Did Crazy Cavemen Make Those Cave Drawings?

I dunno, they could have been just bored. Both those pictures look like the way kids cover their notebooks with doodles during a tedious class.

Mental illness is something that has been around for a very long time, but just in modern times recognized and understood. There were many ways people coped with it, but there were the few that were outcast due to it. In some cultures these people were revered for their ability to see things others did not, and developed to become spiritual guides and prophets.

(An example from this guys blog)

http://spiritualemergency.blogspot.com/2006/01/shamanism-schizophrenia.html

Although there were the few people that used psychedelic drugs to have religious/spiritual experiences, but these people didn't need them to trip out since they were doing it 24/7. I also have the belief that Jesus has schizophrenia, while also being a humanitarian. He actually believed he was the son of god, and formed his reality around that, and since he believed it he had his followers convinced as well.

It is an established fact in cultural anthropology that the psychotic patients of today were yesterdays prophets and schamans.
The question of 'crazy caveman or wise ancient dweller' is typical for a modern folk psychiatry soaked perspective.
To answer the question from my perspective as a scientist: Assuming that most inscriptions were done by members of the society who had a religiously significant position of some sort, it is very probable that the person would suffice to some criteria written down in DSM-IV somewhere to be seen as mentally ill according to todays standards.

A question more interesting that 'how people today and 1000s of years ago cope with mental illness' (scribbling on walls?!) would be a question of some sort like:
Assuming the social brain hypothesis is true, why are there people with hereditary mental illnesses around?
And the answer might lie in the material presented above.

don't we all draw the same kind of thing during a boring lecture?

It's possible that petroglyphs were expressions of boredom. But they must have been pretty bored, as petroglyphs can take quite a bit of time and effort to do. Additionally, some sites appear to have been used for carving petroglyphs over long periods of time, as if generations came back to certain spots to make them. Which makes me think these certain spots had some significance to the people who left their mark. Perhaps it was something as simple as having easily carved rock, or correlation with things like natural springs or good game hunting.

It's also certainly possible that they were made by the insane, thought to be spiritually connected at the time. It does seem unlikely that they were penned up, however. I've seen many places in the Southwest of the US where such glypghs occur. Almost all were in wide open spaces, not caves or places that were conducive to being natural enclosures. Occasionally, they're done over very large open spaces in the case of geoglyphs.

I'm just glad that humans have evolved to the point that we aren't all bow-legged like the people in the cave drawings.

@Bryd Brain

Well if women did look like this you'd know damn well why they were bow-legged.

http://www.neatorama.com/2009/05/13/35000-year-old-human-figurine-oldest-ever/

Good point rika. This is anthropomorphic view of our own ancestors and you might as well link mental illness to all forms of graphical expression ranging from bathroom stall graffiti to modern art. The only similarity I see is that these drawings were done on a wall. We draw because we can.

I thought aliens did those.

Wow, that guy has no idea what he's talking about. No one lived in those caves where the paintings were. There are no signs of habitation. People specifically went into the caves to paint, and the paintings are actually incredibly detailed and the subjects well observed. It's the depictions of people that are lackluster, usually abstract and with animal features.

Also, we have hints that art extended out of the caves and served ritual purposes. We have lots of little fertility goddess figurines, carved bits of ivory with similar depictions of game and predators. And the same things happened in other cultures that we've observed and documented, for one thing. Recall the cave paintings in Australia and their ritual significance.

Seriously, what's up with this post? It's very glib and misleading. This art history student is annoyed.

Specialists in the rock art of the Southwest pretty much agree that the petroglyphs (which do take a long time to make, especially the more complex ones) represent either shamanic icons or actual art. The impulse for mankind to make art is basic, and certain symbols occur over a number of different cultures, often widely separated in terms of space and time. Think spirals, for instance, which are ubiquitous. Or mazes. Or handprints -- I could go on and on. These symbols are present in the human unconscious (read Jung theories of the collective unconscious) regardless of the culture. I have seen gigantic rock art sites (one in northern Arizona on the Hopi Reservation covers all the cliffsides of a 250 acre mesa) completely exposed to the open air, not hidden away at all. In fact the panel used to illustrate this article is called "Newspaper Rock," and it's totally out in the open in northern Arizona near Monument Valley. For a great look at some amazing rock art, check out "Stone Chisel and Yucca Brush, Colorado Plateau Rock Art" by Ekkehart Malotki and Donald E. Weaver, Jr. (for whom I used to work). Fascinating. Lots of great theories about who did it and why, too.

Most artists are slightly wrecked in their brains anyway! We are just marginally acceptable enough by social standards not to be taken to asylums!

The Nazis made the connection with mental illness to wilfully discredit modern artists. The thought is surely fascinating, but let's not fall into the pitfall of assuming something similar for our scribbling ancestors. Just because something looks crazy, the person who made it does not have to be crazy.

I seriously doubt it.

The effort required to trek down through many of the cave systems where such art was found would have required quite a bit of preparation. We're not talking about shoving a social outcast down a hole and having them scratch on the walls with a loose stone out of boredom here - it required the mixing and blending of pigments found outside of the cave, creation of a light source of some sort out of animal fat and a wick, not to mention learning how to form such images from observing others at work or practicing it themselves.

It's unlikely a mentally unstable pariah would have foresight to do all of this. Of course, as others have said, that's not to say the artist could not have had other forms of mental disorder. However I don't see any reason to invoke such a hypothesis.

Athon

The history of madness is an interesting topic. It's helpful to see the mechanisms of power that were in place at the time madness was constructed to be abnormal.
Madness and non madness, reason and non reason once shared equal power.

I'm sure that given enough time, we will eventually realise that the norms we live by today are just another form of madness. But that will only happen if we can avoid destroying ourselves in the name of reasoned rational thought, for example (with a nuclear holocaust).

@Athon

There is no great genius without a mixture of madness.
-- Aristotle

I'm not saying this guy was made a hermit by the people of his tribe. If we don't know what the reason was behind these wall carvings, are you saying it's better to not look at possibilities with what we do know? I'm not saying it's the right idea, I'm just saying it's something worth pondering.

What an incredibly half-assed hypothesis (and "half-assed" is being generous).

I can't believe this merited a post on Neatorama.

I had to comment on just how crackpot a theory this is. We know for a fact that natives used to do paintings and rock carvings everywhere. In many cases, they were part of a rite of passage for young men, during which they would get to the point of hallucination and start creating what came to mind. Hence a lot of sexual imagery. Cave paintings were done over a period of time, and not all at the same time by one person.

Extrapolating from this, we can assume that all people who doodle are schizophrenic.

Interesting question. It's evident that there was a
good deal of energy expended on these, suggesting perhaps
they had some expendible energy and time to do so.

Some of it does look obsessive and repeatative and might
be the things done to stave off going stir-crazy or
out of boredom. If they were forced to stay in the
caves for some reason: something to do. The interest
in animals is intriguing.

I started searching the web on this topic for two
main questions: in some caves the paintings are out of
reach. How did they reach the ceilings conveniently?

And some are in very cramped crawl spaces. What fashion
of 'fat lamps' were used that could be held while
crawling and also having little soot or fumes
to prevent anoxia or suffocation while crawling
along?

hey mother fuckers you guys are nerds why would you read this shit anyway i got better things to do like masturbate and fuck chicks all night long