The Historical Journey of Image Creation

There's something we do hundreds of times a day without even noticing it. It's an ability that we utterly depend on in our lives, yet we take it for granted. Just watch. We see some lines and can give them meaning. We can tell one shape from another. And we understand that an arrangement of colours can represent something. The ability to read images is an essential part of our lives. But what if we didn't have this ability? Imagine we couldn't understand images. What would our world be like? Well, for a start, images would never have been invented. We'd have lost something we totally rely on. life would be impossible. And our world would be unrecognizable. But at some point in our ancient past, that's what the world looked like, imageless. Now, of course, pictures dominate our lives. Well, this is the extraordinary story of how we humans discovered the power of images and how they created the world we live in today. How long has it taken for you to realise that I'm drawing a horse? A second? A fraction of a second? We can tell what a two-dimensional image represents almost instantaneously, without even having to think about it. I'm not much of an artist, but even I can arrange a collection of pencil lines on a piece of paper so you see what I want you to see. And I don't do just horses. I could draw almost anything in the world, and you'd probably guess what it was. But there must have been some point in our human story when we first got this ability, some moment in time when we began to create pictures and to understand what they meant. So what happened back then? How did we first get this ability to create images? To find the answer, we need to go way back in time. What if we go back 2,000 years? This is the image of a horse from classical antiquity. It was made to decorate a Roman household about 100 years before Christ. And clearly, the artists here had no problems with two-dimensional representation. We've gone back another thousand years to 1200 BC. This tiny fragment comes from ancient Egypt and the person who painted it knew perfectly well how to represent something in the world around them. We're going to have to go back much, much further. This is northern Spain, a place called Altamira. We've come here because towards the end of the 19th century, a discovery was made at Altamira that would radically alter our understanding of when the world's... First images were created. This historic discovery was made by a nine-year-old girl. Her name was Maria. She was the daughter of Marcelino de Sautola, a local Spanish nobleman who was also an amateur archaeologist. He'd become intrigued by Altamira, and in autumn 1879, Maria and her father paid the cave a visit. This was a cave that was completely unknown until a few years before. Even though I was a mere amateur, I was determined to undertake my own investigations. As a gentleman scholar, De Saltuola took a serious interest in finding out more about the prehistoric past. But, like other archaeologists of the day, he assumed that the people who had once settled or sheltered in these caves were little more than savages, uncouth, lowbrow, hardly better than apes, and certainly incapable of any kind of creative achievement. I hoped that through these investigations we would manage to tear away the thick veil that separates us from the origins and customs of the ancient inhabitants of these mountains. Now, Dessa Twola had come to the cave to excavate the floor, to poke around for prehistoric relics, such as bones and tools. It was Maria who made the discovery for which Altamira became famous. Papa! Look, oxen! I was overcome with amazement. What I saw made me so excited I could hardly speak. Young Maria had caught sight of the first gallery of prehistoric paintings ever to be discovered. Now, many more have since come to light in caves all around the world, but these at Altamira are still considered among the most beautiful. Dominating the ceiling were dozens of paintings of aurochs, a species of ox that had long been extinct. They appeared to be standing, sleeping and running. As soon as he saw them, de Sautuola was convinced that the images had been painted by prehistoric people. But others weren't so sure. When de Sartorla announced his discovery to the world, archaeologists immediately began to question its authenticity. The images were simply too good. It was unthinkable that they'd been created by prehistoric scientists. savages. Experts claimed that the paintings had been faked and that de Sautola was either the victim or perpetrator of a hoax. He stood by his discovery. It's hard to believe that someone would have decided to shut himself away in the dark to paint extinct animals. There was absolutely no reason to doubt that these paintings came from an ancient period in time. Desautola fought hard to clear his name, but his fellow archaeologists were consistently sceptical. Within a few years, he died, here at his family home not far from Altamira, a disbelieved and a disillusioned man. His supporters said... that the accusations of dishonesty had broken his heart and caused his death but the time would come when desautola was vindicated over the decades discovery after discovery was made in France as well as Spain, that proved beyond doubt that the cave paintings were prehistoric. Then came an even more exciting find, in a cave called Lascaux, a gallery of pictures of breathtaking beauty. As more and more paintings came to light, they revealed prehistoric artists had painted with a confidence and a skill that matched almost anything from the modern world. Pablo Picasso himself said on first setting eyes on these pictures, We have learnt nothing. And when experts began dating these paintings, there was another surprise. They found that we'd started creating images comparatively late in our human story. Let me show you what I mean. Let's imagine that the entire length of time that modern humans have been around on the planet is represented by these steps. People like you and me, the species known as Homo sapiens, we've been around for about 150,000 years. That's where I am now. Biologically, from then onwards, human beings didn't change. We had exactly the same brain as we have today. And yet, for more than 100,000 years, we didn't create any images. It wasn't until here, that's about 35,000 years ago, that something began to change. Archaeologists call it the creative explosion. The moment in time when people first began to create pictures. So what happened back then? Why did people suddenly decide to start creating images of the world around them? Experts began searching for an answer. And their first explanation seemed the obvious one. Today, one of the main reasons that we make pictures is to create representations of things in the world around us. Surely, the experts said, thousands of years ago, prehistoric humans also had painted to create representations of things around them. But as more and more cave art was discovered, it became clear that this explanation was wrong. Because today, artists create images of every aspect of the world that they live in. But back then, they created images of mostly one thing. Prehistoric artists were obsessed by animals. And not just any animals, but some in particular. Like horses, bison, and reindeer. But why? What was it about these animals that so fixated the minds of our ancient ancestors? Henri Bois was a French priest, but he was also the foremost expert on cave art for much of the 20th century. He believed, perhaps not surprisingly, that the paintings were about hunting. Prehistoric artists had painted animals because they believed it would increase the chances of a successful hunt. The theory made sense. It certainly explained why only some animals had been painted. Roy seemed to have settled the question. But more recently, when archaeologists began to examine the bones of animals that had been hunted and then eaten around the caves, they discovered something puzzling. If people had created these images to improve the chances of a successful hunt... you'd expect them to paint pictures of their quarry. But they didn't. At Altamira, for instance, prehistoric artists had painted oxen. But the bones that had been left were those of deer. At other French sites they were painting