Our researchers enter a cave and notice lines or other configurations on its walls, which must be of artificial origin, have no structural function and have a visual resemblance to one or another life form found outside. From their lips breaks the exclamation:
This is what „man“ has done!
Why? The proofs do not require the perfection of Altamira’s frescoes for their validity. The coarsest, most childish drawing would be as conclusive as Michelangelo’s art. Proof of what?
For the more than animal nature of her progenitor; and for the fact that he is a potentially speaking, thinking, inventing, in short, a „symbolic“ being.
Jonas, Hans (1963.27): Between Nothing and Eternity, 2nd Essay
THE FREEDOM OF EDUCATION. Homo pictor and the differentia of man.
Göttingen: VANDENHOECK & RUPPRECHT.6
In his book „Between Nothing and Eternity“, Hans Jonas philosophically defines the premises for art whenever it appears and encounters us humans. The links shown above both lead to scenes that are a matter of life and death. In both sculptures, it is artistically put into work how a big game is torn by a big cat. The first link shows the death throes of a bison, the second that of a horse.
As Hans Jonas demands, they have an obvious resemblance to one or another form of life that took place before the artist’s eyes. He witnessed how the big cats, which chased every large collection of game, made their prey. Perhaps he even admired them because the big cats made their prey lighter and with fewer injuries than he himself did in his work as a hunter.
Since the founder of Palaeolithic, Boucher der Perthes, 1788 -1868, the professors of prehistory have taught that Stone Age art only began 40,000 years ago with homo sapiens.
If they were to draw the logical conclusion from the above, they would finally have to rewrite their lecture drafts on the origin of art in the Paleolithic Age.