Why We Draw I: Very Old Art – Balance and Beauty

We won’t be able to answer the question “why we draw” with the exactness expected of a watchmaker. Indeed, any confident answer needs to be judged suspicious because of the shifting streams that emerge and recede along our path to approach the question. We can, however, shine a light on some regions that have led us to pick up the pen, brush or a finger reddened with red ochre to draw lines and – curiously – to have everyone in our tribe to understand them. The story told here puts focus on the narrowly evolutionary journey of the broad tribe hominini. The tribe begins when primates start to appear in Africa about 70 million years ago, just before the extinction of the dinosaur.¹ With the end of the era of the dinosaurs the order primate blooms in their diversity. Though having a habit to live in trees some found a home on the floor of the earth. There, they chipped stones to reveal edges of their making in concert with others that they have experienced, lines in leaves, horizons, the edges of a stream.

We need to consider this wide range of primates as a party to those of us who somehow eventually danced into the area where they found need to build nuclear reactors, temples that drew in the gods as well as creatures that wrote poems and opera. It is a tenuous mission to seek in these ancient creatures the first drawn lines. Within the range of a million years ago we can find signs of the first intentional lines and edges and offer an argument for their appearance. Still, to consider this long-ago world involves looking at how ancient primates moved from place to place, what and how they picked things up as well as what and how they saw and listened to. How these people engaged in the world shares many of the boundaries of significance, purity and danger, with modern homo sapiens (I will call a lemur-like primate from sixty-one million years ago a ‘person’ for the purposes of this essay).²With even a Late Cretaceous lemur of some 70 million years ago we share a sense of sky, earth, horizon, ground and underground. It would be difficult to imagine that we do not share what it is to grasp, bring closer and consume. Creatures consume what is ready for eating and reject what is putrid. In the key of bringing closer, it is likely these early people also understood the difference between community and isolation, friend and predator or enemy. Hard and soft, wet and dry are similar categories. Upon these understandings, language and our ability to make something emerges.³

With a complex of language, meaning voice, gesture and sign combined, we are able to direct the lines of significance, purity and danger. While our species has language to push us into the future and draw from the past all creatures have a kind of life-world that they collect, transform and translate through their own language complex that is directly bound to their breath whether they be plants, four legged beasts or perhaps even rivers.

Myth, stories that orient our lives, often reflect this binding of breath and language. A well developed series of stories that ties breath, language and making are from the Diné, the Navajo. Once such story explicitly ties life, that is breath, to making. Gary Witherspoon writes: “…wind souls have an existence which is independent of the body which they occupy. They are dispatched into one’s body at birth, and become its source of life and breath, thought and action [italics mine].⁴ Being in the world, here, therefore, is explicitly tied to thought, action and language.

The Diné ideal is that virtually everyone participates in creating beauty as an extension into the world. All women and some men weave, all sing and write songs. Most, if not all men participate in sand painting. The word for this business is hózhó, ‘beauty-way’ the pursuit of balance and beauty and a philosophy that is bound directly to world and earth.⁵ A somewhat similar existential perspective on making things is shared by the ancient Greek understanding of art and its origin with Daedalus. Daedalus, of course, was the maker of the mythic labyrinth in Crete. He is also understood to offer a model for a particular path of being in the world. The model of Daedalus is, like the Diné notion of hózhó, one of balance: Daedalus and his son Icarus escape Crete by navigating the region between the sun and the sea judiciously.⁶Likewise, the life-like cow costume made by Daedalus for Pasiphae, with which she mated with the court bull to gave birth to the Minotaur is a cautionary tale for us to consider the place of the things that we make amid a living cosmos. Both stories about balance, beauty, language and a way to live in the world have roots so deep that we are unlikely to find their source. We can leave it as a question if such cautionary tales, a sense of beauty as well as intentional reflections on things of the world and cosmos were felt if not ‘described’ in some manner by early hominids.

An interest in making things well, in “balance and beauty,” has roots that are likely to transcend our understanding of time and certainly science and history. In this light it is important to make clear that the kind of making, that most of us participate, contrasts to what is known to be ‘making’ in the broad chronological sweep of our genus and species. In our time things proliferate. We make not necessarily in beauty nor do we couch the making of things in balance of a larger world. There are demonstrable conditions that brought us to our present carelessness towards the things we make. Our addiction to making things did not arrive ex nihilo in modern times. In large measure our orientation to things and our ability to shift an orientation will be directed by a language complex.