woolly mammoths, but they were eating a wild version of this animal, the goat. All in all, there's very little correlation between the animals depicted in prehistoric art and the animals that feature in the prehistoric diet. So, Breuil's hunting theory had also failed to solve the mystery of why people first started painting. And there was a bigger problem with these theories. The pictures would need to be painted in places where people could see them. Yet something had compelled many prehistoric artists to paint in the narrowest and deepest parts of the caves. Like here in Pêche-Merle in France. Sometimes images are found on parts of the cave that are almost inaccessible. It's hard to imagine how the artist got in to paint them, let alone imagine how anyone else got in to admire them. I mean, who would have got into a tight spot like this to decorate the ceiling? This painting isn't just difficult to reach. When you finally get here, it's even harder to understand what these artists were painting. Because, like many other cave images, it doesn't seem to represent anything at all. They're made up of dots and lines, or abstract shapes and patterns. Nothing in the natural world of the prehistoric artist would have looked like this. But... And very often, these patterns are repeated or scattered across more recognisable images in a seemingly random way. Here, at the Pêche-Merle caves in France, the prehistoric artist has painted a splendid pair of horses. But look, he's covered the image with a series of spots. It really is hard to see what a pattern of spots has got to do with the world of hunting. Archaeologists realize they were as far away from understanding cave painting as they had ever been. The obvious explanations, like the paintings having been created to represent things in the world, or for hunting, would never unlock the puzzle of these images. Because both of these theories missed the point. Instead of explaining why people were painting images in caves, they should have been trying to solve the mystery of how we got the amazing ability to create images in the first place. To be able to paint a picture of something, you first need to know what a picture is. And how can you know that if you've never seen one before? Henri Broglie himself realised that this was at the heart of the problem. He told the curious story of a Turkish man in the 19th century who was shown a picture. It was a picture of a horse. But the man was mystified. He'd no idea what he was looking at, because never in his life had he seen a picture before. This Turkish man, it seems, was a devout Muslim. Now, at its strictest, Islam forbids images of living creatures. So here was someone, apparently, who refused to believe that you could create an image of an animal in two dimensions. He said he didn't recognize it was a horse because he couldn't move around it. For us, looking at a painting as vivid as this one, it's almost impossible to believe. We can't imagine what it would be like not to understand what a picture was, that it can represent something in the world. This is what it might look like for people who've never seen any pictures before. A collection of lines, colors, markings without any meaning. Now if you can't understand what a picture is unless you've seen one before How on earth do you come up with the idea of creating one in the first place? So how did our ancient ancestors come to realise that a collection of lines, dots and colours could represent something? How did the penny drop all those thousands of years ago? This is one of the great mysteries of human creativity. It's one that experts have long tried and... ...failed to solve. But then, a few years ago, a revolutionary idea appeared. It was an idea that might solve this very problem. And it originated not in Europe, but a place thousands of miles away. It came from South Africa. Hidden among high crags of these mountains, the Drakensberg, are images on rock walls, uncannily like European cave paintings. They too feature large animals, and they also seem to show hunting scenes. But unlike the European paintings, these pictures aren't thousands of years old. They were painted just a couple of hundred years ago, almost within living memory. They were painted by people called the San, the Bushmen. For a long time, these paintings were largely ignored. But one man became fascinated by them. His name was David Lewis Williams. When I first started looking at the paintings, the general opinion was that they were scenes from daily life, and because they were Sarn people, they thought they were hunting scenes. Take this one as an example. Here we have an eland and a man who appears to be holding the eland's tail. People thought, well, maybe when Eland were hunted by Bushmen, they pulled its tail as a demonstration of being very brave or something like that. But when you begin to look more closely at the paintings, you begin to find point after point that just doesn't... doesn't add up. For example, this man here, you see, has got hoofs and not feet. So, had no one noticed these hooves before? I don't think anybody stuck their head under there to notice it, no. And then, of course, there are things about the man himself. His legs are crossed and the elan's legs are crossed. And then you notice other things, like that one higher up there that has a very clear antelope head. And then you realise that he's also got hairs standing on end. all over his body. And the eland has got hairs standing all over its body. And when you say these are pictures of daily life, it just doesn't fit. And when I began to notice all these strange points about the paintings, I thought we've got to find some way of cracking the code of what these paintings are. But when Lewis Williams began his investigation, he immediately faced a problem. Because these are the sand today. Rather than living in mountains, they now live a thousand miles away, on the Kalahari grasslands of Namibia. Over the centuries, their ancestors were persecuted and driven from the Drakensberg. Although the sand still hunt, today they no longer paint, and there's a good reason for that. For one thing, there are no rocks in the Kalahari for them to paint on. And their ancient tradition has disappeared. The San artists have died out, taking their secrets with them. So the key to unlocking the mystery of the strange paintings in the mountains seemed to be lost forever. There just didn't seem to be any way of getting at that because the people who made the paintings were extinct. But then, far away from the Drakensberg, Lewis Williams found the first clue. it was the start of a trail that would eventually lead him all the way back to the prehistoric cave paintings of europe although there are no bushmen today who remember a time when their people painted on rock there were some still alive at the end of the 19th century and thankfully the stories that they had to tell were written down and preserved they're kept here at an archive in cape town At the end of the 19th century, a German settler called Wilhelm Blake discovered there were still some Sandbushmen alive who had lived around the Drakensberg. Blake realised that they opened a rare window onto the past. He began to interview them. This vast archive, 12,000 documents, is the only one that can be found in the Drakensberg. Their testimony, it gives a tantalizing glimpse of a culture that no longer exists. Lewis Williams had a hunch that buried among these papers, which were like a bible of Bushman belief, there might be clues as to the original significance of the Drakensberg images. There was indeed something there. In reading the Blake manuscripts, it became very clear that their religion was built around a notion of travelling to a spirit world. It seemed the sand believed that while you're still alive, your spirit can leave your body and visit the spirit world. It happens when you enter a trance, what's sometimes called an altered state of consciousness. This sound tradition is still practiced today. I came to a village near Chumkwe in Namibia, hoping to see it for myself. Here I was introduced to the community's healer, or shaman. I'd been told he was the person who travels to the spirit world. Doctor, can you tell us why you're going to a trance? Anytime somebody sick, I'm asked by