If you want to see glossy photographs of foreign worlds , your desire may be fulfilled in an unexpected place : the prehistory of homo sapiens . NYU anthropologist Randall White ’s beautiful book Prehistoric Art : The Symbolic Journey of Humankind ( Abrams ) is one of the good books out there devote to the art of proto - world who walked the Earth decade of thousands of years ago . In pictures and commentary , White recreates a public so unlike our own that it might as well be on the cold steppes of Mars .
These cave painting , statue and carved pearl were made by our remote root , including Neanderthals . But they are , in a very basic sense , art made by non - human .
Cro - Magnons , Neanderthals , and Ice - Age homo sapiens lived in a macrocosm utterly unlike our own . And the art they lead behind volunteer us a glimpse into cognisance forged in an foreign world without cities , agriculture , or wheels . Along with ghost figure of speech of 12,000 - yr - old Ice Age fertility statues and 30,000 - year - former painting of animals in cave , White ’s comment is a treat . He consider that art was the former form of human symbolic communication , emerging roughly around the same time as complex language .
These art object , seen through Randall ’s heart , become messages from a world where symbolic communicating itself was an experimentation . It ’s undecipherable precisely what these object mean , but it ’s sure that they were an innovative way for early mankind to express themselves and catch images of what they see in a now - go away cosmos . Even if you ’re not an anthropology buff , this magnificently - illustrated book will appeal . It ’s not a history lesson , just . It ’s a chance to see Earth through foreign eyes .
prehistorical Art[Powells ]
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