Did Crazy Cavemen Make Those Cave Drawings?

I dunno, they could have been just bored. Both those pictures look like the way kids cover their notebooks with doodles during a tedious class.

It is an established fact in cultural anthropology that the psychotic patients of today were yesterdays prophets and schamans.
The question of ‘crazy caveman or wise ancient dweller’ is typical for a modern folk psychiatry soaked perspective.
To answer the question from my perspective as a scientist: Assuming that most inscriptions were done by members of the society who had a religiously significant position of some sort, it is very probable that the person would suffice to some criteria written down in DSM-IV somewhere to be seen as mentally ill according to todays standards.

A question more interesting that ‘how people today and 1000s of years ago cope with mental illness’ (scribbling on walls?!) would be a question of some sort like:
Assuming the social brain hypothesis is true, why are there people with hereditary mental illnesses around?
And the answer might lie in the material presented above.

It’s possible that petroglyphs were expressions of boredom. But they must have been pretty bored, as petroglyphs can take quite a bit of time and effort to do. Additionally, some sites appear to have been used for carving petroglyphs over long periods of time, as if generations came back to certain spots to make them. Which makes me think these certain spots had some significance to the people who left their mark. Perhaps it was something as simple as having easily carved rock, or correlation with things like natural springs or good game hunting.

It’s also certainly possible that they were made by the insane, thought to be spiritually connected at the time. It does seem unlikely that they were penned up, however. I’ve seen many places in the Southwest of the US where such glypghs occur. Almost all were in wide open spaces, not caves or places that were conducive to being natural enclosures. Occasionally, they’re done over very large open spaces in the case of geoglyphs.

@Bryd Brain

Well if women did look like this you’d know damn well why they were bow-legged.

http://www.neatorama.com/2009/05/13/35000-year-old-human-figurine-olde st-ever/

I thought aliens did those.

Specialists in the rock art of the Southwest pretty much agree that the petroglyphs (which do take a long time to make, especially the more complex ones) represent either shamanic icons or actual art. The impulse for mankind to make art is basic, and certain symbols occur over a number of different cultures, often widely separated in terms of space and time. Think spirals, for instance, which are ubiquitous. Or mazes. Or handprints — I could go on and on. These symbols are present in the human unconscious (read Jung theories of the collective unconscious) regardless of the culture. I have seen gigantic rock art sites (one in northern Arizona on the Hopi Reservation covers all the cliffsides of a 250 acre mesa) completely exposed to the open air, not hidden away at all. In fact the panel used to illustrate this article is called “Newspaper Rock,” and it’s totally out in the open in northern Arizona near Monument Valley. For a great look at some amazing rock art, check out “Stone Chisel and Yucca Brush, Colorado Plateau Rock Art” by Ekkehart Malotki and Donald E. Weaver, Jr. (for whom I used to work). Fascinating. Lots of great theories about who did it and why, too.

The Nazis made the connection with mental illness to wilfully discredit modern artists. The thought is surely fascinating, but let’s not fall into the pitfall of assuming something similar for our scribbling ancestors. Just because something looks crazy, the person who made it does not have to be crazy.

The history of madness is an interesting topic. It’s helpful to see the mechanisms of power that were in place at the time madness was constructed to be abnormal.
Madness and non madness, reason and non reason once shared equal power.

I’m sure that given enough time, we will eventually realise that the norms we live by today are just another form of madness. But that will only happen if we can avoid destroying ourselves in the name of reasoned rational thought, for example (with a nuclear holocaust).

What an incredibly half-assed hypothesis (and “half-assed” is being generous).

I can’t believe this merited a post on Neatorama.

Interesting question. It’s evident that there was a
good deal of energy expended on these, suggesting perhaps
they had some expendible energy and time to do so.

Some of it does look obsessive and repeatative and might
be the things done to stave off going stir-crazy or
out of boredom. If they were forced to stay in the
caves for some reason: something to do. The interest
in animals is intriguing.

I started searching the web on this topic for two
main questions: in some caves the paintings are out of
reach. How did they reach the ceilings conveniently?

And some are in very cramped crawl spaces. What fashion
of ‘fat lamps’ were used that could be held while
crawling and also having little soot or fumes
to prevent anoxia or suffocation while crawling
along?