In the south of France, by the river Aveyron, tens of thousands of years ago, families gathered by the light of a roaring fire to watch tiny creatures dance amid the shadow and flame.
Or so we might think. A new look at more than 50 stone plaquettes from a paleolithic dig site in the 19th century has recently invited speculations over their use, perhaps it was art that flickered to life when viewed by firelight.
Archaeologists from the University of York and Durham University in the UK analyzed the samples of engraved river stone and limestone to figure out what purpose they might have served.
Researchers suggest that the drawings may have been placed next to the hot flames in order to create an animated effect.
The heat damage visible on some plaquettes was likely to have been caused by accident, but experiments with replica plaquettes showed the damage was more consistent with being positioned close to a fire.
Humans have been scratching and painting lines on surfaces for hundreds of thousands of years.
Considering the artistic creatures we are today, it is hard to say what caused us to make our world in picture-form. Was it to communicate? To entertain? Was it for a more spiritual purpose?
There are many small, flat stones that were found across Europe more than 10,000 years ago. Practical uses for the decorated blocks include flooring, lamps, or stones for surrounding hearths.
The abstract shapes, human figures, animals, and geologic motifs found on a number of stones unearthed at a dig site near the French town of Montastruc have no obvious use.
The researchers noted on the plaquettes that there were 76 engravings of animals, of which 40 were horses, seven were reindeer, and six were red deer. A bird, a wolf, and even a human-like figure were included. Most were shown in a naturalistic position.
Needham et al. are in the journal PLOS One.
There are signs of exposure to fire in the Stones etched with a horse and bison.
One horse has a leg seemingly styled around a crack in the rock, and lines and flaws in many of the stones were incorporated into the scene itself. The animals that are strangely stacked are the most intriguing.
It initially seems odd to superimpose animals over one another, because of the broken plaquettes from other sites.
The scenes are seen as not being authentic representations of still life, but as something more dynamic, to be appreciated in the presence of moving flames, instead of the harsh light of day.
There is precedence to the suggestion. The suggestion was made ten years ago by a Paleolithic researcher and filmmaker.
To test their proposal, the researchers made 3D models of the stones and used virtual reality software to view the images as they could have been seen tens of thousands of years ago.
The stone surfaces were illuminated by the wavering glow of a campfire, which made them seem less static.
These movements would have sparked a sense of awe and connection in our minds, even though they were far from life-like.
Creating art by firelight would have been an experience that would have activated different parts of the human brain.
It is common to see plaquette designs that have used natural features in the rock to draw animals or artistic forms.
Whether our ancestors knowingly embraced a form of art we can only describe as cinematic, or decorated their hearth-stones with dynamic imagery purely by chance, is not certain.
It is not hard to imagine artists of a long time ago finding ways to bring their scratches to life in the chaos of an evening fire.
The research was published in a journal.
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