TRACES OF THE ANCIENTS: ETHNOGRAPHIC VESTIGES OF PLEISTOCENE 'ART'

Abstract

Due to their traditional fierce and sustained opposition to external contact, the Jarawas of the Andaman Islands have become only recently accessible to detailed study. Their graphic art-like productions appear to consist entirely of non-figurative, essentially geometric patterns. In this paper, they are compared with the palaeoart of the south-eastern Asian mainland’s final Pleistocene and early Holocene, and distinctive similarities are documented. Linguistic and genetic evidence suggests that after humans occupied the archipelago, probably during a period of low sea level in the Late Pleistocene, the rising sea of the initial Holocene interrupted contact with the mainland. This isolation may have led to the preservation of cultural elements in an endemic population. The recent discovery that the Jarawas can produce very realistic iconic art, especially when young, leads to the hypothesis of explaining the rare occurrence of figurative graphic art in most Pleistocene traditions of it being a ‘juvenile’ art form, practiced mostly by the young. This coincides with the pronounced lack of evidence that the cave art of south-western Europe, the only known Pleistocene graphic art body comprising a significant component of iconic motifs, is the work of adults. It also links with the strong hypothesis that the course of hominin development during the last third of the Late Pleistocene is marked by conspicuous neotenisation of the human clade. Consequently the rise of semi-naturalistic graphic art may be an exaptation of a juvenile trait favouring pictorial thought and, ultimately, leading to the introduction of pictographic writing.

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