How Ancient Art Defined the Human Species | BBC Timestamp

After a century of civil war, Japan's capital had been moved to Edo, now modern Tokyo, and by 1700 it had become the world's largest city, home to over 1 million people. Driving the city's spectacular growth had been a new class of hard-working merchants, who'd grown rich supplying luxuries to the aristocratic elite. But in Japan's strictly hierarchical society, it was unthinkable that mere businessmen could dream of a share of power. Instead, they created a new urban culture of their own. They were a very clubbable lot, they wanted poetry, haiku reciting societies, they wanted the kabuki theatre, they wanted music, they wanted comedy clubs and they got them. And when you have all that, what's the next thing that comes along? Of course, a new kind of art. This art would take the form of an ancient Japanese craft, the woodblock print, made by a community of artisans, from artists and publishers to woodcarvers and colour printers. This was mass-produced art, not for rulers or religion, but for the people. Sold on every street corner for the price of a double helping of noodles, what came with it was a shot of pure metropolitan pleasure. These prints glowing with this intense, spectacular colour are what we think about when we think about the greatest things that Japanese art ever produced. This is not an art made by some starchy official academy laying down rules. No, this essentially was generated spontaneously by the hungry consumerism of a bustling city like Edo and it wanted to be entertained. And these pictures had to play their part. They were called ukiyo-e, after uki, meaning both floating, but also uki-uki, excited or feeling bouncy. And their subjects were Edo's ukiyo, its licensed entertainment districts. Here were the stars of the kabuki stage. Here too were the city's most famous showgirls and courtesans wearing the latest fashions. These prints were like Playboy meets Vogue and they put you in the front row of the catwalk. And then, of course, there was sex. Awaiting those who could afford it was the Yoshiwara pleasure district and there, ready to make the most well-heeled clients happy, were the exquisite oiran courtesans. These women became immortalised in pornography. But it's not all hardcore. Some of the most beautiful of these images of love are very delicate and tender. Passion indicated by the curl of toes or the touch of hands or by the nape of a woman's neck. And we feel almost as though we're in the room. And that happens because of what woodcuts are. They can't model light and shade very well. But what they can do with these swooping serpentine lines filled with this extraordinary glowing colour is make us dive right into this lovely amorous universe they present. This was an art everybody could afford that gave you pleasure. And if it's all a fantasy, so what's wrong with that? We can all use a fantasy now and then. By the 1830s, coinciding with a boom in domestic tourism, Edo's printmakers expanded their subject matter to include the most famous vistas in the Japanese landscape. The artist behind this shift was Katsushika Hokusai, who for a time at the age of 70, turned his eye almost exclusively to a single landmark, Japan's most sacred mountain. In his 36 views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai pitted the restless working lives of Japan's common people against the ever-present colon of the mountain. What was it that turned hunter-gatherers into empire builders? I'm travelling through the awe-inspiring landscape of Guilin in South China in search of the key to their success. This is the Zhengpian Cave. Excavations here tell us it was once lived in by hunter-gatherers. And in 2001, a wonderful discovery was made. These fragments are so precious that I'm not even allowed to touch them. They are what remains of one of the oldest pots in China. In fact, one of the oldest pots in the world. So who made this pot? Well, the people living in this cave so many thousands of years ago would have been nomadic hunter-gatherers, still living an ancient lifestyle in many ways. But those insignificant looking crude pieces of pot mark a great technological leap forward. So prehistoric pottery has also been found in this cave? Pots are something we take for granted. But for those ancient hunter-gatherers, pottery was part of a completely new way of life. So how did they do it? I'm meeting a team of experimental archaeologists who think they might have the answer. The first breakthrough must have been finding out how to stop the pots cracking when they were fired, tempering them by mixing calcite rock with the clay. And they even have an idea how the pots might have been shaped thousands of years before the invention of the potter's wheel. This is very clever. They've dug a pit here to basically give us the form of the pot, almost like a mold. And then we're pressing this clay in little slabs down into the preformed pit. Transforming clay into hard pottery requires firing at a high temperature. Today this is done at a thousand degrees Celsius in a kiln, way beyond the capabilities of those hunter-gatherers. They would have had open fires, which only produced temperatures of about 250 degrees. I'm quite doubtful this is going