Humans did not invent art. It was the other way around | Aeon Essays

The question of when humans invented art leads us to imagine early humans much like ourselves, deciding one day to express themselves through symbols and figures. The assumption hidden in the question is that they already had minds like ours and simply chose, out of all the things they might have done on a frigid day in the Ice Age, to pick up ochre and make animal pictures. But the evidence, it seems to me, points the other way: it was the practice of making images, repeated over hundreds of generations, that occasioned the emergence of those minds we take for granted. adactio.com/links/22749