[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] Neanderthal art?

[Terry W. Colvin]

< http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3256228.stm >

Last Updated: Tuesday, 2 December, 2003, 12:21 GMT

Neanderthal 'face' found in Loire
By Jonathan Amos
BBC News Online science staff

A flint object with a striking likeness to a human face may be one of the
best examples of art by Neanderthal man ever found, the journal Antiquity
reports.

The "mask", which is dated to be about 35,000 years old, was recovered on
the banks of the Loire at La Roche-Cotard.

It is about 10 cm tall and wide and has a bone splinter rammed through a
hole, making the rock look as if it has eyes.

Commentators say the object shows the Neanderthals were more sophisticated
than their caveman image suggests.

"It should finally nail the lie that Neanderthals had no art," Paul Bahn,
the British rock art expert, told BBC News Online. "It is an enormously
important object."

Nose and cheeks

It is described in Antiquity by Jean-Claude Marquet, curator of the Museum
of Prehistory of Grand-Pressigny, and Michel Lorblanchet, a director of
research in the French National Centre of Scientific Research, Roc des
Monges, at Saint-Sozy.

The mask was found during an excavation of old river sediments in front of a
Palaeolithic cave encampment. Tool and bone discoveries suggest Neanderthals
used the location to light a fire and prepare food.

Triangular in shape, the object shows clear evidence, the researchers say,
of having been worked - flakes have been chipped off the block to make it
more face-like.

The 7.5-cm-long bone has also been wedged in position purposely by flint
fragments.

Marquet and Lorblanchet tell Antiquity: "We think that this is indeed a
'proto-figurine'; that is, a small flint block whose natural shape evokes a
crudely triangular human face - or a mask if one notes that it is primarily
the upper part of the face that is concerned, like a carnival mask, or,
rather less clearly, an animal face, perhaps a feline?

"It was not only picked up and brought into the habitation, but was also
modified in various ways to perfect its resemblance to a face: the forehead,
the eyes underlined by the bone splinter, the nose stopped at its extremity
by an intentional flake-removal, and the rectified cheeks."

Over and over

The standard view of Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) is that they
lacked the thought processes capable of producing art - certainly to any
real level of sophistication produced by modern humans (Homo sapiens).

Clive Gamble, an expert from Southampton University on the early occupation
of Europe by human species, says science has been reluctant to see
Neanderthals as great conceptual thinkers.

"The great problem with all the Neanderthal art is that they are one-offs.
What is different about the art of modern humans when it appears 35,000
years ago is that there is repetition - animal sculptures and paintings done
over and over again in a recognisable style.

"With Neanderthals, there may have been the odd da Vinci-like genius, but
their talents died with them."

Bahn, on the other hand, believes the Roche-Cotard mask should set the
record straight on Neanderthals' artistic capabilities.

"There are now a great many Neanderthal art objects. They have been found
for decades and always they are dismissed as the exception that proves the
rule."

"This is not just a fortuitous bone shoved into a hole in a rock. Whether
the Neanderthal artist saw a rock that looked like a face and modified it,
or conceived the thing from the start - who knows? Either way it is pretty
sophisticated."

Abstract thought

Perhaps the oldest example of modern human art generally accepted by the
scientific community would be the 77,000-year-old engraved ochre pieces
found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa.

There are claims for even older items, dating back 200,000 years or more,
that comprise mainly rock objects apparently sculpted to look like the human
form.

But many sceptical researchers believe these objects are merely accidents of
geological processes, and doubt they have been intentionally modified in any
way by a human hand.

However, earlier this year, scientists announced the discovery of the oldest
Homo sapiens skulls. These 160,000-year-old fossil bones had been polished
after death.

This mortuary practice suggests at least these early people were abstract
thinkers, capable of analysing ideas of life and death.


-- 
“Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress.” Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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