Hello all welcome back! Here is
our next class module for you. This is going to be on the Paleolithic. Now, I
may have said this before but as a general rule we're gonna try to keep the actual
lectures or the narrated PowerPoints somewhere in between say a total of two to three
hours, and that's because I want to try to leave time for you guys to do the readings and the work
and try to keep that all within the time frame of what course hour credits would be. So,
this is a pretty long one: Paleolithic is a very broad span of time there's
a lot of stuff going on and I happen to be madly in love with it, so hopefully
you guys will like it too, and there's a lot of things that really set the stage, in the
Paleolithic, for things that we will see later on. Yes, I put another little 3d image in that
doesn't really have anything to do with the class, but I saw it and I thought he was adorable, and it
reminded me of all those old movies where you see, you know, caveman running around
with dinosaurs, so I thought: okay well let's give a shout out to that.
So, there you go. All right, let's move on... So, we've just got one card
up for this class this week, but there's a lot of stuff kind of jam-packed
in there. We don't have the images and concepts really divided up on this one, but since
there's not a lot of images you need to remember I think this should do pretty okay for you.
Again, however you want to use this to study is entirely up to you: you could print it out
and then sort of write your notes on it or you could take a screenshot of it and then write
your notes in a notebook the old-fashioned way, however you want to do it is fine with me. You
can copy and paste into a word processor program, type it up on your phone, however you want to do
it's entirely up to you, just make sure you are paying attention to these things and it's going
to make sure that the quiz goes nice and easy and quick for you. One other thing I want
to point out, way on the bottom there, the last thing on that list, don't forget your
notes from the terms and examples PowerPoint, that is going to come into
play on your quiz as well. So right now we're going to be talking
about uh, the Paleolithic era. Paleolithic means "old stone" okay, "paleo"
is old and "lithic" is stone. The Paleolithic era is broken down largely
into three periods, I know there's four here but uh, Solutrean is, is, pretty much accepted now
to be uh, really part of the Magdalenian. So it's it's not really um, it's not really a separate
thing anymore, but I leave it in there just in case you guys are doing your own research and you
happen to find a source that means it mentions Solutrean and then you're like but hey where the
heck does that fit in, that's where it fits in. The three main ones that we're going
to look at are Aurignacian, Gravettian and Magdalenian. Now I'm never going
to ask you to remember dates because I don't feel that anything that can be easily
looked up is something that you need to remember As long as you remember the order that they come
in: Aurignacian is first then comes Gravettian and then comes Magdalenian, as I say, we're
not going to talk about Solutrean at all, and that's pretty easy to remember because it's
in alphabetical order "a,g,m". Now each of them have different things that are happening
in them" Aurignacian is where we first get cave art it's where we first get a lot of the
evidence of habitation by humans in caves, the paintings, handprints, etc. Gravettian
is when you get you start to get a lot of um figures in addition to, especially fertility
figures, in addition to the handprints etc and Magdalenian is when you start getting
some really advanced stuff. You start getting a lot of decorated weapons, you start
to...getting stuff that looks like it might be pointing towards some sort of spiritual
or religious beliefs a lot of people say that's the beginning of animism
in, in human existence but who knows Now this is what I'm talking about with
hand prints. There's actually two varieties but the first one that shows up uh, are these
positive hand prints and the positive hand prints is is very, you know, much like
somebody just dips their hand into um pigment and then just sticks it up on the
wall. Now, though the slides that you just saw were positive hand prints just on a wall along
with some other symbols and things like that, sometimes we find them grouped together in a very
specific and purposeful uh, order or organization. This here is the first cave we're going to look
at, it's in Chauvet France... most of the caves we're going to look at are in France because
that's where the quote-unquote "good stuff" is. It just lasts better there um, and they're
the prettiest ones, so you tend to... and air quotes "prettiest"... so you tend to want to show
those especially in a survey class when you don't have a lot of time to look at stuff. If you're
having a hard time seeing the hand prints um, you can kind of make out the little
fingers here and there's the little thumb okay, here's the (didn't really show too good)
same thing here and there's a little thumb you can kind of start to see them a little bit and again, that positive handprint is just taking
the right hand, because most people back then just like today seem to be right hand dominant, right
into that pigment and put it up onto the wall. And interesting things happens when you look
at other things in the cave. Chavez seems to be very much connected with bears and
bear imagery... they don't eat bears but they do seem to have a reverence for
them. There's a place in Chauvet cave where there's just like a bear skull that's
put up on um, like a little shelf of of uh stone I guess you could say, um, the bear clearly
didn't die there, it was clearly placed there uh, so that among with all of the other cave
bear images seem to suggest that they have a very strong connection with bears and I superimposed
an outline of a bear that is also found in Chauvet and what I think you see is that it does
appear to be lining up pretty well... I mean the placement of the leg is a little
off so the leg would be over here I guess um, just draw another leg in there
right, but it does appear to look like some kind of an animal figure and
since Chauvet is known for its bears well that might make sense. So you say well, why
would all of these people want to come together and make a hand image of a bear... well we
kind of have things like that today don't we? Where our sports teams and our colleges
are named after, you know, we have mascots and usually those mascots are big important
kind of animals right? We don't have a football team that's named the baby squirrels, we
don't have a, maybe a little league team, but you don't have a baseball team that's
like the cute and fluffy bunnies right? We have the Bears we have, uh you know, I... we're
the Sharks right? We're the SUNY Suffolk sharks um, it's always something that's sort of
impressive in some way and why do we do that? Well because we want to invoke authority. We want
to invoke a feeling of, of power and strength and you find that in a lot of tribal cultures
as well. Of course the Native Americans they have um, very specific relationships with
animals and again it's this idea that you can share the attributes thereof, so it kind of makes
sense um, that you would find a tribe of hunters who want to associate, or even just the entire
tribe, who want to associate with something big and strong that they find impressive
and maybe that they revere a little bit Speaking of bear images here is one right
here now. We talked about style words before and you remember we had naturalistic, abstract, and non-objective... which one is this? Is
this naturalistic, abstract or non-objective? Well while you think about that, let me help
you out. You know it can't be non-objective because non-objective is "not an object" and we
can clearly see that this is the front of a bear so it's clearly not non-objective, which
leaves us with naturalistic or abstract. So which one do you think it is Now if you said naturalistic consider
the following: naturalistic has to look like the thing, but it also has to have all the
features in place right? So bear: two eyes or at least one eye if it's a profile... we don't
have that, they don't have that in this bear. This bear is basically just an outline, so he is
an abstraction. This is an abstraction of a bear so we know that it's not
talking about an actual bear, it's talking about some aspect of bear
or some sort of spiritual idea of bear Now, if we look at the line
