"Humans are the only animals that draw."

The following quoted passage is from a really lovely little book: The Undressed Art: Why we Draw by Peter Steinhart.

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“Humans are the only animals that draw. While showmen and hucksters have gotten elephants and chimpanzees to drag paintbrushes across paper and canvas, so far as we know the animals are simply manipulating materials and not making representations of things. As rare as the ability is in other species, drawing is almost universal among humans; it is as human a quality as speech and bipedal locomotion. Practically every human being draws at some point in childhood. As adults, we draw maps to direct people to our houses, diagram schemes for seating guests at a dinner party, sketch plans for the bookshelves we intend to build, make graphs of corporate performance.

The qualities that separate the human mind from the minds of other creatures are those that enable us to make images and symbols. Other animals vocalize, but we develop complex languages. That the ability to symbolize with words is built on brain structures that evolved long before humankind did is suggested by the fact that, under laboratory conditions, chimpanzees and gorillas have acquired human sign language. . . . “

Syracuse University physicist Erich Harth theorizes that the human brain developed the ability to formulate mental images and to place them under the control of other brain functions as a way of extending short-term memory of details, sequences and relationships. Humans who elaborated these abilities could thus see more complex patterns in the world around them and could store information that allowed them to compare and contrast things and to understand causes and consequences. Human with such abilities could manipulate these images in such a way as to solve problems.

Harth suggets that other species have limited abilities to do this. A dog that winds its leash sround a tree may not be able to see that it can free itself by backing up. Our closest primate relatives share some of our imaginative abilities. A chimpanzee, for example, can see that by moving a box judiciously, it can reach a bananna placed on a shelf. Dolphins also seem to have some abilties in this regard. . . .” 37

This whole thing fascinates me – I wonder how this relates to the red dot experiment they did on chmips that demonstrated some sense that they can tell that a chimp in the mirror is THEM. How does this relate to their ability to conceive of an image as a REPRESENTATION or symbol of a real thing, and what is it that prevents them from MAKING such representations, or to what extent CAN they generate representations themselves. Can they make representations in a symbolic, or canonical way? Learn that a circle with two triangle ears means cat, but ony when it it is drawn a certain way? Or are they cognitively limited? Can they recognize images of certain complexity (photos, moving video, etc.) but not abstracted or simplified to lines or symbols (bathroom door man?) . . . and is their ability to create representations limited by dexterity and physical skills, mental acuity, cognition, etc? Are they trapped in 2-year old brain where they can only draw a person with a big circle head and 4 stick limbs or draw a teacup with the handle showing out the left side no matter what view of the teacup is actually in front of them? I really want to know who does primate drawing research! This is fascinating stuff.

Also, I bolded a couple of things because it reminds me of this whole attempting to distinguish ourselves from animals . . . and the idea that drawing itself is one of those distinctions (well, art-making in general, I suppose) is interesting.