Nehaveigur

Why is paleolithic cave art so good? The artistic standard of the painting in Chauvet, created 35,000 years ago, is outstanding. My preferred explanation is that the paintings were created by unusually gifted artists, equivalent in their talent to the very best contemporary painter.

Assuming that modern humans appeared 190,000 years ago, that the human population was 2 million and that the average person lived to age 40, this suggests around 9 billion people who lived before the end of the last ice age 11,700 years ago. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) maintains a frequently updated estimate of the number of humans ever born and also arrives at 9 billion people having lived from 190,000 until 10,000 years ago.

If the above approach is correct, it would suggest that the number of humans who lived until the last ice age is equivalent to the 8 billion who are alive in 2025. If only the best painted cave walls, maybe because they were aware of their exceptional talent, this would explain the quality of the resulting work.

The same kind of reasoning can also be flipped on its head. Philosophy Bear quotes fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who argued that Shakespeare couldn’t really have been that great as there have been so many more literate people who lived after him, so surely there must’ve been better writers since purely on Bayesian grounds.

The biggest unknown in a Fermi calculation like the one above is the size of the human population in prehistoric times. The approach has another flaw, and it’s the same than in Bankman-Fried’s argument: It’s the extreme genetic determinism. Creating art isn’t just about talent but also about the environment. While we know that there are times and societies that are particularly conductive to creation, we don’t know much about why that is. Access to prior art and knowledge likely isn’t the only explanation since we haven’t exactly seen an explosion of creativity in the last quarter century since the Internet had made everything available everywhere. Maybe one-on-one tuition is required to make knowledge accessible and AI is going to help with that, or maybe it’s not about knowledge but about unquantifiable cultural vibes that are hard to reproduce intentionally. We can only imagine what those vibes may have been in the paleolithic.

In Brother of Sleep, Robert Schneider writes about an extraordinarily gifted musician who grows up in a remote Austrian valley where his talents aren’t recognized until it’s too late. Even though we know that our ancestors made music in the stone age since we’ve found their flutes, we’ll never know what their melodies sounded like. It’s lucky that we have well-preserved representative art that’s 35,000 years old and that presents the best we’re capable of.