and what's actually depicted, the places where it's most
pronounced...(it) doesn't have legs but the face is very strong, the
mouth is very strong and the hump right, is very pronounced as well and if you think about it, what what's
the part of a bear that you could respect or fear the strength of? The bear right,
and the fact the bear can eat you. So bears aren't known for their speed, so
you don't need the legs, and sure enough they haven't put in any legs . Bears aren't known
for their keen eyesight and eyes aren't well known to help with strength so... he looks
very surprised... but no eyes there right but a bear can eat you and snarl and be loud, we've got that and a bear is very big and very
strong and certainly the hump on the bear is something that's very impressive and makes it
look very big. I don't know how much they know about the musculature of bears, but humps also
help with the big, massive strength of bears. So a couple of things about this: we know that it's
some sort of spiritual bear, a symbol of bear... In the hump we have these three marks... those three marks are non-objective remember those because those will come back One of the things that we use to try to understand symbols is called "ethnographic
comparison"... "ethnographic comparison" And an ethnographic comparison
is when you know about a different culture so you try to compare the culture you
don't know to the one that you do know. Usually, there has to be some kind
of connection; either the one group, the earlier group will grow into the later group
or the later group maybe um, you know supplanted the earlier group or there's trade going on or
something like that. Now, we're in France... Arguably, arguably, you can draw a connection between these
guys and the much, much, much later on Celts... because the earliest celts will go around and kind of grow
out of different regions in Europe. There might be a connection there. With these really, really early cultures you
can kind of get away with using anybody because technically, you know, anybody in Europe could
have grown out of these French people in these caves... they're not French yet but that's where
the caves are... So anyhow um, what is interesting is that if you look at early Celtic and if
you look at Greek cultures, both of them have the bear as a very important
part of their belief system Now, both the Celtic Artio and the Greek
Artemis have to do with um, the ideas of life and fertility uh, in the case of Artemis there
is a, um, I guess you could say ceremony where priestesses will dress up in bear
clothing. In the case of Artio, whose name I'm confident I'm pronouncing
horribly wrong, uh she is associated directly with bears and also fertility uh, she'll
actually, very much like a bear, she's she uh is associated with the spring because
she'll go to... she sleeps all through winter and then wakes up in spring where she brings
all the flowers back and things like that... so considering what we know about these cultures
and these cave, air quote "cave people", that they live in the cave in the winter when
it's cold and horrible and then they come out in the spring, it's very interesting
to make that comparison So, these bears could be talking about the rebirth of spring could also be talking
about the rebirth of an individual but since it seems that the bear is associated with
the tribe as a whole, it probably is more of a whole tribe type thing. The other interesting
thing of course is that both of these goddesses are very strongly associated with women and
caves in a lot of cultures become associated with females as well, so it might all very neatly uh,
sort of tied together to be this thing of rebirth, maybe not just of the seasons but
also in some way for the tribe Incidentally, just in case
anybody was interested I've, well you won't know, I've added
it for you it'll always be here but this word Arktoi is actually the name of those
um little bears of Artemis... they're called the the uh the young priestesses who will actually
dress up in in bear pelts for the ceremony uh, the ritual for Artemis and I just... it's so
close to um the word Artio there for the goddess So remember those three, three little lines there They show up in a lot of places as part of
a larger group of non-objective symbols. Now I'm going... gonna be 100 honest with you
now: we literally have no idea what this is No one's been able to figure it out just yet um... it's a little bit hard to see so I'm gonna
draw this in for you... these are horse heads so we have what appear to be two groups: we have two yellow horse head group and one
red horse head group. Photographs tend to flatten things out so you're not seeing it as it
would be, so for example this makes it look like they're curved ...they're not they're they're if
you look at it in person they're pretty flat and you can't see it here but there are three lines.
So each of these groups have the three lines .Two yellow horse head has like three
circles that are all relatively the same size one red horse head has one big
one and then four little ones Literally have no idea what this
means nobody's figured it out yet but the point that it makes obviously the horse heads are abstract symbols but the circles and the lines... because you
can tell they're horses... um are non-objective they're clearly set up to be two distinctly
different groups but what they mean beyond that is really anybody's guess it's... it's very cool
and I show it to you as an example of how complex the art and the thought process behind it actually
was. These guys are are much more um thoughtful than we might give them credit for. Now
since those lines are on the bear as well, it could be that they have something to do with
the idea of fertility or rebirth or strength I think that it has to do with the idea of
some sort of healing or some sort of rebirth and I'll tell you for why Because of this guy. This guy is Otzi. Now good
old Otzi the iceman is um from from significantly later on he's from the copper age but, and he's
he's from Italy uh he was found in in the Otzel uh region which is uh i believe sort of in between
Italy and Austria so it was found in the Otzel uh Alps in that region and that's why his name
is Otzi. So Otzi has a whole bunch of tattoos on him... now this is one of those times
where if you want to see more of Otzi just let me know maybe I'll even uh put um, a
little thing uh in the in the discussion tab uh, so you can tell me if you
want to see more about Otzi there but um Otzi was found with a lot of
weapons a lot of very cool stuff and he's very well preserved... he's basically
a freeze-dried mummy uh, he is certainly one of the oldest natural mummies that have ever
been found... he's in relatively good condition except right here um when they were digging him
up they were kind of, using a backhoe and they they ripped off some of him... too bad for little
Otzi but among his tattoos what feature the most prominent are these ones that are just lines and
there's a lot of them that are just three lines so the other thing about these tattoos that he
has they're grouped around places where studies have shown that he would have been in pain...
there's a bit of evidence of, in some cases, healed fractures in some cases early, well not
really early because he was I believe he's in his 40s or 50s... I'll have to look that up um but
he's not a "youngin", he's not a spring chicken that's for sure, but uh he had evidence of um...
shoot what is that called now... arthritis and so these tattoos may have been helping that. I
had a student who actually... participated in um like uh a lot of uh alternative medicine type
stuff and she said that a lot of these regions are where people would would give acupuncture for
certain things so maybe that even has something to do with the placement of them, I don't
know but that's a pretty cool thought. So if he has these in regions where he was in pain and
maybe wanted healing that could help bolster the argument that those lines and their association
with the bear means it's something about healing it's a possibility. The other uh
symbol I want you guys to notice is this one right here: that's a
cross. Now we were talking earlier about how non-objective symbols can mean different
things depending on the culture that you're in um this is a great example of that. If
you are of a Judeo-Christian background, you look at that and you say wow that's a cross
why does Otzi have a cross on him... The thing is Judeo-Christians actually borrowed this symbol...
