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SUNDAY STAR#TIMES
June 17, 2012

Were ape-men really old masters?

New research challenges the thinking that Neanderthals were an artless bunch of ... well, cavemen, reports Michael Balter.
THE BASIC questions about early European cave art who made it and whether they developed artistic talent swiftly or slowly were thought by many researchers to have been settled long ago: modern humans made the paintings, crafting brilliant artworks almost as soon as they entered Europe from Africa. Now dating specialists working in Spain, using a technique relatively new to archaeology, have pushed dates for the earliest cave art back about 4000 years to at least 41,000 years ago, raising the possibility that the artists were Neanderthals rather than modern humans. And a few researchers say that the study argues for the slow development of artistic skill over tens of thousands of years. Figuring out the age of cave art is fraught with difficulties. Radiocarbon dating has long been the method of choice, but it is restricted to organic materials such as bone and charcoal. When such materials are lying on a cave floor near art on the cave wall, archaeologists have to make many assumptions before concluding that they are contemporary. Questions have even arisen in cases like the superb renditions of horses, rhinos, and other animals in Frances Grotte Chauvet, the cave where researchers have directly radiocarbon dated artworks executed in charcoal to
Cave art: Rock art from the Corredor de los Puntos in El Castillo Cave near the village of Puente Viesgo in Spain have been tested to be thousands of years older than previously thought ancient enough to have been created not by Homo sapiens like ourselves but by Neanderthals, the species that lived in Europe long before the newcomers arrived from Africa. Photo: Reuters

37,000 years ago. Other archaeologists have argued that artists could have entered Chauvet much later and picked up charcoal that had been lying around for thousands of years. Now in a paper published online yesterday in Science, dating specialist Alistair Pike of the University of Bristol in Britain and archaeologist Paul Pettitt of the University of Sheffield in Britain, together with colleagues in Spain, applied a technique called uranium-series (U-series) dating to artworks from 11 Spanish caves. Using a blade or an electric drill, the team took 50 small samples from calcite that directly overlay either paintings or engravings in 11 caves in northwest Spain. Because the calcite overlays the paintings, it must be younger than the art, and so yields minimum ages.

In a few cases, the team also dated calcite underneath artworks, thus creating a sandwich that generated maximum and minimum dates. The results, if correct, include the earliest reported date for cave art: a red disk from El Castillo Cave, on the Pas River in northern Spain, clocked in at a minimum of 40,800 years. The disk, part of a larger composition that includes dozens of other disks and about 40 stencils of human hands, could be older, depending on how soon after it was painted the calcite layer formed. Other early dates include 37,300 years for a hand stencil at Tito Bustillo Cave and 35,600 years for a club-shaped image at the famous Altamira Cave, whose artworks were previously thought to be only about 17,000 years old.

Forty-thousand years ago, Neanderthals were still living in Spain, while modern humans were only just entering Europe. Thus co-author Joao Zilhao, an archaeologist at the University of Barcelona in Spain who has long championed Neanderthals symbolic and creative capacities, contends there is a strong probability of Neanderthal authorship. He points out that Neanderthals made jewellery and used ochre, and that the oldest known modern human fossils in Europe, from Pestera cu Oase in Romania, are only about 39,000 years old.

The earliest possible dates for archaeological artefacts associated with modern humans, in Spain, Italy, and France are about 41,600 years ago. The team also says that the new work has big implications for cave art elsewhere in Europe, including the magnificent paintings at the Grotte Chauvet, which have long served as the chief evidence for early humans precocious artistic talents. Since the Chauvet art was discovered in 1994, many researchers have seen it as evidence that modern humans arrived in

Europe from Africa able to create sophisticated paintings that rival those of much later caves, such as Lascaux in southern France. The team argues that the new dating suggests that the earliest European artists were less concerned with animal depictions and more interested in simpler motifs such as red dots, disks, lines, and hand stencils, as they put it in the Science paper.
This is adapted from ScienceNOW, the online daily news service of the journal Science. Bloomberg

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