Man and Environment Vol.
Internal analysis can, however, still benefit by having light cast on it from outside sources.
The ethnographic, archaeological and aesthetic comparison of these two independent but partly contemporaneous entities, the rock art of the kangaroo hunters and the cave art of reindeer hunters demonstrate not laws but general principles of human symbolic behaviour. They reveal universality, a certain continuity in the artistic creations of the hunter-gatherer societies as well as significant differences. It is important to know all these because the art of the Australians tell us something about the art of our own origins, even through their differences, and vice versa. This approach is in keeping with a major trend in present- day historical research, that of a comparative history , a search for similarities and differences in time and space. The English translation is published with the kind permission of L Anthropologie.