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The Oldest Enigma of Humanity, by Bertrand David, Jean-Jacques Lefrere
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Thirty thousand years ago our prehistoric ancestors painted perfect images of animals on walls of tortuous caves, most often without any light. How was this possible? What meaning and messages did the cavemen want these paintings to convey? In addition, how did these perfect drawings come about at a time when man’s sole purpose was surviving? And why, some 10 thousand years later, did startlingly similar animal paintings appear once again, on dark cave walls? Scholars and archaeologists have for centuries pored over these works of art, speculating and hoping to come away with the key to the mystery. No one until now has ever come close to elucidating either their origin or their meaning. In their stunning audiobook and for the first time, David and Lefrre, after working together for years, give us a new understanding of an art lost in time, revealing what had until recently remained unexplainable - the oldest enigma in humanity has been solved.
- Sales Rank: #8223139 in Books
- Published on: 2017-01-24
- Released on: 2017-01-24
- Formats: Audiobook, MP3 Audio, Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 6.75" h x .50" w x 5.25" l,
- Running time: 3 Hours
- Binding: MP3 CD
Review
"A must-read. The Oldest Enigma may well have been unlocked in this fascinating new theory."—l'Express
"Staggering return to 35.000 year art. This book offers a provocative conclusion to the mystery: prehistoric man utilized small statues of animals, projected on caves walls by oil lamps, to paint. The debates begin."—Actualités
"A revolutionary theory that will trigger controversy; well worth reading."—France Magazine
"Very entertaining; this new hypothesis will provoke a great deal of
teeth grinding."—Agence France Presse
Most helpful customer reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful history. Will be looking for more books on ...
By Nadine Goodwin
Wonderful history. Will be looking for more books on this subject.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Paradigm shift
By Stephen Balbach
I'm stepping out on a limb here and saying this is that rare thing: a book written by a non-specialist that results in a paradigm shift. Bertrand David has probably solved a mystery that has alluded experts since cave paintings were first discovered in 1870: how did hunter gatherers 30,000 years ago create the artwork?
Paleolithic cave painting is mysterious because there are so many unanswered questions. They were created during a 20,000+ year period but saw little improvement in form. The oldest ones are as good (if not better) then the newest. A fully formed art tradition appeared from thin air and then lasted unchanged for 20,000 years(!). In recorded history, art traditions rise and fall even over 50 or 100 year periods much less 1 thousand. The cave art is consistent across geographic areas. It has certain unusual characteristics, such as profile views of animals and rarely is the interior body detailed. David gives another dozen or more questions that I won't go into here but they are enough to leave one in despair. Suffice to say, David has hit upon what is almost surely the right answer, one so simple it's astounding no one has thought of it before 2010. The book is a joy to read and very accessible to the average reader, indeed it would make a good young adult book. I think a lot of the literature on cave art has been destroyed by this 150 page essay written so genteelly by an unassuming artist in France. And it will surely open new avenues for exploration and discovery of what cave art has to say.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Has the Oldest Enigma of Humanity been really solved?
By Amazon Customer
I bought the book by Bertrand David and Jean-Jacques Lefrère with keen interest to see how the mystery around Paleolithic Cave Paintings has been solved. The book is small and easy to read. First few chapters of the book are about Mr David’s entry to the subject. I skipped parts of these chapters to get to the content I was eager to read. I found myself to be little disappointed with the way the key idea of the book was argued for. Their idea was simple yet needed supportive evidence. Early people used figurines of animals to cast shadows on the cave walls with the help of the ‘flickering’ flames of lamps. It is known that there is an abundance of animal figurines from the Paleolithic Period. Not only figurines but also the lamps were discovered in these Paleolithic Caves. The authour himself acknowledges the difficulty of producing a traceable image using the suggested technique. "Yet no matter how many times I tried, I never managed to arrive at a helpful rule of thumb that would make it possible to consistently obtain a clear shadow, or even discernible one for that matter"p79.
If making a shadow is such a vexing task, how could the early man do it in a deep dark cave? If the lamps were burning for a long time inside the cave they should have definitely blackened the cave roof. But one can argue that they used a method that was similar to what I used to do as a child to collect the soot from oil lamps. They might have placed a shiny side of a dry bark over the lamp to collect the soot, which they in turn used to draw in black.
The authours claim that when they came up with their idea, they didn’t know about Mr Matt Gatton’s work, which shows some similarities to theirs. According to them, Mr Matt Gatton imagined that camera obscura effect might have created a ‘negative’ image of an animal on a ‘plaquette’ that Paleolithic painters used for creating its ‘positive’ image on the cave wall (p. 111). Mr Matt Gatton in a series of papers (Gatton, M (2010) Pleistocene Coalition News Vol 2 (3) May-June p4-5, Vol 2(4) July-Aug p6-7 and Vol 2(5) Sep-Oct p8-9) explained how an appropriate size of hole on the tent of Paleolithic people could act as a camera obscura ("Paleo-Camera"), which could cast inside the tent an inverted image of an animal lurking outside. This inverted image can be traced on to a surface like a paver stone some examples of which were found in the caves. The image was small and had to be transferred onto the walls of caves via a process of projection somewhat similar to Mr David’s. However, Mr David observes that these drawings on free-standing surfaces are markedly different to the cave paintings in composition. Jean Clottes in his book on cave art agrees and says, in the least in respect of one cave, "the artists who made them [sandstone plaquettes found in Les Trois-Freres] were therefore not the same ones who had access to that cave walls." (p244 of Cave Art, Phaidon).
Furthermore, Mr Gatton’s idea seems to be somewhat convoluted for the creation of a cave art. Why do someone go through such a process when Mr David’s process is simpler. Animals are always moving and it is very difficult to imagine that they would stay quite until an artist traces the image on to some surface. Mr Gatton and Dr Leah Carreon (Gatton, M and Carreon, L (2012) Pleistocene Coalition News Vol 4 (4) July-August p1-3) uses probabilistic arguments to prove that these ancestors of ours might have seen camera obscura effect at least one per cent of the time in a day (a range of 1-8% per day). The existence of the said effect doesn’t mean a lot because observing camera obscura effect doesn’t prove that these artists used it to create the prehistoric images. On the other hand, I also believe their conclusions are confusing, to say the least. On the basis of the assumptions and deductions used to derive their probabilities they can only draw conclusions about the year not the day. Their sample space for estimating various probabilities about factors such as the weather and dwelling’s exposure to sunlight consists of the year. Thus, one should wonder how they can interpret their final probability as chances per day. In this light, even the probability of observing a camera obscura effect should be far lower than what Mr Gatton and Dr Carreon believe, i.e. between one to eight times in a 100 year period. In the final analysis, the said probabilities don't add much value anyway. One imaginative individual with the bright idea was very probably all that was required. The rest could be taken care of by the diffusion of innovation. Even though none of the points in the above discussion prove that Mr David’s approach is better, it makes it equally important contender. In favour of Mr David’s method, we can say that the artist didn’t have to go through the extra step of using the camera obscura effect to create a mobile art. The only trouble with Mr David’s method is adjusting the light to get the image displayed on the wall.
There are some other counter-arguments to the reasoning provided in support of Mr David’s method of creating cave paintings. One such argument is about the relative difficulty of the method in contrast to some easier ones. The early ancestors could have drawn these images on an animal hide in daylight, cut the shapes using their stone implements and used those cutouts to draw the outlines of animals inside the caves. If they had some supernatural theme associated with this practice, it would have been very easy for them to find time to perform the above task. As we know the areas where there was light, were usually avoided by these early painters. They could have done the drawing on an animal hide at the area near the opening of the cave and the finished product might have been carried inside to trace it on to the wall. Perhaps, few people held these cutouts on to the wall and others drew the outline. The painters did not need any extra light at all. Like reading Braille writing, a cutout can be easily traced even if there's very faint light or no light at all. Let us assume that the pubescent girls lived inside these caves as a ritual practice in Paleolithic period (Reflections on Palaeolithic Cave Art, Girls at Puberty and the Origin of Religion, published in Social Science Research Network - SSRN). They had been secluded and had nothing much to do. They had all the time to draw an image on a hide, cut it out and use it to trace an image inside the cave as a collective activity.
The second argument is concerned with the ease of testing Mr David’s hypothesis. It is easy to reverse-engineer the process and work out what the distances involved and the size of the figurines required to come up with the images on the wall had to be. Did they have enough space inside the caves to do all the manoeuvres needed to get the images right? Such a process will be almost like a definitive proof of the feasibility of Mr Davis’ hypothesis and doesn’t involve all the work discussed in the book as a proof of concept. It seems strange that the authors of the book didn’t use the above scenario to build a strong case for their hypothesis.
Thus, the Oldest Enigma of Humanity, sadly, is yet to be solved.
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