Of blood, lust and derring-do

On the cave walls at Lascaux in France are expertly drafted scenes of big game, standing, charging and sometimes dying. The fact that such images, which are found on cave walls across Eurasia, were created between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago is striking, alluring, but also mystifying. Palaeolithic art offers some of the first indications that we humans had "arrived", but since the images were created long before the advent of writing the answers to basic questions remain unclear.

Archaeologists have long debated what prompted people to draw what they did. Why does most of the rock art show big game animals? Why is the portable art dominated by fat little Venus figurines? What were the artists trying to say, if anything? And who were the artists?

In The Nature of Palaeolithic Art natural historian and palaeobiologist Dale Guthrie of the University of Alaska seeks to answer these questions by placing the art firmly in the context of natural history and by linking artistic behaviour to our evolutionary past. The result - a theory that most of the Palaeolithic artists were young lads clearly in line for an ASBO - is one of the most controversial interpretations to date.

Previously, there have been two main explanations for the art: it was left by shaman artists for religious reasons to ensure the success of a hunt or the fertility of a group; or that it was done purely for art's sake. This is the first time that anyone has considered that the artists might have been "young guys, high on testosterone, poking into a cave, breaking off stalactites, scuffing up previous images, spitting ochre onto the walls and making images of their own obsessions and images".

Guthrie is not suggesting women, girls or older men were not artistic: his opening chapter deals with the profound preservational biases of Palaeolithic art. Thus artistic expressions on fabrics, baskets or on human bodies - perhaps the domains of female artistic expression - will have perished. Instead, most of the art that has survived the test of time is on cave walls. To Guthrie's mind, only daredevil male youths would be crazy enough to go roaming about in godforsaken caves. To bolster his argument, he notes that statistically, today's male youths are the biggest risk takers. As a case in point, he observes that the art deep inside the cave at Lascaux was discovered not by a team of old archaeological professors but rather by a gang of teenage boys.

Guthrie's thesis draws its main impetus, however, from the surprisingly limited themes dealt with by the art. Although Palaeolithic art is a readily recognisable style, unified in its elasticity and freedom, it concerns a few subject matters only. It is dominated by large mammals, many bleeding and wounded, and complemented by images of voluptuous women, isolated vulva triangles and ochre hand prints. To Guthrie, the art smacks of themes of power relevant to a specific age and sex distortion, namely, adolescent boys akin to modern graffiti artists.

Guthrie maintains that the preoccupation with large animals is something that would have been most important to young men (thus adduced to have been the artists), since successful hunting brings status, which in turn brings women.

Of the large ungulates, an estimated 15 per cent are painted speared and bleeding. Often blood is shown violently spraying from the mouth and nostrils, while some animals are shown urinating or defecating. Both are common responses to a lethal hit - in the first case the result of a mortal wound to the thorax. Such depictions have traditionally been seen in magico-religious terms; some authors have even proposed theories of a "defecation cult" to explain the presence of faeces. But to Guthrie, these images express the fundamental beauty and excitement the young artists felt in the hunt. Moreover, since Guthrie maintains that an interest in violence is generally a male preserve, this too points to male authorship.

Women are the second favoured theme. The rotund Venus figurines and the vulva triangles are generally seen as fertility symbols or protective talismans. Yet, within the context of Guthrie's thesis they take on a very different meaning. He interprets the voluptuous models and sketches of body parts as Palaeolithic pin-ups: the work of testosterone-flushed, high-libido Palaeolithic males following basic human directives.

Whether abstract female curves, headless or faceless models, or "explicit erotica" (couples fornicating, women with open legs or bent over), these female images tend not to be "fine art". Rather, argues Guthrie, they have the timeless "visual erotica of young guys". To Guthrie, they reflect an "unfulfilled sexual desire, a horniness, that is not characteristic of mature men who enjoy a full sex life". Moreover, he suggests that the "palm-sized", portable and easily hidden, Venus figurines were used in much the same way as erotic magazines are used today. Indeed, he suggests that the absence of hair from vulvae would have served to heighten their erotic appeal, while also demonstrating a possible lack of intimate knowledge of the reality of mature female genitalia. Guthrie is silent on the subject of the portable stone phalli, other than maintaining that these too were probably made by men.

The "negative hand print" is the final recurring image in the rock art.

These prints were seemingly made by holding the hand on to the cave wall and spraying liquefied pigment from a blow-pipe onto the hand. Many prints have missing fingers. They were left by poor folk who lost fingers in the bitter cold of the Ice Age and who, by leaving their tragic hand print upon the wall, were asking for magical help or healing. Or so scholars have always tended to claim.

But in a stroke of pure genius Guthrie suggests these ghoulish missing-finger prints were childish pranks. Or rather boys' pranks: Guthrie commissioned an analysis of 201 Palaeolithic hand prints, which concluded that 162 are male and only 39 are female or young male prints. Guthrie thus attempts to get at the essence of the artists and puts a human slant on the art, which draws us close to our forebears and "the possibility that adolescent giggles and snickers may have echoed in dark cave passages".

Throughout his book Guthrie includes many valid, engaging, solid and pertinent observations. However, the point about history in general, and prehistory in particular, is that our experiences and cultural biases affect our interpretations. Consider, for example, Guthrie's pin-up interpretation of the Venus figurines and the notion that they were the work of unfulfilled teens. In fact, there are plenty of cultures in which adolescents engage in sexual activity. Might we hazard that Guthrie's interpretations reflect his experience as a middle-class American man (potentially: no sex in adolescence but a youthful obsession with pornography, abandoned once married)? Second, the notion that women played little or no part in prehistory tends to be the general assumption, but one that has recently been challenged. We cannot know how different Palaeolithic groups apportioned their time or activity. And who is to say that women or girls are unlikely to engage in "testosterone-charged art"? After all, meek and mild nuns sewed the blood and gore of the Bayeux tapestry.

This is a fascinating and compulsive read in which Guthrie harnesses a gamut of anthropological data and rock-art images. Despite this, it is a controversial book and its key contribution to existing scholarship will be that it demonstrates just how far our own experiences can condition our interpretations.

Nadia Durrani is editor, Current World Archaeology .