SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

primitive ceremonial burial of some of their dead as well as ceremonial stone cabinets
containing bear skulls and thigh bones, serving their bear cult, and stone alters with opened
human skulls placed on them that speak of head hunting and cannibal shamanism.
Cro-Magnon and Sapiens Sapiens sites speak of an assertion of prefrontal cognition, memory
and semantic in language far in advance of Neanderthal. It was a progress that made possible
the craft skills and technology with which to introduce the art of beads, necklaces, pendants,
clay fired figurines, complex tools of worked bone, as well as create and map trade routes across
continents.
It is no chance accident or stranded UFO pilot whose art fills the caves of Altamira and
Lascaux, that made possible the large realistic sculptures of bear and bison made of clay, built
up on stone outcroppings in caves. Nor were the animals and realistic figures of nude women
etched into the stone walls of caves 38,000 or more years ago a prank of a late 1800’s or early
1900’s cave explorer, like the wheat field designs mythologized by science fiction and
hollywood, as being of other worldly origin.
Cognitive science makes clear that Cro-Magnon and the later wave of Sapiens Sapiens both had
the bio-brain system architecture and development in memory and cognition with which to
create the culture and art that became the first renaissance of our species. By 10,000 years ago
painting began appearing within all the overlay of paintings on cave walls, of large groups of
Sapiens Sapiens with bows and arrows hunting and doing battle. Each clan or generation of
Sapiens Sapiens immigrants to the area simply found free space on the cave wall, not finding
any overlaid the images of the previous group. I can’t help but be reminded of a graffiti like
process driving some of the cave art. Cave walls were covered with layers of paintings of
animals and figures some carrying spears others bows and arrows. Many appeared to have been
used for target practice.
The layers of paintings includes abstract shapes, earlier under-layers are almost entirely of
animals, with an image of a shaman in totem animal dress appearing here and there. There are
also female images some dancing in the earlier layers. The abstract diagrams seem to document
like a calender, cyclic events.
Their techniques evolved from the more limbic tactile relief sculpture and engraving to later
more abstract-cognition in service of the limbic-shamanic, re-presenting, possession and
controlling of reality, through the invention of the less limbic-sensory tactile, more abstract
in logic figurative painting.
The cave art itself, through each layer, can be understood as a shamanic-picto-graphic-speak
that speaks the memory cognition and shamanic concerns of each clan that inhabited the
territory.
It was a time that might be viewed as our species release from our first and darkest-age. The
promise of our species potential in cognition begun with H. habilis seemed till then almost lost
forever in the deepest recesses of our species limbic-Id.
Although not yet into the bright light of reason, not yet free of limbic-dominance with its
inherent retributiveness in memory and cognition, reason continued to favor the Id-darkness of
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