Posted on 10/03/2001 12:16:47 PM PDT by blam
Wednesday, 3 October, 2001, 18:00 GMT 19:00 UK
Science shows cave art developed early
Chauvet cave paintings depict horses and other animals
By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse A new dating of spectacular prehistoric cave paintings reveals them to be much older than previously thought.
Carbon isotope analysis of charcoal used in pictures of horses at Chauvet, south-central France, show that they are 30,000 years old, a discovery that should prompt a rethink about the development of art.
The remarkable Chauvet drawings were discovered in 1994 when potholers stumbled upon a narrow entrance to several underground chambers in a rocky escarpment in the Ardeche region.
Because the paintings are just as artistic and complex as the later Lascaux paintings, it may indicate that art developed much earlier than had been realised.
'Discovered nothing'
The analysis was performed by Helene Valladas and colleagues at the Laboratory for Climate and Environment Studies at France's CEA-CNRS research centre at Gif-sur-Yvette.
The prehistoric cave art found in France and Spain shows ancient man to be a remarkable artist.
When Pablo Picasso visited the newly-discovered Lascaux caves, in the Dordogne, in 1940, he emerged from them saying of modern art, "We have discovered nothing".
They are obviously very old, but dating them has been difficult because of the small quantities of carbon found on the walls or in the caves. The element is needed, in the form of charcoal or bones, for the standard technique of carbon dating.
To overcome these problems the French researchers have used a newer technique called accelerator mass spectrometry. This separates and counts carbon isotopes found in dead animal and vegetal matter.
'Reconsider theories'
It found the Chauvet drawings to be between 29,700 and 32,400 years old. This is about 10,000 years older than comparable cave art found in the Lascaux caves that are around 17,000 years old.
Art may have progressed in leaps and bounds
According to Helene Valladas the research shows that ancient man was just as skilled at art as the humans who followed 13,000 years later.
"Prehistorians, who have traditionally interpreted the evolution of prehistoric art as a steady progression from simple to more complex representations, may have to reconsider existing theories of the origins of art," she says.
The research is reported in the scientific journal Nature.
Thanks, I was sure I saw a map with them all connected during the ice age. (lower sea levels) I could not find the map, maybe, because I've been looking under Sundra Shelf.
I quite agree!. And yes this is a pretty cool thread. :)
This cave art stuff reminds me of the Mel Brooks movie, where he shows the first artist in the history of the world, painting on a cave wall.
Along comes another caveman, who looks at the newly created artwork on the wall, then lifts up his loincloth and urinates all over the newly created "masterpiece."
Artist shrugs his shoulders and says with a sigh: "Critics."
Hawaii was populated. It seems to be more isolated, so the only thing differing is the stupidity of the protohumans. That would seem to be an asset in this case. There would be a dullness to the perception of danger and unless they paddled with one extremity, causing them to circle aimlessly, it would be inevitable that heading "south" would cause them to run into Australia. As to the lack of fossils, the standard answer is operant, they haven't been found yet. Still, I like the airborne dispersal theory the best and as the Hawaiian Rock Wallaby shows, you don't need no stinking 400 badges er.. specimens, three will suffice.
Well, in the following case, apparently left to their own these animals crossed.
... The owners of the pony, called Tilly, had no idea she was pregnant when they bought her from a wildlife park, where she had been kept in a field with a male zebra.
"She was fairly fat when we received her and we thought that she was getting fatter," Karen Pete said. "It really was a bit of a shock when we got up one morning and we saw the foal that was there. We realised then what had happened." ...
And hybrids are invariably sterile, she added.
The sterility seems to be breakable in rare cases.
What do you get when you try to cross an evolutionist with a creationist? Answer -- nothing. They may attempt a mating, but they keep passing each other in the night.
If true, it's an incredible advantage; but how do we really know the old neanterthals couldn't use language? I know people today who can talk, but whose intellectual lives are as impoverished as those of any neanderthal. It seems that some people can talk, yet they still can't manipulate abstract symbols very well. That could have been the big difference. Perhaps we'll never know.
If you ever get down to Les Eyzies, stay at the Hotel Cro Magnon and be sure to have at least one dinner there. (The Pigeon is great.) Book the annex. Fly into Bordeaux and drive from there. Great vacation.
Hawaii was populated, true. Obviously so. But we need to keep in mind that in the case of Hawaii, which was populated late in the Pacific expansion, that those that did "it" had extremely good sailing skills. Surely it wasn't populated strictly by those on the first voyage. In other words, hundreds of people didn't set out to populate Hawaii right off the bat. Exploratory voyages, following bird migrations, often took place, and that's how most of the Pacific islands came to be populated. Once a landfall was made, those who did the dirty deed then went back to the Marquesas (sp?) and told others what they'd seen and found. Then a much larger voyage, encompassing many more people left for the new lands. Kinda like Columbus.
Please recall that the first voyage in 1492 was with only 3 ships. The second had a much, much larger number, and many more people. Can't recall off the top of my head how many ships or people. But more. I certainly recall that.
People don't seem to realize that the reason many bones, paintings and the such are found in caves is simply because, well, they're caves. And therefore protected from the environment. If you die in a cave, and the structure of the cave is solid for hundreds of thousands of years, your bones and related human debris will make it.
