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What if we go back 2,000 years?
This is the image of a horse from classical antiquity. It was made to decorate a Roman household, about one hundred years before Christ. And clearly the artists here had no problems with two-dimensional representation.
We've gone back another thousand years to 1200 B.C. This tiny fragment comes from ancient Egypt, and the person who painted it knew perfectly well how to represent something in the world around them. We're going to have to go back much much further.
This is northern Spain, a place called Altamira. We've come here because towards the end of the 19th century a discovery was made at Altamira that would radically alter our understanding of when the world's first images were created. This historic discovery was made by a 9-year-old girl.
Her name was Maria. (Maria?)
She was the daughter of Marcelino de Sautuola, a local Spanish nobleman who was also an amateur archeologist. He became intrigued by Altamira and in autumn 1879, Maria and her father paid the cave a visit.
This was a cave that was completely unknown until a few years before. Even though I was a mere amateur, I was determined to undertake my own investigations.
As a gentleman scholar, de Sautuola took a serious interest in finding out more about the prehistoric past. But like other archeologists of the day, he assumed that the people who once settled or sheltered in these caves were little more than savages: uncouth, lowbrow, hardly better than apes and certainly incapable of any kind of creative achievement.
I hoped that through these investigations we would manage to tear away the thick veil that separates us from the origins and customs of the ancient inhabitants of these mountains.
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