first content based lecture of the year we are going to be starting off at the very beginning with global prehistory so you have a warm up that i want you all to do i want you to take a look at these two sculptures right here i've given you the name and the date range for each of them before you even get into any of that without looking up anything on your laptops or anything in your textbooks what i want you to do is to look at these two sculptures and to jot down some observations about each artwork i want you to think about what are you seeing in each of these pieces what are you not seeing which can be just as important as what you do see why do you think that these sculptures look the way they do you'll notice that they are both depicting human figures but we've probably never seen humans that look like either of these before so look at the stylistic choices the artists are making i also want you to think about how these pieces were made who you think made them or why they were made and ultimately you should be coming up with a short list of similarities and differences so take a moment to pause the video right here and jot down those observations also keep in mind that the venus of willendorf which is this statue right here is only about four inches high and this figure from angesol is about three and a half feet high so that's another thing that you can write about in your comparison all right so pre-history is a term that you've probably heard before a term that you've probably used before even um but a lot of people don't really know what it means so pre-history is this notion of a time before history as we know it so it's usually referred to as like an age before the written record before humans like had a written language and were writing things down so because we don't have human records of this period we don't know that much about it a lot of it has been shrouded in mystery for thousands of years so what we do know about this period has been deduced primarily from scientific evidence i'm going to be talking about a couple of different kinds of evidence in a moment but a couple of things that a scientist might use are carbon dating stratigraphic dating contextual evidence etc so oh you come to understand that a well-rounded understanding of prehistory requires multi-disciplinary applications you have people that are on the human studies side of things in anthropology that are looking at human behavior we have archaeology so people looking at human remains as well as these architectural architectural sites and archaeological sites we have biologists chemists etc so there's a lot of members on this like prehistory team that work together to construct our understanding of a time before the written record so one thing that you should all understand is that a lack of writing or a lack of records does not mean that these people were stupid and that they didn't have intention in their artwork or in their actions most prehistoric artwork seems to serve one or more functions or purposes um the notion that humans would have been creating artwork in the first place suggests that they were doing things beyond survival and reproduction so there's certainly an intent to it it's important enough to devote resources to it in this time that is considered very difficult for most early humans to survive in so perhaps one of the first things that we should talk about with relation to global prehistory is this this notion of what art is so humans and human ancestors have been making tools for as far as we know around 2.5 million years and there's actually some modern day primates like chimpanzees and orangutans and bonobos that have been observed creating tools and using them to hunt for food so oftentimes these might be kind of like rudimentary looking spears or a shoeland hand axes like this nothing quite this complicated i believe has been made by a non-human as far as we know so we know that these tools were made by humans and they were not just like these randomly shaped rocks that happen to look like tools because they show evidence of deliberate shaping so there have um there have been a lot of archaeologists that have actually recreated the processes to create these kinds of tools and show how they might be used in the time that they were made they've also been found in large quantities near archaeological sites where human remains have also been found so there's a direct correlation between these objects and human archaeological sites so our historians typically do not regard these objects as quote-unquote art they're considered tools as their purpose is to aim survival and nothing else there's not really an aesthetic intention to these pieces that we can interpret within the bounds of the context that we understand so a lot of times you'll see kind of like a date range surrounding an ancient object or something from prehistory and there's lots of different ways that we can figure out or deduce how old something is because of course again like if artists don't have a written record they're not writing the date on things as they're making them right so there's a couple of different ways these are just a couple of them so stratigraphy is basically the study of looking at geological strata so basically uh the the concept behind this is that there is land and then stuff happens on it and then more land accumulates on top of it over um geological time so you've probably seen images of the fossil record where you have like layers that are representing different epics different ages in the history of the planet so this happens at a somewhat smaller scale when you're looking at human remains and evidence of um human like settlements as well so logic helps you to deduce that typically the oldest stuff is going to be towards the bottom and the newest stuff is going to be towards the top there's