his family if I could help them because I'm the doctor. I go to help them in another world. And when I come back, I find out if it has worked or not. I knew the community was holding a trance dance that evening. The shaman gave me his permission to stay and watch. It all began with the women of the village creating a powerful rhythmic chant. Then the dance began and orchestrating it was the shaman himself. As the dance intensified, something dramatic seemed to happen to him. He seemed to lose himself in the rhythm, become detached from what was happening around him. He did indeed seem to be going into some kind of trance. I've been told that when the shamans enter a trance, they sometimes lose consciousness. And while in this state, they say they die and they visit the spirit world. And from there, they say they can heal people. Lewis Williams had discovered the vital role that trance played for the San people. But how could this help to solve the mystery of the haunting rock paintings created by their ancestors? Having read the Blake papers and found out about an altered state of consciousness or trance on the one hand and then knowing the rock paintings on the other hand, the real crunch is putting those two together. How do they dovetail? How do the sound beliefs explain the paintings? And that was a real puzzle that kept me in the dark for a long, long time. When the answer finally came, he realized it had been literally staring him in the face. In those days I used to have copies of the rock paintings that we had made, and I'd take them home and put them on the mantelpiece of a couple of ornaments holding them in place, and sit and contemplate them. And there's one painting that was particularly important to me from one of the sites in the Drakensberg. It was a copy of the same rock painting Lewis Williams had shown me in the mountains. And then one day, looking at this particular painting, it just clicked. What was going on here? On the left-hand side of the painting, there's an eland, and it suddenly occurred to me that this eland was dying. We could tell that by the crossed legs, it was stumbling, its head was lowered, its hair was standing on end. This is what an eland does when it's dying, particularly from a poison, from a poisoned ant. Next to it and holding its tail was a man and his legs were also crossed and he had hoofs beautifully painted cloven eland hoofs and He had hair standing on end And it's then it was obvious. He was dying the eland was dying and So it became clear that the paintings were not pictures of everyday life They were about spiritual experience in trance. The End This was the true meaning behind the sand paintings. The Eland is the largest antelope in Africa. Its grace and power had captured the imaginations of the sand and given the animal a magical potency. It was what they saw in their trances. The paintings that the Sam had made weren't about hunting. Instead, they were recreating their hallucinatory encounters with the animal by painting them onto the rock's surface. Now an ambitious new idea began to take hold in Lewis Williams mind Because he was aware that there were other rock paintings which were very similar to those painted by the Sun These were many thousands of years older the earliest pictures ever created And they were in Europe For many years I'd also been interested in the cave paintings in France and Spain, the Upper Paleolithic paintings. And one of the things that is very striking is the similarity between the rock paintings in Europe and the Southern African rock art. Just like the Sands'obsession with the Eland, prehistoric cave artists had also been captivated by a few key animals. And as with the images in South Africa, European paintings seem to graft features of animals onto the human body, to create strange new creatures. But above all, there was one inexplicable feature shared by both San and European paintings which intrigued Lewis Williams. What we've got here is a tracing of a painting made by the Sand Bushmen, probably about 200 years ago. It shows a picture of an eland with some sand figures surrounding the animal. But there's also something else. The artist has scattered dots across the whole image. Ring any bells? Well, just take a look at this. It's a drawing of those two horses that we saw down in the caves in Peshmerl. And that too has got this strange patterning. of spots all over it. Just 200 years ago on rock walls in Africa, the sand were creating the same abstract patterns as those painted tens of thousands of years ago in the caves in Europe. But why? What made people from completely different parts of the world and thousands of years apart come up with such strikingly similar geometric patterns? Lewis Williams began to wonder if the answer lay not so much in the art as in the brains of the people. the people who generated it. Now, in Southern Africa, we knew that the art came out of trance experience altered states of consciousness. So it's a simple matter then, of course, to turn to people who have studied altered states of consciousness in laboratory work and ask them what happens to the brain when people go into an altered state. And it was then that we learned that when people going into an altered state, the first thing they see is zigzag lines, bright, flashing zigzag lines, as in a migraine headache, for example, or clouds of dots, or grids. And they see these things because they are wired into the human brain. All our brains work the same way, regardless of who we are or where we're from. Physically, our brains haven't changed since humans first evolved. This means that if we change our brains, we can change the world. If our brains are stimulated, say put into a trance, they'd respond in the same way as the brains of our ancient ancestors. It's an intriguing explanation for the strange patterns. But could it be true? I've come to London to the Institute of Psychiatry to find out. They're going to try to induce a trance-like effect in my brain. So, Dominic, can you tell us what's inside this box of yours? Well, what we have here is an apparatus that allows me to stimulate the visual parts of your brain in a very specific way. Dr Dominic Fitch treats people with a rare type of visual disorder. They don't have a problem with their eyes as such, but with the part of their brain that deals with vision. To investigate their condition, he's designed an unusual device. It's actually very simple. Essentially, it's a set of goggles with some high-intensity LEDs, light-emitting diodes, that is connected up to the computer, which allows me to control the number of flashes I'm presenting to you per second. So you just place them over the eyes. You're going to beam things into my eyeballs. That's right. Now, you have to keep your eyes closed, because, as I said, the flashes are rather bright. His patients had reported seeing... peculiar shapes and patterns appearing before their eyes. The goggles are designed to induce these images in the brain. Is it going to hurt? It's not going to hurt. So if you have your eyes closed... Got one closed. What are you seeing now? Right, what I've got now is... sort of throbbing blobs, if that makes any sense, with a sort of network of very fine black lines. Right, okay. Very, very vivid colours. All the sort of colours of the spectrum seem to be popping up here. Behind all the colour, how can I explain it? It's sort of like a fishing net or... very fine black lines linking up. Like a honeycomb effect, I guess, is what it's like. Now what happens when I just stimulate one eye? Ah. Electric check-board. Sorry, chessboard. Electric chessboard. That's sort of what it's like. Reminds me of a dance floor I was once on. Is it colours in it or is it a black and white? It's black and white, yeah. Very, very bright black and white. Dominic, this was a new experience for me. I had my eyes closed, but I was seeing things. Tell me why. There are parts of the visual brain that seem to code or represent the types of grid patterns and lattices that you've been seeing. And presumably what's happening is that the light is irritating those areas and inducing a hallucination in you. So anyone that's given this type of stimulation will have the same types of experiences. Paradoxically, you can get exactly the same phenomena when too