[RoosterRedux]

Animal-headed humans appear in earliest art

21 November 2001

By LEIGH DAYTON

Paintings of mythical animal-human hybrids are among the oldest surviving art ever produced. New research suggests that minotaurs, satyrs, the werewolves beloved of Hollywood and even Egypt’s animal-headed gods are latecomers to the art scene compared with the “therianthropes” carved by the earliest artists on bone and painted on stone.

“They go back to the dawn of humanity, to the first fully modern people,” claims rock art expert Paul Taçon of the Australian Museum in Sydney.

He has found that in Australia and South Africa there are dozens of animal-headed people in rock paintings and carvings more than 10,000 years old. Some may be far older. The oldest was an androgynous feline-headed statuette from Germany, thought to be around 32,000 years old.

Together with Christopher Chippindale at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Taçon conducted the first rigorous worldwide survey of prehistoric therianthrope images. They surveyed nearly 5000 examples of rock art, most from northern Australia, Europe and South Africa.

Read more: newscientist.com

[RoosterRedux]

Brings to mind Genesis 6 and the Book of Enoch (I Enoch) and the Book of Giants (all of which were in the Dead Sea Scrolls IIRC).

[\/\/ayne]

"Take the prisoner to the cave!"

"Sir, we're all in the cave already."

[teeman8r]

just goes to show that once there was an artist and immediately we had art critics

[mission9]

I ain’t saying they are aliens, but they sure look alien.

[jerod]

Something tells me the ‘me too’ movement will need to get involved. Looks a bit like the first human depiction of sexual harassment.

[Terry L Smith]

44,000 years ago, eh?
Don’t tell that Ham guy in Kentucky that he spent all that money on wood, and his time factor was off by a factor of 7.

[Verginius Rufus]

44,000 years old. So old they were painted when Sulawesi was still called Celebes.

[Mastador1]

And to think some TV writer thought he was being original when he thought up 'Manimal"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugb_TIpPoWA