The history of rock art research is replete with good ideas that get over-applied. From the original interpretation of “hunting magic” to David Lewis-William’s “shamans” interpretations that can be applied to some of the original examples are often then taken up and overused time and time again. Now a paper attributing the inspiration for painted caves in Spain to pareidolia seriously threatens to cause another run on that particular bank.Perhaps the first reference to the phenomenon of pareidolia in cave art involves the bison ceiling at Altamira Cave in Spain where rounded humps on the ceiling of a chamber seemingly inspired images of reclining bison.
“The influence of pareidolia has often been anecdotally observed in examples of Upper Palaeolithic cave art, where topographic features of cave walls were incorporated into images. As part of a wider investigation into the visual psychology of the earliest known art, we explored three hypotheses relating to pareidolia in cases of Late Upper Palaeolithic art in Las Monedas and La Pasiega Caves (Cantabria, Spain). Deploying current research methods from visual psychology, our results support the notion that topography of cave walls played a strong role in the placement of figurative images—indicative of pareidolia influencing art making—although played a lesser role in determining whether the resulting images were relatively simple or complex. Our results also suggested that lighting conditions played little or no role in determining the form or placement of images, contrary to what has been previously assumed.” (Wisher et al. 2023) Sorry gentlemen, I totally disagree with your suggestion that lighting conditions played no role. The lighting conditions would have controlled the appearance of the features that you are attributing the pareidolia to.
“Pareidolia—the psychological phenomenon of seeing meaningful forms in random patterns, such as perceiving faces in clouds—is a universal feature of our visual system. It is likely a consequence of the evolution of our visual system adapting to allow partial or obscured profiles of potential predators to be rapidly identified through the conferral of meaning, and hence to minimize risk.” (Wisher et al. 2023)
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“This process has been the subject of extensive psychological study, with existing debates regarding the particular cultural mechanisms that may cause pareidolia, e.g. do modern Western people see faces relatively frequently because our visual system has evolved to treat the visual stimuli of faces as ‘special’, or merely because we have visual expertise in face perception?” (Wisher et al. 2023) An obvious example of this is represented by the spotted horses of Pech Merle Cave in France where the shape of a horse’s head at the edge of a rock face suggested the panel of spotted horses.
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“This discussion has focused on how heightened sensory awareness and the ambiguous nature of visual stimuli, induced by the darkness of caves, would have likely caused Palaeolithic people to experience visual imagery, priming them to depict the same animals they had perceived. There has also been extensive previous discussion pertaining to the integration of the rock support and its role in determining the placement of depictions within a cave, for example with the rock used to frame depictions or add depth and dimensionality to an animal motif.” (Wisher et al. 2023)
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“Hypothesis 1: The majority of figurative depictions should integrate natural topographic features of cave walls.
Secondly ( and building on Hypothesis 1): As pareidolic imagery of animals generally does not incorporate detail beyond salient outline form or the natural features that triggered the pareidolic image, we further propose that simpler depictions of animals that are incomplete in form and/or feature no additional details beyond the outline should integrate natural features. By contrast, detailed depictions, i.e. those complete in form and/or featuring internal detail such as pelage, hair, eyes, and particularly those with stylistic features consistent with other contemporaneous depictions, may thus reflect pareidolia having no or minimal influence over the form and placement of depictions. It may therefore be expected that detailed depictions are less likely to be scaffolded onto natural topographic features when compared to simple depictions.
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Hypothesis 3: Simpler depictions should have a stronger relationship to natural topographic features of the cave wall than detailed depictions.” (Wisher et al. 2023) While I can understand the reasoning behind their second and third hypotheses, I do not agree with them that having a bump on the cave wall or a crack in the rock will keep me from adding more detail. While the authors assume that the viewer will rely on the change of contour to imply whatever details were supposedly suggested by the rock feature, that would be no reason to keep me from touching it up to “improve” it. And, as the light source moves the appearance of the feature may change so it cannot be relied on to imply the details.
"Dr. Wisher and colleagues found that as many as 71% of images studied in the Las Monedas caves, and 55% in the La Pasiega caves, showed a strong relationship to the natural features of the cave wall, suggesting pareidolia may havew been a partial influence on the artists. Examples included where curved edges of the cave wall were used to represent the backs of animals such as wild horses, or where natural cracks were used as bison's horns. The archaeologists found that of those drawings with a strong relationship to natural features on the cave wall, the majority (80% in Las Monedas and 83% in La Pasiega) lacked additional details such as eyes or hair, which correlates with the simplistic nature of imagery influenced by pareidolia." (sci.news 2023) But the question is - how subjective or objective were these judgements? Without many more pictures illustrating concrete examples of images that they claim were influenced by pareidolia, I have to wonder how subjective their evaluations were - would you or I agree with their judgements?
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Many cave walls are, by their nature, pretty rough. The rock surface can be smooth but it will still be contoured with swellinngs, low areas, projections, etc. It would be hard to place an image on many cave walls without having it interact with some kind of changes of contour. But, are those changes of contour the reason the image was placed where it was?
While I totally agree that some cave art was probably inspired by pareidolia (remember the Altamira bison and the Peche Merle horses), as usual I believe that this goes a little too far. Once someone saw a crack, or a bump, or whatever on the cave wall reminded him or her of an animal and then pictured it there, the idea of making pictures on the cave walls has been established and proliferated from there. They no longer needed pareidolia to prompt them to create cave art. So, some cave art was certainly inspired by pareidolia, I just cannot believe that the influence was this extensive.
NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.
REFERENCES:
News Staff sci.news, 2023, Pareidolia May Have Stimulated Paleolithic Humans to Make Cave Art, 25 September 2023, https://www.sci.news/archaeology/paleolithic-pareidolia-12293.html. Accessed online 25 September 2023.
Wisher, Izzy, Paul Pettit and Robert Kentridge, 2023, Upper Palaeolithic Conversations with Caves: The Role of Pareidolia in the Figurative Art of Las Monedas and La Pasiega (Cantabria, Spain) 21 September 2023, Published online by Cambridge University Press. Accessed online 22 September 2023.
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