“Timeless manifesto of the arts of prehistory”, by Pascal Picq

RFI: Pascal Picq hello, you are a paleo-anthropologist, and author of a beautiful book entitled Timeless manifesto of the arts of prehistorya tribute to all the creativity of humanity…

Pascal Picq: Yes, it may seem odd said that way. But indeed, we have a great artistic tradition in the West. The West has dominated the world for the last centuries, and during these last centuries, we have discovered Prehistory… There you go, it’s Lascaux, Chauvet, Cosquer… Without going so far as to say that it all started in Europe, we were very focused on Europe and it’s true that there are wonderful things. But we realize that it is much older than we imagine, that it does not only concern our species Homo Sapiens and that it is everywhere in the world.

For example, among the Australian Aborigines, or among certain Amerindian or Inuit peoples, we can trace a filiation with artistic representations that are very old (tens of thousands of years) and today there are contemporary artists. But wait… These are not artists who stayed in prehistory. Their art like ours has evolved… So, there it is, “ Timeless manifesto is to show that it is something that is constant in the great adventure of humanity

And by reading your book, our whole view of prehistoric man changes…

And women.

Women, let’s get there…

No, no, I insist because, whenever you have a representation in an illustrated book or a docu-fiction, it doesn’t matter, on a person who paints a Chauvet wall, it’s always a man. But we know absolutely nothing about it. There were men and women artists. The image of women, as you know, is very present in prehistoric art. But be careful not to project our hyper gendered and pejorative clichés vis-à-vis women in prehistory.

It’s true that the image we have is that of the man who hunts and the woman who watches.

Yeah, that’s right, yes… (in an amused tone)

And you, you say ” no, women could also be painters “.

As a woman, you’re not going to believe this stuff? Especially since we are discovering that women were much more active… They always have been. These are our representations inherited from the 19th century – the 19th century was a terrible century for the representation between men and women to exclude women from the issues of the city. But in this case, indeed, we realize that there were women who were in all activities, and why not: artists! So I’m not saying that it was a woman who painted Lascaux, but there is no reason to say that there weren’t women who painted Lascaux.

Why do we have such a pejorative view, in quotation marks, of prehistoric man or woman?

Ah, because it is a construction that goes back precisely to the ideology of progress of the 19th century. When the West dominates the world. Already, there is a whole very old mechanism for excluding women from the side of philosophy, from the side of theology. And what I discovered recently in a book called How modernity ostracized women? that there was also a whole secular arsenal through institutions, particularly scientific ones, but also within the framework of the modern State, in medicine… which consisted of keeping women out of all the important issues in the city. And so we put them back in their natural functions. You know, if we call mammals ” mammals (we could have found other names), in the 19th century, it was to remind women of their primary function: as reproducers and nannies, and to send them back to their homes.

This is linked to the bourgeois revolution. And the 19th century is the apotheosis of this horror, which will completely exclude women from all this. It is the Napoleonic Code that infantilizes women. We only came out of it in the 1960s, after all! And in fact, we are not yet completely out of it. And there, prehistory and paleo-anthropology emerge at the end of the 19th century, in a hyper misogynistic context, and which is also a context of exclusion of all genres. It’s racism, it’s colonialism, it’s the war against homosexuality, it’s the war against nature. In fact, everything that we put in the basket we call the wokism (I don’t really like the term because it confuses everything), nevertheless all this appears at the same time. And we projected into prehistory this hypergendered vision of society which is managed only by patriarchy and men. When you go to the networks and type in prehistoric man or prehistoric woman: who cuts the tools? who hunts? who makes the fire? who paints? It’s the men!

Thirty glorious ! I am a baby boomer. You can’t see it on the radio, but I’m a baby boomer. The ladies remember that this era was also very gendered. Men at work. What we see in American series like Desperate Housewives Where madmen etc And women have developed pathologies. You know, Jules Michelet said: ” Women are the sick people of history “. They are not sick, they have been made sick. So, it’s hysteria in the 19th century, it’s melancholy (one thinks of Madame Bovary) and in the 20th century we found other things. And this was projected into my domain. In the 1950s, when we have no proof of it, we projected the model of the 30 glorious years with dad or Mr. at work, who has the car, and Mrs. who is at home, and who flourishes, this brave lady, with household arts. Oh how happy she is! And we projected it into prehistory.

