The colossal rocks in The Drakensberg in South Africa provide archaeological evidence that bears witness to the existence of people who once considered the Drakensberg mountains home. They are the San, the earliest human inhabitants of South Africa who have lived in the Drakensberg for over 40,000 years. Whilst these paleolithic hunter-gatherers are the first people to inhabit Southern Africa, the migration of Bantu-speaking nations into the country forced them to retreat into the valleys just below the Drakensberg, where they were provided shelter by the rock overhangs (Barnard, 2007). Thereafter, the arrival of European colonizers took place and the Western farmers acquired more of the San’s inhabited land, and by the end of the 19th century, the San was completely wiped out from the Drakensberg, but not without leaving a historical legacy in the form of art induced by a neuropsychological phenomenon.
What they left in the Drakensberg is the largest assemblage of rock paintings in the region (McKenzie, 2010), suggesting that the Drakensberg symbology was plentiful yet not fully understood for a while. Among the subjects represented in this collection are animals such as horses, cattles, dogs, and sheep, but visibly the most prominent figure is that of an eland, one of the largest antelopes found in South Africa. Its quantitative prominence and intricate quality within the 30-meter gallery are both remarkable, indicating that this African antelope played an important part in San culture. Contrary to most subjects on the stone walls, the eland paintings tell a wider range of narratives and are illustrated in multiple colors.
Although the capacity to discern an image and recognize its meaning is an essential part of human life, it is of utmost significance to note that pictures did not emerge naturally at the same time humans began existing. Essentially, the ability to create art was just discovered by our human ancestors. Archaeologists called this historical discovery ‘The Creative Explosion,’ wherein people first began to create pictures and produce art. They dated this period to be about 40,000 years ago (McBrearty, 2013). What, then, prompted our ancestors to start creating images of the world around them? South African professor and archaeologist David Lewis-Williams’ works focused on this query and looked at the rationale behind the South African San imagery. He found the first clue to our question from an archived manuscript by a German immigrant, Wilhelm Bleek, who documented the customs and rituals of the San who lived around the Drakensberg mountains and provided valuable insights into their history. From his ethnography, it was found that the San’s religion was hinged on the belief that the Sans’ spirit can leave their body and travel to the spirit world. Through a ‘trance dance’ (Loubser, 2010), they enter a state of altered consciousness into the said spiritual realm. By this observation, Lewis-Williams made a connection to San's painting of eland and came up with the profound conclusion that our ancestors began producing images as a result of spiritual experience. That is, the early artists are reproducing their hallucinatory visions of the animal in abstract patterns by oftentimes painting them in dark parts of the cave. The lack of light caused them to see luminous, abstract shapes and figures, and the San was able to paint what was in their sensory deprived-hallucinations.
This neuropsychological theory suggests that modern humans, including our Paleolithic ancestors, share a nervous system that is hard-wired in a certain way so that our brain exhibits certain features of universal response to our environment. All this means to say is that our brains react to certain environmental conditions in the same way. As such, it can be said that the human knack for representational imagery was triggered by this neuropsychological capacity of humans to reproduce the images around them. In understanding the San rock art in the Drakensberg through a neuropsychological lens, we can therefore see that our ancestors did not just one day arbitrarily decide to produce art. Rather, prehistoric artists were experiencing sensory deprivation from being in the dark caves for too long where there was no source of light, and this occurrence induced hallucinations and allowed the San to reproduce what they saw in their altered state of consciousness. Nordbladh (2005) suggests that the recurrent visual patterns such as spots and lines visible in the eland paintings, which are similar to what we see when our eyes are closed, strengthens the validity of this neuropsychological model further.
Beyond everything, this study of San imagery has resulted in a more concrete and judicious progress through the interplay of ethnographic anthropology and neuropsychology. This fundamentally goes to show that without the application of an interdisciplinary approach, future researchers would just fail to come up with a comprehensible grasp on human cultural history.
About the Author
Jai Guerrero (Sophia Jireh Guerrero) is a junior at University of the Philippines concentrating in Anthropology.
References
Bernard, A. (2007). Anthropology and the Bushman. Berg Publishers. 4-5. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/34635/390770.pdf?sequence=1.
Loubser, J. (2010). Prefigured in the Human Mind and Body: Toward an Ethnographically Informed Cognitive Archaeology of Metaphor and Religion. Time and Mind, 3(2), 183-214. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233488222_Prefigured_in_the_Human_Mind_and_Body_Toward_an_Ethnographically_Informed_Cognitive_Archaeology_of_Metaphor_and_Religion.
McBrearty, S. (2013). Advances in the Study of the Origin of Humanness. Journal of Anthropological Research, 69(1), 7–31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24393638.
McKenzie, D. (2010). Rock Art of Ages Left by a Vanished People. CNN. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/07/06/south.africa.art.winnebago/index.html.
