Art & Deal

Monthly Art Magazine in India

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Art & Deal Articles

Bhimbetka- A Journey From Pre-Historic Socio-Cultural
Habitat To A World Heritage Entity

Apurva Sinha

“Like a painted wall falsely delighting the mind”
– Maitri Upanishad

On 24th November, Google celebrated the 41st anniversary of the discovery of Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis) the first hominid discovered in Ethiopia that throws light on the birth of civilisation. Not only in Africa or in Europe, the culture blossomed in other parts of the world as well. The arboreal tendency of the hominid gradually transformed into terrestrial and the quadrupeds into bipeds, and so eventually nature endowed them with cranial capacity and a wit to experiment with the natural surroundings. ‘Survival of the fittest’ is what propelled them to sustain the band struggles and help them evolve biologically. Hunting, gathering was their early occupation, trapping the prey was one survival strategy of which Torralba Ambrona, a Palaeolithic site in Spain is the perfect example. Some of these hunting strategies have been well recorded in the form of paintings by the cave-dwellers of lithic times. Painted thousands of years ago, either the rock-paintings were either voices of opinion or experimentation with creativity.