Where did art begin? In a cave, most of us would say — espe­cial­ly those of us who’ve seen Wern­er Her­zog’s Cave of For­got­ten Dreams — and specif­i­cal­ly on the walls of caves, where ear­ly humans drew the first rep­re­sen­ta­tions of land­scapes, ani­mals, and them­selves. But when did art begin? The answer to that ques­tion has proven more sub­ject to revi­sion. The well-known paint­ings of the Las­caux cave com­plex in France go back 17,000 years, but the paint­ings of that same coun­try’s Chau­vet cave, the ones Her­zog cap­tured in 3D, go back 32,000 years. And just two years ago, Grif­fith Uni­ver­si­ty researchers dis­cov­ered art­work on a cave on the Indone­sian island of Sulawe­si that turns out to be about 44,000 years old.

Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve fea­tured the argu­ment that ancient rock-wall art con­sti­tutes the ear­li­est form of cin­e­ma, to the extent that its unknown painters sought to evoke move­ment. But cave paint­ings like the one in Sulawe­si’s cave Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, which you can see in the video above, also shed light on the nature of the ear­li­est known forms of sto­ry­telling.

The “four­teen-and-a-half-foot-wide image, paint­ed in dark-red pig­ment,” writes The New York­er’s Adam Gop­nik, depicts “about eight tiny bipedal fig­ures, bear­ing what look to be spears and ropes, brave­ly hunt­ing the local wild pigs and buf­fa­lo.” This first known narrative“tells one of the sim­plest and most res­o­nant sto­ries we have: a tale of the hunter and the hunt­ed, of small and eas­i­ly mocked pur­suers try­ing to bring down a scary but vul­ner­a­ble beast.”

Like oth­er ancient cave art, the paint­ing’s char­ac­ters are the­ri­anthropes, described by the Grif­fith researchers’ Nature arti­cle as “abstract beings that com­bine qual­i­ties of both peo­ple and ani­mals, and which arguably com­mu­ni­cat­ed nar­ra­tive fic­tion of some kind (folk­lore, reli­gious myths, spir­i­tu­al beliefs and so on).” Giv­en the appar­ent impor­tance of their roles in ear­ly sto­ries, how much of a stretch would it be to call these fig­ures the first super­heroes? “Indeed, the cave paint­ing could be entered as evi­dence into a key aes­thet­ic and sto­ry­telling argu­ment of today — the debate between the pal­adins of Amer­i­can film, Mar­tin Scors­ese and Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, and their Mar­vel Cin­e­mat­ic Uni­verse con­tem­po­raries,” writes Gop­nik.

If you haven’t fol­lowed this strug­gle for the soul of sto­ry­telling in the 21st cen­tu­ry, Scors­ese wrote a piece in The New York Times claim­ing that today’s kind of block­buster super­hero pic­ture isn’t cin­e­ma, in that it shrinks from “the com­plex­i­ty of peo­ple and their con­tra­dic­to­ry and some­times para­dox­i­cal natures, the way they can hurt one anoth­er and love one anoth­er and sud­den­ly come face to face with them­selves.” (“He didn’t say it’s despi­ca­ble,” Cop­po­la lat­er added, “which I just say it is.”) And yet, as Gop­nik puts it, “our old­est pic­ture sto­ry seems to belong, whether we want it to or not, more to the Mar­vel uni­verse than to Mar­ty Scorsese’s.” If we just imag­ine how those the­ri­anthropes — “A human with the strength of a bull! Anoth­er with the guile of a croc­o­dile!” — must have thrilled their con­tem­po­rary view­ers, we’ll under­stand these cave paint­ings for what they are: ear­ly art, ear­ly sto­ry­telling, ear­ly cin­e­ma, but above all, ear­ly spec­ta­cle.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Was a 32,000-Year-Old Cave Paint­ing the Ear­li­est Form of Cin­e­ma?

40,000-Year-Old Sym­bols Found in Caves World­wide May Be the Ear­li­est Writ­ten Lan­guage

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er the World’s First “Art Stu­dio” Cre­at­ed in an Ethiopi­an Cave 43,000 Years Ago

Hear the World’s Old­est Instru­ment, the “Nean­derthal Flute,” Dat­ing Back Over 43,000 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The idea of the clas­si­cal period—the time of ancient Greece and Rome—as an ele­gant­ly uni­fied col­lec­tion of supe­ri­or aes­thet­ic and philo­soph­i­cal cul­tur­al traits has its own his­to­ry, one that comes in large part from the era of the Neo­clas­si­cal. The redis­cov­ery of antiq­ui­ty took some time to reach the pitch it would dur­ing the 18th cen­tu­ry, when ref­er­ences to Greek and Latin rhetoric, archi­tec­ture, and sculp­ture were inescapable. But from the Renais­sance onward, the clas­si­cal achieved the sta­tus of cul­tur­al dog­ma.

