Drawing and Evolution

Humans have learned to draw before they learned to write. Rock art, i.e., paintings found in caves, were made in a time period between the Paleolithic and Neolithic, and are between 40,000 and 70,000 years old.

 

Already then humans had a need to represent ourselves and other animals. Hunting scenes, men, utensils, animals of all kinds and also abstract strokes were drawn. The archaeologist Dean Snow has also demonstrated, by measuring and comparing the length of the hands that made these paintings, that most of those made in Spain and France were done by women. Perhaps the ability of women to develop abstract thinking, as well as the mastery of language, is what allowed them to develop the ability to draw.

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