ANCIENT ODYSSEYS

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

The human mind can't easily comprehend huge expanses of time. Once the years run into the tens of thousands, our brain lumps them together into an undifferentiated mass. The catchall term prehistoric art works perfectly with this sort of thinking. It sounds like just another episode in art history-modern art, Renaissance art, Byzantine art, prehistoric art.

In reality, the artworks created before history began-prior, say, to about 10,000 B.P. (before the present)-cover a much longer time span than what has come afterward. Southwestern European cave painting, only the most familiar expression of ancient creativity, was done over a period of at least 10,000 years. And when Paleolithic people first crawled into the Chauvet cave to daub the walls with images of rhinos and bears, nearly half of all art history was already over with.

When art first appeared, presumably around 40,000 B.P., it spread quickly. Within a mere 5,000 years-barely the blink of an eye on paleontological time scales-the work of early artists popped up in several corners of the globe. Archaeologists have found more than 10,000 sculpted and engraved objects in hundreds of locations across Europe, southern Africa, northern Asia and Australia. The styles range from realistic to abstract, and the materials include stone, bone, antler, ivory, wood, paint, teeth, claws, shells and clay that have been carved, sculpted and painted to represent animals, plants, geometric forms, landscape features and human beings-virtually every medium and every kind of subject that artists would return to thousands of years later.

This creative explosion is best documented in Europe, largely because that is where most of the excavations have taken place. Early body decoration, for example, was found in the 1950s by Soviet archaeologists at Sungir, near the Russian city of Vladimir. From graves dating back to 28,000 B.P., they unearthed the remains of a 10-year-old girl, a 12-year-old boy and a 60-year-old man. The three are festooned with beads, more than 14,000 all told. But each is adorned in a different way, evidence that body decoration was used to emphasize gender and age distinctions in social groups. In addition to the beads, the girl has delicate snowflake-like carvings around her head and torso. The boy has no snowflakes but wears a belt made from 240 fox canine teeth. And the man is wearing a single pendant made of stone in the middle of his chest. Another distinction: the beads on the children's bodies are approximately two-thirds the size of those the man is wearing.

At about the same time that the three were being buried-give or take a few millenniums-a new sort of artifact begins to appear in the prehistorical record. Archaeologists working at sites all across Europe and well into Russia have found dozens of so-called Venus figurines: miniature sculptures of big-breasted, broad-hipped women. The statuettes, which may have been used in fertility rites or even religious ceremonies, suggest a worshipful attitude toward fertility and reproduction.

By 22,000 B.P., archaeologists have found, the first evidence of the cave paintings that appeal so strongly to modern eyes begins to appear. The paintings, some of them realistic portraits of animals, others depicting half-human, half-animal figures or abstract symbols, soon became the dominant form of prehistoric European art. They remained important until 10,000 B.P., when, along with the glaciers of the last Ice Age, they seem to have melted away from human consciousness.

Those are the broad outlines, at least, of early art history. The details are much messier: it's not as though one phase gave way smoothly to another. Beadwork and statuette carving didn't stop just because cave painting began-and the presence of caves didn't automatically inspire people to cover them with images. Says Jean Clottes, one of France's pre-eminent authorities on prehistoric art: "There are a lot of caves in Yugoslavia, for example, but no paintings in them." Moreover, there is enormous regional variation in what sorts of art were produced at what times.

The story is even less straightforward in other parts of the world. Not only have extensive explorations been less common outside Europe, but also what's been found has proved difficult to date. Nonetheless, it is clear that artists were at work in Australia and southern Africa, at least, at roughly the same time as their European cousins.

The Australian continent abounds in Aboriginal rock art, both paintings and engravings. Much of it lies in a 1,500-mile-long, boomerang-shaped area across the country's north coast. Archaeologist Darrell Lewis of the Australian National University estimates that there are at least 10,000 rock-art sites on the Arnhem Land plateau alone, in the Northern Territory. "Each of these sites," he says, "can have several hundred paintings." But unlike early inhabitants of Europe, who frequently decorated caves over a short period and then abandoned them, the Australian Aborigines would return over and over to the same sites-a practice that still goes on today. Unraveling the history of a single site can thus be extremely complicated.

How old is Australia's art? Some archaeologists insist that certain paintings of human hands and life-size crocodiles and kangaroos were done 50,000 years ago, but these experts may be overconfident of their dating techniques. Another controversial assertion is the claim by anthropologist Alan Thorne of the Australian National University that a small piece of red ochre (a kind of clay), dated to 50,000 B.P., was worn down on one side like a piece of chalk by humans. "Whether it was ground to paint a shelter or a person or part of a wall, I don't think anyone would disagree that it is evidence of art," says Thorne. Even if Australia's art is not as ancient as Thorne thinks, there is strong evidence that at least two rock carvings found in the Bimbowrie Hills are more than 40,000 years old, and that scores of others in the area fall between 30,000 and 20,000 B.P.