So this book is not a militant book against that idea. But in any case, it completely collides with these representations both vis-à-vis women, vis-à-vis our ancestors and the diversity of human cultures.

And he also tells us that prehistoric man is not a shaggy monster who will fight, but he is someone who loves beauty.

But of course ! So there, I’m tired (pardon me) of seeing these films on prehistory. So when it’s a bit funny film (pardon me for the term), when it’s a parody, that we see it, ok. Now, when we see docu-fiction or other films where we see these men and women in completely improbable outfits: bikinis, boots, animal skins… Anyway, it’s ridiculous… Even Jean-Paul Gaultier wouldn’t dare to do that. So all that is irrational, these sort of ragged, lousy people of humanity. It’s dead wrong. We know there was weaving. Except that the weaving materials are perishable, there is very little left. But above all, when we discover certain tombs, some are mentioned in this book, in particular the tomb of Sungir. Sungir is in Ukraine. There are four bodies. A grown man and woman and two pre-teens. Ten, twelve years.

When we look at the photographs, we see lots of white dots. There are hundreds of them. These are mammoth ivory beads. There are large spears along the bodies. These are straightened mammoth tusks. There are tiaras with arctic fox canines. Ivory bracelets. All this represents 30,000 hours of work. That is to say that in fact these men and women spent much more time than one imagines creating beauty. They had adornments, they had tattoos. They had makeup. I also don’t want to go into absolute contradiction with this vision we had of these ragged prehistoric people, but in any case the make-up, the hairstyles, the clothes… All this was already important. What is specific to humanity is cosmetics…

Cosmetics, jewelry, clothing, this also reflects more complex societies.

But absolutely. And with codes. Languages. For example, in this book I mention magnificent carved objects called bifaces. Objects that are symmetrical. So obviously we never imagined when we discovered them more than a century ago that these men and women could create such complex objects for the sake of aesthetics. It had to be for something! Of course, they were starving…

My own children at school learned that the handaxe was a tool.

But of course. Of course it can be. But at the time, they were on fire. Just take a wooden spear, blunt it, put it in the flames, it’s much more effective I can tell you. And ultimately, the way to make these bifaces is exactly what we are doing, both of us. It is to construct sentences. From a cognitive point of view, what we call the operational chains is the sequence of gestures that lead to these magnificent objects, it is exactly the way in which we articulate the words with the grammar and the semantics to make sentences and give meaning. This all goes back 1.5 million years. Cosmetics means getting in touch with the cosmos. Cosmogony is the relations of origins. It puts us in a rational position vis-à-vis the cosmos.

Cosmetics, we are indeed the only species that change their appearance for social injunctions: social status, but also for transgressions, to seduce, to provoke, etc. So all this is much older than we imagined. And everything happens at the same time. I recall that before the end of the 19th century, they had invented all forms of art. Including the music that is evoked with sublime instruments that we found. So the new forms of art, the 7th art, or photography, didn’t come into play until the end of the 19th century. They had already invented everything for at least 40,000 years.

This is not in any way to minimize our contemporary artists (they are still honored these magnificent artists in the book), but to show that there is something that has been there for so long… There are millions of years is dizzying. Cosmetics, transformation, the image of women and the pleasure of creating. The most elaborate technical innovations were not to answer material problems. They were made to create beauty.

You also say that there is no hierarchy between prehistoric and contemporary artists. We cannot say the beginnings of art: it is art in its own right.

It is art in its own right. I have been from Marseille for some time and there is a magnificent exhibition around the Cosquer cave, as we did for Lascaux. And there, in the presentation, we are told: this is how this artist has depicted an auroch, which are wild bulls. These are two traits that intersect. And suddenly, it completely reminds me of those lines that Picasso makes to show a bull. The auroch is a prehistoric bull, Picasso is a modern bull. It is a gesture of absolutely extraordinary precision. And besides, it remains a mystery. It is not known at all which were the academies that allow them to access such mastery. And so we cannot rank.

When I was young, a student, I went to Périgord. I joined in the visits. It was fun. It’s not like that anymore, but the nonsense that was told by the guides was still folkloric… It was funny. And then people’s remarks: Ah, not bad for the time! “. I’m sorry, Pech Merle’s horse… Without being a specialist, I’m putting a photo of a horse in front of you, in half a day you know if it’s Pech Merle, Lascaux… We recognize them. There is a style. People who said ” not bad for the time “, it’s very funny. It’s not realism. They are symbolic representations with changing aesthetic canons.