Children, Metaphorical Thinking and Upper Paleolithic Visual Cultures

Abstract

Many children growing up during the Upper Paleolithic lived within rich pictorial cultures. This article explores how these children might have employed metaphorical thinking in the production and decoding of this imagery. Metaphors are said to act as a bridge between different realities, different levels of meaning and different realms of experience. Humans use metaphorical thinking to recognize patterns and create relationships between disparate elements and to imbue these patterns and relationships with meaning. As young children begin to verbalize and engage in fantasy play, they also begin to spontaneously produce metaphors. Through fantasy play, children employ metaphorical thinking to rearrange disparate thoughts, ideas, objects and forms of expression into novel combinations. As they develop both cognitively and socially and their knowledge of their world expands, children's capacity to generate and understand metaphors similarly expands. Adults continue to use metaphorical thinking to comprehend and communicate their realities and to transform the world around them. It is perhaps not surprising that metaphorical thinking is implicated in many examples of Upper Paleolithic art. If adults produced the majority of these images, it is likely the experiences they garnered in childhood and their expanding competency with metaphorical thinking that allowed them to do so.

Keywords:

• cave art
• children
• evolution of childhood
• metaphor
• Paleolithic
• play

Notes

¹It should be noted, that while what it means phenomenologically to ‘be a child’ varies greatly over time and space (e.g. Baxter, 2008; Kamp, 2001; Konner, 2010), the terms ‘childhood’ and ‘adolescence’ are used here as biologically defined stages of human development dependent on anatomical markers that permit comparisons between species.

²In arguing that Upper Paleolithic children spent a great deal of their time playing I am not trying to uncritically apply an idealized, contemporary Western notion of what ‘childhood’ is and how children spend or should spend their time but rather I am discussing humans within a broader mammalian pattern. Even children today who spend most of their time engaged in what we would define as ‘work’ find ways to incorporate elements of play (Konner, 2010).

³Quote found here: http://www.michelangelo-gallery.com/michelangelo-quotes.aspx

Additional information

Notes on contributors

April Nowell

April Nowell, Department of Anthropology, University of Victoria, 3800 Finnerty Road, Victoria BC V8P 5C2, Canada. Email: [email protected]