this symbol, or adopted it I should say. This symbol is ancient, this symbol is prehistoric,
this stems... this symbol this cross symbol is actually found in a lot of caves um, we
call it the "axis mundi" a oh my lord... a x i s m m-u-n-d-i and what that means
what the axis mundi is is the center of the world the crossing of the worlds
okay so this line here this up and down represents heaven up here and the realm
of the dead or the underworld down here and then this line represents our
world, the realm of the living So the axis mundi represents the
fact that all of these realms are connected they're all joined together So, it becomes a symbol of connecting heaven
the underworld and the realm of the living and that connection means that you
can have life, death, and rebirth all right, so and I think I've said
this before but I'll say it again: life, death, and rebirth, that's the original
triumvirate, it's the original trinity. Life, death, and rebirth is going to be so
important to early cultures and it's going to stay important which is why the number three
maintains its importance in a lot of different cultures and I will just point out again that
those lines in the bear: there's three of them and even on Otzi not all of his tattoos
but a lot of them are threes, as well as this very wonderful axis mundi, this connection
between heaven the underworld and our world... life, death, and rebirth. Now we will see
that again we'll see it an awful lot um Yeah... okay so i i hesitate to mention
this because it is such a loaded word but um the swastika originally it's not a
negative symbol originally it's a symbol of celestial good fortune, healing, luck all of
those things and it actually grows out of this axis mundi as well. You take this symbol you
add little arms to it and that puts a spin on it so it's spinning so that all of the the
points are overlapping and crossing each other um most of them turn from east to west and it is
that idea that the sun rises in the east and sets with the west... you're going with the sun um
the Buddhist one actually spins the other way and, or the arms at least make it look
like it's spinning the other way, um I'm not sure why that is
traditionally um I read one suggestion that said uh the symbol, the
Buddhist took the symbol from uh Hinduism and because they wanted it to look different
they they twist they turned it around... I don't know if that's true or not I think that sounds
overly simplistic but the one thing I can tell you is that one nazi [ __ ] ruined that symbol for
basically everybody else who ever used it in the entire world and when I say anybody else who used
it in the entire world what i mean is uh Hindu, Buddhist, Native American, Celtic, Greek... the
list goes on and on. If you are interested in that and if that's something you'd want to see more of let me know and I will show you some
images of that and we can talk about it because it is a very interesting um phenomenon to
know that weirdly uh it was a very beloved symbol before, as I said, the one nazi [ __ ] ruined
it for everybody else... and when I say it was a beloved symbol, like you had good luck
coins in America that included the swastika as as a symbol of good luck right alongside
horseshoes and four-leaf clovers... it's wild it's just wild how, you know, and in a sense
that's what we were talking about earlier as well: context, right? If you're not in the culture
it means something or it can mean something completely different you know axis mundi if
you see this and your Judeo-Christian: oh it's a cross. If you're not: oh it's axis mundi. Same
thing with that symbol: if you're Hindu, oh that's a symbol of of of blessing of good fortune of good
luck, if you're ancient greek oh that's protection you know and just one nazi [ __ ] to ruin it
all for everyone ...it's weird man it's weird Excuse me it came out of nowhere! Usually
I try to pause... what can I say you guys are really getting the live experience
today... so anyhow yeah let's move on So, these are just some more pictures of Otzi's
tattoos and you can kind of see what I was talking about, that many of them are the groups of three.
He has at least two of those axis mundi's and he does have some groups of four or more or four plus
threes as well, so this is a little bit of a segue but it's a good one because I
mentioned at some point, I think when I was talking to you guys about different
things that I'm hoping you guys will get out of this the ability to be able to look at
what's going on in the world around you, in your world, in your life, in the things that
you like and enjoy, and be able to spot things and say oh okay that that is a motif that
means this this is a continuation of this idea and so on and so forth well I've got one
of those for you here and the axis mundi is a symbol that just shows up again and again and
again in the ancient world but it also shows up a lot in the modern world. This is actually from
a video game that came out I believe in 2019 although thanks to what I think we all
refer to as the lost years of Covid I'll have to look that up in check but I'm
pretty sure it came out right before it, anyway the video game was called Death Stranding
and I'm not going to do any spoilers just in case there's anybody out there who hasn't played it
yet and might want to play it, I think it was an absolutely amazing game not only for
content but just for a lot of the themes that sort of appeared throughout it many of them
are themes that we've already started to see in the paleolithic mindset. So the most obvious
one here, this is on a character in the game that has a lot to do with the idea of death
and rebirth and what's the symbol that's front and center on this character? Well
it's an axis mundi right? We have heaven the underworld of the world of the dead and then our plane of existence right so again it's that
axis mundi symbol that life, death, and rebirth symbol being used in a context where it's
meaning, well, you would expect it to be but to see it in in a modern
context, in a video game, that's just really really cool and it just
emphasizes what I keep saying that you're not going to remake these symbols, these symbols
exist and we're going to keep returning to them. It's almost a primordial motif somewhere deep
inside of our brains that we keep coming back to you'll also notice he has a lot of handprints on
him that again has something to do in the game with this idea of illustrating a presence an
existence which I think is something you also see in those handprints in the paleolithic art and
we also have another sort of example of that in our modern world where you you have stars do their
handprints in cement right? It's kind of a way to show that they were there, they exist there's this
permanence about them: they've earned this right to sort of tell the world forever
that they existed that they're there and then you have people come by and put their
hands in the star handprints and be like ah my hand fits whoever's hand right and that
kind of makes a connection so all of these motifs they start so early on in our history but
they're such a part of what makes us human in this shared experience called life that we still
see them and we still use them and I love that So going back now to the cave in Chauvet, just to remind you of where we
were with those positive handprints we have negative handprints as well and far from looking very organized far
from looking like a very specific animal here we have these negative handprints that are
literally all over the place they're also farther back in the cave which implies that it has a
different meaning and a different function. The other thing that researchers have
noted about these hands they're not all the same hands... so you see here we have more
left hands than right hands... now why is that well think about how these images are made. I've
said they're negative hand prints so basically they're using the hand as a stencil, they put
the hand up on the wall and they chew some kind of pigment in their mouth and they spit it
out through a hollow reed or a hollow bone, basically one of the earliest air guns in
existence, and then they take their hand away and it makes a really cool impression on the
wall. Now as you can see this wall has been used for this purpose over and over and over and over
again for possibly generations they're not, oh and why they're mostly left-handed? Well, because
you're gonna hold the straw in your dominant hand right so that's why they're mostly left hands.
