Were Neanderthals Earliest Artists?

Detail from the El Castillo Cave in Spain.

The unexpected old age of some European cave paintings raise the possibility that Neanderthals rather than Homo sapiens were the earliest painters ~ either that, or humans began painting earlier than previously thought.

“It would not be surprising if the Neanderthals were indeed Europe’s first cave artists,” says João Zilhão, an archaeologist at Spain’s University of Barcelona.

According to Wired.com:

Researchers led by Zilhão and Alistair Pike of the United Kingdom’s University of Bristol measured the ages of 50 paintings in 11 Spanish caves. The art, considered evidence of sophisticated symbolic thinking, has traditionally been attributed to modern humans, who reached Europe about 40,000 years ago. 

Traditional methods of dating cave paintings, however, are relatively clumsy. Even the previous best technique — carbon dating, or translating amounts of carbon molecule decay into measurements of passing time — couldn’t discern differences of a few thousand years. 

Instead of carbon, Pike and João Zilhão’s team calibrated their molecular clocks by studying mineral deposits that form naturally on cave surfaces, including paintings. The thicker the deposits, the older the painting. And as the reseachers describe in a June 14 Science paper, some of the paintings are very old indeed.

 “What’s really exciting about this possibility,” said Pike, “is that anyone, because it’s open to the public, could walk into El Castillo cave and see a Neanderthal hand on the wall.”

Click here for the article.

Bear's DNA May Settle Cave Art Dispute

A small section of art in the Chauvet Cave.

Researchers have turned to the DNA of Europe’s long-extinct cave bear to solve controversy surrounding the age of the spectacular art in the Chauvet Cave of southeastern France.

Following its discovery in 1994, radiocarbon dating suggested the cave’s images were around 30,000 years old ~ nearly twice as old as the Lascaux cave art in southwestern France. The archaeological world rapidly was polarized, with many agreeing with the 30,000-year-old date, while other archaeologists said the dating was seriously flawed.

According to New Scientist:

To try to settle the controversy, Jean-Marc Elalouf of the Institute of Biology and Technology in Saclay, France, and his team have turned to the remains of cave bears. Along with mammoths and other huge mammals, cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) dominated the European landscape until the end of the last ice age.

The Chauvet cave contains several depictions of cave bears, and Elalouf argues that these must have been painted while the bears still thrived in the area. To pin down when the bears disappeared, his team collected 38 samples of cave bear remains in the Chauvet cave and analyzed their mitochondrial DNA.

They found that almost all the samples were genetically similar, suggesting the cave bear population was small, isolated and therefore vulnerable. Radiocarbon dating showed the samples were all between 37,000 and 29,000 years old, hinting that by the end of that period they were extinct, at least locally.

Martina Pacher of the Commission of Quaternary Research in Vienna, says cave bears became extinct at least 24,000 years ago. "So the results at Chauvet are not surprising, and I agree with their conclusions," she says.

Click here for the complete article.

Research Shows More Women Cave Artists

Painting from Pech-Merle in France showing several hand prints.

Much more Stone Age cave art seems to be the creation of women artists than previously thought, according to new research.

An American archaeologist has measured outlined handprints found on cave walls in France and Spain ~ some dating back 28,000 years ~ and has shown that the relative lengths of fingers fit the proportions of female hands better than those of males.

“I had access to lots of people of European descent who were willing to let me scan their hands as reference data,” says Dean Snow, of Pennsylvania State University.

According to the London Times:

By matching their hand profiles against photographs of paint-outlined hands from the caves of El Castillo and Gargas, in northern Spain, and Pech-Merle in the Dordogne region of France, “even a superficial examination of published photos suggested to me that there were lots of female hands there."

The handprints were created by placing the palm, or possibly the back, of the hand against the cave wall, taking a mouthful of powdered pigment ~ usually red ochre ~ and blowing it, as Michel Lorblanchet showed many years ago. Sometimes a finger appears to be missing. Such absences have been attributed to mutilation, but bending the finger back while spraying the hand with the pigment powder would give the same effect.