Most people in the good old days we're talking about didn't live in caves, because you don't find 'em around every corner. But where they existed, they would of course move into this ready made shelter. Wouldn't you?
That's why caves are a good source record of human history.
What's interesting is that our ancestors would bother to go down into caves to do these paintings. They must've wanted them to last, and recognized what I just outlined.
I don't have a ready answer for this. Let me do some research and get back to you.
Must be instinct.
From Cavers crawl their way into the depths of Southern Illinois
Standing in front of the entrance to Ava Cave, a cool breeze can be felt flowing from inside.
The entrance is small, and the only way to get inside the cave is to crawl on your hands and knees.
Outside it is a sweltering 90 degrees, but inside the cave it is a cool 58 degrees.
The first few feet of the 1.3-mile cave can only be tackled by crawling, but there is plenty of room. The really tight belly crawls will come later.
As the cavern opens up, there is more room to stand up for a little while, but up ahead lies a narrow passage and more crawling.
Shining a light on the cave walls reveals the traces of the people who have passed through in the past.
There are pieces of string scattered on the floor. The walls in some places look like a bathroom stall because people have spray painted obscenities in the cave.
In some places, care must taken not to get your hands cut on the broken shards of beer bottles left behind.
Good point, what I've bolded. This is a very good question. I know some debate rages over this in scientific circles. I did a quickie search on Google, and here's a good article that specifically addresses this issue:
Did the Neanderthals have Language?
I've cut and pasted the relevant part of the paper. Haven't had time to read the paper. After all, I'm at work. :-)
Also trying to improve my HTML skills, so bear with me.
This discussion has so far given an explanation for how language is acquired by children, an explanation of how language could have evolved and forced the increase in cranial capacity, and the consequences of brain expansion due to language on cranial morphology. This paper will now attempt to argue for a Neanderthal capacity for symbolic language, and a probability that some degree of symbolic language was present using the evidence presented throughout this paper.
The ancestors of Neanderthals were present in Europe by at least 800,000 B.P. (Kunzig 1997: 96; Lahr and Foley 1998: 157), and remained relatively isolated from African populations over time (Stringer & Gamble 1993: 193). Over this period, the Neanderthals reacted to selection pressures to adapt to the cold environment according to Allen and Bergman’s Rules (Holliday 1997). Neanderthals carried more weight than modern humans (Bergman’s Rule), and while the exact mass of Neanderthals is not known precisely, since all primates have a skeleton that weighs 6-7% of their body mass, Neanderthals should be expected to have more robust bones than modern humans. Thus, an increase in brain size may have had less of an effect on decreasing the face, leaving them with a more prognathic face than modern humans. Regardless of the robustness of the Neanderthal crania, the internal size of the palatal cavity is not so much larger than modern humans that the position of the Larynx would be significantly different. Hence, Neanderthals were likely to have had the capacity for speech in terms of structural and motor characteristics.
The capacity for symbolic thought is harder to quantify. The fact that the Neanderthals made complex tools, made decorative body ornaments, may have took care of their elderly, may have buried their dead, etc., seems to indicate that there was symbolic thought processes occurring in their brains. The real question is whether symbolic linguistic communication had replaced more animalistic forms of communication. Decorating one’s body and caring for another of one’s species well being may indicate a sense of self and other, but they cannot prove whether symbolic communication went on between individuals; many animals have been shown to have a concept of “self” (Griffin 1992: 249), and animals like elephants will try to help an injured elephant, indicating an awareness of "other", and yet there is no symbolic communication. Although Neanderthal had slightly larger brains than modern humans, when scaled to body mass they have slightly smaller brains. At the very least, this would seem to indicate that either Neanderthals had been using symbolic language for a shorter period of time than the stock that led to modern humans, or that there was less intensive selection pressure for cortical capacity due to smaller social size or less social communication. Thus, if Neanderthals did have symbolic intercommunication as well as symbolic intracommunication, it was likely to be less complex than modern language in some respect, if only in capacity for vocabulary.
The key to the Homo sapiens replacement of Neanderthals may have been sheer weight of numbers. If humans had a larger social group size, then they would have had more intensive selection for language, giving them larger available cortical area to use for conditional learning, and a higher reproductive success since larger groups would afford more chances for mating and give a greater chance of offspring survival. If Neanderthals were in smaller, more isolated populations, then their reproductive success would be lower than that of humans, and they would have developed less available cortical area for conditional learning. In addition, if humans brought tropical diseases with them, many Neanderthals may have died from disease quickly, allowing humans to replace them easily. Neanderthals may or may not have had symbolic language similar to modern language, but they did have the capacity for learning and using modern language.
Some of the important stuff is bolded. All very interesting.
As Richard Mitchell (The Underground Grammarian, "Less than Words can Say") once noted, a vocabulary that consists of 75 synonyms for copulation does not a language make. While his remark was originally intended as a rebuttal to the laughable claim that Ebonics was a legitimate language, it seems equally applicable to putative proto-languages of Neanderthal.
A language is something more than one "grunt" for "one," two "grunts" for "two", etc., and shouting "ugga-ugga-UGGA!" while pointing at an object to denote "MINE!"
We know. We've been watching you.
Oh. By whose definition?
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