Humans have been creating artistic images of their environment for tens of thousands of years, but weirdly missing from all their cave art and carvings is a pretty obvious omission – the human face. Today we look at the mystery of why Paleolithic humans never drew human faces, and search for the first confirmed image ever created of a human face.
TRANSCRIPT:
I’ve always been fascinated by the cave paintings at Lascaux cave complex in France. There’s the obvious wonder at who these people were who were painting on walls 17,000 years ago – what they must have been like, what they believed, and obviously, why were they making these paintings.
But personally I’m always struck by how talented they were.
How are they better at this than me?
I did a video recently that featured sketches at the beginning – for the record, I didn’t draw those. I paid a guy to draw those based off of some mock-ups that I did that look like this:
I couldn’t draw my way out of a paper bag.
And yet these, LITERAL cave men using charcoal and crushed flowers, living half my life span, while hunting buffalo to survive, with a jaguar tooth lodged in their skull were painting these elegant, artistic renderings of horses and bulls and birds with realistic textures and proportions and colors upside down in the dark.
These guys really cared about what they were drawing and took the time to get the details right. This mattered to them.
But you know what you won’t find in Lascaux cave or any of the other famous prehistoric cave paintings? People.
There are stick-figures here and there but they don’t have remotely the detail that you find in the animals and even more so, most don’t have heads or faces.
This is actually a bit of an archeological mystery that has puzzled researchers for decades. All around the world in the most ancient art that we find, we never see faces.
At the same time, we know that human beings are specifically hard wired to recognize and understand faces. This is how we recognize each other, this is how we communicate our emotions, we see faces everywhere, they call it pareidolia, human beings are all about faces, but for some reason, the depiction of faces is kind-of a new phenomenon.
But… why? And who was the first human face ever recorded?
So for this video, I’ve decided to do something a little bit different.
Instead of yammering around the subject for the next 20 minutes in an esoteric death spiral, which I know is what you all came here for, I’m just going to show you right off the bat. Because it turns out the first drawing of a face… isn’t a drawing at all.
A Pre-Historic Venus
Now I, with my total lack of artistic ability, would imagine that a 3D sculpture of something would be harder to make than a 2D drawing of something. And yet, human figurines have been found all over the place.
In fact, there are hundreds of these figurines, some going back way older than the Venus of Brassempouy, like the Venus of Hohle Fels, which is 40,000 years old.
You might notice that this one has a slight case of missing a head. It just kinda had a nub on top, whoever made this was focused on… Other things.
This by the way is a fairly common theme with these figurines.
Like I said, hundreds of these have been found and almost all of them have proportions that would make Sir Mix-a-Lot blush.
It’s expected that these are fertility totems, which is why they’re all called Venus figurines, from the Greek goddess of fertility… And they do look quite fertile.
In fact, this is why they’re mostly considered symbolic goddess figures because there was an ice age at the time and food was scarce, so there probably weren’t a lot of people who looked like this.
So it’s also thought that maybe the figure of a well-fed woman symbolized abundance and survival.
I do want to point out that in Chauvet cave, whose paintings go back 33,000 years, there’s only one image of the human form, and that’s on a descending stalactite that has been named The Venus and The Sorcerer.
Venus because it shows the… um… pubic triangle of a woman and her legs.
So if you’ve ever wondered just how far back we’ve been literally objectifying women… It goes back a minute.
But is that fair though? I mean why did these early people choose this subject as the only kind of human form they seemed to want to depict, and why was it usually in 3D form? And why didn’t they have heads?
A popular theory is that they just had some cultural bias against representing the human form, unless it was a mobile representation, something that could be carried around as a good luck charm or a talisman.
Maybe because childbirth is such a risky proposition in humans, it was given to pregnant women to protect them or ensure a healthy baby, so they allowed this because it was something that they could carry around with them.
In fact, that may be why they have little nubs instead of heads, that may have been a place to tie a cord around so they could wear it around their necks. I mean a head would work the same way, but then it looks like you’re strangling someone so maybe they just did away with the head altogether.
