Primary Urges
Humanity’s instinctual need to make art
About 26,000 years ago, a human being belonging to a clan of mammoth hunters sits down on the ground, or perhaps a worn stone, with a fragment of an ivory tusk in one hand and a carving implement in the other.
Perhaps he, or she, takes advantage of a brief morning lull as smoke from cooking fires drifts across the season’s settlement. Or perhaps it’s dusk and the day’s light will soon fade.
But this work cannot be rushed. It’s difficult and delicate and the outcome is uncertain. The artist pauses a moment before etching a line into the ivory. An image takes shape in the artist’s mind: a portrait of someone special, a woman, whether lover, mother, sister, daughter, friend.
The carving blade hovers over the seasoned ivory, as the artist contemplates the challenge of carving negative and positive space to make a nose. The height of the headwrap or styled hair. The countless decisions that go into transforming inanimate bone into a three-dimensional representation of a living being.
This single act of artistic creation takes place in a southwestern corner of what we call the Czech Republic. But of course, the place had no such name at the time. It was home, hearth, a good hunting ground near fresh water.
Archaeological concerns aside, it doesn’t matter where this art is made. What matters is that it is made.
A huge mammoth was slaughtered, skinned, rendered, and eaten, its tusks set aside for perhaps all manner of utilitarian uses…and also art. Arguably the most and least utilitarian usage of all: the painstaking act of carving a tiny head that is 1.9 inches tall and 1 inch wide.
Tiny and breathtaking: the head is considered the oldest known depiction of a specific person.
As today’s humans insist on trafficking in hatred, violence, and selfish means to selfish ends, we absolutely must not forget that one of our primary functions as a species is to deploy our imaginations without imposing limits.
Making art is intrinsic to the human experience. The impulse cannot be denied—or not for long.
So when all the ugly noise around us weighs you down, remember this artist who, 26,000 years ago, found time in a day when simply surviving was everyone’s main occupation, to make something so completely unneeded and absolutely essential.
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