Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from Lewis Mumford's work The Myth and the Machine: Technics and Human Development (©1967 by Lewis Mumford). This passage notes the relationship between hunting and the development of Imaginative art during the Paleolithic era.

Behind the fine craftsmanship and expressive art that characterized the last phases of Paleolithic culture was the mode of life brought about by specialization in hunting big game. In this pursuit a more cooperative strategy, requiring larger numbers of trackers, beaters, and killers, was required; and that presupposes a tribal or clan organization. Single family groups of less than fifty people, only a minority being adult males, could hardly have done the job. That Ice Age hunting life was necessarily dependent upon the movement of the great herds in search of fresh grazing or browsing grounds: yet it developed fixed points of reference and return....

If curiosity, cunning, adaptability, inurement to repetition were—along with sociability—the prime virtues of early man, the later Paleolithic hunter needed still other traits: courage, imagination, adroitness, readiness to face the unexpected. At a critical moment in the hunt, when an enraged buffalo, already wounded, turned upon the hunters closing in upon him, the ability to act in concert at the command of the most experienced and daring hunter was the price of avoiding injury and sudden death. There was no parallel to this situation in food-gathering, nor yet in the later modes of Neolithic agriculture....

Unlike food-gathering, be it noted, hunting carried with it an insidious danger to man's tenderer, parental, life-fostering nature: the necessity to kill as a recurrent occupation. The stone-pointed javelin or arrow, with its capacity to strike home at a distance as well as at close quarters, enlarged the range of killing and appears at first to have awakened anxious misgivings as to its effects. Even toward the cave-bears he expelled from their shelters and ate for food, Paleolithic man seems to have nourished a sacred fear, as with his later totemic animals. The skulls of these animals have been found arranged as if they were the objects of a cult. Like some hunting tribes to this day, Paleolithic hunters possibly begged the slain creatures' forgiveness, pleading hunger as justification, and limiting the kill to such food as was actually needed....

The systematic killing of big game probably had still another effect upon Paleolithic man: he was confronted by the fact of death, not at infrequent intervals, but as an everyday accompaniment to life. To the extent that he may have identified himself with his victim, he was forced to take into consciousness his own death, too, and that of his family, his kinsmen, his fellow tribesmen.

Here, under the further incitements of dream, may lie the beginnings of man's devious efforts to prolong his life in the imagination, by assuming that the dead, though physically removed from the scene, are still in some sense alive, watching, intervening, prompting: sometimes benignly, as a source of wisdom and comfort; but in no small number of instances the spirits of the departed, haunting the dream life, are full of malice and must be exorcised, or propitiated, lest they bring on disaster. Perhaps the memorial arts of sculpture and painting, which flourished now for the first time, were deliberate attempts to outwit death. Life departs, but the image remains and continues to enhance other lives.

The greater part of Paleolithic art was preserved in caves; and in the case of some of the painted images and sculpture found there—about ten percent of the total number—we have reason to associate the art with magic rituals to invoke success in hunting. ... If magic ritual was invoked by the hunter, it was because in the very performance of it he acquired both the insight and the skill necessary to carry out his task successfully. The kind of graphic line achieved in the paintings of the bisons of Altamira or the deer of Lascaux implies fine sensory-muscular coordination, along with the sharpest kind of eye for subtle detail. Hunting, as everyone who has hunted even in the most desultory way knows, requires a high degree of visual and aural alertness to the least quiver of movement in leases or grass, along with hair-trigger readiness to react promptly. That the Magdalenian hunter had attained this state of sensory vividness and esthetic tension is shown, not merely by the evocative realism of his highly abstract representations but by the fact that many of his animals are depicted in motion....

All that we can say with any surety about this phase of human development is that hunting was a propitious medium for imaginative art. ...

So while hunting in the grand style required daring muscular exploits and promoted a surgical hardness about inflicting pain and taking life, it was also accompanied by an increase in esthetic sensitiveness and emotional richness—preludes to further symbolic expression.