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The Master of the Masek Beds: handaxes, art and the minds of early humans[1]

[Forthcoming in Goldie and Schellekens (eds) Aesthetics and Psychology. Oxford University Press, 2010]

How old is art? People who disagree about what is to count as art will answer the question in different ways; even those with similar conceptions are unlikely to converge on a common century. For me, agreement within a few hundred thousand years would be progress. The answer I’m suggesting is: About a million years ago. This is massively imprecise, but it’s not blandly uninformative; on the contrary, it’s an answer rejected by almost everyone whose views on this I understand. I don’t say the answer is right; I’m not very confident about the answer. My point is that it is a serious candidate for an answer, and no one seriously considers it.

One reason this answer is not taken seriously may be that it has consequences many find unattractive. My candidates for first art are certain stone implements, called handaxes. Acreature making these things around 800 thousand years ago (kya)had, so far as we know, limited social intelligence, no articulated language, no narrative, religion or symbol. To many it will seem absurd that anything produced within such a thin cultural and cognitive setting should count as art. I’ll have this worry in mind throughout, giving it special attention in Section 4.I’ll also argue for the immense explanatory potential of handaxe production for issue which, while art-related, stand as independent markers of human achievement: practices of Gricean meaning-making,the imposition of style on human action,thedevelopment of symbolic culture. If you suspect that the question about art will turn out to be largely or wholly verbal, there may still be something here of interest.

I had better clarify one thing before I begin. I am arguing that the first art is an art of pure, unmeaningful beauty, and that our loss of a sense of the connection between art and beauty and our insistence that what matters is meaning stand between us and a sense of the true significance of these objects. It would be wrong to take this as an argument for the enduring primacy of beauty over meaning in art, or even as a denial that beauty is sometimes highly meaning-dependent.

1 Acheulean technology

Thirty five years ago the prehistorian J Desmond Clark noted that “The symmetry and refinement of some of the earlier Acheulean handaxes, which surely go beyond the utilitarian need, may reflect the first appearance of an aesthetic appreciation of form”.[2] Similarly hesitant references have been made since then, and occasionally before, to an aesthetic role for these stone artefacts produced from about 1.6 million years ago (mya) onwards. This has never gained the momentum that would turn it into a “Here is the origin of art” thesis of the kind so often expressed concerning the European Upper Palaeolithic (UP) from 35kya onwards, with its exquisite carvings and grand painted caves. There are dangers in declaring this or that body of very ancient artefacts to be art; dangers that range from accusations of ethnocentricity, through the hubris of speculating in an environment almost devoid of signposts, to the possibility, once again, that the issue turns out to be largely or wholly verbal. Risking all these dangers, I want to give an airing to the idea that Acheulean tool making has a place in the history of art, and in the process to draw attention to a remarkable body of work that was in production for a vastly longer time than any familiar art historical category such as Cubism, or even Western mimetic realism. It lasted more than one million years, outlived several human species and spread from Africa to western Asia and parts of Europe. We call this handaxe technology the Acheulean, after St Acheul in France, the place where these objects were first recovered in modern times, though the form indisputably originated in Africa, perhaps in what is now southern Ethiopia.

These stone tools may also be called bifaces—two worked sides of a stone cobble or flake that meet at a sharp edge going all the way round. They are tear, cordate or ovate in shape and sometimes worked to a high degree of symmetry.[3] They were created by a complex process of heavy and light striking with other objects: stone for the rougher shaping, bone and antler for the fine work. Because they were produced by reduction of a very durable material they have survived. Indeed, they exist in vast numbers, and carry a great deal of information about the techniques of making, techniques which modern stone knappers have been able reliably to reproduce.[4] At some sites the flakes removed in the process of reduction lie where they fell, making possible a painstaking refitting of the pieces and a (literal) blow by blow reconstruction of the making. Scholars have even drawn conclusions about the social relations between members of the community on the basis of the pattern of stone waste, sometimes called debitage. Despite talk of “transitional artefact traditions,” the current evidence suggests that the Acheulean emerged quite suddenly, against the background of a much less refined stone tool industry called the Oldowan which goes back to 2.6mya.[5]

So these objects are not utterly mysterious, even granted the huge temporal distance of their making from us, and the pathetically small quantity of contextual information we have to go on in interpreting them. There are, as we shall see, some well-articulated theories on offer to explain their flourishing. Before we get to that, it’s worth focusing on the remarkable, the strangely satisfying beauty of these objects. Some of them seem to me among the most visually arresting human artefacts we have. Wide eyed, untutored responses should not be our stopping place, but they are not a bad place to start.

