiguous outlines and shapes of an animal - this prompts the human brain to fill in the gaps and complete the picture.
People often observe familiar objects or patterns inrandom places, such as a face in the clouds or a dog in a piece of burnt toast. This effect, known as pareidolia, occurs because our brains are wired to look for these patterns. For generations, pareidolia has helped humans survive, for example by identifying a predator in the bushes.
Pareidolia may have deep evolutionary roots. The researchers suggest that the Ice Age artists used it in a very different way - to help the creative process.
For example, they used an overlay of severalshapes of the same subject to help create the animation. This effect has been observed in part of the Magdalenian rock paintings, in which some animals have multiple heads or extra pairs of legs.
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