Long before the famous duck-rabbit illusion (seen at right), prehistoric artists were creating mind-bending double images of their own, according to a new paper presented earlier this year at an international convention on rock art research.
The paper’s author, Duncan Caldwell has surveyed the Paleolithic art of several caves in France and discovered a recurring theme that he says can’t be simply accidental. Throughout the cave of Font-de-Gaume, and in examples from other sites as well, drawings and engravings of woolly mammoths and bison often share certain lines or other features, creating overlapping images that can be read first as one animal, then the other. Rarely, if ever, do they do the same with other animals. While images of horses, deer, extinct cattle, and even rhinos often appear in such caves, and often partially or entirely overlap each other, it is only the mammoth-bison pair that Caldwell found regularly appearing superimposed so exactly. For example in the modern drawing below of an image from Font-de-Gaume, one main body shape, underbelly, and set of legs is adorned with signs of both mammoth and bison heads at both ends. These two large, bulbous, “armor-headed herbivores” which share many physical similarities in life, seem to have had some connection for people in this region in art as well.
In a particularly striking example, a small figurine has been given the details of a bison on one side and those of a mammoth on the other. The Paleolithic artist was clearly playing with the similar contours of the two animals and creating a single object that could be flipped to represent one species or the other.
Nice Trick, but Is It an Illusion?
There’s a big difference between overlapping images or ambiguous profiles and a proper optical illusion however. Nigel Warburton is a senior lecturer of philosophy at The Open University and co-host of the podcast “Philosophy Bites,” which uses the duck-rabbit as its logo. For him, knowing the original context of the image is key. Speaking of the classic version, he said “If somebody had been illustrating a children’s book about rabbits, nobody would have seen it as a duck.” As he put it, “the fact that a figure can be read in two ways isn’t conclusive proof that it was intended to be read both ways.”
The duck-rabbit is different because we know that it was created not just to show both animals individually, but to call attention to the strange sensation of one replacing the other. It’s to some degree a “reflection on the nature of perception.” The mammoth-bison images clearly make use of ambiguous shapes and similarities between the animals, but that doesn’t guarantee they were intended as optical illusions.
Magic Is in the Beholder of the Eye
Perhaps the most dramatic candidate for a mammoth-bison image meeting this requirement and being an intentional illusion isn’t on a cave wall, but on a carving from a spear-thrower from the site of Canecaude. In this piece, as Caldwell sees it, it’s not that the animals share a contour or a few lines, but that just two small details allow the entire image to be read as either of the two species, and seeing one causes the other to “disappear.”
The details in question are the eyes. Caldwell describes how there is “both an upper eye, which turns the crescent beneath it into a tusk, and lower eye, beside the front leg, that transforms the same crescent which we just interpreted as a “tusk”, into a bison’s overhead horn.” Looking back and forth between the eyes then, we are able to see the entire shape transform from one animal to the other, an effect much more like the classic Gestalt shift of the duck-rabbit.
Significantly, it is hard to think of other reasons for the unusual position of the eyes. First of all, their delicately carved shapes show that they were made intentionally, and are not just accidental markings. Secondly, the details of the body of the animal, its tusk/horns, long hair, and legs are all fairly realistically represented showing the artist’s ability to make an accurate full profile view if desired. Even in the somewhat common technique in prehistoric art of using “twisted perspective” where an animal’s body will be shown in profile, but both eyes will be visible on the face in a Picasso-like manner, the eyes are generally still close together. In addition, that technique seems to be more common in flat wall art than in full sculpture, where the ability to put one eye on each side of the sculpture takes care of the perspective problem.
The possibility remains however that pieces of the complete spear-thrower that are now missing would clarify the image further, and show that the image is just a mammoth, plain and simple. For example, in a reconstruction in the book “Mammoths: Giants of the Ice Age,” authors Adrian Lister and Paul Bahn propose that the mammoth’s trunk would have looped back in the lower-left part of the carving, making the lower “eye” the curled up end of the mammoth’s trunk.
A Window Into Stone Age Philosophy?
If Caldwell’s analysis of the mammoth-bison phenomenon is correct, we begin to get a view not only of what prehistoric people saw, but also how they thought, and that has the potential to change our perspective and how we see other artifacts as well. That perspective shift is also what makes these ambiguity illusions so appealing in the first place. Nigel Warburton said he chose the duck-rabbit as the logo for “Philosophy Bites” because it’s also what he likes about philosophy itself. “Part of what philosophy does,” he said “is, sometimes, make you see what you already knew in a completely different light.” Perhaps someone enjoyed the same thought sitting in a cave, some 15,000 years ago.
For More Information
Duncan Caldwell is a fellow at the Marine and Paleobiological Research Institute in Massachusetts. Follow his varied research and interests on his personal site.