Caricature and Contrast in the Upper Palaeolithic: Morphometric Evidence from Cave Art

Abstract

The earliest known explicit and unambiguous employment of representation in external media is in the form of figurative depictions of large mammals during the Upper Palaeolithic. These images, though often created with evident technical skill and intimate knowledge of the subject matter, are frequently characterised by curious and pronounced distortions. We provide evidence, based on quantitative analysis of parietal graphic images of two commonly depicted species, for the hypothesis that certain of these distortions are neither errors nor idiosyncratic variations, but systematic deviations from veridicality in the form of caricatures consistent with cognitive principles of graded typicality and contrast in categorisation. Our analysis provides evidence that the first apparent conventions of representational art by humans were informed by basic cognitive-perceptual principles of categorisation.