As multi-media artist Matt Gatton and others have argued, it’s highly likely that small holes in animal hides used by cavemen to cover cave mouths created – if only sometimes – natural camera obscuras which projected images onto the cave walls of these people’s dwellings. Indeed, Gatton challenges us to ‘Imagine… a Paleolithic person waking in the morning to find the image of animals walking around on the wall, the three-dimensional world reduced to two dimensions on a surface inside the tent’!
If you want to see what that could have looked like – including the projection on the wall – have a look at his site: http://www.paleo-camera.com/reconpage.htm
This idea is really not so incredible. A camera obscura is nothing more than a dark room or other space which has a tiny hole in one side through which light reflecting off an object outside the room projects an upside-down image of that object – and this would clearly have happened in a darkened space cut off from daylight by an animal hide put up to keep in the warmth. It also helps to make sense of early cave paintings since many of them were upside-down, and also seem to suggest movement and a sort of blurriness. Both these elements might well have come from mimicking camera obscura images projected onto cave walls.
While these first projection screens were not man-made, they were in many ways more like the home cinemas we have today than were many intervening inventions, precisely because of their status in darkened living spaces – spaces not so very different from the “man caves” created by many of today’s home movie enthusiasts!
However, those who did not have the luxury of a cave, would have had their first projection screen made of fabric. Though not intentionally, but through a coincindental camera obscura created by a small hole in their tent.
Below, you can see the reconstruction that Matt made and how the an image is projected onto the tent’s interior. Keep in mind that the image would have been upside down in the tent. The image is rotated 180 degrees to make it easier to understand what was projected inside.