Week 1 - Prehistoric Art and Cave Painting
Week 1 – Prehistoric Art & Cave Painting Text Document
Lesson:
I bet you draw, color, play with playdough or listen to music almost every day. What other art do you do each day? These are all examples of art, but human beings haven’t always made art. The first humans, or Homo sapiens, lived about 315,000 years ago, but it’s only about 40,000 years ago that we have the first signs of art. This early art consisted of humans crafting tools made out of sticks and stones. Then, about 10,000 years later we find the first ever paintings, mostly of animals drawn on the walls of dark caves.
The oldest of these caves is called the Chauvet cave in France. Here, humans drew pictures of lions, panthers, rhinoceroses, bears, and mammoths. Imagine living in a place where those animals all roamed in your backyard. Yikes!
What animals do you see in this picture?
One of the best Prehistoric caves was found in another part of France, called Lascaux. The art in this cave was made over 15,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until 1940 (80 years ago) that we even knew it existed! A group of boys were playing outside when suddenly their dog ‘Robot’ fell into a hole! When they went to rescue the dog they found caves and caves of Prehistoric art!
These caves showed pictures of bison, deer and cattle – different kinds of animals than found 15,000 years earlier in Chauvet. We believe these drawings were part of magic hunting rituals – these early people believed that killing the animal in the painting would help hunt the animal in real life. This is actually one of the first examples of religion, specifically religion that believes nature is filled with spirits – think Disney’s Pocahontas!
What animals do you see in this picture?
The paintings themselves were drawn on the cave walls either in black outlined form (think a coloring sheet that hasn’t been colored in yet), or filled in with earth toned colors. These early humans would use the natural cracks and bumps of the stone walls to help form their animals. What do you think they used for paint? What did they use for paint brushes?
Probably just their hands and for paint different elements like charcoal from their fires, mud, and other things found in their environment.
Videos:
“Cave Art 101” from National Geographic gives some great information and images of these caves:
“Cave Baby” by Julia Donaldson read aloud:
Art Project: Cave Art
For this ‘Cave Art’ project we made mud paint using powder paint & mud and drew our cave drawings on crumpled up pieces of paper (or our cave walls!). This project is definitely as messy as I get – maybe even a little too messy… if this is you as well, feel free to swap out just for plain mud (no paint) or just finger paints.
Step 1: Make “mud paint”:
Add mud to individual containers – as many containers as you want colors
To each mud container add 1-2 tablespoons of a paint powder color (found on Amazon List)
Add a squirt of dish soap (like dawn)
Add a 1/4 cup of water
Mix and adjust ingredients until paint-like consistency
Step 2: We don’t have a rock surface in our yard, so we took large pieces of craft paper, gave them a quick crinkle to give the surface some texture, then used the natural indentations of the paper to create animal shapes. If you have a rock surface in your yard that you’d like to paint on directly, do that instead!
The paint took a few through hand washings to remove from our hands, but it definitely comes off. Also easily came out of clothing – the mud however was a different story. Be sure to wear dark clothes for this project.
Now what to pictures to create?? What animals live in your community? What would you want someone 30,000 years from now to know about who you are and what you believe in? Can you paint something that has magical powers? The Caveman sure thought he could!
Art Supplies Needed:
Powder Paint – if you don’t want to deal with the powder paint you can just use mud or finger paint
Dish soap – like Dawn
Find all underlined items on my Amazon List