2 Some bifaces

First, an example from Northern Cape, South Africa, dated at 750,000 BP and made from banded iron stone, remarkably symmetrical and crafted so as to show off variation in the material. [Plate 1 about here]Moving out of Africa with a relatively late human diaspora, we have the Hoxne handaxe, presumed to be the product of our direct ancestor, H. Heidelbergensis. It was discovered in 1789 by John Frere, a Suffolk land owner; it came, he surmised, from "a very remote period indeed, even beyond that of the present world".[6] Frere’s handaxe is shaped as an elongated tear drop, roughly symmetrical in two dimensions, but with a twist to the symmetry which has retained an embedded fossil. [Plate 2 about here]In size and shape it would not have been a useful butchery implement, and is worked on to a degree out of proportion to any likely use.[7]

Astonishingly, given the depth of time involved, we occasionally glimpse the oeuvre of a single individual. At the Masek Beds, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, were found five finely shaped handaxes in white quartzite, measuring about 27 cm in length, dated between 600 and 400kya. [Plate 3 about here]This is very large; the average length for all handaxes is 13cm and 90% are less than 18cm in length.[8] Superposed drawings of their outline shapes show them to be almost perfect matches. Mary Leakey (great-great-great grand daughter of John Frere, by the way) describes them as “elongate, with delicately trimmed tips…. In spite of the material being coarse grained, and intractable, these tools have been elaborately trimmed over both faces…. The close similarity in technique, size and form suggests the possibility that they may have been the work of a single craftsman”. Another analyst, not otherwise given to the language of connoisseurship, speaks of “a highly accomplished knapper, in full control of a difficult raw material… a “tour de force”[9]

Rivalling the work of the Master of the Masek Beds, though in a less familiar genre, we have two implements from Cuxton in East Anglia found at exactly the same level; there is a suggestion, once again, that they were made by the same agent. One is an extraordinarily elongated dagger-like instrument (such things are called ficrons) measuring 30cm in length, said to be “exquisite, almost flamboyant”. [plate 4 about here]The other is a cleaver—a blunt-edged, less common version of the handaxe--of comparable size. Here again “[t]he workmanship is… extraordinary. Despite the large size, there are no mistakes such as step fractures across the wide expanse of the faces. The cross-sections along the long axis and across the handaxe are perfectly symmetrical. The cleaver edge, straight and perfectly orthogonal to the long axis, has been achieved by two immaculate opposing tranchet blows, one from each edge.”[10] Both weigh well over a kilo and are too large and heavy for a modern human male of normal size and strength to use.[11] They are provisionally dated at 240,000 BP.[12]

Finally, at Sima de los Huesos, in Northern Spain the remains of about thirty people belonging to the species H. heidelbergensis have been found, dating from 300kya; it is possible that the bodies were thrown into the pit for burial. Among them was one impressive handaxe of quartz, not a material otherwise worked in this area, which some have speculated to be an early example of grave good.[13][Plate 5 about here]

I have emphasised visually arresting aspects of these object. But they are engaging in other ways. Anyone who has held a handaxe will understand Steven Mithen’s question:

Why does it feel so enthralling to hold a finely made symmetrical handaxe in one’s hand? Why does a symmetrical handaxe look and feel so attractive? My guess is that the thrill of holding a finely made symmetrical handaxe is an echo of the Stone Age past, of a time when these objects played a key role in sexual display and to which our modern minds remain attuned.[14]

I shall say more about the answer Mithen gives later on; for now I simply note the strong tactile and kinaesthetic impression they make.[15]

3 Art of the Acheulean?

Responses like these to artefacts from distant cultures often provoke warnings about ethnocentric foisting on others of aesthetic and artistic categories said to be the invention of recent western societies.[16] Oddly, we don’t hear parallel claims to the effect that preliterate societies past and present lack technology and religion, categories which are assumed to be elastic enough to take the strain of such cross-cultural comparison. A culture’s technology may be seen as underpinned by magical forces, or as subject to the will of Gods; religions may be polytheistic and suffused with magical elements in ways that make them very unlike the systematic and official doctrines some of us ascribe to today. Our art is not obviously more distant from that of the Upper Paleolithic than Anglicanism is from the religion of, say, the San people of southern Africa well into the twentieth century—a system of belief which, it has been suggested, is the best model we now have for religion in the Upper Paleolithic (Lewis-Williams 2002). Why this so selective unwillingness to grant that art comes in varied forms and against radically different cultural backgrounds?[17] Further, those who insist on the impossibility of bringing the products of our own society and other, very different societies under a common category of art often ignore or deny a striking fact: the degree to which the aesthetic of another society is recognisable and appreciable without heroic efforts of cultural re-education. As John McDowell says, “…it is remarkable, and heartening, to what extent, without losing hold of the sensitivities from which we begin, we can learn to find worth in what at first seems too alien to appreciate”.[18] These acts of recognition are difficult to explain without the assumption that we apply to the artistic cultures of otherssensibilitiesnurtured within our own.

