Art is older than writing, older than farming, older even than settled life. It is the most ancient form of human communication beyond speech - a means of transforming the fleeting moment into enduring form. When the first humans painted animals onto cave walls, carved lines into ochre, or shaped fertility figures from ivory, they were not merely expressing themselves - they were articulating their world, questioning it, revering it, and giving it shape. Long before the emergence of formal philosophy, art was already serving its function: to reflect on existence, to challenge perception, and to communicate abstract truths. In this way, the earliest art and storytelling must be understood not only as aesthetic or ritual but as deeply philosophical - a living testament to the dawn of human metaphysical thought.
The evidence for early artistic expression dates back at least 100,000 years. Ochre-processing kits discovered at Blombos Cave in South Africa (~100,000 BP) suggest the deliberate preparation of pigments for symbolic or decorative use (Henshilwood et al., 2011). By 75,000 BP, engraved ochre pieces from the same site show patterns that were likely communicative or mnemonic. These engravings are not utilitarian - they serve no functional purpose in hunting or tool-making. Instead, they suggest that early humans were already capable of abstract visual representation - a hallmark of symbolic consciousness and possibly of metaphysical rumination.
As the Upper Palaeolithic period unfolded (~50,000–10,000 BP), the archaeological record becomes increasingly rich with visual and performative art. The Chauvet Cave in France, dating to approximately 36,000 years ago, houses some of the most exquisite and well-preserved prehistoric paintings known to archaeology. Lions, mammoths, rhinoceroses, and horses are depicted in motion, often layered to suggest temporal progression. The sophistication of shading, use of perspective, and positioning within the cave’s architecture indicate not mere depiction, but intention - a planned engagement with space, perception, and perhaps even audience.
What these painted animals represent has long been debated. Some scholars, such as David Lewis-Williams (2002), interpret them through the lens of shamanism - as visions experienced during altered states of consciousness, induced by sensory deprivation or ritual trance. Others argue that the paintings served as totemic or instructional devices - a form of hunting magic or social storytelling. Whatever their function, their form reveals philosophical thought in its embryonic state: the contemplation of being, movement, spirit, and the sacred.
Sculpture, too, appears early. The Venus figurines - such as those from Willendorf, Hohle Fels, and Lespugue - date between 35,000 and 25,000 years ago and are characterised by exaggerated sexual features. These figures have been interpreted as fertility symbols, ancestral icons, or even expressions of body awareness and identity. The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, dated to around 40,000 years ago, merges human and animal form, indicating not only imagination but metaphysical synthesis - the capacity to conceive of beings that exist outside empirical experience. This is no mere art object. It is ontological creativity: a reflection on what it means to be human, to be animal, to be something else entirely.
Alongside these visual forms, we find growing evidence of storytelling. Language, oral performance, and memory likely co-evolved with symbolic cognition. While no prehistoric story survives in its original spoken form, the structure of later oral traditions - from Aboriginal songlines to Homeric epic - points to ancient roots. These traditions preserved not only genealogies and survival strategies, but moral lessons, cosmologies, and existential reflections. The structure of myth, as identified by scholars such as Joseph Campbell (1949) and Claude Lévi-Strauss (1969), often revolves around fundamental binaries: life and death, chaos and order, nature and culture. These binaries are not arbitrary. They reflect the earliest human attempts to make sense of a world that was, and remains, unpredictable, fragile, and profound.
Storytelling, then, served as the first moral and philosophical system. Through narrative, early humans explored justice, betrayal, sacrifice, and transformation. Heroes descended into underworlds; animals spoke; ancestors returned in dreams. These were not hallucinations or superstitions - they were thought experiments. They were the first theories of mind, soul, and community. In a world without writing, storytelling encoded collective wisdom, taught empathy, and negotiated the boundaries between the real and the imagined.
Performance was likely inseparable from these stories. Music, rhythm, dance, and mimicry were not entertainment but embodiment - the lived philosophy of a people whose understanding of the world was deeply relational and sensory. Bone flutes from sites like Hohle Fels (~40,000 BP) are tuned instruments, capable of producing scales and melodies. Music, like myth, was a way of patterning emotion and time - a metaphysical technology that could stir memory, hope, or transcendence. Rhythmic repetition, chanted invocations, and group participation may have bound early communities together in shared meaning, much as liturgy does in later religious traditions.
The philosophical implications of early art and storytelling are profound. Here, in caves and on bones, we see the birth of concepts: beauty, death, eternity, kinship, mystery. These are not modern abstractions imposed on ancient evidence - they are latent within the very structure of the artefacts themselves. The capacity to symbolise is the capacity to reflect. To draw a bison is to imagine not just a bison, but the idea of one - its movement, spirit, role in the world. This is the beginning of metaphysics, of ontology, of aesthetics.
The first artists were not “primitive” by any measure that matters. They were not merely copying nature but interpreting it, transforming it, and embedding it with intention. Their work was both material and immaterial - pigment on stone, yes, but also memory in mind, myth in voice, spirit in gesture. Their art was philosophy in motion - not written in books, but in caves, rituals, and blood.
In this light, the story of early humanity is inseparable from the story of art. Before law, there was song. Before doctrine, there was dance. Before nation, there was myth. And before philosopher, there was artist - painting in darkness, imagining in silence, carving being out of absence.
To study the first art is to glimpse the first thought. And in that thought, we recognise ourselves.