Secular Café: Cave Paintings perhaps by Neanderthals

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Cave Paintings perhaps by Neanderthals Jun 14th 2012, 20:42 Quote: New Dating Puts Cave Art in the Age of Neanderthals By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Published: June 14, 2012 Stone Age artists were painting red disks, handprints, clublike symbols and geometric patterns on European cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported on Thursday, after completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility that Neanderthals were the artists. Enlarge This Image Pedro Saura/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Hand stencils at the El Castillo Cave in Spain have been dated to have been created earlier than 37,300 years ago, making them the oldest cave paintings in Europe. RSS Feed RSS Get Science News From The New York Times » A more likely situation, the researchers said, is that the art — 50 samples from 11 caves in northwestern Spain — was created by anatomically modern humans fairly soon after their arrival in Europe. The findings seem to put an exclamation point to a run of recent discoveries: direct evidence from fossils that Homo sapiens populations were living in England 41,500 to 44,200 years ago and in Italy 43,000 to 45,000 years ago, and that they were making flutes in German caves about 42,000 years ago. Then there is the new genetic evidence of modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding, suggesting a closer relationship than had been generally thought. The successful application of a newly refined uranium-thorium dating technique is also expected to send other scientists to other caves to see if they can reclaim prehistoric bragging rights. In the new research, an international team led by Alistair W. G. Pike of the University of Bristol in England determined that the red disk in the cave known as El Castillo was part of the earliest known wall decorations, at a minimum of 40,800 years old. That makes it the earliest cave art found so far in Europe, perhaps 4,000 years older than the paintings at Grotte Chauvet in France. The handprints common at several of the Spanish caves were stencils, probably made by blowing pigment on a hand placed against the cave wall. The oldest example, at El Castillo, proved to be at least 37,300 years old, which the scientists said "considerably increases the antiquity of this motif and implies that depictions of the human hand were among the oldest art known in Europe." At many-chambered Altamira, its splendor discovered in the 19th century, the researchers obtained a date of at least 35,600 years for a red club-shaped symbol. Archaeologists said this indicated that Altamira's artistic tradition started about 10,000 years earlier than once estimated, and the cave appeared to have been revisited and painted many times over a span of 20,000 years. In a report published online in the journal Science, Dr. Pike and his colleagues noted that the oldest dated art is "nonfigurative and monochrome (red), supporting the notion that the earliest expression of art in Western Europe was less concerned with animal depiction and characterized by red dots, disks, line and hand stencils." The more stunning murals of bison and horses came gradually, later. Although the early dates coincide with recent evidence of a Homo sapiens presence in Europe, the scientists wrote that because 40,800 is only a minimum age, "it cannot be ruled out that the earliest paintings were symbolic expressions of the Neanderthals," who were living in that part of Spain until at least 42,000 years ago. .... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/sc...pagewanted=all

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