One famous exception to the no-head thing is the Venus of Willendorf, which is dated to around 30,000 years ago. But even it has a head that’s fully covered by what looks like a basket or a headdress. So still no face. (beat) Like that’s what you’re looking at here.
By the way, just to put the time scales in perspective, the time between this one (Willendorf) and this one (Brassenpouy) is longer than the time between today and the pyramids of Giza. And it’s five times older.
There are some other prehistoric sculptures with faces but often they’re animal faces like the Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel. Or if it is a human face, it’s a very abstract representation, like the the Punjab terracotta figure.
And just to wrap this bit about the figurines, it’s worth mentioning a couple of massive outliers called the Venus of Tan-Tan and the Venus of Berekhat Ram, which actually predate modern humans, but they are very highly debated.
But back to the Venus of Brassempouy, what makes this so different is that unlike the other Venus figurines that don’t have detailed heads, this one is just a detailed head. Which means maybe this is something different.
Maybe this was an actual person.
It was discovered in 1892 by a French archaeologist named Édouard Piette. It was found in a cave called the Grotte du Pape near the village of Brassempouy in southwest France.
One of the things that’s kind-of remarkable about it is the figure is wearing some kind of hood, which makes this one of the earliest representations of human clothing as well. In fact, another name for the figure is La Dame à la Capuche, which means The Lady with the Hood.
It wouldn’t be until the 4th Millennium BCE that we start to actually see realistic faces depicted in human art, and even then examples are sparse. So the Venus of Brassempouy stands basically alone as a prehistoric attempt to sculpt a human face.
Whoever the artist of Brassempouy was, his-or-her work is all but unique across 20,000 years worth of artifacts. And that’s weird, right?
Faces are Fundamental
Especially considering how hard-wired for faces we are, like I said in the beginning, we’re totally hard-wired to recognize faces. It’s one of the very first things that kids draw when you put a crayon in their hands.
They do it horribly, children are terrible artists but still, they draw faces.
So surely, there had to be some faces in cave paintings… Right?
A Survey of Cave Art
They had the talent for it. There are paintings of pigs from a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia that go back 30,000 to 43,000 years ago show an understanding of shading and other artistic techniques.
And yet, in all of the Lascaux cave images there is only one picture of a human, this weird guy with a bird-like beak getting mauled by a bison.
Probably because of his dumb face.
Now, there is one cave in Europe that seems to be the exception to the rule.
It’s called the La Marche Cave in western France and there they found bone and stone artifacts that have been dated back to what they call the Magdalenean period, roughly 12,000 to 17,000 years ago, but along with those artifacts, they also found portraits on the walls and floor of the cave.
Portraits of men, women, and children alongside the usual animals, but these weren’t painted on the rock, they were etched into it.
The portraits can be kinda hard to interpret because they often overlap each other but while they definitely show faces, and portray emotions, like some of them are laughing, some look scared… they aren’t what I would call totally realistic.
They look a lot more like caricatures, almost like something a modern artist would create.
In fact, that’s exactly what many experts think they are — forgeries done by modern artists.
The clothes the people have on are a little too much like our clothes, some of the men appear to be shaved, it just doesn’t look like any other cave art from that time period… There are a lot of red flags.
Now, could there have been some way-ahead-of-their-time artist that took the cave art world by storm 17,000 years ago? Or wasn’t appreciated in their time and spiraled into depression and cut off their ear? Who can say? It’s possible.
But it’s also possible some artistic wanderer came along much much later, found the animal carvings and decided to commune with the ancients. A lot can happen in 17,000 years.
So, La Marche is really interesting but hotly, hotly debated, and because of how they were etched, it’s hard to date the portraits themselves.
So, we’ve been talking a lot about ancient Europeans, but, despite what I learned in history class… There were other places in the world.
Australia has some impressive rock art that dates back at least 40,000 years. And some of the art does depict faces. But those faces are not human.
They’re wandjina, which are rain or cloud spirits with halos around their heads, huge eyes, and no visible mouths.