One ten­ant of clas­si­cal ide­al­ism is the idea that Roman and Greek stat­u­ary embod­ied an ide­al of pure whiteness—a mis­con­cep­tion mod­ern sculp­tors per­pet­u­at­ed for hun­dreds of years by mak­ing busts and stat­ues in pol­ished white mar­ble. But the truth is that both Greek stat­ues and their Roman counterparts—as you’ll learn in the Vox video above—were orig­i­nal­ly bright­ly paint­ed in riotous col­or.

This includes the 1st cen­tu­ry A.D. Augus­tus of Pri­ma Por­ta, the famous fig­ure of the Emper­or stand­ing tri­umphant­ly with one hand raised. Rather than left as blank white mar­ble, the stat­ue would have had bronzed skin, brown hair, and a fire-engine red toga. “Ancient Greece and Rome were real­ly col­or­ful,” we learn. So how did every­one come to believe oth­er­wise?

It’s part­ly an hon­est mis­take. After the fall of Rome, ancient sculp­tures were buried or left out in the open air for hun­dreds of years. By the time the Renais­sance began in the 1300s, their paint had fad­ed away. As a result, the artists unearthing, and copy­ing ancient art didn’t real­ize how col­or­ful it was sup­posed to be.

But white mar­ble couldn’t have become the norm with­out some will­ful igno­rance. Even though there was a bunch of evi­dence that ancient sculp­ture was paint­ed, artists, art his­to­ri­ans and the gen­er­al pub­lic chose to dis­re­gard it. West­ern cul­ture seemed to col­lec­tive­ly accept that white mar­ble was sim­ply pret­ti­er.

White stat­u­ary sym­bol­ized a clas­si­cal ide­al that “depends high­ly on the great­est pos­si­ble decon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion,” writes James I. Porter, pro­fes­sor of Rhetoric and Clas­sics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley. “Only so can the val­ues it cher­ish­es be iso­lat­ed: sim­plic­i­ty, tran­quil­i­ty, bal­anced pro­por­tions, restraint, puri­ty of form… all of these are fea­tures that under­score the time­less qual­i­ty of the high­est pos­si­ble expres­sion of art, like a breath held indef­i­nite­ly.” These ideals became insep­a­ra­ble from the devel­op­ment of racial the­o­ry.

Learn­ing to see the past as it was requires us to put aside his­tor­i­cal­ly acquired blind­ers. This can be exceed­ing­ly dif­fi­cult when our ideas about the past come from hun­dreds of years of inher­it­ed tra­di­tion, from every peri­od of art his­to­ry since the time of Michelan­ge­lo. But we must acknowl­edge this tra­di­tion as fab­ri­cat­ed. Influ­en­tial art his­to­ri­an Johann Joachim Winck­el­mann, for exam­ple, extolled the val­ue of clas­si­cal sculp­ture because, in his opin­ion, “the whiter the body is, the more beau­ti­ful it is.”

Winck­el­mann also, Vox notes, “went out of his way to ignore obvi­ous evi­dence of col­ored mar­ble, and there was a lot of it.” He dis­missed fres­cos of col­ored stat­u­ary found in Pom­peii and judged one paint­ed sculp­ture dis­cov­ered there as “too prim­i­tive” to have been made by ancient Romans. “Evi­dence wasn’t just ignored, some of it may have been destroyed” to enforce an ide­al of white­ness. While many stat­ues were denud­ed by the ele­ments over hun­dreds of years, the first archae­ol­o­gists to dis­cov­er the Augus­tus of Pri­ma Por­ta in the 1860s described its col­or scheme in detail.

Cri­tiques of clas­si­cal ide­al­ism don’t orig­i­nate in a polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect present. As Porter shows at length in his arti­cle “What Is ‘Clas­si­cal’ About Clas­si­cal Antiq­ui­ty?,” they date back at least to 19th cen­tu­ry philoso­pher Lud­wig Feuer­bach, who called Winckelmann’s ideas about Roman stat­ues “an emp­ty fig­ment of the imag­i­na­tion.” But these ideas are “for the most part tak­en for grant­ed rather than ques­tioned,” Porter argues, “or else clung to for fear of los­ing a pow­er­ful cachet that, even in the belea­guered present, con­tin­ues to trans­late into cul­tur­al pres­tige, author­i­ty, elit­ist sat­is­fac­tions, and eco­nom­ic pow­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vas­es Come to Life with 21st Cen­tu­ry Ani­ma­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness