The origins of art history can, according to invaluable.com, be traced back to the Paleolithic era, with the earliest artifacts being rock carvings, engravings, pictorial imagery, sculptures, and stone arrangements. "Art from this period relied on the use of natural pigments and stone carvings to create representations of objects, animals, and rituals that governed a civilization's existence."
What were the origins of this art of the Paleolithic period? In his book Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind, Yuval Noah Harari posits four phases in modern human's passage through time and two of those phases are co-incident with major artistic innovations.
Prior to what Harari refers to as the Cognitive Revolution, biological systems determined mankind's destiny. That is, changes to practices and methods only came about as a result of genetic mutations. The Cognitive Revolution, beginning about 70,000 years ago, resulted in a wave of innovations and new ways of thinking about the world. In this period humankind introduced a number of inventions and, more relevant to the subject at hand, began to spin stories of legends, myths, gods, and religion -- a fictive language, according to Harari. The first artworks may represent mankind's first attempts at physically manifesting the inhabitants of these stories.
A second major departure for humankind was the transition from hunter-gatherer to more settled communities, afforded by the onset of the Agricultural Revolution. Those settled communities allowed for the creation of surplus as well as the concentration of labor resources, all leading to greater monumentality in the art of the period. These two major shifts, and their impacts, are summarized in the first three panels of the chart below.
The timeline and types of art that fall into the Prehistoric sphere are depicted in the chart below. Specific examples of this type of art are provided in the second chart following.
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