also a technique that's used by chemists called radiocarbon dating so there's different isotopes of carbon that aren't present in living things so most living basically all living things on the planet have carbon in them that means that they're organic they have these organic molecules in them so all organisms have a a known or a they have radio um radioactive carbon in their bodies it decays at a known rate so the amount of non-decayed carbon-14 left in the sample basically determines how long it has been since an organism died so this is only really useful for objects that of things that are once considered alive so bone antler shell and other bio-materials it's not like you could take a random rock and do radiocarbon dating on that another form of evidence that an archaeologist or an art historian might use is contextual evidence so oftentimes an object's function purpose age etc is determined for evidence found in close proximity to that object so usually around its site so for example there have been examples of mortars and pestles so basically um a mortar and pestle is a a long kind of like cylindrical piece of stone and then a cup and you put things inside the cup and then you use the stone to grind it into a fine powder so you could you couldn't do radiocarbon dating on the the stone itself but say an ancient human being took some sort of seed or grain and they put it in the cup and they ground it to make flour and there might be microscopic remains of that flower in the crevices of that object that a scientist can then scrape out and then test so oftentimes contextual evidence is this like more indirect method of figuring out how old something is you could also deduce that if you were to find a julian hand axes for example these these kinds of stone items and they're in the same site as some sort of animal bone and they're on the same same stratigraphic layer that they might be of similar age so a major concept that i want everybody to understand before we're leaving class today is the importance of climate change in the migration of early humans and human ancestors so there's three different species that we typically talk about when we talk about early humans and human ancestors we have homo sapiens homo neanderthalensis aka the neanderthals and homo erectus so the surviving species today what we basically are classified as is homo sapiens sapiens so we're like a further derived form of homo sapiens so um the neanderthals and homo erectus have since died out there is some evidence in um that has been found in dna that a lot of people from modern day western europe actually have some neanderthal dna um so there's some evidence that there was some interbreeding between these populations um throughout their history they were closely related enough that that could have happened so basically humanity as we know it was start started in southeastern africa right over here in the rift valley region so this is where humans and human ancestors um including the homogeneous as well as the australopiths were originally known to exist so one thing that everybody should understand is that homo sapiens which are our closest ancestors in this list were not the first to migrate homo erectus actually spanned across a pretty broad range of eurasia before they eventually died out and then homo neanderthalensis um took over a pretty pretty much all of what is now continental europe and parts of the middle east the one species that was able to really go out and populate the entire kind of like known world was homo sapiens they're the ones that got the furthest as evidenced by these these red regions and arrows so the numbers beside the arrows signify the number of years before the present that human activity is predicted to have existed in these places so there's a big misconception about human migrations and that's that there was like this one population chilling out in the rift valley over here and then there was like a group of 20 people that went out and populated the rest of the world and that was the only migration that happened what actually happened is that there is like geologic not geological there's genetic evidence as well as like temporal evidence that suggests that there are several waves of migrations out of this region to go to the rest of um the african continent as well as the rest of the world that was happening over tens of thousands of years so that range right around now is around 120 to 50 000 bce it changes every couple of years as we find more things more evidence out there so these migrations of early humans were primarily facilitated by climate change and i'm going to talk about um the nuances of that in a moment so there's a couple of things that are involved that climate change kind of like caused in terms of like global phenomena that allowed people to move out of this region over here which is typically called the rift valley and out to the rest of the world so you probably understand um that the continent of africa today has this kind of like rain foresty region right here this area tends to not receive as much sun because there's more like plant coverage and then there's this massive desert right here called the sahara that is extremely hot extremely dry and generally you can't really pass through it um without like contemporary technology like having large quantities of water and like a very organized plan to get across this region without dying of thirst or hunger so one thing that was happening um around 125 000 years ago was this thing called axis wobble so at this point in time the the axis um the the equator was kind of shifting in terms of like the the area of the earth that was considered the hottest that was perceiving the most radiation from the sun was kind of um wobbling around so these areas that were bombarded by sunlight actually became more um tropical