While the perspective that our species is the only creature that uses language is argued with less confidence than it was fifty years ago it is difficult to argue that other creatures conjure and construct as we do an opera, cathedrals or novels. More to the point, however, is Ludwig Wittgenstein’s aphorism “If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it.”⁷ Indebted or at least in concert with a collection of ideas developed in phenomenology called the life-world, the aphorism illuminates how a lion’s life, and the world it collects is equivalent to its engagement in the world in thought, action, and commerce with and between others. A language complex, in other words, is equivalent to any creature’s ‘world.’ Understanding world to be something of an envelope, only rarely breached, contains the habits of function: thought, action and commerce. Lions, in other words, are not likely to need or certainly aspire to anything like operas, cathedrals or novels; the languages that we use to navigate our world. In that light, let’s proceed to consider how distant ancestors may have been dressed for the kind of thinking that modern humanity worked while drawing over and over the sweeping lines at Lascaux or Cheuvet or scratched into a rock surface on cave walls in Sulawesi.

Seven Million Years

 Before we step into the evidence surrounding the first drawn lines a broad timeline will be of value. Mammals survive the Great Extinction Event of 66 million years ago that defines the dividing line between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic (more specifically the Cretaceous and the Paleogene).⁸ This is the catastrophic hit, that most of us are familiar, of a meteor near the now Yucatan Peninsula. The oldest fossil evidence of a primate is genus purgatorius.⁹ This creature seems to have survived the Great Extinction Event and persisted into an era with extremely high temperatures, high sea levels and very high levels of carbon in the atmosphere. Crossing into the Cenozoic primates begin a relative explosion of diversification. Between 7 and 6 Ma primates start to appear in the fossil record that walk upright, and comport an apparently larger brain. Because of this ability these primates are collected in the ‘tribe’ hominin.¹⁰ Our earliest, tenuously identified, hominin kin, sahelanthropus tchadensis and orrorin tugenensis lived about 6 million years ago or close to a little less than 300,000 generations ago.¹¹

Prior to the fuzzy hominin cutoff line were ‘apes’ who lived principally in trees with dismissively small brains.¹² The broadly accepted view is that Hominin began to experience their world on the ground walking on two feet around 3 Ma with Australopithecus africanus. The established ‘first’ walking hominid lived in the trees as well as the floor of the earth. The oldest known stone tools date to 3.3 million years ago but it is argued that virtually all primates have made tools, though not all were made of stone stone.¹³  Beginning around 3.3 million years from the present the archeological evidence shows a diversity of tools. These tools range from the first known

knapped tool found in Lomekwian, Kenya as well as iconic paleolithic findings including: Oldowan pebble cores 2.6 ma, Acheulean hand axes, 1.76 ma (found throughout much of Africa, parts of Europe and Asia). Around three hundred thousand years ago is the emergence of a consistency in stone tool manufacture (levallois technique) and a diversity of flake tools rather than core tools. This is also a period of widespread migration throughout the world with evidence of homo erectus or early homo sapiens in South America at 250 thousand years before present at Toca da Esperanca.¹⁴

From all accounts homo sapiens emerged by engaging in a circle of involvement in the world that included: an intense relationship with a language complex, technology improvements (sharp dependable stone tools) and fire. With a dependable cutting edge we can parse meat from a bone. With fire we: control warmth, keep predators at bay and cook. With language the, another form of DNA wrapped in story, we are able to better preserve and extend traditions. It should be of little surprise that increasingly better tools and technique as well as the apparent pleasure in making these things will have an effect on the creatures who make things.¹⁵ The intensity of work involved in making stone tools is likely greater than that of making wood tools as would be, perhaps, the intensity of thought, speculation and language in regard to these tools. One needs to know the grain and cleavage of the stone material that you are working with. Within the broad archeology of stone tool making there are many types of tools and ways of making them. Neanderthal and homo sapiens drawing traditions start to emerge around 40 to 30 thousand years before the present around the world. Tools and other objects such as sculptural manuports and jewelry show clear evidence of an interest ‘beauty’ and making these things special.¹⁶

Image attribution: 1. Navajo Third phase wearing blanket, circa 1890-95. Millicent Rogers Museum, Taos NM
Peter D. Tillman (Wikimedia: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Navajo_Third_phase_wearing_blanket,_circa_1890-95._Millicent_Rogers_Museum,_Taos.jpg)  2. Daedalus Icarus Albrecht Dürer 1493,(https://itoldya420.getarchive.net/amp/media/daedalus-and-icarus-by-durer-2-a62521) 3. Photograph in Chauvet Cave Replica. Claude Valette. https://www.worldhistory.org/Chauvet_Cave/4. Sahelanthropus tchadensis skull. 5. Acheulean hand axes 6. Oldowan pebble cores. Hadar, Ethiopia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11290844. 7. Clovis Point. Virginia Dept. of Historic Resources.Wikimedia Commons.

