The Importance Of Cave Paintings

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The distraction of shaping one’s perception started developing since the prehistoric era. The religious practices mentioned by Armstrong provide the steps to control the environment and the interactions people have with the environment. The example of this is when Armstrong mentions the cave paintings that plainly mark the cave as a place of appreciation. Through expressing their understanding of the supernatural not in temporary objects, but in perpetual cave paintings drawn on the wall, the Paleolithic people were interpreting the place itself as a place for appreciation and respect, so that anyone who went into this place would immediately understand its importance and purpose, and feel the same emotions. Whether aware of it or not, these Paleolithic painters realized that by using artistic symbolic terms with the natural enclosed and intimate feeling of the cave, they could inspire people toward a spiritual uprising of sorts; the powerful social cues conveyed by these physical features attatched meaning to, or perhaps inspired their rites of passage. This social cue was so powerf...

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