in nature they received more rain and less sun so they were more easily passable by early humans so whereas this quarter right here into the arabian peninsula was once virtually impassable to humans there were a couple of windows during axis wobble that allowed humans to actually migrate northward and across the arabian peninsula and into eurasia there is also a big um contribution of climate change to the arrangement of land masses on the planet so one of these things was um the ice ages so you've probably heard of like the ice age as this like monolithic like notion how it was cold for a long time and then it was warm it wasn't actually like that so what we have are these glacial periods so these periods where the global temperature was very low or relatively low and then these times when the um the global temperature was relatively higher so this is today right here our kind of global temperature is in what is considered like an interglacial period it's actually getting warmer because of anthropogenic impact greenhouse gases and so on but there were actually several glacial periods where the average global temperature was relatively low so you probably know from chemistry and biology that the amount of water on the planet is consistent there's not water that is entering or leaving the atmosphere in fact there's no element on earth that is really entering or leaving the atmosphere in any significant quantities um the only exception to this is iridium which um enters the um which enters the atmosphere through things like asteroids so the amount of water on the planet is consistent so what happens is that during these glacial periods a lot of water is frozen in the poles creating these massive glaciers so if the amount of water is that is frozen on if there's a lot of water that's frozen on land what's going to happen is that the sea level is going to decrease so the water table is going down and what happens is that because a lot of these islands or a lot of these seas between these modern day islands are relatively shallow when the sea level goes down these land masses are revealed so there is actually a pretty significant amount of time when these areas which are now kind of like these more isolated islands were connected by land masses and people were literally able to just walk across them this includes um floor and fauna as well so there's a lot of um consistencies between the the animals that you can find here in this region versus the ones that you can find in this region so as these land masses are merging together during these glacial periods people are able to pass across these previously unpassable areas so some key key locations for these land bridges that are forming are in south asia which is here as well as east asia and north america so you've probably um seen on a world map this connection between alaska and russia right here so this land mass over here was also there was also a bridge that was connecting these two regions right here to allow humans to pass from eurasia over into what is now called north america so we're talking about again this period between 120 000 bce and 50 000 bce when humans are beginning to migrate out of africa to populate the rest of the world so there's typically three ages that are designated when we talk about art the paleolithic the mesolithic and the neolithic i've highlighted paleolithic and neolithic because these are the two that we focus on in the ap curriculum the mesolithic is more of like a transition period between the paleolithic and the neolithic so for those of you who know your greek and latin roots you probably see the word lith and you're like oh yeah that word means stone so paleo is a word that means old and neo is a word that means news so this is basically old stone middle stone new stone referring to like stone ages so during the paleolithic period the climate is relatively cold it's one of these glacial periods it's at this point that we're seeing what are recognized as the first consciously manufactured pictorial images in human history humanity at this point is comprised primarily of hunter-gatherers societies they are people that hunt for their food and they gather the things that they do not hunt oftentimes the subjects that we see in artwork from this period um are animals and images of fertile or second women so human subjects at this point in time are typically more representational and nature reduced kind of like to these stick figures with a couple of identifiable features so this um image right here shimula so cave in france and is a pretty like famous um section of the cave so we have this one bowl over here that has probably been hit by a spear and its entrails are then spilling out and there's also this very curious human figure right here um that might be lying on the ground he has a bird head and the only other kind of discernible feature that he has are his genitals there's also this other bird figure right here there's a lot of like very strange conspiracy theories and like postulations behind this figure people are not quite sure what it means so um again human subjects tend to be more representational in nature we see lots and lots and lots of images globally of these like fertile looking women so one of my favorite art pieces that you'll see over and over again in this unit is the venus of willendorf so she is this four-inch tall figure that was found in austria and as you'll notice she has these very emphasized enlarged breasts and genitalia without really having any facial features this is a release sculpture that was found in another cave again of this um of this female presenting figure um with kind of like enlarged breasts stomach and genitalia so typically you would envision these features as possibly representing kind of like an ideal female at this time a person who has the physical resources