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Palimpsests of the painted and engraved animals obscure individuation and separate group categories (Whitley, 2009). Blum (2011) theorizes that on a deeper level of the unconscious, the cave art may be regarded as a communication, a dialogue that began with mother–infant sensory and affect– motor exchanges. In its primordial unconscious meaning, the cave likely represented transitional space for the emergence of self and object boundaries, the primal cavity, the container for progressive parental transformation of the infant's affects and cognition, and the development of intrapsychic, interrelated self and object representations. The cave itself could be symbolically representative of a birth canal and womb, a living organism in which undying art was produced. Art could then be associated with magic, omnipotence, birth, death, rebirth, and immortality. Entering and leaving the cave could be a wishful but dangerous return to and separation from the womb and the primary object. The cave artist or spectator could be swallowed in the primal cavity of mother earth but, in their sublimated and sublime art, could transcend the anxiety of intrapsychic merger, separation, and infantile regression. The dialogue with the cave and with cave art might unconsciously represent the primary and evolving communication of mother–infant and then parent–child. The cave at Pech Merle (Lot, France) has silhouettes of fingers bent at the first joint, which most men cannot do. Some of the hands on the wall appear to be those of women. Paleolithic art may indicate the cooperation of men and women so necessary to Ice Age survival. Humans are mainly symbols, stick or deformed figures, disembodied vulvas, phalluses, and heads, a hybrid or composite human–animals. These composite figures suggest animism and identification with selected animals, as found in later totemism. Horses in sequential advancing positions imply that that these first humans had a sense of time, of past, present, and future. Painted with virtuosity, animals include the extinct mammoth, wooly rhinoceros, auroch (a fierce oversized ox), giant elk, horse, bison, reindeer, bear, and unidentified herbivores. The caves display the human capacity to categorize and connect covariant animal groups. Two clusters have been identified as mammoth–bison– reindeer–bear, and bison–reindeer–ibex. Music and visual art appear to have been created concurrently. Vulture bone flutes (found in France and Germany) have been dated to 36,000 years ago. Sculpture was present outside and infrequently inside the caves, but only those works made of durable material have survived. Sculptures included large polychrome friezes, statuettes of variable size, and small objects and animals made of bone, horn, ivory, and seashells. Affirming the importance of fertility and birth in the small, endangered Paleolithic Homo sapiens, the earliest sculptures were mostly female gender specific. The statuettes represent obese or pregnant women, with an emphasis on large breasts, buttocks, and the pelvic and genital areas. Inescapably representing fertility, pregnancy, birth, or rebirth, the sculpture
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