Reading the walls
More wonders of human heritage can be seen in two exhibitions opening in Johannesburg this week. From Thursday to October 1, The Wonders of Rock Art: Lascaux and Africa will be at the Sci-Bono Discovery Centre in Newtown, and The Dawn of Art will be at the Origins Centre Museum at the University of the Witwatersrand.
The world’s first examples of art and symbolism, found in Southern Africa, are more than 100 000 years old, while Europe is home to some of the world’s most well-preserved prehistoric cave-art sites.
This is the first time the replica of the Lascaux cave paintings exhibition will be seen in Africa. The Palaeolithic paintings, found in 1940 in the Lascaux cave near the village of Montignac in Dordogne, southwestern France, are around 17 000 years old and are mostly of large animals native to the region at the time. They are regarded as masterpieces because of their outstanding quality and sophistication. The cave, a Unesco World Heritage site, was closed in 1963 to protect the paintings. The travelling replica is an exact reproduction — meticulously recreated using materials and tools identical to those used by the original artists — of more than 2 000 figures painted on the walls of the caves. They will be shown alongside prehistoric South African rock art, celebrating the earliest works created by humans on two continents.