Robert Hughes, the great Australian art critic whose criticism spans from Lascaux to Lichtenstein, suggested an interesting theory about cave paintings in an article in Time Magazine about the Avignon cave paintings on the occasion of their discovery in 1995. Visual art, he mentioned, is generally agreed to have been created about 40 thousand years ago. That is, art was created just as Cro-Magnon man migrated from the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East to Ice Age Europe. The migration spelled the end of the current inhabitants of that continent – the Neanderthals – and the cave paintings provided a clue as to why: Cro-Magnon man was capable of associative thinking.

Compare the two skulls above. On the left is a Neanderthal skull, and on the right is a Cro-Magnon skull. There are numerous differences (as well as obvious similarities) but the one that concerns us is in the forehead, where the Cro-Magnon skull has much more room. This is where the frontal lobe is located, the part of the brain that manages our most complex functions: logical thinking, impulse control, judgment, language, memory, problem solving. It is here that the brain performs the operations that we call “associative thinking,” operations that Hughes saw as crucial to the production of art. As he put it in his article, “art, at its root, is association — the power to make one thing stand for and symbolize another, to create the agreements by which some marks on a surface denote, say, an animal, not just to the markmaker but to others.”

The Neanderthals did not have this power of associative thinking, and this is one of the many reasons why the Cro-Magnon species almost certainly drove them into extinction. In the battle for survival, abstract thought was the most powerful tool that natural selection had evolved yet. And even in its earliest appearance with Cro-Magnon man it was evident that abstract thought could be put to both peaceful use – as in the paintings on the walls of Lascaux – and destructive use – as in the now forgotten and lost history of the conflict and struggle that resulted in the extinction of Homo neanderthalis.

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