The ancient Homo sapiens Thread

At present, there’s no evidence that Homo sapiens sapiens left Africa earlier than 120,000 years ago. But at least four sister species were living in East Asia around the time, and three would be contenders for crossing into the Americas. (The fourth is Homo floresiensis, the much-ballyhooed “hobbits” of Indonesia’s island of Flores—but they’re probably not involved.)

Might the tool users have been Homo erectus, our direct ancestors and the earliest known fire-starters? What about Homo neanderthalensis, which had made it to present-day Kazakhstan around the time of the activity at Cerutti? Or could they have been the Denisovans, the enigmatic East Asian group known from DNA samples collected in a single Russian cave?

At present, it’s impossible to say.

Wibbs wrote: »

I seem to recall Picasso and a few other artists saying similar of other cave art examples, Lascaux being one.

It always seemed to me that the handprints and possibly the dots were a communal thing, with the figurative art being the work of individuals, the "shaman artists" as it were. That these people existed is hard to deny, given the special skills involved. When you look at figures in Chauvet cave where the swoop and heft and underlying muscles of the lion's back, male and female are described in continuous lines, you realise that takes serious artistic skill. The artist has rendered "Lion" in about the fewest strokes possible and rendered their genders and movements. Rembrandt and Picasso, two very different artists, but both were artists who could take a simple line for a walk and bring the viewer somewhere beyond that line with them and IMHO they would have been impressed by the Chauvet artist.



One area that illustrates the likelihood of such specialists is Palaeolithic sculpture. Now things like spear throwers were often decorated in relief to varying depths and in many cases it looks like by the owners as the skill varies as one might expect. Objects, figures like the various Venus' and the Lion Man require far more skill and considerably more time to produce.



You're talking hundreds of hours to produce something like that. I've tried carving hawthorn wood with chert tools and yes it's a tough wood, but nothing like bone or ivory and it was hard going. Antler was way worse. Sure heating the material can help, but you'd yearn for a Dremel with each cut. Never mind that this kinda thing was done in what we'd see as rough shelter in natural or by campfire light in pretty crappy weather for the most part, where your tribe were very aware of just purely surviving in many cases, as periods of famine recorded in teeth testify(though Neandertals show more of that. We were more efficient in food gathering it seems).

What always interested me and it's something I've not read too often, if ever, is that in this period, the art of "us" in Europe is the same across large distances. From Spain through France into Germany modern humans are creating essentially the same art(and tool making). Which suggests to me a shared culture across those distances. Maybe even similar languages and overall culture and religions.

If you look at examples of Neandertal art and culture where they're found, they're less in evidence and are quite different between groups. The Eagle Talon people of Italy are alone in that pursuit, the shell decorators of Spain are alone in that. I would see them as territorial like wolves in the landscape and individual culture was a reflection of that, a Them V Us. Whereas we come in with a large "monoculture" by comparison. Which might explain one reason why we "won". There was a bigger "Us" overall compared to their myriad "Thems".

Another interesting and counterintuitive aspect is the "best" most accomplished art is the earliest and it tends to get simpler and less accomplished over time. This threw earlier researchers who understandably assumed the more "primitive" art was the earliest. Carbon dating upset the applecart there.

"A painting beneath a wasp nest must be older than the nest, and a painting on top of a nest must be younger than the nest," Mr Finch said. "If you date enough of the nests, you build up a pattern and can narrow down an age range for paintings in a particular style."

Lack of organic matter in the pigment used to create the art had previously ruled out radiocarbon dating. But the University of Melbourne and ANSTO scientists were able to use dates on 24 mud wasp nests under and over the art to determine both maximum and minimum age constraints for paintings in the Gwion style.


Scientists put the Gwion Gwion art period around 12,000 years old.

"This is the first time we have been able to confidently say Gwion style paintings were created around 12,000 years ago," said Ph.D. student Damien Finch, from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne. "No one has been able present the scientific evidence to say that before."

One wasp nest date suggested one Gwion painting was older than 16,000 years, but the pattern of the other 23 dates is consistent with the Gwion Gwion period being 12,000 years old.

Some 25,000 years ago, a circular wall of bone and ivory rose like a macabre mirage from a snowbound plain 500 kilometers south of present-day Moscow. The ring—built from the bones of at least 60 mammoths—was thought to shelter people living on the treeless expanse during the coldest part of the last ice age. Now, a new study reveals the ring, discovered in 2014, is 12.5 meters in diameter—likely too large to have been roofed. Archaeologists also failed to find any remains from animals other than mammoths, making it unlikely that humans lived there for any length of time.

The ring, found at a site called Kostenki, is the oldest such structure found in Russia. It’s about 3000 years older than two similar, smaller mammoth bone rings found at the same site almost 40 years ago.

Although it’s not clear why nomadic hunter-gatherers would have built such a permanent, labor-intensive structure, most scientists assumed they assembled it from mammoth bones because the region had precious few trees during the ice age. So it came as a bit of a surprise when workers at the site sifted out hundreds of bits of charcoal, dated to about 25,000 years ago, from the soil.