little information gets into the visual system. And certainly many subjects, when they're blindfolded, after a time will start to see those sorts of patterns as we induced in you today. Right, so if I went into a cave with no sources of light or blindfolded myself, I might start seeing just the same sort of things as I've seen. Indeed. Indeed. This would explain the strange patterns. Deep within the darkness of the caves, prehistoric artists experienced sensory deprivation. This induced hallucinations of abstract shapes and patterns, which our ancient ancestors then painted. But Lewis Williams realised abstract shapes were just the beginning. As people spent longer in trances, their hallucinations took the form of things of great emotional importance. As with the Sam, for our prehistoric ancestors, that meant the animals whose power had captured their imaginations. We're going to hallucinate an eland if we're a San person, whereas if we're living in France we're going to hallucinate a bison, shall we say. Or they will see a horse. So culture plays an enormous role in it. And because these images were hallucinations, they'd appear, and later be remembered, as two-dimensional records. Presentations. Visions flattened onto the wall of the cave. People didn't one day invent making pictures. What happened was that people were familiar with the images that their brains were producing and being projected onto walls. And they wanted to nail down and make permanent those images, those visions they saw. So they weren't making pictures of horses that they saw outside the cave. They were nailing down visions. Lewis Williams had finally found an answer to the mystery of how people who had never seen a picture before Came to create two-dimensional imagery all those thousands of years ago They weren't copying nature, but reproducing visions created inside their heads Here, for the first time, we've got a theory which seems to solve many of the puzzles that have mystified experts in the past. It's a theory based not just on an investigation of the cave art itself, but a scientific understanding of what was going on inside the heads of those who made it. It explains how we went from a world with no images to one with cave paintings. But it doesn't explain how we got from there to today, the modern world where images dominate our lives. Because about 12,000 years ago, something strange happened. People stopped painting in caves. Archaeologists don't know exactly why it happened, but throughout Europe, wherever they looked, they found little evidence of images being created for many thousands of years. The prehistoric people who discovered how to create images and then reproduced them for countless generations seemed to have lost interest in them. It was almost as if, rather than being an essential part of human existence, Images had been just an optional extra. Imagery seemed to have lost its hold over the human mind. So how did we get from there.....to today? How did the power of the picture recapture our imaginations and lead to a world so full of images we can't imagine life without them? Well, it's only recently that we've begun to discover the answer. We've come to southern Turkey, to the foot of a large hill called Göbekli Tepe. At the top lies something which reveals just what happened to imagery all those thousands of years ago. Researchers first visited Gobekli Tepe in the 1960s. What they found was a hillside that was carpeted with the remains of thin stone working. Little pieces like this. But then they assumed that the site itself had no special archaeological significance. Then, around 10 years ago, German archaeologists began excavating here. What they found astonished them. Because under their feet were colossal structures, stone circles built from huge T-shaped megaliths. The site is vast. At least 20 stone circles remain buried, containing hundreds of pillars. In Britain, Stonehenge was built four and a half thousand years ago. But this site is almost three times older. It dates back nearly 12,000 years, to the time when people stopped painting in caves. It is pretty obvious that the Quebecli Tepi was some kind of ritual centre, a meeting place in the mountains with great religious power for the people who created it. So how does this help to explain what happened to our ability to create images? Well, the best time to see that is at night. Because it's what's on these pillars that's essential for our story. They're not just megaliths, big stones. They're decorated, covered with carvings of dozens of wild animals. You see these best at night time, by the light of a naked flame, just as their creators once saw them. Lions. Cranes. Boars. Foxes. 12,000 years ago, at exactly the time images were abandoned in the caves of Europe, here on a Turkish hillside, they completely gripped people's imaginations. It means images were never an optional extra. Once humans discovered how to create them, they didn't stop. They'd been engraved onto the human mind. But this place may contain an even bigger secret. Because, remarkably, it seems to reveal that it was images which created the world we live in today. It's all down to the immense effort that lies behind these images. On one side of the hill, archaeologists discovered an area that had been used as a quarry. This is where the huge pillars that dominated Gobekli Tepe were cut from the limestone bedrock. Here's a pillar that never... This is the oblong of the head and here it narrows to the shaft. For some reason, we'll never know, it was abandoned while still half finished in the bedrock. And here we've got the space where another pillar was successfully extracted. It really is amazing to think that these stones were cut out of the rock and carved with images using only flint tools. Metal didn't exist. And what's also remarkable is their size. Each one of them is about 20 feet long and weighs an estimated 50 tonnes. That means it would have taken about 500 people just to shift them up the hill. Even the hill itself is massive. man-made. But what's so important about this huge effort is the effect it had on the society that built Gobekli Tepe. 12,000 years ago, hundreds of people travelled long distances to work and worship here. And they all had to eat. Back then, people throughout the world led the lives of hunter-gatherers, hunting wild animals, gathering wild plants. This way of life had successfully supported small groups of people since humans first evolved. Today though, we feed large numbers of people by farming. We grow crops and keep domesticated animals. Agriculture is the cornerstone of our modern world. Archaeologists had always wondered what made us give up our hunter-gatherer existence? What caused the agricultural revolution, the greatest change in human history? Quebec-Litepé got them thinking because it was in this area that farming first started and it happened at the same time this place was being built. Could it have been the need to feed all the people building Gobekli Tepe and worshipping there that first compelled people to start farming? There is some convincing evidence. Scientists recently sought to discover where the people who were killed by the Gobekli Tepe Where our modern cultivated wheat came from. They began by analysing the strain of farmed wheat that goes into our food and extracting its DNA. They did the same to several varieties of wild wheat. Then they compared their genetic make-up. And what they discovered is that the closest wild relative to our cultivated wheat grows in those mountains over there, the Karaca Dac, about 20 miles from Gobekli Tepe. The theory is that wild wheat was brought from the mountains and farmed here to feed the thousands of people frequenting the site. So there's the momentous conclusion that imagery had become so powerful in the minds of human beings that it brought about the greatest transformation in human history. Today our modern world is dominated by pictures in ways our ancient ancestors could never have begun to imagine. What would they have made of images that move? that are beamed across the globe and that are seen by millions. Yet none of this could have happened without people thousands of years ago having had a revelation. The revelation that with lines, shapes and colours they could capture the world.