We are free, of course, to use the word “art” in more refined ways which make it inappropriate to speak of art before the UP, or before the Renaissance, or even before Duchamp. Some of these refined usages have their point, and it will be a waste of time to argue that one perspective should have a monopoly of the term. I am using art in the broad but not wholly amorphous sense of that which is produced with the intention that it have aesthetic features. My usage is more or less the same as that employed by Franz Boas ninety years ago when he praised the work of most “uncontaminated primitive manufacturers”, saying that “most objects of everyday use must be considered as works of art”[19]. And this apparently very broad sense of art is enough to generate significant battle-lines; when anthropologist Richard Klein says that the Acheulean “produced nothing that could be mistaken for art”,[20] he does not mean that the people who made Acheulean tools lacked an art world of curators, critics and Turner Prizes—the sorts of things that “post-aesthetic” theorists of art consider so important.[21] He means art in a much looser and more traditional sense which includes the painted caves and carved statues of the Upper Palaeolithic (UP), a period which he contrasts very favourably with the supposedly art-free times before that. Klein is not alone in his view. Making the same contrast with the UP, Randall White says that “[f]or the first two and a half million years of the archaeological record the only artefacts of human beings and their hominid precursors were strictly utilitarian: stone tools and perhaps fragments of bone used for simply digging tasks”.[22]

How has the UP acquired this apparently unassailable status as first art? Perhaps the Acheulean’s small-scale, non-representational objects have found it difficult to compete for attention with the spectacularly large cave depictions, and with sometimes exquisite representational carvings of the UP—though one might expect their very abstractness to appeal to a modern sensibility. Working in the UP’s favour was the fact that the cave paintings were discovered at a time of intense reflection on and experimentation with modes of depiction. On visiting Altamira cave, with its combinations of naturalistic skill and confident deviations from naturalism, Picasso is reported to have said “We have learned nothing”, powerfully encapsulating the thought that these great works anticipate what European art has struggled to achieve in its painful path to—and beyond—pictorial realism. Thus the cave paintings were easily incorporated into a conception of “high art” that spoke to classical and modernist sensibilities.[23] Then there are the dramatic stories of discovery, scepticism and final vindication that go with the late nineteenth century’s revelation of cave depiction, easing it naturally into the narrative form so often adopted when telling of the discoveries of Schliemann and Carter.[24] UP artefacts also benefit from the period’s reputation as an unprecedented leap forward in cultural achievement across a range of activities which include a complex and articulated tool-kit, co-operative hunting, trading, and ritual and symbolic behaviours visible in grave goods and, by inference, many of the artistic products of the period. This picture is perhaps a too vivid one, and the UP has its detractors;[25] but on no one’s account is the Acheulean comparable in cultural richness. The handaxe is basically a tool, and a simple one within a narrow and scarcely changing technology; aesthetic approaches to it naturally seem sentimental and unscientific.

4 Art, symbol, culture

I’ll argue that an aesthetic approach to the Acheulean has nothing sentimental or unscientific about it. The primary difficulty for it is the close association scholars presume between art on the one hand and, on the other, culture, tradition and the symbolic. In fact the thing which is currently threatening the view of the UP as first art is the discovery of evidence for symbolism in the Middle Stone Age, the latest being a report (January 2009) by the team working at Blombos Cave, Southern Cape, claiming to have found pieces of ochre with symbolic markings dated at 100kya. This is said to “have challenged the notion that full-fledged symbolism, such as cave paintings, did not appear before about 40,000 years ago in Europe”.[26] The view that the marks on ochre at Blomos cave have symbolic significance is disputed, but I don’t presume to join in that debate; I treat this as merely illustrative of the idea that symbolic activity is at least a necessary condition for art. As the same commentator puts it “… art is an aesthetic expression of something more fundamental: the cognitive ability to construct symbols that communicate meaning, whether they be the words that make up our languages, the musical sounds that convey emotion, or the dramatic paintings that, 30,000 years after their creation, caused the discoverers of the Chauvet Cave to break down in tears”.[27] As long as this view prevails, and as long as we find no strong evidence for symbolic culture prior to 200kya, the claim to find an artistic element in the Acheulean technology will not be taken seriously.

But it can’t, surely, be a necessary or conceptual truth that art depends on symbolic cultural practices. Take the case of the UP. Nicholas Humphrey has drawn attention to the often made assumption that the caves at Lascaux and Altamira show that the Magdalenian people were fundamentally like us, though living in a world remarkably different from ours.[28] As Humphrey points out, we have good evidence for the falsity of this assumption: pictures drawn by a profoundly autistic, languageless child, Nadia, which are remarkably like those at Lascaux, Altamira and the more recently discovered Chauvet cave, where depictions of horses, lions and other creatures have been dated at 32kya. Someone looking only at Nadia’s art might well conclude that she had a mind of extraordinary maturity, something we know is unfortunately not the case. Humphrey is not asking us to conclude that the people of the UP were autistic; his point is that there is no sound inference from their artistic production the modernity of their minds.