by Charmain Naidoo
November 2018
NOW RUNNING UNTIL 20th JANUARY, 2019!
Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have told stories through pictures. Human ancestors used rock faces as the pages of their picture books and mixed ochre powder with animal fat, charcoal, and a host of other natural ingredients as ink. Rock art, experts say, was born in Southern Africa more than 100 000 years ago. However, while this region might be the cradle of this ancient storytelling art form, the phenomenon occurs all over the world.
It is surprising to see the global similarities in how all the world’s pioneering forebears depicted their lives and the environment they lived in. This common resemblance is visually evident in the exhibition that is on at the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in downtown Johannesburg.
The Wonders of Rock Art: Lascaux Cave and Africa explores paintings found in French caves in that town, paintings that go back 17 000 years. The caves were discovered by accident in 1940. Paintings depict the wild animals that roamed the plains of France, and a few humans, grotesquely distorted.
Camille Bourdier, a prehistorian, associate professor and researcher in Toulouse, France writes that the Lascaux paintings “tell us about the spiritual world of prehistoric European hunter-gatherer populations.” She says that in European Palaeolithic rock art, the motifs are not randomly chosen.
“They focus on a few animal species, particularly large herbivores,” she explains. “Landscapes, the sky and stars, and the mineral and botanical worlds are missing. Humans and their material world (their objects and habitats) are also barely present.”
The few humans that are represented in the art are drawn simplistically or with exaggerated, ugly features.
Dr Bourdier continued, sharing that “the Lascaux rock art is an exquisite expression of the symbolic and spiritual world of these past populations of hunter-gatherers, and how they perceived the human world through animals.”
The travelling French exhibition is accompanied by a Southern African companion exhibit called “The Dawn of Art” that includes the San’s spiritually-inspired cave paintings. This prehistoric exhibition, with its depictions of how the early humans lived, how they sharpened stone for cutting tools or turned ivory into buttons and horns into needles, is a wonderful way to introduce children to their early forebears – through pictures.
Picture books, the experts tell us, help children develop a sense of self. Children respond to images long before they can read and it helps them make sense of their place in the world, and their relationship to other people. We understand the thinking of our forebearers through the stories they told about themselves and the spiritual representation of things they believed in.
It is also an important way of helping us connect to our origins and learning about how we segued into civilisation – and how we recorded our relationship with the real world, and the spiritual world.
Visit the Sci-Bono website for more information
The exhibition opened in May 2018 and was supposed to run until 1 October 2018, but due to popular demand, the exhibition has been extended until 20 January 2019.
Add this to your list of holiday outings. It does not disappoint.
