Wielding lamps and torches shed new light on Stone Age cave art

Try drawing a picture of a forest on a moonless night. It is very difficult to portray how we see things when our eyes are at the limits of their abilities. For instance, our peripheral vision can see better in dim light than our focused vision, causing us to see things in the corner of our eye that disappear when we look strait at them. Try simulating that effect in a photograph. Perception of color also changes over time. If you sit in a cave with a fire (mostly red/yellow) after several hours you will start seeing color differently. Something that looks yellow on a computer screen (lots of blue/green) may be perceived as white after hours bathed in the red/yellow of firelight.

These are areas where painters are better than photographers. Nobody can make a good photograph of a dark forest and all the effects that entails. But a painter with a brush can communicate through artistic trickery.

IIRC, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) has some scenes where the cave walls are illuminated by flickering light.

> to pirate that work

I doubt that copyright existed in the Stone age, so it's public domain.

> they weren't sure it was good enough? A bit of self-conciousness on how my stick figures are a lot less realistic than Bob's paintings in his cave?

It could have been a curse, a pay to get better hunting that some other people in the tribe or even a new religion. I agree that is difficult to say, I hope that future discoveries get more light into this drawings.

Or they wanted it to be protected and stored away for the times. Or the act of getting to those paintings was some kind of special act that was carried out under certain circumstances (and therefore it being hard to reach was part of the plan).

> Using just a torch or a lamp from below, the paintings and engravings stay hidden. But lit fireplaces on the ledge illuminate the whole gallery so that anyone on the cave floor can see it. That suggests the artists may have wanted to keep their work hidden, the researchers say.

I dunno. To me, this suggests that the artists may have used the cave art in theatrical productions, with the audience on the gallery floor, and stage crew working lights up on the ledge. Combined with the difficult trek into the cave to build suspense, some good storytelling and potent entheogens, I can imagine this being quite an attraction outlasting the original painter(s) and benefiting their descendants for generations.

Imagine the power of being able to say, with certainty, the sun will rise higher than it did the previous day, that the spring is coming, that rains are ending soon, and so on.

I'm reading "The Human Cosmos" (Marchant). In it is proposed that lots of cave art / building was related to stars, and therefore seasons and therefore plants and animal patterns. It was a kind of future-telling. It appears in many, many cultures in strikingly similar forms.

The Chumash in CA kept this kind of knowledge sacred and known only to a few. They used spirit quests, hallucinogenics, and celestial-inspired art to guard, interpret, and pass on knowledge.

If these artworks are part of a teaching / fortune-telling ritual, then they would need to be hidden and preserved for generations.

Maybe the willingness to keep them secret is caused by the meaning of the paintings shared among people