No! We’re not… No!
Thank you.
No, in this case we know what they are and they aren’t people. Spirit depictions are common in Australian art and this is just one of them, besides, the wandjina paintings actually aren’t that old, they only go back like 4000 years ago.
Which is roughly when you start to see faces painted everywhere else around the world, so the mystery still stands. I mean even if you want to count the La Marche carvings, that’s still a massive outlier, the fact is, faces are still massively underrepresented in ancient cave art.
So maybe the better question to ask is, why did they paint images in the first place?
Education, Ritual, Storytelling
So maybe the paintings were meant to be educational. A way to teach young hunters what animals they eat, and what animals eat them. Maybe they used the image to explain hunting tactics so they knew what to do on their first hunts. Kinda like a football coach in front of a whiteboard.
They might have held some kind of ritual significance. That was the opinion of archaeologist Henri Breuil.
He proposed they were a kind of “hunting magic”. Artists would paint the animals to ensure a successful hunt.
Shamans may also have used the caves as visionary temples. They would go in a cave full of whacked-out animals, maybe taking a little something to drink along. After a while, they’d come of the cave and tell the tribe what the animal spirits said to pass on.
Or maybe the paintings were all about telling a story. “Grok see thing with horns the other day. No, not bull. Horns on nose.”
You know how it goes. Nobody believes Grok without pictures, so he draws one and bam! He’s known forever as Grok the Hornspotting Guy.
Pics or it didn’t happen. Even in the Paleolithic.
Why Few People?
So, those are the reasons they might have painted on cave walls — education, ritual, storytelling — so why, in those contexts would there not have been faces?
Well if education was the reason, if Lascaux was Hunting 101, then maybe humans just weren’t important. They didn’t need to know how to kill a human, so why put it on the wall?
By that logic though you’d have to assume they weren’t talking about tactics because then you might want to show where you need to be to approach from the right angle, you would expect to see human figures on there. But maybe simplifying the depictions of humans kept the focus on the animals, which was more important.
If the art was ritualistic, if it was “hunting magic” that ensured that animals died on the hunt, then that actually makes a lot of sense as to why they wouldn’t put humans on the wall. That could kill somebody!
Shamans wouldn’t need to go on vision quests to commune with humans, they could just talk to them.
Although, a lot of ancient cultures believed in communing with their dead ancestors, which would have been a reason to paint them… Just saying.
As for the storytelling aspect, Grok telling his buddies what happened to him, it’s possible that humans just didn’t run into other tribes of people very much back then. There weren’t a lot of us around.
Also a lot of these paintings took place around the Ice Age so maybe roaming around wasn’t in the cards. Maybe that’s why they were stuck in the cave in the first place.
By the way, I haven’t mentioned so far in this video the hand stencils that you see in caves all over the world. If you want to talk about human cave art, that’s the very earliest that you’ll find.
It’s thought that the stencils may have served as a means of communication between groups because some hands had missing fingers. Archeologists thought at first that those fingers were missing in real life, but now they think maybe they folded in fingers as a form of sign language.
If that’s the case, maybe the written communication was considered enough of a “human touch”. No pictures necessary.
Taboo
But I can’t help but find it remarkable that in all that time and all those cultures that SOMEONE wouldn’t have just painted a face on a lark if nothing else. It just feels like such an obvious thing to do… unless it was enforced in some way.
What if it was just culturally taboo to paint people’s faces? That would definitely explain why nobody did it – or maybe someone did but it was removed.
You know, because of the taboo.
I mean there are cultures today with taboos against depicting people that go back hundreds if not thousands of years.
The most famous is the Prophet Mohammad in Islam. Creating his likeness is a big no-no and they take that very seriously.
You could argue this is a cultural prohibition as much as a religious one, it isn’t actually directly stated in the Quran.
What is stated is a rule against worshipping images. It stands to reason that an image of Mohammad would tempt people to worship it, so they just don’t allow it. I could imagine something like this existing in the prehistoric world.
