The Animal Within: The Triple Inheritance of Late Pleistocene Rock Art

This contribution examines the multispecies matrix of parietal art-making in early human evolution. While the habitual production of rock art is often considered to flag an irreversible departure from the hominin ‘state of nature’, I argue that the formation, design and organization of early image worlds remain deeply ecological, and thus bound up with pregnant and rich human-nature relationships. Situating my approach within ongoing efforts to overcome so-called ‘philosophies of access’ and their static subject-object renderings, I show that albeit rock art is indeed to be regarded a cultural signature behaviour in the hominin lineage, early expressions of parietal art are substantially framed and co-constructed by significant nonhuman others who are variously engaged, implicated or convoked in processes of image-making. I draw on a set of key concepts from New Materialism and Human-Animal Studies and deploy the abundant archaeological evidence from Upper Palaeolithic Franco-Cantabria as well as from Late Pleistocene and Holocene rock art traditions of South America to demonstrate that our understanding of the origin, assembly and motivational background of this early imagery can be considerably enhanced if we begin to explore the active involvement of rock formations and nonhuman animals. Building on theoretical insights from Jane Bennett and others, I maintain that the archaeological evidence for early parietal art-making supports the view that rock art is a hybrid phenomenon and its genesis often linked to shifting assemblages of humans and nonhumans and their various ‘conactivisms’. Rock art carries a triple inheritance – human, mineral and animal – and as such comes into view as a human-fashioned synthesis of nature and culture, where natural potentialities and agencies meet human behavioural and cognitive horizons. This alternative apprehension of early rock art has important consequences for the evolutionary narrative of art-making in becoming human. Rather than signifying a fundamental withdrawal from nature, image-making emerges as a powerful ecological practice with the potential to re-configure and re-imagine human-nature relations in unprecedented ways while nonetheless remaining open, sensitive and responsive to other-than-human ecologies. The Homo Pictor, in this view, does not overpower the shackles of nature but instead re-integrates nature into culture to open up a whole new universe of seeing, knowing and meaning-making.