#(although y'all know i hate defining archaological places and items as single purpose when so few things ever are in real life)

[rhysintherain]

Okay, consider the accuracy and detail of the animals in these cave paintings. We see animals so accurately depicted that thousands of years later, we can identify them to the species level - even for species that are extinct and we've never seen except as bones.

They seem less like entertainment and more like scientific illustrations. As a young stone age hunter, you could sit in those caves and learn to identify large game species on sight without any of the dangers of going out to find it without proper training.

And what do we get when we have detailed visual depictions on the wall in a chamber with excellent acoustics, meant for a single speaker to communicate with a large audience about the material presented?

Well, back in university we called that a lecture theatre. And honestly, if you turned off the power most of the ones I've spent time in, they would also feel like a cave chamber with good acoustics.

There's a good chance these caves were the places experienced hunters taught students what animals were good to eat, which ones were dangerous, and where to place a spear or arrow for the quickest kill.

Hunting big game is dangerous work. A classroom like this, with cave art as an educational resource, would allow younger hunters to be prepared in a safe environment for a job where they'd need to be ready for split-second decisions when time wouldn't allow for instruction in the moment.

Now take the next bit with a grain of salt, since I have very little experience with the lighting technologies paleolithic teachers would have access to, but it would take considerable resources to light an entire painted surface in these caves:

If you're using a torch or other 'domesticated' fire to illuminate these images, it makes more sense to do so one at a time, with a single light source. Especially so in that second image (that's from Chauvet, which has some beautiful detailed work), where the images are presented less as a landscape (like Lascaux in the first image) and more like figures in a textbook.

By illuminating each image as you discuss it, these paintings could act like a PowerPoint, allowing various examples for study in a single space.

The red dots and lines marking high quality acoustic areas also remind me of something we see a lot in the modern world:

We also use high contrast paints to mark places where we know something we might need to access is located when we can't see it.

So what happens if things change, and you need to add new educational resources to your paleolithic school? Well, it probably helps if somebody found and labelled the best areas to put a new lecture theatre ahead of time, predicting that this might happen. These marks might be the construction plans that, for whatever reason, were never actually built.

Anyway. If these were educational spaces, they're some of the most successful humanity has ever created. We're still studying their lessons and learning things about ecosystems that no living human has ever seen. We can still look at their work and discover things we didn't know about their world.

In the 1980s in France, musicologists and archaeologists Iégor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois used their voices to explore caves with notable Paleolithic wall paintings. By singing simple notes and whistling, they mapped their perceptions of the caves’ acoustics. They found that paintings were often located in places that were particularly resonant. Animal paintings were common in resonant chambers and in places along the walls that produced strong reverberation. As they crawled through narrow tunnels, they discovered painted red dots exactly located in the most resonant places. The entrances to these tunnels were also marked with paintings. Resonant recesses in walls were especially heavily ornamented.

In a 2017 study, a dozen acousticians, archaeologists, and musicians measured the sonic qualities of cave interiors in northern Spain. The team, led by acoustic scientist Bruno Fazenda, used speakers, computers, and microphone arrays to measure the behavior of precisely calibrated tones within the cave. The caves they studied contain wall art spanning much of the Paleolithic, dating from about forty thousand years to fifteen thousand years ago. The art includes handprints, abstract points and lines, and a bestiary of Paleolithic animals including birds, fish, horses, bovids, reindeer, bear, ibex, cetaceans, and humanlike figures. From hundreds of standardized measurements, the team found that painted red dots and lines, the oldest wall markings, are associated with parts of the cave where low frequencies resonate and sonic clarity is high due to modest reverberation. These would have been excellent places for speech and more complex forms of music, not muddied by excessive reverberation. Animal paintings and handprints were also likely to be in places where clarity is high and overall reverberation is low but with a good low-frequency response. These are the qualities that we seek now in modern performance spaces.

Sounds Wild and Broken, David George Haskell