You do have a couple of righties which proves that even way way back in the day... let me pick
another color that will show up... even way way back in the day you do have uh some people
who are left-hand dominant rather than right hand dominant. You also apparently have female
hands as well as male hands uh all different ages because of all different sizes there's even
baby hands there's even baby hands on this wall! I don't have a picture of it... I'm sorry but
there are some baby hands on this wall as well so it is very clearly something different... it's
farther back in the cave it's harder to get to the belief is that it has it might have had
something to do with a kind of healing ritual um that you would take the person back there and
you would put the hand up on the cave wall again with this idea that the cave was a
manifestation of some sort of female energy or bear energy bear for protection,
bear for healing that kind of thing and for the minute that your hand is up there
with the pigment being blown around it you and the wall are the same color so you and the wall of the
cave are one and then when you take your hand away it must have looked like something almost
magical that as your hand gets pulled away your hand remains on the wall but also the
bit of the cave that was painted over the same color comes with you on your hand so it
would be very easy to kind of imagine this being a healing ritual. Is that what it is? Who
knows? But it is very cool to speculate on it, and you can see how different it looks
some people have said this said to me that this looks hellish and it unsettles
them... I hope it doesn't unsettle you Now speaking of things that look very different we
come to a room that has two very different styles in it, this is the firsy, side note: so it's
a small room. it's so small you could probably reach your arms like spread your arms out and
touch one side with one arm and with one hand and the other side with the other hand that's how
small it is but the images in this room are very very different. So on one side we have
animals that look like this and they're very they're very almost ethereal looking they don't look solid and part of what's
giving them that feel is the way that they were created we're gonna focus up on the horsey because he's
my favorite but also because he's the clearest of the images. Now where as the other images
we've seen so far, the bear and most of the other images that we're going to see in caves in
general, are made by applying paint to the wall, these guys are made differently, they're actually
made by scratching into the wall. There's a very soft kind of sediment that's on the cave wall
and they can literally just using their fingers and maybe a stick if they feel like using
a stick ,can just kind of scrape off that top layer and that's how these were made. So
right off the bat they have a different feel just because of the way that they look
but if you look at this horse, now again which one of our style words is this: is this
naturalistic, abstract, or non-objective? If you're having a problem, let's
compare it to the other side of the cave, of a... of the room of the cave,
remember you just spread your arm across you touch one hand to this
guy and your other hand would be touching these guys. Now look at these horses and compare these horses to the
horse we were just looking at I think you can see what I'm getting at... these
guys look so very naturalistic. They're just a whole bunch of different horses um, it looks like
they're even eating... I love this guy, he's my favorite. Look at him! His little horsey mouth is
open and he's he's got a little horsey chin and his little horsey nose and their little manes I
mean they are they're so so beautifully rendered very naturalistically now here's where I got to
tell you some bad news... remember how I told you that they don't eat the bears? They eat
the horses. Paleolithic man eats horses um, if you are a fan of horses I'm very sorry to
have to tell you that, but on the plus side um they draw really nice pictures of horses and
that probably has to do with some kind of spiritualization of the horse. Now why do I say
that? Well even though this is a naturalistic depiction so it's clearly talking more
about horse and the horsiness of horse, it's still in a place that's kind of farther
back in the cave it's a dark cave room so just because it's naturalistic doesn't mean
that it doesn't have an important meaning, just like if you think back to the first half of
class today just because something is utilitarian doesn't mean that it's not important. In this
case it could very well be something like you are making this image in celebration of the horse
that you will eat to appease the horse spirits so that they will let you eat them or maybe
to bring more horses to allow you to hunt and to eat them that's not too far-fetched, I
know in a few Native American cultures, especially northwest coast, you have a practice where you'll
decorate your weapon, like a harpoon, beautifully and the idea is that the whale that you're
hunting or maybe the seal that you're hunting will look at it and kind of go: oh all
right, you spent a lot of time on that weapon you obviously appreciate my life so
I'll let you kill me and and eat me um, it might seem a little bit weird to us maybe
but um, it does it it kind of makes sense. So these images, very naturalistic, clearly
talking about the physicality of a horse versus versus this guy. Now hopefully you can see, when you compare it to how naturalistic those
other horses were, that this is clearly more abstract. He doesn't have the same kind
of detail he doesn't have the same kind of you know emphasis on his mouth uh,
that might be an eye that they gave him but it also could just as easily just be you know some kind of a schmear or something
...now it looks like he's wearing horsey glasses neigh... but what really sets it apart uh as being
abstract there's something in there that doesn't go with horse it's not helping the horsiness
of horse so to speak it's this line here that doesn't seem to go with
"horse" right? It's it's not it's not a physical descriptor of horse but if
you think about it and again I know I have a lot of artists in this class, what does this
line kind of invoke, what kind of a feeling? Especially if you take it uh, in turn with
these kind of lines that are underneath it does that kind of feel like motion? like movement? If you ever watch a slow-mo thing of a
horse's head especially the head kind of goes up and down and up and down so to me it
feels very much like this is talking about motion or something like that. Now the other
ones are so solid they're definitely talking about "horse" be it the horse that they
eat or the horse that they want to eat whereas this one is clearly talking about
movement or flow or something like that and since they're in the very same room I think
that's such an interesting comparison that we have solid horse naturalistic horse on one wall
and then we have the kind of spirit horse on the other side of it, it's very much a dichotomy...
"dichotomy" means two different sides of the same thing so for example, or not necessarily of
the same thing, but two opposites that you put them together and they make a stronger sort of
meaning, so like death plus life equals rebirth right? male and female are a dichotomy: they're
opposites, right, but when you put them together you can get the idea of life or something like
that ying and yang is a dichotomy as well, uh up and down that's a dichotomy, right?