to bear children so you can imagine that when you're in a hunter-gatherer society there's not a lot of resources to go around um and women typically need to be like like not malnourished they need to have enough nutrition and enough reserves of fat and other resources to to be able to reproduce so this is considered an ideal figure at the time this is one of the uh prevailing theories around the prevalence of these kinds of images um in terms of sculpture there's a lot of small freestanding sculptures oftentimes they're portable so they're just small enough to be taken around and they're oftentimes made using stone ivory or bone oftentimes they're a lot of them there's evidence that they are painted in some way or covered in a sort of pigmented stone like red ochre um and of course we see some relief sculptures that are carved into cave walls using chisels like this woman holding a bison horn here so um a lot of these images as you can imagine are coming from hunter-gatherer societies they don't necessarily have the the faculties about them to be creating these large things to cart around with them every everywhere typically hunter-gatherer societies are nomadic they're traveling around following their food um and oftentimes following the seasons so that they can survive so it doesn't really make sense to make this large thing that you're then carrying around so a lot of the sculptures um from this era are relatively small a lot of these sculptures depict humans animals and combinations thereof so this figure right here as you can see has a human torso and legs and this lion like head in terms of paintings um the paleolithic is best known perhaps for its cave paintings um usually you'll see paintings in different sizes and scales and rocks oftentimes these paintings are deliberately far from the entrance so it takes a bit of a walk from the entrance of the cave to get to these locations inside where you're seeing the richest quantity and quality of these pictorial images which is suggesting this notion of exclusivity that not everybody had access to these spaces because they might have been considered sacred in some way so they're reserved for special members of the communities or shamans um there's also there's also evidence of a lot of these images being superimposed on top of one another imagine like going like seeing the um the concrete on an underpass and you see like generations of graffiti layered on top of one another so we see the same kind of effect in these caves where you're having like some drawings from very very long ago that are kind of faded in the background and then people from subsequent generations hundreds or even thousands of years later are painting on top of them so animals are portrayed somewhat realistically there's a sense of three-dimensionality to these images but humans are not really portrayed that often so we see this emphasis in paleolithic art on animals and this really aligns with the hunter gatherer kind of like lifestyle and ideology where basically their entire livelihood are these animals that they're following around and hunting and humans are occupying a relatively like smaller and less significant role in this natural order which is why you don't really see them that often again these are postulations that have been made we don't have any written records to confirm any of this so i want to talk a little bit about twisted perspective so twisted perspective is a somewhat flattened representation of a subject usually a human or an animal that shows a composite view of the subject's features so oftentimes any an image that is in twisted perspective you'll see some elements that are in profile so viewed from the side um and then there are others that are viewed more frontally or in a more three-quarter view so i've been sometimes it's a little bit difficult to discern this when you're looking at animal figures but when you look at this image of a bowl right here you can see that there's like we have this this notion of one leg in front of the other so we're seeing that yeah that looks like pretty anatomically accurate but when you look at the head right here when you look at a a bull in complete profile there is this foreshortening that is happening where one horn is covering a lot of the other and it's creating this projection of almost like a single horn um there's also this bar at the top of the head that is basically supporting the horns and again we're not seeing it very much because of this foreshortening and this like profile perspective so compare this to the how the horns are arranged on this bowl right here from lasso caves so pretty much everything is in profile like from up from here over to this side and then you get to the top of the head and it's like they've they've twisted this portion of the top of the head over so that you can more recognizably see this two-horned orientation right here so oftentimes this is done to um create a more like quote unquote recognizable figure um you would think consider like things that are like essential to your understanding of what a bull is are going to be emphasized the most so these horns are particularly um kind of like emblematic of a bulls so and having two of them so it would be in the artist's best interest theoretically to have both of those horns showing even if they have to mess around with the perspective a little bit so um twisted perspective is a little bit more obvious in the depiction of human figures so this is um an image of a wall painting from ancient egypt i want you to try recreating these poses at your desk um and including the way that the legs are very rigid and close together in the way that the torsos are twisted um and you can see both shoulders instead of just one you'll notice that these poses do not feel natural so oftentimes these twisted perspective poses are not