There's something we do hundreds of times a day without even noticing it. It's an ability that we utterly depend on in our lives, yet we take it for granted. Just watch.

We see some lines and can give them meaning. We can tell one shape from another. And we understand that an arrangement of colours can represent something.

The ability to read images is an essential part of our lives. But what if we didn't have this ability? Imagine we couldn't understand images.

What would our world be like? Well, for a start, images would never have been invented. We'd have lost something we totally rely on. life would be impossible.

And our world would be unrecognizable. But at some point in our ancient past, that's what the world looked like, imageless. Now, of course, pictures dominate our lives. Well, this is the extraordinary story of how we humans discovered the power of images and how they created the world we live in today. How long has it taken for you to realise that I'm drawing a horse?

A second? A fraction of a second? We can tell what a two-dimensional image represents almost instantaneously, without even having to think about it. I'm not much of an artist, but even I can arrange a collection of pencil lines on a piece of paper so you see what I want you to see. And I don't do just horses.

I could draw almost anything in the world, and you'd probably guess what it was. But there must have been some point in our human story when we first got this ability, some moment in time when we began to create pictures and to understand what they meant. So what happened back then? How did we first get this ability to create images?

To find the answer, we need to go way back in time. What if we go back 2,000 years? This is the image of a horse from classical antiquity.

It was made to decorate a Roman household about 100 years before Christ. And clearly, the artists here had no problems with two-dimensional representation. We've gone back another thousand years to 1200 BC. This tiny fragment comes from ancient Egypt and the person who painted it knew perfectly well how to represent something in the world around them. We're going to have to go back much, much further.

This is northern Spain, a place called Altamira. We've come here because towards the end of the 19th century, a discovery was made at Altamira that would radically alter our understanding of when the world's... First images were created. This historic discovery was made by a nine-year-old girl.

Her name was Maria. She was the daughter of Marcelino de Sautola, a local Spanish nobleman who was also an amateur archaeologist. He'd become intrigued by Altamira, and in autumn 1879, Maria and her father paid the cave a visit. This was a cave that was completely unknown until a few years before.

Even though I was a mere amateur, I was determined to undertake my own investigations. As a gentleman scholar, De Saltuola took a serious interest in finding out more about the prehistoric past. But, like other archaeologists of the day, he assumed that the people who had once settled or sheltered in these caves were little more than savages, uncouth, lowbrow, hardly better than apes, and certainly incapable of any kind of creative achievement. I hoped that through these investigations we would manage to tear away the thick veil that separates us from the origins and customs of the ancient inhabitants of these mountains.

Now, Dessa Twola had come to the cave to excavate the floor, to poke around for prehistoric relics, such as bones and tools. It was Maria who made the discovery for which Altamira became famous. Papa!

Look, oxen! I was overcome with amazement. What I saw made me so excited I could hardly speak.

Young Maria had caught sight of the first gallery of prehistoric paintings ever to be discovered. Now, many more have since come to light in caves all around the world, but these at Altamira are still considered among the most beautiful. Dominating the ceiling were dozens of paintings of aurochs, a species of ox that had long been extinct.

They appeared to be standing, sleeping and running. As soon as he saw them, de Sautuola was convinced that the images had been painted by prehistoric people. But others weren't so sure.

When de Sartorla announced his discovery to the world, archaeologists immediately began to question its authenticity. The images were simply too good. It was unthinkable that they'd been created by prehistoric scientists. savages.

Experts claimed that the paintings had been faked and that de Sautola was either the victim or perpetrator of a hoax. He stood by his discovery. It's hard to believe that someone would have decided to shut himself away in the dark to paint extinct animals.

There was absolutely no reason to doubt that these paintings came from an ancient period in time. Desautola fought hard to clear his name, but his fellow archaeologists were consistently sceptical. Within a few years, he died, here at his family home not far from Altamira, a disbelieved and a disillusioned man. His supporters said... that the accusations of dishonesty had broken his heart and caused his death but the time would come when desautola was vindicated over the decades discovery after discovery was made in France as well as Spain, that proved beyond doubt that the cave paintings were prehistoric.

Then came an even more exciting find, in a cave called Lascaux, a gallery of pictures of breathtaking beauty. As more and more paintings came to light, they revealed prehistoric artists had painted with a confidence and a skill that matched almost anything from the modern world. Pablo Picasso himself said on first setting eyes on these pictures, We have learnt nothing.

And when experts began dating these paintings, there was another surprise. They found that we'd started creating images comparatively late in our human story. Let me show you what I mean. Let's imagine that the entire length of time that modern humans have been around on the planet is represented by these steps. People like you and me, the species known as Homo sapiens, we've been around for about 150,000 years.

That's where I am now. Biologically, from then onwards, human beings didn't change. We had exactly the same brain as we have today. And yet, for more than 100,000 years, we didn't create any images. It wasn't until here, that's about 35,000 years ago, that something began to change.

Archaeologists call it the creative explosion. The moment in time when people first began to create pictures. So what happened back then?

Why did people suddenly decide to start creating images of the world around them? Experts began searching for an answer. And their first explanation seemed the obvious one.

Today, one of the main reasons that we make pictures is to create representations of things in the world around us. Surely, the experts said, thousands of years ago, prehistoric humans also had painted to create representations of things around them. But as more and more cave art was discovered, it became clear that this explanation was wrong.

Because today, artists create images of every aspect of the world that they live in. But back then, they created images of mostly one thing. Prehistoric artists were obsessed by animals. And not just any animals, but some in particular. Like horses, bison, and reindeer.

But why? What was it about these animals that so fixated the minds of our ancient ancestors? Henri Bois was a French priest, but he was also the foremost expert on cave art for much of the 20th century. He believed, perhaps not surprisingly, that the paintings were about hunting. Prehistoric artists had painted animals because they believed it would increase the chances of a successful hunt.

The theory made sense. It certainly explained why only some animals had been painted. Roy seemed to have settled the question.

But more recently, when archaeologists began to examine the bones of animals that had been hunted and then eaten around the caves, they discovered something puzzling. If people had created these images to improve the chances of a successful hunt... you'd expect them to paint pictures of their quarry. But they didn't.

At Altamira, for instance, prehistoric artists had painted oxen. But the bones that had been left were those of deer. At other French sites they were painting woolly mammoths, but they were eating a wild version of this animal, the goat.

All in all, there's very little correlation between the animals depicted in prehistoric art and the animals that feature in the prehistoric diet. So, Breuil's hunting theory had also failed to solve the mystery of why people first started painting. And there was a bigger problem with these theories.

