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.
By David Braun
National Geographic News
October 5, 2001
Panoramas of hunting and war, graceful images of animals loping across the savanna, ghostly handprints of people who lived long ago—ancient artists daubed millions of images like these across Africa, recording the world as they saw it.
The paintings, which can be found in more than a million sites across Africa, are a precious depository of information on how ancient Africans interpreted their physical and spiritual worlds. Whereas their bones and implements may tell us when and where they existed, how they lived and died, and even what they ate, it is only through their art that we can know a little about their thoughts.
Photographer and explorer David Coulson is criss-crossing the vast continent to document Africa's rock art and make the world aware of its importance before it disappears.
Significant rock art exists in at least 30 countries in Africa, said Coulson. "We estimate that there are well over a million sites in Africa, and sometimes one single site might have thousands of images," he said.
The ancient rock images—some that date from more than 20,000 years ago—have withstood the effects of time, weather, and the activities of countless human generations largely because they were painted on the walls of caves or under cliff overhangs, where their creators sought shelter.
For decades, scientists and others have been warning that the rock art is vanishing.
Many of the images have been defaced with graffiti left by colonial explorers, settlers, bandits, and modern populations. Others are being rubbed out by pollutants in rain. Some sites that housed rock art have been dynamited to make way for burgeoning housing development and the construction of roads and dams.
Coulson and his colleague Alec Campbell have produced the first comprehensive photographic book of Africa's rock art for distribution in the English-speaking world. "We are certainly the first to visit all the sites ourselves," Coulson said.
Much more work on the project remains to be done. "The story has only been partly told," he said. The team has published two articles in National Geographic on Saharan rock art, for example, but the remarkable rock art by the Bushman of Southern Africa is still little known, as is rock art in eastern and central Africa.
Ancient Origins
To expand awareness about the value and importance of this African heritage, Coulson and others founded the Trust for African Rock Art (TARA), based in Nairobi, Kenya. He believes, and other experts have concurred, that Africa has more ancient rock paintings and engravings than any other continent, most of it found in northern and southern Africa.
Tom Hill, a founding trustee of TARA, said: "We know from human evolutionary science that modern Homo sapiens began in Africa. It stands to reason, therefore, that Africa would contain both the oldest and the greatest amount of rock art in the world."
TARA, Hill noted, is the only organization he knows of that's dedicated to preserving rock art across the entire continent of Africa. "This is a world heritage that is used by scientists, visited by some tourists, damaged and stolen by vandals, ignored for the most part by governments, and left otherwise to vanish from sight," said Hill, who is also the founding chairman of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.
Of the African rock art that has been scientifically dated so far, the oldest images are in Namibia, from about 27,000 years ago. Yet most experts agree that some of Africa's rock art may date to more than 50,000 years ago, Coulson said.
In the Sahara, much of the rock art depicts animals that no longer live in the region. When the paintings and engravings were made, the Sahara was not a desert. Until 2,000 years ago it was somewhat green and fertile, supporting at times large herds of game and relatively large human populations. Nine thousand years ago the region was covered with lakes and forests.
With support from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration, Coulson and his colleagues will travel to Algeria in November to document engravings that may be the largest pieces of prehistoric art on Earth.
"Herding and hunting peoples all over our planet have created extraordinary rock art," said Henry Wright, curator of archaeology at the University of Michigan's Museum of Anthropology and a member of the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. "These representations are among our best pathways to ancient systems of thought. From these images we learn how long-disappeared people viewed their universe—an invaluable testimony from the past."
Questions of Size
The large engravings Coulson will be searching for on the National Geographic-supported expedition are thought to have been made thousands of years before the pyramids were built and are virtually unknown, Coulson said.
Among the giant engravings Coulson and his team documented on previous field trips, for example, was an image on rocks in Niger of a giraffe 18 feet (5.4 meters) high. Why did the ancient artists make such outsize engravings?
The subject matter offers clues to why the artists engraved such large images, Couslon said. "Giraffe appear to have been important animals through many different ancient cultures in Africa," he said. "They were painted and engraved more frequently, with greater care and artistry, and to a greater size. We think that many cultures may have considered them as rain animals, possessing power over the rains."