to be enough. So how's our pot? Oh, I think that's it. I think that's our pot there. And it looks okay. Fantastic. There are many different theories about why the Chinese hunter-gatherers might have started making pots. Some people say it was a symbol of prestige, but the Chinese archaeologists think that the explanation is much more simple. Cooking. Pots meant that a wider range of food could be cooked and stored. Vital in hard times. And by 9,000 years ago, there was another innovation. Farming. One of the things that those early Chinese potters would have been eating was wild rice. Now it certainly wouldn't have been the main source of food, because it was hard to collect and actually didn't give much energy in return. But despite the availability of other vegetables, it was rice that became more and more important and even crucial to the early success of the Chinese. The Church justified Spain's conquests on the grounds that they helped spread the Christian message. But while the Inquisition ruthlessly defended the purity of the Catholic faith, the exchange of ideas and influences was unstoppable. Spain's aggressive exporting of her culture and her faith to other parts of the world didn't render her immune to the inflow of cultural influences from abroad. Here in Toledo, the spiritual heart of the Spanish Church, cultures met and mixed, and in doing so, some of the very greatest European art of all time was created. It was the work of a visionary, a man whose style and intensity was centuries ahead of its time. He'd been born in Crete as Dominikos Theotokopoulos, but he was known here in Spain as El Greco, the Greek. El Greco brought to Spain the traditions of Greek Orthodox art, as well as the strange distortions of Italian mannerism. But his great achievement was combining those influences in a way that expressed the fanatical intensity of the religious culture of 16th century Toledo. In 1596, he began work on a dramatic view of the city. It's starkly lit beneath a stormy sky, a vision of a holy citadel where God's authority was made manifest through the Spanish Church. Rising up from the skyline is the spire of Toledo Cathedral. It was for this cathedral that El Greco painted one of his greatest masterpieces. El Greco's painting still hangs in the space for which it was created. This is the sacristy, where the priests put on their robes before performing Mass. So it's fitting that El Greco chose as his subject the disrobing of Christ. What we see is the moment just before Christ's clothes are ripped from his body before the crucifixion. No other artist more vividly captured Catholic Spain's intense fascination with the brutal horror of Christ's sacrifice. Now there's no blood in this painting, but we are symbolically reminded of the violence that's to be done to the body of Christ through the deep intense red of the robe. It reminds us that the crucifixion was a blood sacrifice, a strange echo of the human sacrifices that were at the heart of the religion of the people who Spain had conquered, the Aztecs. El Greco made Christ's blood sacrifice explicit when he painted his battered, distorted body hanging on the cross. The bloodstains trailing down towards a view not of the Holy Land, but of Toledo, the beating heart of the Spanish Empire. But Spain's conquests in the New World were not the norm in the 16th century. They were, in a sense, the exception. When European explorers first reached the shores of more powerful empires, like India and China, they initially found themselves marginal players. In Japan, they encountered a feudal society too robust to be conquered. Although the details are vague, it's believed that the very first Europeans to reach Japan arrived by accident. They were a group of Portuguese merchants on board a Chinese ship that was driven ashore by a storm around the year 1543. The Japanese were fascinated by these new arrivals, who they regarded as little more than exotic novelties. But within just a few years, the Portuguese began to arrive in these waters in their own ships. And from the very beginning, it was obvious to them that the Japanese were not a people who they could treat the way the Spanish had treated the Aztecs. Japan was extremely wealthy. She had an enormous population, a highly sophisticated culture, and militarily, she was a formidable power. This was not a country in which Europeans could even dream of being conquistadors. So the Portuguese instead became Japan's trading partners. Saint Petersburg, the former imperial capital of Russia. The Hermitage is one of the world's greatest museums, home to some of the most celebrated works of art. But there's something else here too. It's not on display, but it's every bit as precious. Here in the storerooms are a few objects that could unlock the secrets of those Siberian families struggling in the depths of the Ice Age. What is really striking about these objects from the height of the last Ice Age is that they're found in just a few places in the south of Siberia, which is interesting because it suggests that as the climate worsened, these prehistoric people retreated into refuges where it still would have been very cold, but they would have been just able to survive. People vanished from the frozen wastes of northern