CRADLE OF HUMANITY

The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture collects essays andlectures by Georges Bataille spanning 30 years of research in anthropology, comparative religion, aesthetics, and philosophy. These were neither idle noridyllic years; the discovery of Lascaux in 1940 coincides with the bloodiest war inhistory -- with new machines of death, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima. Bataille'sreflections on the possible origins of humanity coincide with the intensified threatof its possible extinction.For Bataille, prehistory is universal history; it is thehistory of a human community prior to its fall into separation, into nations andraces. The art of prehistory offers the earliest traces of nascent yet fully humanconsciousness -- of consciousness not yet fully separated from natural flora andfauna, or from the energetic forces of the universe. A play of identities, the artof prehistory is the art of a consciousness struggling against itself, of a humanspirit struggling against brute animal physicality. Prehistory is the cradle ofhumanity, the birth of tragedy.Bataille reaches beyond disciplinary specializationsto imagine a moment when thought was universal. Bataille's work provides a model forinterdisciplinary inquiry in our own day, a universal imagination and thought forour own potential community. The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culturespeaks to philosophers and historians of thought, to anthropologists interested inthe history of their discipline and in new methodologies, to theologians andreligious comparatists interested in the origins and nature of man's encounter withthe sacred, and to art historians and aestheticians grappling with the place ofprehistory in the canons of art.