My father always impressed me with his deep knowledge of cars. He could tell you the make, model, and year of any car with a glance, and further, he could tell you how to disassemble its carburetor or repair its brakes or tell you all about its ignition timing, and other such things that soared right over my head. I was unfortunately car-blind, an automotive ignoramus who could not distinguish a Ford from a Chevy, let alone make any finer distinctions. Clearly, there has been a generational decline in awareness of the automotive world. Our forefathers had a deeper appreciation of cars and their place in the world around us.
You can see it in the art of our culture.
I thought about this when I read this article, Humanity’s ancient bond with biodiversity is visible in rock art.
Across continents and cultures, one of the most striking features of ancient rock art is how often it places the natural world at its center. Whether etched into sandstone cliffs in the Sahara, painted in hidden shelters in Southern Africa, or drawn on stone faces deep in the Amazon, the recurring subject is not architecture, warfare or abstract political power.
It is animals, forests, rivers, spirits of the land and the intimate relationship between people and the living world around them. I have seen rock art in remote regions of the Amazon, left by ancient San communities in Angola, across the Ennedi Plateau in Chad, and in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, I have come to believe that these works reveal something profound: long before the language of “biodiversity” existed, many human societies understood that their survival, identity and spirituality were inseparable from the ecosystems that sustained them.
Modern conservation discourse often treats biodiversity as a scientific concept — a measurable index of species richness, ecological resilience and genetic variation. This framing is useful, but it can obscure an older and deeper truth. For much of human history, biodiversity was not an abstraction. It was immediate, sacred and embedded in daily life. The extraordinary prevalence of animal and ecological imagery in rock art across the world suggests that early human societies recognized, at minimum intuitively, the centrality of the natural world to both material survival and cultural meaning.
I do not think my father regarded cars as “sacred”, although he’d agree that the diversity was not an abstraction. It was real! He was an auto mechanic. That was his business. I would not be surprised to learn that he believed that automotive diversity was central to both material survival and cultural meaning. He also admired the beauty of certain cars and expressed aesthetic preferences in addition to appreciating the practical mechanical differences.I am certain that we can find people who have attached a kind of spiritual reverence for certain models of cars. But so what? Humans categorize and classify and add value arguments to everything we see; it is not at all surprising or informative to retroactively paint spiritual interpretations on top of the work of survival, and it is especially specious to then deplore how the current generation has lost their proper understanding of how the world works.
Of course, it would be simplistic and romantic to suggest that ancient peoples were conservationists in the modern sense. They hunted, altered landscapes, and undoubtedly contributed to local ecological pressures at times. But what the rock art strongly implies is that many societies understood themselves as existing within ecological systems, not above them. Nature was not viewed merely instrumentally. It was spiritually, socially and existentially central.
This matters because modern industrial societies have, in many respects, lost that orientation.
Yes. Let’s recognize the pragmatic pressures that drive a culture’s artistic focus. Show me societies that did not understand that they exist within ecological systems, while being dependent on those same ecological systems. Of course ancient artists were fascinated with the living world around them, and drew it and probably dreamed about it. I would agree that modern industrial societies have shifted their focus from natural ecosystems to technological ecosystems, and it would be a good idea for us to be more conscious of the broader biological implications of our way of life, it is not surprising that human beings dwell on the subjects that most interest them and have difficulty expanding their sphere of analysis.
I am sure that many of those ancient cultures also had interpretations of the world that were rooted in magic and gods and invalid spiritual ideas, and that we’ve abandoned. Most of that is invisible and unexpressed in the catalog of rock art that we have, because it’s easier to draw a gazelle than a cosmic spiritual connection. We have to make up the spiritual element now and impose it on the art, which makes trying to draw conclusions and interpret our interpretations a masturbatory act.
I can sympathize with many of the conclusion this author reaches while being skeptical of how they reached them.
Ancient rock art is therefore more than archaeological evidence or aesthetic achievement. It is testimony. It bears witness to the fact that human societies across vast stretches of time and geography saw themselves in a relationship with a biologically rich world and considered that relationship important enough to record in an enduring form.
In this sense, rock art offers a quiet but powerful rebuke to modern ecological indifference. It reminds us that our ancestors often lived with a deeper awareness of ecological dependence than many contemporary societies do. They may not have had the vocabulary of biodiversity science, but they understood that the fate of humans and the fate of the living world were intertwined.
We would be wise to recover some of that understanding.
OK, yes, we should have a deeper appreciation of biodiversity and work to preserve it. But is the way to do that by invoking the inferred spirituality of our ancestors, and suggesting that they had the right answer, while we do not? I know we don’t have the right answer, but we also have this new layer of technology that complicates our understanding of the world that must be incorporated into our answer, and pretending that solutions that worked in Chad ten thousand years ago will work again is dodging the problem. I suppose we could just simplify the world, jettison all the technology, and go back to living in small villages, and then we’d appreciate nature much more.
My dad, who has been dead for 34 years, could also work himself up into a good rant about those goddamn fuel injection systems and unrepairable computer chips in modern cars. We’ve lost our understanding of the elegance of a simple V8 engine. Bring back the beauty of the Fords of the 1950s.