Siberia. To the south, one of the refuges they gathered in is now called Malta. So can the few remains found here tell us anything about what happened? Just look at these tiny blades from the Ice Age. They are unusually small, and the archaeologists think this is because the appalling cold made it difficult to reach the quarries. So the stone itself was such a precious resource that they were using it to its utmost, getting as many blades as they could out of it. So the blades themselves got smaller and smaller. And something extraordinary was happening during this period. In spite of that struggle for survival, there was a blossoming of art. Now, we may never know the meaning of this beautiful pair of swans to the people that made them, but archaeologists have suggested that they might be hunting charms, that when the first swans flew, the first deer would appear, and it was the beginning of the spring hunting season. And how they must have longed for spring. Many of the objects in this collection are mysterious. This unique plate is made from mammoth ivory. Some have suggested it's a map showing the physical and spiritual worlds, with a connection between them symbolized by a hole in the middle. These precious bone figurines are amongst the earliest depictions of people wearing fur. Further proof that plenty of these Asian pioneers could sew clothes by this time. And finally, there are these delicate and beautiful little statues of women, and some of them are pierced, so they may be worn as pendants, perhaps amulets. It's possible that they're fertility symbols, really underlining the importance and difficulty of producing children during such harsh conditions. And in fact, some archaeologists see this entire very beautiful collection as a cry to the spirits in a time of stress and struggle. But they may not have survived at all had it not been for this. The rock shelters and caves that riddle the landscape. And deep underground, they left something that we still marvel at today. I'm in a cave called Peshmeral, which is stunningly beautiful naturally, but look at this. This is real artistic expression, something that defines us and sets us apart as a species. And Peshmeral is unusual because artists were coming here to paint these images both before and after the peak of the last ice age. Generations of them returning to the cave as the world outside froze over. This is a very beautiful image and it uses the contours of the rock. The horse's back sort of curves along a bulge in the rock, and there's an echo of the horse's head on this right side there. And it's obviously a very stylized horse as well. And I love the way those spots carry on into the background as though the horse is sort of camouflaged against the rock. And there's a hand placed against the rock just above the horse's back. I mean, that is amazing, isn't it? That's an ice age hand. Michel Lablanche has devoted his life to studying the art found in caves like Peshmeral. I think I naively imagined that you'd just take a mouthful of charcoal, a bit of water and just spit it at the wall and that would be it. But of course all that would happen would be that the mess would run down the wall and obscure the stencil that you were trying to do. So you have to do it like this, using an almost dry mouth and just building it up very gradually with a fine spray. Michel Lablanche did a recreation of the horses at Peshmeral using this technique. It took him a whole week. Is it finished? Yes. It's finished? Yes, that's right. But what drove these people, struggling just to survive, to paint? The vast majority of these images seem to be animals. There don't seem to be many representations of humans. No, that's true. They are mainly animal figures. And for them, of course, animals were not only game but also spirits, symbolic. So the animal figures are in fact symbolic figures. And going into Peshmeral, I mean it's such a beautiful cave with all the stalactites hanging down and it does feel as though it was, I don't know, almost a temple. Yes, that's right. This is a natural temple, if you like. They are sacred sites. They are not painting just for fun. By painting a cave and having a sanctuary, it is a way for them to say, here is our sacred place. A painted cave is symbolic of the whole tribe. Being bound together in this way may have helped our ancestors survive the kind of climate change that only haunts our imaginations today. As landscape painting came off the walls, it turned its back on the bucolic dream world. And it happened in a place which couldn't be more different from the glowing sunlit stone of the Villas of the Veneto. It was in the 1500s in the dark primeval forests of Bavaria in southern Germany that European landscape art really came into its own. Albrecht Altdorfer was a painter who'd spent his career depicting religious scenes, albeit one strangled in greenery. But the undergrowth began to take over until Altdorfer made nature itself, by itself, the whole story. It may seem a bit over the top to describe this scrappy, tiny, sketchy little thing as constituting a revolution in art, but you know, that's pretty much what it is. Because with this little painting, the landscape suddenly happens. By which I mean, landscape, the word, stops being