1. Gregory P. Wilson Mantilla et. Al. Earliest Paleocene purgatoriids and the initial radiation of stem primates. Royal Society, Open Science. 24 Feb. 2021. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.210050 accessed. 26 Feb. 2025.
2. Mary Douglas is unlikely to endorse granting an awareness of ‘purity and danger’ to cats or beetles but I don’t think that this is really out of the question. The boundaries of any creature can be observed. In fear birds and raccoons display a boundary, likewise with taste creatures will eat or turn away, birds select certain nest building materials and reject others etc.
3. Biosemiotics. The relatively new field of biosemiotics looks to be a fruitful direction towards deciphering a broader definition of language in our and associated species. Jesper Hoffmeyer, one of the founders of biosemiotics writes: “The mechanistic and gene-centered way that biology has been presented to us in school and in the media has painted a picture of life as fundamentally stupid, blindly obeying natural laws in general, and genetic determinations in particular. Part of my workin explaining biosemiotics to people is about overcoming this utterly unsatisfying view of life.”(PDF) Jesper Hoffmeyer: Biosemiotics Is a Discovery. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337613495_Jesper_Hoffmeyer_Biosemiotics_Is_a_Discovery [accessed Mar 10 2025].
4. Witherspoon, Gary. Language and Art in the Navajo Universe. United States: University of Michigan Press, 1977. pp. 30
5. Witherspoon, Gary. Language and Art … pp. 151-153
6. There is an alternate version of the story where father and son escape Crete in a boat provided by Pasiphae. In one version they escape in one boat (Smith), in another version they escape in two small boats (Pausanias). Pausanias writes that Daedalus, himself, made the boats and, then, invented sails for the escape as well. The sails allowed the two to overtake the fleet of Minos whose boats were powered by oars. Icarus however, “…sailed rather awkwardly and upset the ship …” and a large wave swept him into the sea. His body was found by Herakles swept ashore on a then unnamed island. The island is now called Ikaros (Icarus). See: Smith, William, ed. . A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology. Little Brown and Company. Boston. 1867 and Pausanias. Tr. Peter Levi. Guide To Greece. New York. Penguin. 1985. pp. 331.
7. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe et al. Philosophical Investigations. Wiley-Blackwell. 2009. pp. 235e
8. See Emily Carlisle, et al. “A timescale for placental mammal diversification based on Bayesian modeling of the fossil record,.”Current Biology. Volume 33, Issue 15, 2023, pp 3073-3082.e3, ISSN 0960-9822, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.06.016. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982223007674)  Primates did live with dinosaurs.
9. Emily Carlisle, et al.
10. While homini are understood to walk upright it is likely that some, like a. africanus, also maneuvered through trees but the judged ability to walk upright with a larger brain are two defining elements of homini.
11. Sahelanthropus tchadensis “coastal-man from Chad” and Orrorin tugenensis “Original man from Tugen Hills (Kenya).
12. Primates appear as long ago as 65 – 37 million years before the present at the early Cenozoic. Interestingly, this is just after the major extinction event that ended dinosaur life by way of a meteor impact.  See, Wyman, Errin. Five Early Primates You Should Know. In Smithsonian Magazine. Oct. 31, 2012. Accessed 14 Feb. 2025. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-early-primates-you-should-know-102122862/. Further, it is interesting to note recent work on brain size evolution by a group of researchers published in the National Academy of Sciences that 1. Brain size increase has not nessisarily reflected _______ advances in a species and brain size has not jumped in size, as previously thought, but has grown proportionately larger gradually over time. See: Püschel, et al. Hominin brain size increase has emerged from within-species encephalization. In PNAS. (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.) November 26, 2024. 121 (49) e2409542121 . https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2409542121.
13. Harmand, S., Lewis, J., Feibel, C. et al. 3.3-million-year-old stone tools from Lomekwi 3, West Turkana, Kenya. Nature 521, 310–315 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14464. Archeologist John Hawks argues that all hominins and possibility all primates made tools in; Hawks, John. All the hominins made tools: A study of associations between stone tool evidence and fossil hominin remains shows that a wide range of species made stone artifacts. In John Hawks Blog. https://johnhawks.net/weblog/all-the-hominins-made-tools/ [accessed 8 March, 2025.]
14. Toca da Esperanca site in east central Brazil. The site dates to 250 thousand years ago. Lumley, H. de ., Lumley, M. A. de ., Beltrao, M. C. M. C., and others, ., & Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas, Rio de Janeiro, RJ. (1987). “Stone tools associated with middle Pleistocene fauna in the Toca da Esperanca, central region, Bahia state, Brazil.” [accessed 18 March 2025]
15. The recent book Your Brain on Art summarizes the many benefits of art in the category of healing and wellbeing. Especially appropriate the authors describe how engaging in art will increase brain capacity (the growth of neurons). Magsamen, Susan, and Ross, Ivy. Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. United Kingdom, Canongate Books, 2023.
16. Ellen Dissanayake’s term “making special” from her ethological approach to the origin art. See: Dissanayake, Ellen (2013). “Genesis and development of «Making Special»: Is the concept relevant to aesthetic philosophy?” Rivista di Estetica 54:83-98.