things that artists are observing in nature and then copying like you're doing a landscape painting but rather it's this kind of like conception in your brain of like these elements go together and make human or these things go together to make bull so now we're transitioning into the neolithic so remember that there's this transitional period um called the mesolithic that we don't really talk about that much but during this point in time you'll notice when you're looking at these glacial and interglacial periods that are beginning to transition from this glacial period into a time when temperatures are becoming a lot warmer so the climate is becoming warmer the um the glaciers and ice sheets that have been frozen up in the caps and the poles are melting the water levels are resuming um they're kind of like current levels more or less so we see on the sea level rising around 300 feet in a thousand years which in terms of geological times extremely fast um we also have this thing that is often referred to as the neolithic revolution so this is basically the dawn of agriculture we see the domestication of plants and animals um and humans beginning to settle in more permanent um homes and buildings so there's no need to be moving around constantly because you're not following the food because you're corralling all the food in one place you're creating some sort of like field where you're growing your food so humans are becoming a lot more sedentary um and their lives are a lot more stable as a result so there's this sweet spot in the um what is now kind of considered the middle east called the fertile crescent so this is the sweet spot for the first civilizations and permanent settlements um that we start studying in the west there's plenty of sun water and natural resources in these regions you'll also notice that a lot of these regions are flanked by these uh very significant bodies of water so this is something consistent that you'll see in all the civilizations that we study in global prehistory as well as the ancient mediterranean is that they're all depending on these water sources particularly fresh water to survive water is also an important component of travel as well so this is where we get we begin to see these concentrated human population centers what we'll call city states so what's really interesting is that you can oftentimes distinguish a neolithic and a paleolithic painting by the roles that humans are playing in the painting so oftentimes paintings from the neolithic period are more organized and narrative in nature so they're telling a story and you're also seeing an abundance of human figures and oftentimes these human figures are dominating over nature in some way oftentimes you'll see images of humans with domesticated animals and livestock or you'll see them hunting the animals and like triumphing over triumph thing triumphing over them um so they're they're having a more central role in these narrative paintings we also see the first landscape so things other than kind of like these human figures and animal figures on these kind of like non-planar landscapes of solid rock we actually start seeing these depictions of things that resemble human dwellings and cities so this is in katahook which is in modern-day turkey and it's very possible that this orangish shape right here is a depiction of a volcano so humans and animals are no longer the only subjects depicted in art we're seeing humans kind of expand their portfolio um of things that they're drawing and then and we're starting to see these narratives incorporated as well in terms of skull sculpture there's a very logical progression here if you're staying in a place longer then you're it's going to make more sense for you to devote time into creating a more permanent architectural settlement instead of just having a hut that you can easily dismantle and carry around with you so we're seeing a lot of energy put into um erecting these massive stones um in particular which are referred to as megaliths there's kind of like a weird distinction between megalith and men her so men her is like a non-rectangular prison shaped rock so it's more organically shaped whereas a megalith is something that is usually carved to resemble like a typical rectangle so humans basically starts basically like pushing up rocks um to mark a an important location and then they find out what if we take two rocks and we put them close together and then we put another another rock on the top you have your first basic unit of architecture which is post and lintel construction so we're going to see post and lentil construction for thousands of years before the romans invent the arch so another thing that we're seeing with respect to sculpture um is that we're seeing access to more varied media so again you have more time um to settle down in a certain area a lot of these places are establishing trade routes so that they can um they can obtain materials from places other than like their their low their local region um so you'll see like materials in these sculptures that um are not from the local area we'll see this a lot especially in the ancient mediterranean unit we're also seeing statues um becoming larger because again like you're in a more fixed location and you don't have to carry it around with you so it's not a problem if you make something larger so now knowing what you do about the paleolithic and the neolithic i want us to go back to these two sculptures right here and i want you to think about like how does the venus of willendorf reflect aspects of paleolithic art and then conversely how does this human figure from angusol represent aspects of neolithic art so now that you have some contextual information i want you to finish the last part of your handout and apply your knowledge to your your new understanding of these two pieces