a description of background, of setting, and becomes the work of art itself. What is that revolution? Well, what Altdorfer has done is something extraordinary. He's removed from the picture any semblance of a story, any kind of characters. Yes, there is one little fellow here, which gives this watercolor painting its title, Woodcutter. And if you look very, very closely, he's on lunch break. He's got a jug of something. It's the German world. It's got to be beer, I would think. And he's laid his axe down. If you look really carefully, he's got a devastating pair of scarlet stockings on there. But he's not really the kind of character you expect when you see landscape as background. There, the characters are full and frontal. There is, of course, a heroic character in this painting. A monster, a giant. And it is the tree itself, dwarfing the little figure sitting at its base. And doesn't that tree remind you of someone else? Of the twisted torso of the crucified Christ, on his wooden cross, arms outstretched. What we've got here, in effect, is a disguised religious picture. And I think there's a reason for the disguise. Altdorfer is actually in a sticky position. He was living in a Catholic town at the beginnings of the eruption that was the Protestant Reformation. He'd been involved in organizing towns, ceremonies, and pilgrimages. And part of the force of Protestantism was about the so-called idolatry of images. With this painting, he neatly sidesteps the whole issue of brutal and bitter partisan religious conflict. We have religion implied by the body of the Christ and the tree, rather than frontally represented. This is a very stylish picture, but it is also very raw and rough and coarse. It's almost at times as if he painted it with a pointed, sharpened twig. There is a kind of slashed, cut element to some of the details, over which the paint drips and hangs when it describes these leaves. This is a portable thing. It's not stuck in a church like an altarpiece. It's not stuck on a wall like a fresco. You can own this. You can carry it around. A new kind of art is born here, and Altdorfer knows that very well. When Altdorfer used woodcuts to reproduce his paintings, the audience for landscape art dramatically increased. And what his audiences were buying into were landscapes loaded with symbolism. The sacred tree, the Gothic wood. Mostly, though, they were devoid of human beings. Deep inside a cave, rudimentary marks have bloomed and multiplied. Red circles. There are no brushes, no sticks to lay on this paint. They are all applied orally, colour swilled in the mouth with saliva and blown directly onto the rock. And then these, an eruption of design, not blown onto the surface, but painted. Contours, outlines, flowing streams of dots. There's a meaning here, but we don't know what it is. The signs of a biological compulsion to pattern? It's what we humans do. What we want to do. What we can't stop ourselves doing. Then you come across this. And in an instant, vast millennia of time just collapsed. And you're in the midst of fellow humans, their hands doing what hands do. Signalling from a very long way off. 37,000 years distant, in fact. But this long-distance greeting somehow makes us bond with the makers of this because they establish a presence that is palpably alive. Astonishingly, hand stencils like these have been found in caves as far apart as Indonesia and Patagonia. Wherever we went, it seems, the urge to signal a presence went with us. And undeniably, these hand stencils do what nearly all art that would follow would aspire to. First, they want to be seen by others. And then they want to endure beyond the life of the maker. Like the earliest photographs, the images here are faded, indistinct. But something tantalising is happening. The realisation that we can, however crudely, represent. In another cave further west, in Asturias, 20 minutes' walk away from any daylight are images that are anything but crude. This was a doubling of the world. A life copy. And executed with startling precision of drawing technique. They even understood modelling. Anatomical features following the rock wall surface of the cave. And there were many colours, not just the ubiquitous red ochre, but violets and blacks. And all those techniques seem to have been there from the beginning. Tens of thousands of years ago. When you think about this technique, your head just spins because it has to have been, above all, a memory exercise. They would have had to fix in their mind exact anatomical details. And then transpose them here on the surface of the cave. And yet, when all that was done, they managed to preserve, miraculously, this animal vitality. This is truly one of the great marvels of the suddenly expanded human mind. But as the number of painted caves discovered grew, it became clear that art and music came into the world together. For musical instruments were found. Animal horns. Flutes made from the bones of vultures. And even more hauntingly, bull-roarers. A piece of wood tied to a rope spun round the head that makes this strange whooping sound. Recent experiments with these instruments have suggested that the proximity of painting and music was not accidental. That they were connected elements in sacred rituals.