If the cave art shamans considered images a part of worship, they might have been picky about who was depicted. Animals were one thing — they were gods or spirits or the messengers. But to put humans on that level might be sacrilegious.
Going back to Australia, the aborigines have a taboo about depicting the dead or even saying a dead person’s name until after the mourning period is over.
Journalists in Australia take this very seriously, it’s part their ethics code. So they don’t include images of dead indigenous people in their stories.
The point is, a ban on faces is not unheard of, so I could see it. Especially if it was the “hunting magic” scenario I talked about before, maybe they felt depicting a human face would bring death to whoever had been drawn – or to the artist possibly.
The Power of Portraits
Now there is the possibility that we’re overthinking this. Maybe they didn’t have portraits for the same reason they didn’t have iron age weapons, or the wheel, or polyester leisure suits… It just hadn’t been invented yet.
We don’t actually start to see realistic human portraits show up until a surprisingly short time ago. And then they just sort of start popping up everywhere.
Realistic face carvings start showing up in Mesopotamia around 3300 BCE. Old Kingdom Egyptians started carving faces into statues and reliefs just a little after that, but the Egyptian art was highly stylized, not meant to be an accurate representation but symbolic in nature.
The first paintings featuring detailed human faces have been found in China dating back to 1200 BCE. This portrait tradition would make its way to Rome 500 years later.
But perhaps the most striking examples of early realistic portrait painting comes from the 1st Century BCE in Faiyum, in what was at the time Roman Egypt.
These are mummy portraits, images of the dead that were placed over their bodies in tombs. And about 900 of these have been found.
Unlike the earlier Egyptian art that was usually in profile and formal, the Faiyum portraits are face-on, personal, and about as close to a glamour shot as you could get in the ancient world.
No expense was spared in the portraits. Real gold leaf was used to depict jewelry. Yet the images are down-to-earth, vulnerable, and refreshingly honest about middle-aged hairlines.
These images are not a symbolic representation of some spirit or king, when you look at these images you are looking at a person. You could imagine crossing eyes with them at the market. You could have ordered tea from him. Watched her sing a song. Ask her where she got those earrings.
They look like someone you might see today. In fact, here’s a picture of a modern Egyptian man standing next to one of the portraits.
And we know exactly who these people are because their names were on them – and their bodies were beneath them.
These faces are kind-of an immortality for these people. We get to still see them, 2000 years later.
Of course, realistic visualizations of the human face became a lot more normal after that. And once photography came around, we saw our own faces all the time.
Today we look at our own faces constantly. On our phones, in social media, in mirrors. But that’s not at all the norm throughout history. In fact… maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Maybe the mystery isn’t why they didn’t paint faces – but why we seem so obsessed with them?
Why Are Faces Important Now?
Not to say that people in the past had no idea what they looked like, they saw themselves in pools of water, they polished metal to see their reflections. Glass mirrors showed up about 2000 years ago – about the same time as the Faiyum portraits. Which is kind-of interesting.
But there’s no question that in the long span of human history we see our own faces far more than ever before. How many selfies do you think get taken every day? We went from creating no realistic depictions of the human face until 2000 years ago to creating an image of a face somewhere in the world every second. Hell, probably every millisecond.
So yeah… Maybe we’re the weird ones.
But as to the question of who was the first human being to have their face ever recorded, I’m gonna go with the Venus of Brassenpouy. I do, I think this was an actual person.
It’s so different from everything else from that time period, it’s wearing a hood, a specific piece of clothing, I think that the person who made this was trying to make it look like another person. A woman who was important to them.
A mother, the memory of who’s warm smile was a source of comfort.
A lover or a wife that they couldn’t imagine living without. Until they had to.
Or a daughter, who he missed while on a long hunt.
I like to think that there was a woman out there who left such an impression on someone that they had to put stone to tusk to honor her. That there was some unknown person in the great span of human history whose very humanity was so powerful that her likeness lives on, 25,000 years later. I like that.
Of course, they do think that the head broke off something else, likely a body so if it was like everything else from that time, she had giant mommy milkers.
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