This is my first post in the blog, so I'd like to tell a story about the first painting. Not actually the first , but the first one we know about.
Who were the first “people,” who saw and interpreted the world as we do? Studies of genes and fossils agree that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa 200,000 years ago. But although these earliest humans looked like us, it’s not clear they thought like us.
The oldest dated art was found in Europe. The spectacular lions and rhinos of Chauvet Cave, in southeastern France, are commonly thought to be around 30,000 to 32,000 years old, and mammoth-ivory figurines found in Germany correspond to roughly the same time. Representational pictures or sculptures don’t appear elsewhere until thousands of years afterward. So it has long been assumed that sophisticated abstract thinking, perhaps unlocked by a lucky genetic mutation, emerged in Europe shortly after modern humans...Read More...