The pictures would need to be painted in places where people could see them. Yet something had compelled many prehistoric artists to paint in the narrowest and deepest parts of the caves. Like here in Pêche-Merle in France. Sometimes images are found on parts of the cave that are almost inaccessible. It's hard to imagine how the artist got in to paint them, let alone imagine how anyone else got in to admire them.

I mean, who would have got into a tight spot like this to decorate the ceiling? This painting isn't just difficult to reach. When you finally get here, it's even harder to understand what these artists were painting. Because, like many other cave images, it doesn't seem to represent anything at all. They're made up of dots and lines, or abstract shapes and patterns.

Nothing in the natural world of the prehistoric artist would have looked like this. But... And very often, these patterns are repeated or scattered across more recognisable images in a seemingly random way.

Here, at the Pêche-Merle caves in France, the prehistoric artist has painted a splendid pair of horses. But look, he's covered the image with a series of spots. It really is hard to see what a pattern of spots has got to do with the world of hunting. Archaeologists realize they were as far away from understanding cave painting as they had ever been. The obvious explanations, like the paintings having been created to represent things in the world, or for hunting, would never unlock the puzzle of these images.

Because both of these theories missed the point. Instead of explaining why people were painting images in caves, they should have been trying to solve the mystery of how we got the amazing ability to create images in the first place. To be able to paint a picture of something, you first need to know what a picture is. And how can you know that if you've never seen one before?

Henri Broglie himself realised that this was at the heart of the problem. He told the curious story of a Turkish man in the 19th century who was shown a picture. It was a picture of a horse.

But the man was mystified. He'd no idea what he was looking at, because never in his life had he seen a picture before. This Turkish man, it seems, was a devout Muslim.

Now, at its strictest, Islam forbids images of living creatures. So here was someone, apparently, who refused to believe that you could create an image of an animal in two dimensions. He said he didn't recognize it was a horse because he couldn't move around it.

For us, looking at a painting as vivid as this one, it's almost impossible to believe. We can't imagine what it would be like not to understand what a picture was, that it can represent something in the world. This is what it might look like for people who've never seen any pictures before. A collection of lines, colors, markings without any meaning. Now if you can't understand what a picture is unless you've seen one before How on earth do you come up with the idea of creating one in the first place?

So how did our ancient ancestors come to realise that a collection of lines, dots and colours could represent something? How did the penny drop all those thousands of years ago? This is one of the great mysteries of human creativity.

It's one that experts have long tried and... ...failed to solve. But then, a few years ago, a revolutionary idea appeared.

It was an idea that might solve this very problem. And it originated not in Europe, but a place thousands of miles away. It came from South Africa. Hidden among high crags of these mountains, the Drakensberg, are images on rock walls, uncannily like European cave paintings. They too feature large animals, and they also seem to show hunting scenes.

But unlike the European paintings, these pictures aren't thousands of years old. They were painted just a couple of hundred years ago, almost within living memory. They were painted by people called the San, the Bushmen.

For a long time, these paintings were largely ignored. But one man became fascinated by them. His name was David Lewis Williams. When I first started looking at the paintings, the general opinion was that they were scenes from daily life, and because they were Sarn people, they thought they were hunting scenes.

Take this one as an example. Here we have an eland and a man who appears to be holding the eland's tail. People thought, well, maybe when Eland were hunted by Bushmen, they pulled its tail as a demonstration of being very brave or something like that. But when you begin to look more closely at the paintings, you begin to find point after point that just doesn't... doesn't add up.

For example, this man here, you see, has got hoofs and not feet. So, had no one noticed these hooves before? I don't think anybody stuck their head under there to notice it, no. And then, of course, there are things about the man himself.

His legs are crossed and the elan's legs are crossed. And then you notice other things, like that one higher up there that has a very clear antelope head. And then you realise that he's also got hairs standing on end.

all over his body. And the eland has got hairs standing all over its body. And when you say these are pictures of daily life, it just doesn't fit. And when I began to notice all these strange points about the paintings, I thought we've got to find some way of cracking the code of what these paintings are. But when Lewis Williams began his investigation, he immediately faced a problem.

Because these are the sand today. Rather than living in mountains, they now live a thousand miles away, on the Kalahari grasslands of Namibia. Over the centuries, their ancestors were persecuted and driven from the Drakensberg. Although the sand still hunt, today they no longer paint, and there's a good reason for that. For one thing, there are no rocks in the Kalahari for them to paint on.

And their ancient tradition has disappeared. The San artists have died out, taking their secrets with them. So the key to unlocking the mystery of the strange paintings in the mountains seemed to be lost forever. There just didn't seem to be any way of getting at that because the people who made the paintings were extinct.

But then, far away from the Drakensberg, Lewis Williams found the first clue. it was the start of a trail that would eventually lead him all the way back to the prehistoric cave paintings of europe although there are no bushmen today who remember a time when their people painted on rock there were some still alive at the end of the 19th century and thankfully the stories that they had to tell were written down and preserved they're kept here at an archive in cape town At the end of the 19th century, a German settler called Wilhelm Blake discovered there were still some Sandbushmen alive who had lived around the Drakensberg. Blake realised that they opened a rare window onto the past. He began to interview them. This vast archive, 12,000 documents, is the only one that can be found in the Drakensberg.

Their testimony, it gives a tantalizing glimpse of a culture that no longer exists. Lewis Williams had a hunch that buried among these papers, which were like a bible of Bushman belief, there might be clues as to the original significance of the Drakensberg images. There was indeed something there.

In reading the Blake manuscripts, it became very clear that their religion was built around a notion of travelling to a spirit world. It seemed the sand believed that while you're still alive, your spirit can leave your body and visit the spirit world. It happens when you enter a trance, what's sometimes called an altered state of consciousness.

This sound tradition is still practiced today. I came to a village near Chumkwe in Namibia, hoping to see it for myself. Here I was introduced to the community's healer, or shaman.

I'd been told he was the person who travels to the spirit world. Doctor, can you tell us why you're going to a trance? Anytime somebody sick, I'm asked by his family if I could help them because I'm the doctor.

I go to help them in another world. And when I come back, I find out if it has worked or not. I knew the community was holding a trance dance that evening.

