The arts are a vast subdivision of culture, composed of many creative endeavors
and disciplines. It is a broader term than "art", which as a description of a fi
eld usually means only the visual arts. The arts encompass the visual arts, the literary arts and the performing arts music, theatre, dance and film, among othe rs. This list is by no means comprehensive, but only meant to introduce the conc ept of the arts. For all intents and purposes, the history of the arts begins wi th the history of art. The arts might have origins in early human evolutionary p rehistory. According to a recent suggestion, several forms of audio and visual a rts (rhythmic singing and drumming on external objects, dancing, body and face p ainting) were developed very early in hominid evolution by the forces of natural selection in order to reach an altered state of consciousness. In this state, w hich Jordania calls battle trance, hominids and early human were losing their in dividuality, and were acquiring a new collective identity, where they were not f eeling fear or pain, and were religiously dedicated to the group interests, in t otal disregards of their individual safety and life. This state was needed to de fend early hominids from predators, and also to help to obtain food by aggressiv e scavenging. Ritualistic actions involving heavy rhythmic music, rhythmic drill , coupled sometimes with dance and body painting had been universally used in tr aditional cultures before the hunting or military sessions in order to put them in a specific altered state of consciousness and raise the morale of participant s. Ancient Greek art saw the veneration of the animal form and the development of e quivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct pro portions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with charac teristic distinguishing features (i.e. Zeus' thunderbolt). In Byzantine and Goth ic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expressio n of biblical and not material truths. Eastern art has generally worked in a sty le akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning an d local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a r ed robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shad e and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is of ten defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is ev ident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan. Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead. The physical and rational certainties depicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment we re shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by Einstein and of unseen psychology by Freud, but also by unprecedented technological development. Parad oxically the expressions of new technologies were greatly influenced by the anci ent tribal arts of Africa and Oceania, through the works of Paul Gauguin and the Post-Impressionists, Pablo Picasso and the Cubists, as well as the Futurists an d others.