When and Why Did Art Begin?
- Janet STRAYER
- Apr 30
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 30
When Did Art Begin?
When and why did art begin? A good guess of when was with the first humans born with an opposing thumb to their hand. No originating date marks art's birthday, but evidence shows that art-making is hundreds of millennia old.
Just as we remain uncertain of who the first humans were who poked their fingers into mud or ash in order to draw or sculpt, we don't know what the first things they made were or why. Aside from making tools and utensils for functional use, why did humans create apparently non-functional artworks like drawings and sculptures?
That these first art creations were non-functional doesn't mean they were non-meaningful. Quite the contrary, they must have had great significance for those who crept into deep and dark caves to find just the right spots for their depictions. Similarly for those who made, and possibly revered, special figurines carried close to themselves wherever they roamed
Some of the art made by the earliest human beings has endured for millennia. Examples of what we've come to call fertility icons, "earth-goddess" or "Venus" figurines date back an amazing 500 millennia. These material products have endured to our time. But think of the lost legacy of all the art that has not endured, painted onto eroded rocks or into shifting sands! Who knows when those time-erased works were first created or the scope of their depictions.
Art as the Greatest Human Invention of All
Anthropologists tell us that the ability to make and use tools is one of the prime definitions of "humankind" as distinct from other "kinds" on the planet. Other primates use tools, as do other animals. Nevertheless, the technological reach of tool-making and its applications remains exceptional for humans (so far).
Despite this triumph of human tool-making, a National Geographic article reports (along with gorgeous photographs), that "the greatest innovation in the history of humankind was neither the stone tool nor the steel sword, but the invention of symbolic expression by the first artists." (January, 2015, p. 33). Art marks the invention of invention! (see alsoThe Greatest Innovation in History)
Art is a Defining Feature of Being Human
Art is a defining feature of being human. We are homo aestheticus or art-makers and art appreciators. Our aesthetic purpose takes on an entirely different emphasis than functionality. Tools are, by definition, concrete and functional. Art need not be. DaVinci, one of the greatest artists of all time, is famous also for the vast scope of his creative scientific explorations, machine inventions, and innovations in architecture and mathematics. Creativity walks many paths and recognizes many soulmates.
Although tools can be beautifully and elegantly crafted, their purpose is to be useful. They serve to get us something we need or want: like a stick poked into water catches us a fish for supper. What does a stick poked into mud or ashes and then dabbed as a design onto a rock get us?
Art needn't serve material functions as do tools. Yet, for eons of pre-written history, humans have been impelled to create art, even under the most hazardous of conditions. Interestingly, many creation myths across the globe have a divine creator artfully making humans out of some earthy material like mud or clay and then breathing or speaking life into the figure. Quite an analogy for the act of artistic creation!
Why Make Art?
Why did the first humans make art? The question continues to intrigue us for contemporary art-making. Why do we make art now? We can only speculate about the reasons, but we do know that art is a fundamental human experience, both the making and the experiencing of it.
S. Giedion's illustrated volume The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Art, suggests we can infer the reasons for making art by conceptualizing the earliest experiences of our prehistoric ancestors. He suggests we do this by attending to the content of the work, what is most emphasized, and its manner of presentation (for example, the innermost parts of caves). Using a similar focus applied to contemporary art, its reasons for being can range from destructive and cynically aggressive to holy, and everything in between.
Art's Function
With us from the dawn of our consciousness, art can take on many functions. It registers and and conveys human experience, it expresses yearnings and imagines possible worlds, it makes connections and meanings. Art is useful, not in the same way that tools and utensils are useful. Whereas tools have fairly narrowly defined uses, art is encompassing. It's essential to our human being in the world. Art makes or marks our sense of ourselves in the world. It focuses on whatever impacts us, is needed or sought, commemorating, imploring, or deploring significant objects or events, whether physical or metaphysical.
Art is also an act of exploring our minds, inventing, creating and re-creating experiences, dreams, wishes, or worlds that others, too, can experience. It is an act of exploring our powers to create, elevating or submerging us into what we do not quite know ... but somehow begin to imagine. In the process of dedicated art-making and art-viewing, this not-quite-knowing begins to take shape and form. And so, art itself makes meaning.
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