So... light and dark... anyhow um it really is it hints at a very interesting thought process
going on uh in these paleolithic cave artists be it whether or not this is talking about
speed or spirit or what the juxtaposition in this room definitely suggests that it
is something very interesting going on and this is an owl also from Chauvet... I'm
just... I'm showing it to you because it's cute and also they don't eat owls so why
are they depicting an owl? Your guess is as good as mine. Usually owls are symbols of
the night um, you know usually they are seen as very wise messengers... birds in general
in the ancient world are seen as being very sort of special creatures because they can fly
and of course again think of the axis mundi, right: heaven, underworld our plane of existence.
A bird can fly up right a bird is not bound to our plane of existence right, um , ducks ducks
are like the ultimate of spiritual bird for the ancient people because they fly up but they
can also dive under the surface of the water and water is considered a symbol of
life but some cultures actually believe that you get to the underworld by going
underwater um the Mayans have that belief Water is is very typically associated with that
so ducks are especially kind of this weird, wonderful creature... remember this
because it's going to come back and now we're entering into a
Gravettian era cave: Cosquer Now as we move on to the uh second period, the
Gravettian period, we're going to visit our second cave which is called Cosquer and we're still in
France, and Cosquer's earliest dates are about 2200 bce sorry 22 000 bce um I have a problem with
hundreds and thousands I don't know what it is but I just I always mess it up so I'm gonna try
not to do that again but I will. Anyhow, these are negative handprints but do you see something
different about them? You see anything different? The handprints are making symbols try to do that a little
better... they're making signs now what exactly do these signs mean? We don't know but what we do know is that there's an awful lot of them.
There's an anthropologist who went around uh cataloging and probably still
cataloging all the ones that he found and he tries to um recreate how they may have
made them and there's just so many of them and what it is seems to be a
genius way of communication. They don't have written language but they have
hands so they can effectively throw up a hand sign do a negative handprint of it and use that as
a way of communicating with others... it's genius it's genuinely genius and beautiful. Now what
exactly do they mean, again, we don't know. One researcher suggested that
they are based in animal kingdom stuff so I don't really see it... this one kind
of looks like a bird maybe this one kind of looks like a bear paw maybe but, other than that
I don't really see it but it's cool and and you can see how that would work because if you
walk up to somebody and flash the peace sign well they'll probably flash the peace sign back
if you walk up to somebody and and flash them an i love you sign well you'd probably make them
smile and make their day if you walk up to someone and flip them the bird chances are you'll have a
very different reaction. So hand gestures are very very effective, they're a very effective way of
communication and it seems as though not only did the paleolithic people know that but they
also figured out a way to I guess you could say utilize it as a visual form of
communication for when they weren't there, right? They really found
a way to kind of evolve it Now I've been showing you a whole bunch of
hand prints so I figured, let me show you some footprints. Cosquer is remarkable in that the the
ground was so soft that you get these footprints captured in the silt and since as I've mentioned,
when you go back into these caves the farther you get into the chambers the more difficult it is
and it's not something that everyone was doing so you don't have foot traffic over foot
traffic over foot traffic over foot traffic so in in some cases the conditions are just
right and here we have one of those just right conditions where the footprints of this
artist from thousands of years ago are captured, perfectly preserved you can see it and
apparently they had big feet because that's that that's a ruler. That's a foot ruler
so that's a foot long it's a foot long it's a foot long! Oh i'm gonna see myself
out now... and I will see myself back in to do another comparison with you... both of
these images are abstract. One of them is of an ibex which is a kind of sort of goat
creature kind of thing maybe sort of deer-like probably more deer-like than goat-like hey
it has antlers and hooves there you go, and um that is in Cosquer, and then of course
down here you have a horsey from Chauvet. Now both of these are done in that scrapey style, both
of them have some extra bit inside of them but they're depicted in two completely different
ways so whereas we said this abstraction seemed to be talking about movement or speed or something
like that this one with the ibex clearly isn't um I'm not sure what they're talking about
there, maybe they're trying to talk about where to hit the ibex maybe
it's some kind of of um uh coloring thing I don't know um, there's many things we don't know but it
definitely the cross hatching is definitely a different feel than a line like that so whatever
that abstraction is, it's clearly very different. And one last painting from Cosquer,
it hasn't held up that fantastically, again caves are wet places anyway uh doubly so for
caves like Cosquer that is now mostly underwater, but I just had to show these guys to you
they're great auk, they're basically a kind of giant penguin I think there was
something like four or five feet tall and uh I just love the idea of there being
giant penguins walking around France... so yeah they are...I think they're very cute.
Okay so now we're going to go to Lascaux, France uh for the our Magdalenian period cave
which is our last period in the paleolithic era and we're 20 000 to 15 000 bce and it says
bc there; bc and bce are essentially the same thing it's just different ways of saying it. BC is
"before Christ", BCE is "before the common era", so you can see why people might gravitate towards
bce and then on the other side of, air quotes, "zero" ,there is not really a zero there's not
really a year zero, so, but on the opposite side of bce we have the dates AD or CE. CE is "common
era", AD is uh "anno Domini" which means "in the year of our lord" so again you can see why we're
gravitating more towards uh ce or bce but um, lots of books still do bc and so do I when I just
type because I'm tired... one other thing I need to apologize for very quickly guys, if you're
hearing a lot of rough cuts or if I'm repeating some stuff I'm very sorry but again I don't have
my new computer yet so I've been trying to do all of this on my tablet and it hasn't been terribly
reliable so I'm having it cut out a lot I'm having it go to sleep when I don't want it to I'm
having it erase slides on me that I know that I saved so when I go back to check on things they're
just not there and I have to re-record them and um I'm running out of time to do that now because
I want to make sure that your test is up and everything is up for you the way it should be so
I'm not gonna listen to myself five thousand times um three times is about my limit and I just
I repeat myself sometimes as a result of that and sometimes you hear like a weird sort of um
like a fuzz out noise I don't know what that is I'm sorry the snoring is my cat
but she's she is now uh snoring over there in her bed so I don't think you'll
hear her, anywhere, anyhow uh Lascaux. These two guys are from the Hall of the Bulls and
we will talk about them in just a tickety-boo the first thing I want to do is just talk to you
a little bit about Lascaux itself now, Lascaux was one of the most famous caves probably in the
whole world. It's known for its variety and its quality of images as well as having some that
are unique in the whole world. More on that in just a little bit, one of the things about
Lascaux is it's not open to the public anymore. Very early on after it was opened to the public
um I think in the 60s they already found that the amount of people coming in and
looking at it was causing too much chaos and too much um I guess you could say uh damage to the place uh
yes, caves are already very warm very humid places but when you add to that a whole bunch of people
uh breathing and carrying you know stuff in on them and bacteria in on them it just was very
poor conditions for trying to maintain this treasure for human culture and so
they originally just tried to add more ventilation that didn't work they tried to limit