SOUTHERN AFRICA'S ARTISTIC RECORD is much sparser. Scientists have unearthed a pendant made from a seashell that may be more than 40,000 years old, carved bones and beads made from ostrich eggshells that probably date from around 27,000 B.P., and paintings on slabs of rock in a Namibian cave that may be nearly as old. But like Australia's Aborigines, southern Africa's indigenous people carried on their rock-art tradition into modern times, confusing anthropologists' tasks considerably.

And in the rest of the world ... nothing. Not in the Middle East, not in Southeast Asia, not in China or Japan or Korea, and not in North Africa before 15,000 B.P. at the very earliest-although there is ample evidence of an ancient human presence in all these areas. This may mean the people there weren't interested in art, or it may simply be that they painted or carved on wood or animal skins, which have long since rotted away.

Nobody can do more than speculate about the answer. That uncertainty, along with the spottiness of the archaeological record-even in an intensively studied area like southern France-makes it hard to know whether art, once invented, was a universal practice. Probably not, argues archaeologist Olga Soffer, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: "Art is a social phenomenon that appears and disappears and, in some places, may not arise at all." But many anthropologists counter that the term art is usually defined too narrowly. What paleolithic humans really invented, they say, is symbolic representation, and by that definition art may well appear in every culture-though it might not be easy for us to recognize.

It's also difficult to say whether art originated in a specific part of the world. By the time of humanity's great artistic awakening, Homo sapiens had probably already traveled from its African homeland through most of Europe and Asia. The urge to make art could have arisen in any of these places and spread throughout the world, or it could have happened in many areas independently.

There are problems with either scenario, however. "The pattern is puzzling," observes anthropologist Randall White. "One of the most common forms of body adornment in Western Europe during this early period is canine teeth from carnivores, drilled with holes and worn as dangling ornamentation. And damned if in Australia, some 35,000 to 40,000 years ago, this isn't exactly what they're doing too." It might seem like an unremarkable coincidence-after all, carnivores must have loomed large in every culture. But anthroplogists have learned that such coincidences are actually quite rare. If art did spread around the world, it moved with astonishing speed (on a paleontological time scale, that is), and, says White, "it's a long way from southern France to Australia."

One possible explanation: art was percolating along for tens of thousands of years before most of the known examples show up. Perhaps the original Homo sapiens populations in Africa invented art and carried it to other regions. The reasons nothing much has been found dating before 40,000 B.P., goes the argument, are that scientists haven't looked hard enough and most of the evidence has perished. As appealing as it may seem though, this art-is-older-than-we-think theory has attracted little support; the demarcation line at 40,000 B.P. is just too sharp.

New discoveries like the one at the Chauvet cave, and more intensive study of existing sites, are constantly giving archaeologists more information to work with. Also, dating techniques are becoming more refined. It used to be that scientists needed to test a large sample of paint to pinpoint its age. And, says anthropologist Margaret Conkey, "no one was willing to scrape a bison's rump off the wall." Now it takes only a tiny sample. French prehistory expert Arlette Leroi-Gourhan estimates dates by using pollen particles preserved on cave floors.

The results of all these studies, while always enlightening, don't necessarily simplify things for scientists. A new analysis of the Cosquer cave on the French Riviera, for example, has shown that painted handprints on the walls date to 27,000 B.P., while images of horses and other animals came some 9,000 years later. Rather than being decorated in a single, prolonged burst of creativity, the cavern was painted over scores of centuries, quite possibly by artists who had no connection of any kind with one another, unlike Aborigines, whose culture has direct links to the distant past.

Prehistoric art was created over so long a period by so many different humans in so many parts of the world, and presumably for so many different reasons, that it may never fit into a tidy catalog. These ancient masterpieces are telling us that our prehistoric forebears had modes of expression more varied than we once imagined-and also that we'll never truly understand just how rich their lives must have been.

-Reported by David Bjerklie and Andrea Dorfman/New York, Tim Blair/ Melbourne, Peter Hawthorne/Cape Town and Thomas Sancton/Paris

With reporting by DAVID BJERKLIE AND ANDREA DORFMAN/NEW YORK, TIM BLAIR/ MELBOURNE, PETER HAWTHORNE/CAPE TOWN AND THOMAS SANCTON/PARIS