Harsh climates in the Paleolithic era forced humans to adopt heat-retaining dwelling strategies, including the use of hide tents in cave mouths, under rock overhangs, and in the open. Small random holes in these hide tents would have coincidentally and occasionally formed camera obscuras, projecting moving images inside the dwelling spaces. These ghostly images carried with them spiritual, philosophical, and aesthetic implications.

Imagine, if you will, a Paleolithic person waking in the morning to find the image of animals walking around on the wall, the three-dimensional world reduced to two dimensions on a surface inside the tent.

How would he or she respond? What would be made of these randomly revealed spirits? Is this the crystalline moment, the veritable light bulb over the head? An entree to religious realms, philosophical thought, and visual communication?

LEFT: A man in a tent. There is a small hole in the tent which allows light to enter, projecting an inverted moving image of the outside world onto the man's midriff.

 

BELOW: Close-up of the image on the man's torso (flipped 180°). An image of a living horse projected inside the tent.

Viewing the moving image inside a room size camera obscura is much like watching a movie. The image holds shape, value, and movement—just like reality only flat. The horse on the wall stands for a horse, it's recognizable and yet it is not a real living, breathing animal. Inside a tent camera obscura a person cannot see the living animal outside at the same time they see its image inside. In that perceptual moment, the animal on the wall is independent of any real object—it is a representation. The seed is planted in the human brain and a floodgate of possibility opens.

Comparison to other origin of art theories:

Origin of art theories can be divided into three categories: interpreted purpose, mental capacities, and recognition.

1) Interpreted purpose

A) Hunting Magic (Reinach, 1903; Breuil 1952)
B) Coping with Fear (Worringer, 1906; Shlain, 2003)
C) Totemism (Frazer, 1910)
D) Sanctuary (Bégouën, 1929)
E) Sexual Dichotomy (Leroi-Gourhan and Laming- Emperaire, 1958)
F) Time Systems (Marshack, 1972)
G) Body Covering (Bahn, 1998)

2) Mental Capacities

A) Eidetic Imagery (Galton, 1883)
B) Art-for-Art’s Sake (Lubbock, 1904)
C) Art-for-Life's Sake (Dissanayake, 2000)
D) Neural Mutation (Klein, 2002)
E) Visions (Brown, 1928, derived from Wundt; Hodgson, 2006)
F) Trance Flashback (Lewis-Williams, 2002)
G) Dreams (Coolidge and Wynn, 2005)

3) Recognition

A) Macaroni (Luquet, 1910)
B) Shadows (derived from Pliny the Elder, 77)
C) Bear Claws (Maringer and Bandi, 1951)
D) Worked Stones (Benekendorff, 1991)
E) Fossils (Feliks, 1998)

Each one of these theories has a degree of plausibility, a kernel of truth. Unfortunately these theories have traditionally been viewed as antagonistic, each theory competing with the other as the one true universal origin of art theory. We would like to introduce the idea that these theories are not competitive, but are in fact collaborative, even cumulative, each theory providing a piece to a larger puzzle; researchers from a variety of disciplines (anthropology, biology, art, art history, psychology, sociology, archeology, theology, philosophy, and ethnology) arriving at a truth within their respective areas of expertise. By piecing these truths together we can gain a clearer understanding of how art arose.

The strength of the interpreted purpose based theories is that necessity is the mother of invention. Art has a job to do—communicate in the physical absence of the communicator—which is extremely useful and lends itself to a variety of applications. Likely all of the purpose theories came into play at one time or another.

The strength of the mental capacities theories is that they show how humans are biologically evolved and culturally shaped with the capacity for a multitude of communication forms. Clearly the neural wiring had to be in place for art to start. In a broad perspective these theories are unassailable.

The strength of the recognition theories is that they are very simple and are based on the day-to-day physical environment of Paleolithic people. These theories look for plausible experiences that could have helped to formulate the representational idea.

One way to look at the problem of the origin of art is that it was discovered in different places at different times by different people—a skill gained and lost and then gained again over vast reaches of time and distance. In any particular instance the art idea coming from not any one particular need or capacity or experience alone, but from a the combination of the three, the alchemy of beginnings.