the amount of people coming in that didn't work um they thought about adding ventilation systems
instead of just improving things like artificial ventilation system uh they couldn't do that
obviously so what they ended up doing was just closing Lascaux and you really can't get into
it now unless you're one of the party of people that occasionally go in, scientists to study how
everything is faring in there to study how things are going on uh, occasionally also like you know
anthropologists or people who can prove that they really need to get in there uh can get in there... but don't despair because uh very close
next door there's the Lascaux museum which I believe is called Lascaux
Four uh the site is part museum part reproduction really they 3d
scanned a good portion of Lascaux put it, reassembled it as an attraction. They keep it warm and humid so the
experience of walking in the cave will be very similar to what you would
have they keep it relatively dark although, there are lights there so that you can see
everything much more clearly than if you were even in the original cave, and the floor
is leveled off so you don't need to worry about what you can't walk on, and what I mean by that is
if you look at this diagram of the actual Lascaux what you'll see is that there's a good
portion of it that you can't actually walk on so like for example this is the
is the large entryway uh where originally you would have and when I say originally I
mean way back in the day in the paleolithic era that's where the bulk of the
people the tribe would live and they would, during the inclement months, they
would go in there each family group would have its own little tent set up and then in the middle you
would have a communal fire or something like that and then the farther back the more difficult
it gets ,as we've said ,but you can see that now you can't walk on any of this that's a
wall. This is just very rough sort of terrain and basically the only part that they can
walk on would have been this right here and then you can see how narrow it gets in places
and as we mentioned the farther back you go the more difficult it is to get there so
going this way it gets more difficult this way less difficult than this way but more
difficult than than than this here and then this here this is
very very difficult terrain, the floor actually kind of drops out and you get
into this shaft situation where um it it literally drops down into this place that's like six meters
lower than everything else and six meters is about 18 feet so it's it's really
nothing to sneeze at at all So now these bulls are perhaps one of the
most beautiful, I mean Lascaux is nicknamed um the Sistine chapel of the ancient
paleolithic world with good reason, I think um it's they're not all this beautiful I have to
tell you some of them are kind of funny looking but this is a gorgeous example of paleolithic
cave painting. What we have here are two bulls and they're painted with tremendous detail, these guys are super naturalistic they're so
naturalistic that we can see they're little boy bulls or bison, we can see they have little hooves
we can see they have eyes and little noses little nostrils and little mouths we're looking at
them from the side so they only have one horn You can also see that the artist who made these
use two different techniques so for this part it's pretty smooth but then for the part that's fuzzy
it actually looks fuzzy it's really something. Now some people like to say that they're, they've even
attempted to show perspective... in other words, this bull looks closer to us than this bull
because this guy is bigger and has more detail whereas this one has less detail and is smaller
and it even looks like here they've overlapped and put left a little bit of like a blurring
in between to really emphasize that this guy is in front... the problem with that is there's
too much damage that's been done to the cave and there's too many variables so you can't
say that they meant for this guy to have so little detail you just can't, but what you can
say is that it's a beautiful example of bulls. Hey guys! just me, from the future! I just wanted
to pop in because I noticed that for some reason that last picture of the bulls, for some reason
when I uploaded it the first time, it kind of it lost a whole bunch of pixels and I don't know
why so I'm putting this more high res picture in and I'm not going to draw on it or anything and
I'm just going to hope that it stays looking as nice as it does okay that's it let's go
back to your regularly scheduled class now... I just want to go back to the map for
a second to emphasize that where we just were is right here in the Hall of the Bulls, all
right, it's not the hardest place to get to right? uh It's kind of literally the
first one after the the living quarters which is probably why it looks so naturalistic.
What we're going to do now is go down and over to here, all right, so that's where we're going Now this is all in Lascaux 4, so this is all
in the recreation of Lascaux, but a couple of things I want you to notice, and just let
me reassure you that they did everything as realistically as they possibly could, so yes, the
size of those bulls on the wall are the size that they are in the original Lascaux, the only thing
not original as I mentioned the floors are level and there was no lights in the original
Lascaux obviously. The original Lascaux is very dark and when you imagine these
artists having to go back into these spaces, look at this tiny little opening there,
if you imagine them having to go back into these spaces with just one little sad oil lamp
again it's very clear that these are important and that the farther back you go the
more special they get. So, for example, these bulls look less naturalistic probably
because they're starting to talk less about real bull and starting to talk more
about some kind of spiritual aspect This is again Lascaux 4, this is the remake. It
doesn't have, the remake, it doesn't have the lights in it yet but I like it because it shows
you that even with a flashlight even in modern times it's very very dark and you can see again
how they're having to squeeze into those passages which brings us to the shaft. Now
this is in the original Lascaux This door was added in as something to um basically when they had to when they have to
check on the cave to see how everything is but also to allow gases that build up to have a place
to go, like co2 for some reason the cave has a big problem with co2 um and it allows it to to kind
of have a place to escape, in fact one of these things is a pipe I think it's this and it runs
down all the way down into what what you can't see uh the bottom of this place uh down on the bottom
here now this is the lowest point in the cave so To the bottom of this shaft is six meters down, there's six meters between
the top here and the bottom The images that are on the
bottom of this shaft are among well, you tell me, I mean I
know you can't tell me but think about it think of how hard
this was for them to get to okay Think of how difficult it would have been
for them to get not only back into the cave but down into the space and then obviously leave
again and you tell me, do you think whatever's there is going to be naturalistic like the
bulls in the front or do you think they're going to be more abstract because they're
talking about something more spiritual and when you have your guess hit the next slide this is what's there yeah if you said more abstract get yourself
another cookie because you are absolutely correct um and in the weirdest and most
wonderful way possible now this particular image has a lot of different names to it and I don't
really like any of them. It's most popularly called the "Shaft of the Dead Man" but I don't
like calling it that because there's no way to tell this guy is dead. If anything the only thing
that's 100 percent dead or at least 100 dying is this guy, this is a bull who clearly has a
spear chonking through him and what are probably his intestines falling out. This is almost
certainly a spear because they've left the spear thrower on it just so that you know that it is a
spear, but this guy this figure right here, oh the other thing they call it is uh the "bird-headed
man", i don't like that one either. Now why don't I like Shaft of the Dead Man? Well
for a couple of reasons: as I already said, there's... we don't have any evidence that this
guy is dead uh there's no ground line and without the ground line you can't tell what he's doing:
is he, is he falling backwards, is he getting up, what's, what's he doing? We don't know. Second
thing I don't think we can call this guy a man, I just don't because this head here is
