Emerging from the Caves
Starting around 9,000 BCE, the earth's climate began to warm and the ice flows to recede. Reindeer moved northward, the wooly mammoth went extinct and humans emerged from the caves. During the Mesolithic period, (7,000 - 4,000 BCE in Spain and Northern Europe and 7,000 - 6,000 BCE in the Eastern Mediterranean regions) a culture flourished and produced art that closely resembles the cave art of the Paleolithic inhabitants, with one striking and important difference – the regular appearance of human figures engaged in battle, ritual dance, the hunt and gathering the harvest.
Since 1903, these extraordinarily lively paintings have been discovered on the stone walls of shallow rock shelters in the hills along the east coast of Spain. The same stylized animals adorn the walls, but a new sentiment for human themes and concerns is beginning to appear. Large, coherent groups of hunters and dancers are in kinetic motion in a variety of poses and settings. The Spanish paintings have been dated to 7,000 BCE and this style appears to have lasted, with many variations, until approximately 4,000 BCE. Examples of similar style have also been uncovered in North Africa, which some scholars consider to be the place of origin.
The characteristic features of the rock shelter paints are exemplified in the Marching Warriors found in the Gasulla gorge in Castellon, Spain. In the painting, which is only about 9 inches wide, a group of five men, holding bows and arrows, are depicted in tense, exaggerated motion. Their movements are uniform, but they are not just one image repeated five times over. Each individual has distinct facial features and the leader wears a feathered headdress. Opinion differs as to whether the group is engaged in ritual dance or the hunt.
Other paintings show a greater uniformity of basic shapes in a sharp, angular design, suggesting that they are pictographs or phonetic hieroglyphs. Over the millennia, styles became more abstract and schematic, more symbolic than directly pictorial. It is likely that these pictures illustrate the evolution from pictorial to symbolic, a process that culminates in the invention of writing in the Near East. Later, rigid letter-like shapes, repeated as if from a catalog of signs (as if letters from an alphabet) replace the spontaneous, dynamic paintings.
Some theorize that the rock paintings held a magical-religious significance to the artists in the same way that the cave paintings held significance for their Paleolithic creators. The rock shelter paintings are concentrated in areas that appear to have been used over a long period of time prior to the emergence of the Mesolithic painters while more accessible and well-suited lie unadorned. This suggests that the sites were long considered sacred or powerful and continued to be thought of as such into the Roman era, as evidence by Latin and Iberian inscriptions left on the stone walls.
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