Nordbladh, J. (2005). San Rock Art, Ethnography and Neuropsychology: Lewis-Williams’s Interpretative Approach [Review of A Cosmos in Stone. Interpreting Religion and Society through Rock Art, by J. D. Lewis-Williams]. Journal of Southern African Studies, 31(1), 239–242. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25064986.
What they left in the Drakensberg is the largest assemblage of rock paintings in the region (McKenzie, 2010), suggesting that the Drakensberg symbology was plentiful yet not fully understood for a while. Among the subjects represented in this collection are animals such as horses, cattles, dogs, and sheep, but visibly the most prominent figure is that of an eland, one of the largest antelopes found in South Africa. Its quantitative prominence and intricate quality within the 30-meter gallery are both remarkable, indicating that this African antelope played an important part in San culture. Contrary to most subjects on the stone walls, the eland paintings tell a wider range of narratives and are illustrated in multiple colors.
Although the capacity to discern an image and recognize its meaning is an essential part of human life, it is of utmost significance to note that pictures did not emerge naturally at the same time humans began existing. Essentially, the ability to create art was just discovered by our human ancestors. Archaeologists called this historical discovery ‘The Creative Explosion,’ wherein people first began to create pictures and produce art. They dated this period to be about 40,000 years ago (McBrearty, 2013). What, then, prompted our ancestors to start creating images of the world around them? South African professor and archaeologist David Lewis-Williams’ works focused on this query and looked at the rationale behind the South African San imagery. He found the first clue to our question from an archived manuscript by a German immigrant, Wilhelm Bleek, who documented the customs and rituals of the San who lived around the Drakensberg mountains and provided valuable insights into their history. From his ethnography, it was found that the San’s religion was hinged on the belief that the Sans’ spirit can leave their body and travel to the spirit world. Through a ‘trance dance’ (Loubser, 2010), they enter a state of altered consciousness into the said spiritual realm. By this observation, Lewis-Williams made a connection to San's painting of eland and came up with the profound conclusion that our ancestors began producing images as a result of spiritual experience. That is, the early artists are reproducing their hallucinatory visions of the animal in abstract patterns by oftentimes painting them in dark parts of the cave. The lack of light caused them to see luminous, abstract shapes and figures, and the San was able to paint what was in their sensory deprived-hallucinations.
This neuropsychological theory suggests that modern humans, including our Paleolithic ancestors, share a nervous system that is hard-wired in a certain way so that our brain exhibits certain features of universal response to our environment. All this means to say is that our brains react to certain environmental conditions in the same way. As such, it can be said that the human knack for representational imagery was triggered by this neuropsychological capacity of humans to reproduce the images around them. In understanding the San rock art in the Drakensberg through a neuropsychological lens, we can therefore see that our ancestors did not just one day arbitrarily decide to produce art. Rather, prehistoric artists were experiencing sensory deprivation from being in the dark caves for too long where there was no source of light, and this occurrence induced hallucinations and allowed the San to reproduce what they saw in their altered state of consciousness. Nordbladh (2005) suggests that the recurrent visual patterns such as spots and lines visible in the eland paintings, which are similar to what we see when our eyes are closed, strengthens the validity of this neuropsychological model further.
Beyond everything, this study of San imagery has resulted in a more concrete and judicious progress through the interplay of ethnographic anthropology and neuropsychology. This fundamentally goes to show that without the application of an interdisciplinary approach, future researchers would just fail to come up with a comprehensible grasp on human cultural history.
About the Author
Jai Guerrero (Sophia Jireh Guerrero) is a junior at University of the Philippines concentrating in Anthropology.
References
Bernard, A. (2007). Anthropology and the Bushman. Berg Publishers. 4-5. https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/34635/390770.pdf?sequence=1.
Loubser, J. (2010). Prefigured in the Human Mind and Body: Toward an Ethnographically Informed Cognitive Archaeology of Metaphor and Religion. Time and Mind, 3(2), 183-214. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233488222_Prefigured_in_the_Human_Mind_and_Body_Toward_an_Ethnographically_Informed_Cognitive_Archaeology_of_Metaphor_and_Religion.
McBrearty, S. (2013). Advances in the Study of the Origin of Humanness. Journal of Anthropological Research, 69(1), 7–31. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24393638.
McKenzie, D. (2010). Rock Art of Ages Left by a Vanished People. CNN. http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/07/06/south.africa.art.winnebago/index.html.
Nordbladh, J. (2005). San Rock Art, Ethnography and Neuropsychology: Lewis-Williams’s Interpretative Approach [Review of A Cosmos in Stone. Interpreting Religion and Society through Rock Art, by J. D. Lewis-Williams]. Journal of Southern African Studies, 31(1), 239–242. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25064986.