clearly not a human head if anything it's like the bird so he does have a bird head but only four fingers now if they were trying to show that this
was definitely a human I think they could have thrown on an extra finger don't you and
giving them five little digits, but they didn't so between the head and the fingers I don't
think we can convincingly say that this is a regular human, let alone where it is
in the cave let alone the fact that this is the only full body humanoid image that
has ever been found painted in a cave. Now, you do have full bodied sculptures most
of them are of women but you do have them and you do have sculptures and paintings
of well, parts of men and women largely the sexual organs but images of full-bodied people
painted on caves, no this is it. so This is an amazingly important image now, the one
thing we can say with difinity is that clearly this figure is meant to be masculine. Why do
I say that, well I'm gonna give you a new word and it's a nice word, it's a good word "Ithyphallic" and please hold while
I look up the spelling of that... yes amazingly I spelt it right on the first
try... I'm as surprised as anybody else. Anyhow our bird-headed man is what we call an
ithyphallic figure, that is a fancy way to say has an erect penis. We use the term so that we
don't have to say "erect penis" in a room full of, classroom full of people that may or may
not get the giggles as a result of it um but that's what it means so we're looking
at an ithyphallic bird-headed figure that's the other reason I don't like calling it Shaft of
the Dead Man because that doesn't really go with "dead". Now I know what you might be thinking, and
you might be thinking that well what about rigor mortis? Rigor mortis doesn't
affect that particular organ um yeah so just uh just throwing it out there um anyway, the other so the other thing we know about this culture is there's a lot of emphasis
on the idea of life, death, and rebirth. Now they could have chosen any head for this
particular figure, by the way the fact that we have a bird head on a humanoid body
at all that's called "anthropomorphic" okay? Anthropomorphic is a kind of abstraction
where you combine human with non-human okay so, the brave little toaster, Thomas the tank
engine, those guys are anthropomorphic too... Mickey Mouse, Goofy: anthropomorphic.
Okay bird-headed guy anthropomorphic Generally speaking again as we said with our other
abstractions whatever you abstract it with has a purpose so they could have abstracted anything
they wanted here they could have given it a bull head but they didn't, they gave it a bird head
and they doubled down on it with this bird image right here. There's no reason for that bird to be
there other than to let us know definitely a bird Now the other thing about the bird image is the
bird is on a stick. Now the bird could literally be on a stick or the bird could be at the top
of this to emphasize the idea of verticality. Now think of it for a minute okay:
this is at the bottom of a shaft that's vertical so you're emphasizing verticality
as a way of going up think of our axis mundi right heavens underworld our plane: life, death, rebirth birds do what? birds fly birds are constantly going back
and forth between our world and the above that's why angels have wings right so interestingly everything is pointing
to this idea of life, death, and rebirth. I'll do you one more This bull is clearly either dead or dying if ithyphallic representations traditionally
have to deal with fertility or life/death plus life equals rebirth right and that cycle so I think what we're looking at here again also taking into consideration
that this particular depiction is in the lowest point of the entire
cave and well back so it's dark it's very wet it's very humid it's
very warm it's very down right I think it's really a metaphor for the idea of
connecting death with life and therefore rebirth if that's not enough let me just toss a
couple more things at you this lamp was found at the
bottom of the shaft more or less underneath that depiction. Now that's not the
only painting in there let me make that clear but it is I think the most evocative one,
there the other ones are animals which again still important but that's not
what we're talking about right. Now this lamp is very different from
other lamps that have been found other lamps look like this okay this lamp is relatively
cruedly made, it's very rough but it's functional right it's definitely functional if we compare the lamp that was
found at the bottom of that shaft to this lamp that was found in
a much more accessible location it becomes obvious that there is a
difference in quality as well as construction One uses a very sort of uh rough stone
the other one has been purposely hewned to be very smooth. It's a red color,
very different from the other one okay so what are we talking here, this one also has extra markings on it. Do those
markings help the lamp be a better lamp? No right. You could argue the handle helps
a little bit but probably not because it's going to slosh around anyway, but those
markings they don't help it be a better lamp so what are we looking at here? We're looking
at a ritualistic lamp versus a utilitarian one here's the kicker: so dark so deep so difficult to get to this lamp must have taken a while to get so pretty and they just leave it there. I
sure hope he had another lamp to walk back with otherwise he wasn't gonna have a fun time but
maybe that was part of the ritual who knows So all of this leads to the belief that
the Shaft of the Dead Man, as it's called, as I hate to call it um, is a was a very special,
very religiously, we can't really use the word "religious" yet because we don't, you know, that
implies a sort of organized thing that we don't necessarily have but a very symbolically
important piece of work very ritual heavy now if you remember back to Chauvet where we
had those dots, we're still finding weird dots so they're not set up in the exact
formation as either of those dots but they are in a very particular group that
does reappear quite a few times in Lascaux so they must have a specific meaning
but what that meaning is, we don't know, because it's non-objective and we're not
in on the lingo. Same thing with these I... checker boards? I
don't know what to call them Checkerboards is one of the way that they are
referred to because you really can't... they they are just weird little tic-tac-toe boards
with different colors in the different squares some people suggest that it's some kind of almost
map like a territory thing but I don't know that there's enough real evidence for that so I
don't know that we'll ever quite figure out what they are um interesting
they they are interesting you start getting very advanced weapons
during this time period and very fancy weapons so they're not only uh just you know sort of scarier looking with barbs
and whatever but they're also very decorative so here's an example of a kind of a baton type
thing probably not a weapon probably more for some sort of ritual type thing. Now just so you
know this is what it actually looks like this is what we call a roll out and a roll out is a
special means of... if you have like a cylindrical or round kind of artifact or object you can take
a picture of it that is basically a panoramic and it will open it up so that you can see the
whole thing at once and what you're seeing here is a very I think kind of cute, naturalistic
scene of these deer that are looking back over their shoulder at something and if you look there
they're swimming, they're very clearly swimming, you see their little hooves just so very elegantly
no weight on them because they're swimming and look at the fish look at those fish I mean I
I don't... those are really well rendered fish um super impressive so very naturalistic and yet with all this naturalistic
stuff you also get some weird non-objective symbols. Now we refer to those as
"lozenges" because they're kind of lozenge shaped again there's a lot of
supposition to what they might be it has been speculated that the
deer is actually looking up at them I don't know about it, it's possible they
kind of look like eyes and since they are in the uh sky portion of this work uh it has
been speculated that they may represent stars many ancient civilizations think of stars as being
the eyes of the deceased or the eyes of gods so it's possible but it also could just be a symbol um of something else that we
have no idea what but it could be here's a close-up of those lozenges in the
sky and you can really see those those fishy really good fishy this is part of a spear thrower and again you
can just see how naturalistic these depictions are. I mean they're really very very impressive.