Snow believes that many of these hand prints are those of women. In two examples from Castillo, about 28,000 years old, “The very long ring finger on one example is a dead giveaway for male hands,” he said. “The other has a long index finger and a short little finger — thus very feminine.”

Click here for the London Times article.

Thousands of Cave Paintings Found in Jungle

A painting from Peru’s Toquepala caves, similar in style and content to the newly discovered paintings near the Tambolic caves.


In the past two years, a Peruvian archaeologist has discovered more than 10,000 cave paintings ~ dating back more than 6,000 years ~ in the Peruvian section of the Amazonian jungle. The paintings have been hidden by lush vegetation for centuries, in caves near the village of Tambolic.

“Over the past two years,” says archaeologist Quirino Olivera, “we have found 6,000-year-old cave paintings, especially in the Cuaco and Yamón mountains, located in the Lonya Grande district. These are in addition to those recently found in Tambolic, where many of these ancient images are concentrated.”

According to Olivera, most of the Tambolic paintings depict hunting scenes and are similar to those found in Toquepala. The artists used mainly red, brown, yellow and black pigments.

The Toquepala caves are located in the western Andes at 9,000 feet above sea level. They are noted for cave paintings depicting scenes of hunters corralling and killing a group of guanacos, a camel-like animal native to South America. Known as “chaco” in the Peruvian Andes, this hunting technique consists of forming human circles to corral the animals and either capture or kill them.

Click here for the Peruvian Times article.

Dancing Figure Dates to Mississippian Period

The drawing on the roof of the concealed rock shelter is about a foot long.

A drawing of a dancing stick figure recently discovered in a rock shelter in Tennessee's remote Cumberland Plateau dates likely from 1000 to 1600 AD.

“I knew that Native American rock art had been found in the area, but I didn't realize this was so significant," said Corey Holliday, a cave specialist who found the drawing. "My first impression was that someone had drawn it with charcoal."



In fact, the artist most likely lived during the Mississippian Period between A.D. 1000 and 1600 and used a paint based on a prehistoric recipe whose main ingredient was pulverized clay, according to Jan Simek, a University of Tennessee anthropology professor who specializes in cave archaeology.

Simek determined that the reason the pictograph looks so fresh is because it has been protected by a veneer of calcium carbonate leaching out of the sandstone.

"It is a remarkable figure," Simek said. "In my mind, there is no chance it is a recent fake."



Click here for the complete article.

Cave Paintings Took Thousands of Years

Using uranium-series technology, scientists have been able for the first time to accurately date paintings in Spain's famous Altamira caves.

Scientist are now saying some of the world’s prehistoric cave paintings may have been a 20,000-year work in process. Across hundreds of generations, the prehistoric paintings in Europe’s caves were refreshed, added to and sometimes painted over.

The realization came about as the result of new technology enabling researchers for the first time to accurately date paintings that span millennia. The technique is called uranium-series technology, which reduces the dependency on carbon in the dating process, where carbon has proven to be notoriously unreliable.

"The art gives us a really intimate window into the minds of the individuals who produced them, but what we don't know is exactly which individuals they were as we don't know exactly when the art was created,” says Dr. Alistair Pike of Bristol University, who is leading the research. “If we can date the art then we can relate that to the artifacts we find in the ground and start to link the symbolic thoughts of these individuals to where, when and how they were living."

Scientists have used the new techniques to date a series of famous Palaeolithic paintings in northern Spain known as the "Sistine Chapel of the Palaeolithic,” thought to date from around 14,000 years ago. But Pike’s team discovered some of the paintings were between 25,000 and 35,000 years old. The youngest paintings in the cave were 11,000 years old.

"We have found that most of these caves were not painting in one go, but the painting spanned up to 20,000 years,” he said. “This goes against what the archaeologists who excavated in the caves and found archaeology for just one period. It is probably the case that people did not live in the caves they painted. It seems the caves they lived in were elsewhere and there was something special about the painted caves."

Click here for the complete London Telegraph article.