Richard Leakey - Origins Reconsidered (1992)

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Because the art of Africa was on rock shelters, not deep in caves, as in Europe, the ravages of time have eroded most of a rich expression. What we now see is the merest glimpse of what was on the minds of these people.

Richard Leakey
Dots are just one example of an element in Lascaux art, and in all cave art... This is a profusion of nonrepresentational, geometric patterns. In addition to dots, there are grids and chevrons, curves and zigzags, and more.... The coincidence of these geometric motifs with representational images is one of the most puzzling aspects of Upper Paleolithic art.... images, six different kinds in all, are shimmering, incandescent, mercurial—and powerful. Called entoptic images—which means "within vision"—these phenomena are products of the basic neural architecture of the human brain.

Richard Leakey
The question... is whether Upper Paleolithic art bears the telltale signs of Lewis-Williams' three stage neuropsychological model, and could thus be shamanistic art.

Richard Leakey
Of the range of images in Upper Paleolithic art, the most arresting are the therianthropes. There are not many... but they seize the imagination. The most famous is the so-called sorcerer... In a manner unusual for Upper Paleolithic images, the sorcerer is staring directly out of the wall, a full-face stare that transfixes the spectator.

Richard Leakey
The first major discovery of prehistoric art was the Spanish cave of Altamira, which, like Lascaux, is one of the most spectacular examples of Upper Paleolithic art yet known.

Richard Leakey
Next to the discovery of the Turkana boy, the visit to Lascaux ranks as one of the great moments of my life.

Richard Leakey
Prehistoric images speak to us more evocatively than any other element of the archeological record: colorful, vibrant paintings of horses, of bison, of a panoply of animals and humans that often seem alive and in motion. And yet there is a dimension of unreality about them... The images seem plucked from life... often arranged chaotically to our eye, frequently superimposed... sometimes apparently incomplete.... There is an enigma in these images, a profound challenge to our understanding of the past.

Richard Leakey
When a San Shaman goes into a trance, he harnesses that power, becomes part of the world beyond, becomes invisible to the singers and dancers around him, and draws images on the rock face. Ask the San who drew the images, and they say the spirits. And the rock face is more than a surface for the paint; it is the boundary of this world and the world beyond.... part of the meaning of it all, and the rock shelter itself assumes a special status, a place of veneration.

Richard Leakey
The first era of the Upper Paleolithic, the Aurignacian, is notable for several reasons, one of which is the absence of painted caves.... One of the most evocative pieces from this era, from the Abri Blanchard in southwestern France, is a flute. Music must have been an integral part of Upper Paleolithic life too.

Richard Leakey
The painted, engraved, and carved images of prehistory are threads from past cultures, and we are foreigners trying to interpret their meaning. Perhaps more than anything else, art can be fully understood only in the context of the culture that produced it.

Richard Leakey
To our western eyes, the painted images are the most prominent component of a corpus of artistic expression. This Western bias, a particularly Eurocentric bias, has been pervasive and deep.... it has resulted in a lack of attention to, and concern about, prehistoric art of equal and sometimes greater antiquity in eastern and southern Africa.

Richard Leakey
Where Breuil has seen chaos—or at least, randomness—in wall art, Leroi-Gourhan sought and found order.

Richard Leakey
Leroi-Gourhan surveyed more than sixty caves and saw order in the distribution of their images. Deer... often appeared in entranceways but were uncommon in main chambers. Horse, bison, and ox were the predominant creatures of the main chambers. Carnivores mostly occurred deep in the cave system.

Richard Leakey
My father used to say that, through culture, humans effectively domesticated themselves.

Richard Leakey
People who pass from stage two hallucination to stage three often experience a sensation of a vortex or rotating tunnel around them, and soon have hallucinations filled with iconic images, not just signs.... It is here that "monsters" appear, part human, part beast, known as therianthropes.

Richard Leakey
Humans become human through intense learning not just of survival skills but of customs and social mores, kinship and social laws-that is, culture.

Richard Leakey