Dr. Anneliese A. Pontius, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, has drawn dissent from prominent psychology professors for her debatable theory on Stone Age art.

Using her knowledge of cave paintings and her study of various hunter-gatherer tribes over the past 20 years, Pontius posits that the disproportionate facial features drawn by Stone Age artists in their cave paintings may not be a result of their "primitive" developmental state but rather a response to their dangerous, nomadic lifestyle.

Furthermore, Pontius believes her research may also apply to inner-city students, arguing that their "enormous illiteracy rate" may be the result of their violent environment.

The Theory

Since 1971, Pontius has researched the psychological reasons why Stone Age artists in the neolithic period represented human faces without proper proportion or details.

After studying groups of modern hunter-gatherers living in Ethiopia, the Amazon area and New Guinea, Pontius concluded that a constant fear for life altered the way the brains of their Stone Age ancestors operated.

As a result, Stone Age artists represented intra-pattern facial relations inaccurately.

"It is their persistent fear for life, either from wild animals, snakes, [or] wild beasts," Pontius says.

Pontius says the hunter-gatherers saw danger lurking everywhere. "[It is] also their animalistic belief system," she says. "For them, there are evil spirits in everything they see around them."

The Research

To formulate her theory, Pontius gave two spatial tests to various modern hunter-gatherer tribes and compared groups who were surrounded by enemies with those who lived securely in large areas with no threat of attack.

Pontius gave her subjects a face-drawing and a block design test. In the block-design test, subjects were asked to copy a geometric pattern shown to them.

For the face-drawing test, Pontius says she asked her subjects to draw a person facing forward. She then looked to see if they portrayed the intra-pattern facial relations correctly.

"I'm not testing perfection but representation [of] what they remember in their mind," Pontius says.

Pontius was looking for drawings that resembled Stone Age artists' renditions of human faces.