How art invented humanity

In 1940, rumours of secret passageways to an old manor lured four teenage boys
into a hole in the ground near the village of Montignac in southwestern
France. Instead of a tunnel laden with gold, they found a series of natural
chambers bejewelled with exquisite paintings: horses and elk, ibex and bulls,
almost perfectly preserved on the limestone walls. Experts examining the
Lascaux caves in subsequent years using radiocarbon dating estimated that the
paintings had been made some 19,000 years ago. Today, the images are believed
to be around 20,000 years old. But Lascaux is far from the oldest example of
human art. Since 1940, many other caves have been found in Europe, Australia,
Indonesia and Africa containing art no less astounding. Some of it is more
than twice the age of the Lascaux murals.
Cave painting of prehistoric animals in earthy tones on a textured rock
surface.

These discoveries have turned the questions of when and why humans invented
art into central problems of the human sciences. As fair and poignant as such
questions may be, they leave unaddressed the deeper mystery of what art is in
the first place, where it comes from in the human soul, and what it might
reveal to us about the nature of reality.

Popular legend holds that when Pablo Picasso visited the Lascaux cave a few
years after its discovery, he emerged exclaiming: ‘We have invented nothing’ –
art had appeared full-grown from its earliest instance. The common
interpretation is that Picasso was humbly attributing the invention of art to
our prehistoric ancestors rather than claiming it for himself and his
contemporaries, or any human of the modern age. But perhaps this apocryphal
story conveys a weirder truth, namely that no one really invented art.
Instead, it was the other way around: art invented humanity..........

Art has never been a celebration of humanity, but always an exploration of
those borderlands where the human ends and something else begins. This applies
even to art dealing with seemingly human ideas, feelings and things. Only
through art can a city become a jungle, a house an alien structure, a sadness
a kind of weather event....................

https://aeon.co/essays/humans-did-not-invent-art-it-was-the-other-way-around?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=48f001c5bc-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_07_24_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-49ad69cbc2-71577312