Storytelling Through Cave Paintings

Rainbow serpent rock

During the paleolithic era, Homo sapiens didn't have a language to speak but they used their art to communicate with other members of their groups. Cave paintings were not only used for communication, it was also used for educating the young children at the time. The elders would explain the paintings to children depicting a story of what happened in the painting. Cave paintings are a form of story telling, and would have shown a hunt, or an event from years before the younger generations were born. They would then be told to them as a part of oral history. The Homo sapiens didn't have much to do for entertainment, but they would use the paintings to create stories to make others interested in listening. By looking at it, you can see the depiction of what was going on inside the painting,the elder would then explain or tell the story of the ceremony or event. Legends were also told through the paintings our ancestors done in order to show others the things they seen. There were different species of mammals that have existed that we did not see, but thanks to our ancestors we can look and research on the different animals that died long ago. The picture above is known as the Rainbow-serpent-rock. Its origins is from the country of Australia and has played a role in history. The Rainbow-serpent has been in rituals and in legends of the creations of human beings. It has has a part for the weather as in the generation of rain, storms, floods and the reproductive system.

A good example of an existing painting inside the Lascaux Cave is the "Bird-Headed Man With Bison (15,000 BCE)" on a shaft scene below. For “Bird-headed man with bison” painting, there is a male hunter wearing a bird mask that is laying on the ground, a bison stands over him with his baton and spear thrower under his feet. There seems to be a spear inside the bison looming over the hunter and is about to die soon and a few feet away on the left side is a woolly Rhinoceros running away from the hunter and dying bison. This story can be spoken of a man that was hunting and tried to hunt a bison, but was to strong for it to go down to quickly and the hunter was facing it while he was laying on the ground, yet scared off the woolly rhinoceros. Researchers these days have seen story paintings in the caves in europe, they are still trying to figure out what some of them mean but they would have to go deeper into their history. 

Bird-headed Man with Bison 15, 000 BCE

image of rainbow serpent here

image of bison here