↞Native American Oral Tradition↠

The Impulse to Make Art: Examining Oral Tradition

by Haley Rains

  The Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc, Southern France

↠ "Native American cultures use stories to teach moral lessons and convey practical information about the natural world." The Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc was discovered in 1994 and is located in Southern France, about 400 miles from Paris. Before landslides and other natural occurrences within the environment around the cave exposed it, the cave was sealed tightly for around 20,000 years. Inside of the cave, discoverers found elaborate paintings that--according to radiocarbon dating--are from as long ago as 32,000 years. This makes these paintings some of the earliest known artifacts of present-day man’s ancestors; in fact, the paintings are two times older than any painting ever discovered elsewhere.  

              According to Werner Herzog—a well-known documentarian and the writer and director of “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams” (a documentary about the paintings in the Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc)—what is most intriguing about the paintings is what they represent; the horses, bison, cave lions, cave bears and woolly mammoths that cover the walls within the cave represent the “instinct to make art in order to represent the world around them.” 

               As soon as humans evolved to the point where they could walk upright (by way of changes to the environment in which natural selection selected favorably for)--thus allowing for the use of their hands (which were previously used to walk on)--they began to develop tools; these tools increased their ability to hunt and gather more efficiently and subsequently created more time for them to develop early stages of culture, which included the production of art and early forms of language. 

                Like our early human ancestors, Native Americans encompassed this transmission of information through art and storytelling within their culture.  As stated in Key Elements of Oral Literature, "In this one brief tale, important, life-sustaining lessons about greed, the wisdom of elders, and game management are conveyed in an entertaining and engaging way."

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Works Cited:

Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Dir. Werner Herzog. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Jan. 2017.

"Herzog Enters 'The Cave Of Forgotten Dreams'" NPR. NPR, 20 Apr. 2011. Web. 30 Jan. 2017.