I’m reading a very interesting book at the moment by Rowan Williams, entitled The Edge of Words. Although he is a very difficult author his work is well worth the effort of reading it. Writing about the origins of language he points towards a theory I have not encountered before, about the development of language in humans. This suggests that the phenomenon we now recognise as “language” probably emerged from the “musical” character of the sounds made by our pre-human ancestors. I rather like that idea. It implies that art is not some kind of decorative “add-on” that we acquired in the later stages of our evolution, but it was essentially implicated in the process of our becoming properly human.
This stands in contrast to the kind of historical-anthropological theorising one often encounters, which proposes that art only became possible when people had managed to produce enough of a surplus beyond their basic needs, enabling them to devote time to the (by implication) optional endeavour of expressing themselves artistically. In other words, people began to be artistic when time began to hang heavy on their hands after their basic needs had been satisfied. Art, in this view, is an optional extra to our “real” humanity, as producers.
In the approach suggested by Williams, however, the means by which our fundamental capacity for collaboration was achieved, namely language, always carried with it the possibility of its artistic elaboration.
We have no means of knowing, of course, whether and to what extent our ancient ancestors who left their rudimentary designs on the walls of caves, possessed anything we might recognise as “language”, but it is a fair bet that art in its many and diverse forms has always been with us. Even if they were unable to “say what they meant” I am prepared to bet that they “meant what they drew”.