Coulson expects to find paintings as well as engravings in southern Algeria. "From what I have heard, I believe that there may be paintings from the early pastoral period on the northern Tassili plateau, and possibly from the Roundhead period [about 9,000 years ago]," he said. "I have heard that there are many incredible engravings in other wadis [river beds], some as old as the big giraffes."
The Tassili plateau resembles the surface of the moon, and much of it is inaccessible even by four-wheel-drive vehicles, Coulson said. Getting to the sites where the ancient engravings and paintings of giraffes can be found will require his team to travel on camel and by foot in the final stages of the journey. They will traverse river beds in 1,000-foot (300-meter) gorges.
"Southeast Algeria is about as remote as you can get," Coulson said. "We have traveled hundreds of miles, and occasionally over a thousand in the central Sahara, without seeing a single living soul."
Coulson plans to document the rock paintings and engravings in a variety of formats to add to his growing archives of the continent's rock art. In addition to reporting on the art in magazines and the scientific press, he will film a television documentary on African rock art and his work in Africa.
With support from the Ford Foundation, he and others are also developing a program to increase awareness among people in Africa about the importance of the continent's rock art and the need to preserve it. The materials will include videos for schools in urban and rural areas.
David Coulson is one of a distinguished group of scientists from around the globe, in fields ranging from astronomy to zoology, who have been awarded grants from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration (CRE).
AS I noted, this seems to be the point that Richard Mitchell was getting at when he condemned the notion of Ebonics being a language.
Language is communication, but not all communication rises to the level of a language. Or so it is my impression. I claim no special knowledge of linguistics, but the thread seemed bogged down, and I felt like giving it a jump start.
My guess is that to be considered language, some sort of structure would be required (verbs, nouns, modifiers, etc. as well as rules for construction of sentences). I also suspect that it would need to embody abstract concepts e.g., names for numbers, instead of a sequence of grunts for the number, and names for things, instead of just pointing at the thing. Perhaps there are other requisites for a language.
Think of this as an hypothesis, not an assertion as fact.
Example of pre-linguistic activity: Responding to a rational argument by uttering "Slime!"
Good point!
Where has G3K been lately, sharpening his flints and gutting a wooly mammoth?
Been there. They banned me. That whole era sucks.
30k years is but the blink of an eye geologically speaking!
OK. I guess I can buy that. In terms of a "formal" language ebonics does not deserve a second look. It is not a language rather at most a dialect. It is not something upon which we need to spend any time, money, or effort.
Agreed.
I should also amend my previous statement about what Mitchell said about Ebonics. What he condemned was the notion that it was a DISTINCT language in it's own right, as opposed to a dialect or slang form of English.
Right, but apparently humans didn't look the same. Why did we keep evolving but the horses stopped?
Two species; one either now extinct or absorbed! Like woolly rhino/african rhino, mammoth/elephant, etc.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the niches. Once those damn niches get filled, evolution is screwed.
It was at the following site: Dolni Vestonice and the implications in relationship to human evolution just blew me away.
A quote from that site by Tim White, paleoanthrophologist:
After two or three hundred thousand years of nothing new, suddenly, in a tiny segment of time, after this huge gulf of nothing, you've got everything. There's one style over here and another one over there; there's trade, there's art, there's differentiation, all of this stuff just blowing up in your face. So you say to yourself, how come? There's only one thing ...that is big-time enough to render such a huge behavioral shift...it's got to be language.
"...Cave Art Developed Early"
What? The French Impressionists weren't cave-dwellers? Nor the cubists or post-modernists? Andy Warhol lived in a house? (big grin)
Hitler was probably carried entirely into power by the force of his mouth. He was able to tap into all that rage strictly because of his mouth. Before that, Marx was able to transmit his sick ideas due to the written word.
Without communication, any sort of development by our ancestors was stifled because of the inability to pass on information gained, etc.
This is a good point. A recent book out about the development of language asserts something along this line. Some monkeys have different screams designed to alert their fellows to different dangers. Lions get a different scream from them than other predators. Is this a language? I think not. It's communication, but not language.
That's my sense of it. Pointing to a wooly mammoth skeleton and grunting three times while pointing beyond the next hill may well communicate to the other Neanderthals that there are three wooly mammoths waiting over the hill to be hunted done for dinner, but lacking abstraction, syntax, structure, and so forth, it is hardly language. Or so it seems to me.
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