The shaman gave me his permission to stay and watch. It all began with the women of the village creating a powerful rhythmic chant. Then the dance began and orchestrating it was the shaman himself. As the dance intensified, something dramatic seemed to happen to him.

He seemed to lose himself in the rhythm, become detached from what was happening around him. He did indeed seem to be going into some kind of trance. I've been told that when the shamans enter a trance, they sometimes lose consciousness. And while in this state, they say they die and they visit the spirit world.

And from there, they say they can heal people. Lewis Williams had discovered the vital role that trance played for the San people. But how could this help to solve the mystery of the haunting rock paintings created by their ancestors?

Having read the Blake papers and found out about an altered state of consciousness or trance on the one hand and then knowing the rock paintings on the other hand, the real crunch is putting those two together. How do they dovetail? How do the sound beliefs explain the paintings?

And that was a real puzzle that kept me in the dark for a long, long time. When the answer finally came, he realized it had been literally staring him in the face. In those days I used to have copies of the rock paintings that we had made, and I'd take them home and put them on the mantelpiece of a couple of ornaments holding them in place, and sit and contemplate them. And there's one painting that was particularly important to me from one of the sites in the Drakensberg.

It was a copy of the same rock painting Lewis Williams had shown me in the mountains. And then one day, looking at this particular painting, it just clicked. What was going on here?

On the left-hand side of the painting, there's an eland, and it suddenly occurred to me that this eland was dying. We could tell that by the crossed legs, it was stumbling, its head was lowered, its hair was standing on end. This is what an eland does when it's dying, particularly from a poison, from a poisoned ant.

Next to it and holding its tail was a man and his legs were also crossed and he had hoofs beautifully painted cloven eland hoofs and He had hair standing on end And it's then it was obvious. He was dying the eland was dying and So it became clear that the paintings were not pictures of everyday life They were about spiritual experience in trance. The End This was the true meaning behind the sand paintings.

The Eland is the largest antelope in Africa. Its grace and power had captured the imaginations of the sand and given the animal a magical potency. It was what they saw in their trances. The paintings that the Sam had made weren't about hunting.

Instead, they were recreating their hallucinatory encounters with the animal by painting them onto the rock's surface. Now an ambitious new idea began to take hold in Lewis Williams mind Because he was aware that there were other rock paintings which were very similar to those painted by the Sun These were many thousands of years older the earliest pictures ever created And they were in Europe For many years I'd also been interested in the cave paintings in France and Spain, the Upper Paleolithic paintings. And one of the things that is very striking is the similarity between the rock paintings in Europe and the Southern African rock art. Just like the Sands'obsession with the Eland, prehistoric cave artists had also been captivated by a few key animals. And as with the images in South Africa, European paintings seem to graft features of animals onto the human body, to create strange new creatures.

But above all, there was one inexplicable feature shared by both San and European paintings which intrigued Lewis Williams. What we've got here is a tracing of a painting made by the Sand Bushmen, probably about 200 years ago. It shows a picture of an eland with some sand figures surrounding the animal.

But there's also something else. The artist has scattered dots across the whole image. Ring any bells? Well, just take a look at this.

It's a drawing of those two horses that we saw down in the caves in Peshmerl. And that too has got this strange patterning. of spots all over it. Just 200 years ago on rock walls in Africa, the sand were creating the same abstract patterns as those painted tens of thousands of years ago in the caves in Europe.

But why? What made people from completely different parts of the world and thousands of years apart come up with such strikingly similar geometric patterns? Lewis Williams began to wonder if the answer lay not so much in the art as in the brains of the people. the people who generated it.

Now, in Southern Africa, we knew that the art came out of trance experience altered states of consciousness. So it's a simple matter then, of course, to turn to people who have studied altered states of consciousness in laboratory work and ask them what happens to the brain when people go into an altered state. And it was then that we learned that when people going into an altered state, the first thing they see is zigzag lines, bright, flashing zigzag lines, as in a migraine headache, for example, or clouds of dots, or grids. And they see these things because they are wired into the human brain. All our brains work the same way, regardless of who we are or where we're from.

Physically, our brains haven't changed since humans first evolved. This means that if we change our brains, we can change the world. If our brains are stimulated, say put into a trance, they'd respond in the same way as the brains of our ancient ancestors.

It's an intriguing explanation for the strange patterns. But could it be true? I've come to London to the Institute of Psychiatry to find out. They're going to try to induce a trance-like effect in my brain. So, Dominic, can you tell us what's inside this box of yours?

Well, what we have here is an apparatus that allows me to stimulate the visual parts of your brain in a very specific way. Dr Dominic Fitch treats people with a rare type of visual disorder. They don't have a problem with their eyes as such, but with the part of their brain that deals with vision. To investigate their condition, he's designed an unusual device.

It's actually very simple. Essentially, it's a set of goggles with some high-intensity LEDs, light-emitting diodes, that is connected up to the computer, which allows me to control the number of flashes I'm presenting to you per second. So you just place them over the eyes. You're going to beam things into my eyeballs. That's right.

Now, you have to keep your eyes closed, because, as I said, the flashes are rather bright. His patients had reported seeing... peculiar shapes and patterns appearing before their eyes.

The goggles are designed to induce these images in the brain. Is it going to hurt? It's not going to hurt. So if you have your eyes closed... Got one closed.

What are you seeing now? Right, what I've got now is... sort of throbbing blobs, if that makes any sense, with a sort of network of very fine black lines. Right, okay.

Very, very vivid colours. All the sort of colours of the spectrum seem to be popping up here. Behind all the colour, how can I explain it?

It's sort of like a fishing net or... very fine black lines linking up. Like a honeycomb effect, I guess, is what it's like.

Now what happens when I just stimulate one eye? Ah. Electric check-board. Sorry, chessboard. Electric chessboard.

That's sort of what it's like. Reminds me of a dance floor I was once on. Is it colours in it or is it a black and white? It's black and white, yeah. Very, very bright black and white.

Dominic, this was a new experience for me. I had my eyes closed, but I was seeing things. Tell me why.

There are parts of the visual brain that seem to code or represent the types of grid patterns and lattices that you've been seeing. And presumably what's happening is that the light is irritating those areas and inducing a hallucination in you. So anyone that's given this type of stimulation will have the same types of experiences. Paradoxically, you can get exactly the same phenomena when too little information gets into the visual system.

