Could cave paintings be graffiti by prehistoric yobs?
Paleaobiologist R Dale Guthrie, Professor Emeritus at the Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, has said what many of us have perhaps privately suspected, which is that not all prehistoric cave painting is in the same league as the masterpieces ofn art adorning the walls of the Lascaux caves in France’s Dordogne region. In his new book, The Nature of Palaeolithic Art, Guthrie argues that Lascaux-quality art represents only a small proportion of preserved Palaeolithic art, and that much of it consists of crude depictions of genitalia. Professor Guthrie has also studied one of the commonest forms of cave art ─ human handprints ─ and concluded that they were mostly made by adolescent boys, but that all ages and both sexes were making this art, not just the senior male shamans, as has been assumed by some scholars. Paul Pettitt, who discovered Britain’s first example of Palaeolithic art at Cresswell Crags, responded by saying that ancient art could not so easily be d
