Understanding Rock Art: What Neuroscience Can Add

In this chapter, I will make a case that neuroscience can help with the understanding of any art, and that in the context of rock art, with its deep history, it offers particular advantages. Most importantly it can give us new access to the minds of its makers and users, something much needed in the absence of the verbal commentaries associated with most other categories of material. That access, I suggest, can be obtained by using the latest knowledge of the extent to which the formation of the individual brain is affected by the environment to which it is exposed. This knowledge can help not only to reconstruct salient aspects of the neural resources of any individual or group whose material and social environment is sufficiently familiar to us, but also to infer how those resources are likely to have influenced such art-related behaviours as their motor inclinations and visual preferences. When these insights are supported by an understanding of such other newly discovered properties of our brains as its neural plasticityNeural plasticity and neural mirroringNeural mirroring, we can build up a new understanding of the mental activities behind the similarities and the differences in the way people living at different places and times have marked rock walls. A neural approach also allows us to re-evaluate assumptions about the history of culture that have been taken for granted in the fields of archaeology, anthropology, and art history, such as the pre-eminence of the role of language in the formation of culture and the associated insistence that art is necessarily a symbolic activity. In this way neuroscience can add a new dimension to cultural history.