Among the variety of reasons that human create art, one of them relates to fear of death. The impetus to make art arose from the confluence of several different urges, one of which was the desire to create something that would outlive its creator. The over nine hundred stenciled hand prints in the cave of Gargas in southwestern France, created over thirty thousand years ago, give the impression that their creators made them for the generations to come. The making of a mark that will live past one’s allotted three scored and ten is uniquely human and embodies the longing of a primate equipped with its sense of death and time to touch the hem of immortality. As poet Emily Dickinson wrote “When this you see, remember me”. Nearly everyone experiences a tingle of excitement when holding in his hand an artifact from a bygone age. Knowing that it was fashioned by someone very much like us links us to the past.
Art serves as an umbilical cord connected us to past generations and can be seen as a novel form of DNA that transmits cultural values.
- Sex, Time, and Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution by Leonard Shlain