Page 219 - Kavur, Boris. Devet esejev o (skoraj) človeški podobi. Založba Univerze na Primorskem, Koper 2014.
P. 219
summary
for the lustration of ideas about the racial struggle which were used to argu-
ment biological inferiority of social classes and to support unjust institutions
such as slavery, colonialism and eugenics (Caspari 2003, 67).
But in the middle of the 19th century a new era started in science – a pe-
riod when all previous discoveries and cognitions were interpreted anew and
included in to different fields. When in 1847 J. Boucher de Perthes published
in Paris the first volume of his work dedicated to Celtic and antediluvian an-
tiquities and depicted in it numerous stone tools discovered in the terraces of
river Somme, he started something unimaginable to him. His work demon-
strated soon that there ought to be another reality, different form the one de-
scribed in the Genesis. Not only that the river system in northern France was
much different in the past, but the position of the tools deeply buried in grav-
els started to indicated that processes were active in nature which needed
much more time to pass as allowed by the short chronology of mankind.
In the middle of 19th century great thinkers considered the whole theo-
logical theory of creation, as it was still preached, as finally doomed (White
1993, 49). As the line of astronomers from Copernicus to Newton dismissed
the old astronomy in which Earth was the center of the universe with an Al-
mighty floating above its axis and moving the celestial bodies, so the line of
new biologists annihilated the old idea about the Creator as the punctilious
designer of all the living things which were ought to serve humanity. It was a
period when evolutionism consolidated as the leading scientific and social
ideology slowly leading to the collapse of the short creationistic chronology of
life on Earth. It was a period when depictions of humans together with ex-
tinct animals appeared for the first time. And the image of the people changed
too. In accordance with evolutionistic convictions their appearance was prim-
itive – firstly similar to deprivileged primitive people and later gaining more
and more characteristic from our ape relatives. Their tools become less hypo-
thetical – beside the indispensable clubs illustrations of archaeological finds
made their first appearance. Often we are witnessing in this period a unifica-
tion of grotesque human figures with old symbolic attributes such as fury
clothes and clubs with discoveries of modern science.
We can clearly distinguish two genres of depictions of past life – depic-
tions of landscapes where humans were just one of the actors and depictions
of human portraits. In the first case the focus was oriented towards the rep-
resentation of nature mostly dominated by images of lavish vegetation and
water with numerous different animals arranged around it. But the portrait
like illustration of early humans featured mostly static individuals and fami-
lies posing as for early photographers – they presented images of tool making
219
for the lustration of ideas about the racial struggle which were used to argu-
ment biological inferiority of social classes and to support unjust institutions
such as slavery, colonialism and eugenics (Caspari 2003, 67).
But in the middle of the 19th century a new era started in science – a pe-
riod when all previous discoveries and cognitions were interpreted anew and
included in to different fields. When in 1847 J. Boucher de Perthes published
in Paris the first volume of his work dedicated to Celtic and antediluvian an-
tiquities and depicted in it numerous stone tools discovered in the terraces of
river Somme, he started something unimaginable to him. His work demon-
strated soon that there ought to be another reality, different form the one de-
scribed in the Genesis. Not only that the river system in northern France was
much different in the past, but the position of the tools deeply buried in grav-
els started to indicated that processes were active in nature which needed
much more time to pass as allowed by the short chronology of mankind.
In the middle of 19th century great thinkers considered the whole theo-
logical theory of creation, as it was still preached, as finally doomed (White
1993, 49). As the line of astronomers from Copernicus to Newton dismissed
the old astronomy in which Earth was the center of the universe with an Al-
mighty floating above its axis and moving the celestial bodies, so the line of
new biologists annihilated the old idea about the Creator as the punctilious
designer of all the living things which were ought to serve humanity. It was a
period when evolutionism consolidated as the leading scientific and social
ideology slowly leading to the collapse of the short creationistic chronology of
life on Earth. It was a period when depictions of humans together with ex-
tinct animals appeared for the first time. And the image of the people changed
too. In accordance with evolutionistic convictions their appearance was prim-
itive – firstly similar to deprivileged primitive people and later gaining more
and more characteristic from our ape relatives. Their tools become less hypo-
thetical – beside the indispensable clubs illustrations of archaeological finds
made their first appearance. Often we are witnessing in this period a unifica-
tion of grotesque human figures with old symbolic attributes such as fury
clothes and clubs with discoveries of modern science.
We can clearly distinguish two genres of depictions of past life – depic-
tions of landscapes where humans were just one of the actors and depictions
of human portraits. In the first case the focus was oriented towards the rep-
resentation of nature mostly dominated by images of lavish vegetation and
water with numerous different animals arranged around it. But the portrait
like illustration of early humans featured mostly static individuals and fami-
lies posing as for early photographers – they presented images of tool making
219
