The Hohle Fels Bird Figurines and the Case That Art Was Survival Equipment
An Aeon video about the Hohle Fels cave asks why we aren't all Neanderthals, and gives the question an answer that rests on some very old bird figurines: art, the video suggests, was essential to our evolutionary success.
Put that way, carving and decorating stop being ornament on top of survival and become part of the equipment — a thing a lineage does in order to stay around, rather than a thing it gets to do afterward.
The trouble with an argument this neat is direction. Art may have been the advantage itself; it may equally be the residue of other capacities that were the advantage and happened to leave similar marks behind. The figurines look the same under either reading, which is what makes the claim more seductive as a story than comfortable as a finding.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
If art really is survival equipment, a carved bird sits closer to a spearhead than to a painting — a tool whose usefulness simply isn't visible to us now.
Or the carving is a symptom of a mind that could plan, imitate and teach, and those are the tools. Making the art itself essential may be flattering our own interests more than explaining our survival.