And certainly many subjects, when they're blindfolded, after a time will start to see those sorts of patterns as we induced in you today. Right, so if I went into a cave with no sources of light or blindfolded myself, I might start seeing just the same sort of things as I've seen. Indeed.

Indeed. This would explain the strange patterns. Deep within the darkness of the caves, prehistoric artists experienced sensory deprivation.

This induced hallucinations of abstract shapes and patterns, which our ancient ancestors then painted. But Lewis Williams realised abstract shapes were just the beginning. As people spent longer in trances, their hallucinations took the form of things of great emotional importance. As with the Sam, for our prehistoric ancestors, that meant the animals whose power had captured their imaginations. We're going to hallucinate an eland if we're a San person, whereas if we're living in France we're going to hallucinate a bison, shall we say.

Or they will see a horse. So culture plays an enormous role in it. And because these images were hallucinations, they'd appear, and later be remembered, as two-dimensional records.

Presentations. Visions flattened onto the wall of the cave. People didn't one day invent making pictures. What happened was that people were familiar with the images that their brains were producing and being projected onto walls.

And they wanted to nail down and make permanent those images, those visions they saw. So they weren't making pictures of horses that they saw outside the cave. They were nailing down visions.

Lewis Williams had finally found an answer to the mystery of how people who had never seen a picture before Came to create two-dimensional imagery all those thousands of years ago They weren't copying nature, but reproducing visions created inside their heads Here, for the first time, we've got a theory which seems to solve many of the puzzles that have mystified experts in the past. It's a theory based not just on an investigation of the cave art itself, but a scientific understanding of what was going on inside the heads of those who made it. It explains how we went from a world with no images to one with cave paintings. But it doesn't explain how we got from there to today, the modern world where images dominate our lives. Because about 12,000 years ago, something strange happened.

People stopped painting in caves. Archaeologists don't know exactly why it happened, but throughout Europe, wherever they looked, they found little evidence of images being created for many thousands of years. The prehistoric people who discovered how to create images and then reproduced them for countless generations seemed to have lost interest in them.

It was almost as if, rather than being an essential part of human existence, Images had been just an optional extra. Imagery seemed to have lost its hold over the human mind. So how did we get from there.....to today? How did the power of the picture recapture our imaginations and lead to a world so full of images we can't imagine life without them? Well, it's only recently that we've begun to discover the answer.

We've come to southern Turkey, to the foot of a large hill called Göbekli Tepe. At the top lies something which reveals just what happened to imagery all those thousands of years ago. Researchers first visited Gobekli Tepe in the 1960s.

What they found was a hillside that was carpeted with the remains of thin stone working. Little pieces like this. But then they assumed that the site itself had no special archaeological significance.

Then, around 10 years ago, German archaeologists began excavating here. What they found astonished them. Because under their feet were colossal structures, stone circles built from huge T-shaped megaliths.

The site is vast. At least 20 stone circles remain buried, containing hundreds of pillars. In Britain, Stonehenge was built four and a half thousand years ago. But this site is almost three times older. It dates back nearly 12,000 years, to the time when people stopped painting in caves.

It is pretty obvious that the Quebecli Tepi was some kind of ritual centre, a meeting place in the mountains with great religious power for the people who created it. So how does this help to explain what happened to our ability to create images? Well, the best time to see that is at night.

Because it's what's on these pillars that's essential for our story. They're not just megaliths, big stones. They're decorated, covered with carvings of dozens of wild animals.

You see these best at night time, by the light of a naked flame, just as their creators once saw them. Lions. Cranes.

Boars. Foxes. 12,000 years ago, at exactly the time images were abandoned in the caves of Europe, here on a Turkish hillside, they completely gripped people's imaginations. It means images were never an optional extra.

Once humans discovered how to create them, they didn't stop. They'd been engraved onto the human mind. But this place may contain an even bigger secret.

Because, remarkably, it seems to reveal that it was images which created the world we live in today. It's all down to the immense effort that lies behind these images. On one side of the hill, archaeologists discovered an area that had been used as a quarry.

This is where the huge pillars that dominated Gobekli Tepe were cut from the limestone bedrock. Here's a pillar that never... This is the oblong of the head and here it narrows to the shaft. For some reason, we'll never know, it was abandoned while still half finished in the bedrock. And here we've got the space where another pillar was successfully extracted.

It really is amazing to think that these stones were cut out of the rock and carved with images using only flint tools. Metal didn't exist. And what's also remarkable is their size. Each one of them is about 20 feet long and weighs an estimated 50 tonnes.

That means it would have taken about 500 people just to shift them up the hill. Even the hill itself is massive. man-made.

But what's so important about this huge effort is the effect it had on the society that built Gobekli Tepe. 12,000 years ago, hundreds of people travelled long distances to work and worship here. And they all had to eat.

Back then, people throughout the world led the lives of hunter-gatherers, hunting wild animals, gathering wild plants. This way of life had successfully supported small groups of people since humans first evolved. Today though, we feed large numbers of people by farming. We grow crops and keep domesticated animals.

Agriculture is the cornerstone of our modern world. Archaeologists had always wondered what made us give up our hunter-gatherer existence? What caused the agricultural revolution, the greatest change in human history? Quebec-Litepé got them thinking because it was in this area that farming first started and it happened at the same time this place was being built.

Could it have been the need to feed all the people building Gobekli Tepe and worshipping there that first compelled people to start farming? There is some convincing evidence. Scientists recently sought to discover where the people who were killed by the Gobekli Tepe Where our modern cultivated wheat came from.

They began by analysing the strain of farmed wheat that goes into our food and extracting its DNA. They did the same to several varieties of wild wheat. Then they compared their genetic make-up.

And what they discovered is that the closest wild relative to our cultivated wheat grows in those mountains over there, the Karaca Dac, about 20 miles from Gobekli Tepe. The theory is that wild wheat was brought from the mountains and farmed here to feed the thousands of people frequenting the site. So there's the momentous conclusion that imagery had become so powerful in the minds of human beings that it brought about the greatest transformation in human history. Today our modern world is dominated by pictures in ways our ancient ancestors could never have begun to imagine. What would they have made of images that move?

that are beamed across the globe and that are seen by millions. Yet none of this could have happened without people thousands of years ago having had a revelation. The revelation that with lines, shapes and colours they could capture the world.

Transcript for:The Historical Journey of Image Creation

Transcript for:
The Historical Journey of Image Creation