Researchers say modern humans in the area did not see the ritualistic purpose of painting on cave walls, unlike their European counterparts.
A new study from Tel Aviv University (TAU) may have found the answer to the question that has been puzzling archeologists for decades: Why is there no prehistoric cave art in the Levant, and specifically in modern-day Israel?
The study postulates that humans in the Levant during the Upper Paleolithic Age, or Old Stone Age, did not paint on the walls of the caves because many large animals were already extinct in the area by that point, and there was no need to try to depict them.
Large animals on which humans depended for survival during that time were the primary subjects of cave art in Western Europe, where hundreds of cave paintings from 35,000 to 30,000 years ago have been discovered.
The study says the images of the animals were painted as part of shamanic rituals involving altered states of consciousness. They were intended to convey messages to entities beyond the cave walls, sometimes asking for solutions to various problems.
The researchers say that soon after modern humans first came to Europe from Africa, large animals such as woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses began to disappear.
“Watching these populations diminish, worried prehistoric Europeans ventured deep into caves and painted large animals on their walls, asking the entities to bring them back, emphasizing their own dependence on large game for their survival.” said Prof. Ran Barkai.
Barkai was part of the team from TAU’s Jacob M. Alkow Department of Archaeology & Ancient Near Eastern Cultures that authored the study, along with Ilan Dagoni, Miki Ben-Dor and Yafit Kedar.
“The practice of cave painting came to an end more or less when Europe’s large animals became completely extinct,” added Barkai.
The study was recently published in the Journal of the Israel Prehistoric Society.
“In Israel, we do not find such paintings because when Homo sapiens arrived [in the Levant from Africa], the large animals were already eradicated by earlier types of humans. Here, with elephants and rhinoceroses all gone, Homo sapiens were forced to hunt smaller, faster animals,” explained Barkai.
Because people in both regions at the time belonged to the same Aurignacian culture, and maintained contact with each other, the practice of wall painting was probably known to those living in the Levant.
“Their tools were similar, and their artistic objects, beads and pendants for example, were also similar; there is no doubt that humans here had the cognitive ability to paint and were no less capable than their European contemporaries,” said Barkai.