It has been noted that the eye of this guy kind of has that same Lozenge shape which
does give credence to the theory that those lozenges in the last one are supposed to
be eyes, so stars or something like that Now I wanted to show you a cave
that was not just in France, so here we have Altamira which is in
Spain and it dates to about 12 000 bce and um it's it's a beaut so the Magdalenian
period we're still in and it is just an absolutely beautiful cave so this is the
inside of Altamira and what you can see is that the ceiling has all of
these little dips and divots in it, and paleolithic man when they were staying in
this cave thought that these shapes closely resembled body shapes of bison and so they used
these bulges to create a sort of three-dimensional image of a whole bunch of of bison; some of them
are standing up and some of them are laying down and now we're going to take a look
at some sculptural figures remember most of the the sculpture from the paleolithic
period is going to kick off or start in the Gravettian period but that doesn't mean you get
absolutely nothing in the period before that In fact this example is from the period before
the Gravettian this is from the Aurignacian period and it's called Lowenmensch. Now,
"Lowenmensch" means a lion person, basically although it's sometimes translated as lion
man, lion person would be more accurate because no one, the the gender of this
particular uh figure is very much up for debate. Now, uh we had this word
before um but again this is another example of anthropomorphism right the combination
of animal and human in this case lion and person so it's very different than
bird and person birds fly they talk to god lions well they prowl they eat and they protect
and they probably scare so whatever Lowenmensch is it's probably for protection or something like
that now why do I say that the gender of this anthropomorphic figure is up for debate?
Well because it is um this was made of ivory uh mastodon ivory, ancient elephant
ivory, and it was found in pieces so it was put together as best as they could
but that doesn't mean that it's perfect. So many people who say well it's got
to be a guy because that looks like it originally had a penis that broke
off well you can't say that because um you know they don't know if there was
anything extra there to begin with, and then you have people say well it has to be a
female lion because it doesn't have a mane well mountain lions, the mountain lions
that lived in Germany at this time they didn't have manes either if they were
male; male or female didn't matter they didn't have manes, as some lions don't, so you can't
tell from that um so it's always important to study something before making a snap judgment One of the most famous and important
figures that show up are fertility figures again because fertility is such an important
concept not just because of life, death, and rebirth but also because well if you're
not having babies then your people die out so I'm sure that's another reason. This here
is the Venus of Willendorf, it is from the Gravettian period so, the second one when you
start getting a lot of little figures and things. She was found in Austria and what do you
think are we looking at: naturalistic, abstract, or non-objective? Again we know right
off the bat it can't be non-objective and it's not naturalistic either. Why, well number one look
at the proportions I mean she barely has any feet, number two her arms are like little
spaghetti noodles over her giant bosom and number three has no face None at all so she's an abstraction and what do
you think is the concept that she's abstracting? Well remember for abstractions you
exaggerate what you need to exaggerate and take away which you don't need to have
right? So if you look at what's exaggerated here the giant breasts the huge belly the very
large belly button the pubic triangle all things that are necessary for birth and taking
care of one's young so she's a fertility figure. Why doesn't she have a face The same reason she doesn't
really have arms or feet: it's not important to fertility but also
because the second you put a face on her she is an individual and that's not what you want
you don't want an individualized fertility figure you want one that's for everybody which is indeed
probably why she's wearing the hat even though she doesn't have a face that hat or perhaps hair
style is very indicative of this part of the world and you see it in a lot of the artwork
so it probably is a symbol of that tribe. As you can see here, this is an example of another
fertility figure this one being carved into a wall still has the hat. Now if you're wondering why
belly button is a symbol of fertility, well anyone who's ever been born has a belly button
right because the umbilicus the umbilical cord is attached to your mother and to your your
placenta that way, it's what kept you alive. I don't think I don't know how much of it they
knew but they did know that it played some part in "baby" and so an exaggerated belly button
would fit very nicely with the theme of fertility And this is her from the back just because
you don't usually get to see her from the back so there you go... do she have the
booty? I will leave that up to you. She's not very large she's actually pretty small
she's just about four and a half inches high and that makes sense because you're hunter gatherers
you're wandering around you would want something that's not very big and that you could kind
of just put in your hand and walk around with And this here is another fertility figure, again
no face but large breasts, large belly button, large belly she is from the Czech
Republic, still from the Gravettian period, she's known as the Venus of Dolni
Vestonice and she is super important because she is the earliest figure in the
entire world made of ceramic. She's fired clay she's a ceramic figure. It's amazing that they
did this 29 000 bce, it's amazing. The other really cool thing about her she's got some
holes in her head that were apparently used to put some feathers in so she had feathers on
her head again birds flying up to the heavens: life, death, rebirth maybe? possibly? right?
Fertility figure flying up; it's very possible But what I really love if you look super super
super carefully there's a little uh fingerprint it's a little kid's fingerprint
so maybe somebody gave this you know while they were making
it they gave it to a kid to hold before they put it in the fire it's just
it's such an amazing piece of our history And that's her from the back side because I can Now finally I just wanted to show you this
example. She's from France, she is another Venus She is made of ivory and she is the only
example that I know of that's carved with even remotely a face she does still
seem to have very particular hair; some people have said that it's braids some
people have said it some kind of a headdress whatever it is it's very particular to her. I
think it definitely does kind of look like braids, but you know who knows could could be could be
a combination could be anything um it could be curls who knows all we know is that uh I I wish we
knew what the rest of her looked like... we don't but I thought I'd show you a Venus
that actually has a face because even the ones that have faces don't really
have faces there's eyes and a nose and that's it so it's still keeping a good amount of
uh anonymity in it um but this is a very interesting venus... it's the pity that the
rest of it's broken off and we don't have it okay that's going to do it for this lecture! Next
time it will be the Neolithic. I hope everybody's having a good week, I hope everybody's doing good
and I will talk to you all again real soon. Bye!