Why does prehistoric art look so uncanny and creepy to us moderns...

>some dude painting with his fingers what he saw was as basic human as you can get
All cave paintings were made by women.

t. a feminist

disregarding the runes, the Norse societies were illiterate until around 800-1000 AD

Because primitive art is magic, it's meant to give power over what is represented. Which is why representing a recognisable human is taboo, and human figures are usually left faceless or armless like here, or with just one arm and one leg like in prehistoric Egyptian art.

i am not saying they didn't think but i wonder how you can have complex thoughts without a language

you can have simple thought without language but anything complex cannot be organized in your mind without one, can it?

Imagine you never stop seeing the world as you where when you where a child. And then trying to convey complex imagry.
The spirits and ghosts are the same, but the hand is steadier and the mind is sharper. The eyes more detail oriented and the method more precise.

Its as if the ideas we couldnt even fathom to express when we were children found a way to be expressed. Through the hand of someone who has lived a life filled with death and pain and hope.

It's amazing how people expressed their feeling or told stories through art even waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back then.

Sigh... I hope you're trolling

the rock carvings of Alta in Norway (helleristninger) are interesting
I get fucking angry when Samis try and take credit for it
there were no Samis there in the fucking Bronze Age

complex thought can occur without language, i mean. that should just be a given.

Basically because economies weren't very specialized and the average person didn't have free time to practice painting in detail or crafting intricate sculptures. Today even people with no artistic training spend their childhoods surrounded by art and the means to easily create art, so they tend to learn it to some extent doodling in copy books at school and the likes. In historic societies however, people didn't have this kind of exposure to art or the means to create it (except maybe among the wealthy), so only specialists were actually any good at it. So, societies without specialists didn't create very detailed or naturalistic art.

That said, some prehistoric and even pre-agricultural societies did have such specialization. Look at the Paleolithic cave paintings of southwest Europe, the wood carvings of the Tlingit and Haida, or the pottery of the Jomon; all produced by hunter-gatherer societies whose environments were productive enough that they could support sedentary populations engaged in non-utilitarian practices like art and architecture.

language =! written language

I think ancient peoples saw symbolism as very powerful and magical. So for example if you could draw a very lifelike deer, it was as if you could "summon" the deer. Note how cave painting often depicts animals in a very lifelike manner, but people are just drawn as stick figures, there's not one lifelike portrait of a person from any cave painting in the entire world. Think about it.

This one looks like an asshole

Well for your pic at least, it might be the fact that it was carved into stone. It's probably hard as balls to get shapes the way you want them, and you gotta keep it simple.

Think about intelligent animals, like primates, or certain species of bird.

They definitely don't have any sort of language, but they are still able to communicate with each other and they can solve complex problems, create tools, etc.

I think it's kind of like that. Primitive humans may not have had any language, but they could still do some pretty intelligent shit.

Quality post, it made me read up on the Chauvet caves and native-american wood carvings.

That's just how you've been raised, with language, and how you've integrated it with your thoughts so much so that you even "speak" your thoughts that you don't voice in your head.

If you were raised in a cabin in the woods, with no books, and just a mute mother without sign language, you'd be able to think just as well as you do, now.

Also, even they had a spoken tongue, just one that wasn't very complicated.
It's in our DNA to create language, so and decent population of humans you leave anywhere for a few generations will develop a basic language.

Hunter gatherers worked less than we do today to garantee their own survival

They had a scarcity of materials and lots of time in their hands. If you add to that the fact prehistoric people had generally much more knowledge of how to make stuff they actually needed (pottery, arrowheads, clothing, etc), I'd say they generally were better artists than everyone in this thread. They just didn't like painting realism or maybe the idea of objectivism was not at all important to them. They like abstract art better

Its because they didn't read the fucking sticky

>uncanny
>creepy

>If you were raised in a cabin in the woods, with no books, and just a mute mother without sign language, you'd be able to think just as well as you do, now.
And you base this on what, exactly ...?

As it happens, there's actually a fair amount of evidence that cognitive abilities are at least somewhat tied to language acquisition.

But obviously that only applies to modern-day humans -- I wouldn't make any inferences about any hominins earlier than sapiens from that, and not even about archaic Homo sapiens, for that matter.

Not him but there is evidence of language being used very early, certainly by the time the cave paintings became a thing, if not necessarily written down. Symbolic reasoning and multi-stage thinking (like making tools that are used to make other tools or composite tools) as well as awareness of past and future were also a thing before cave paintings or mini-sculptures.