Cultural Beginnings #5

In a major find, Britain's first cave art has been unveiled at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire. The paintings are tentatively dated to 13,000 years ago and are generally of animals such as ibex, bison, a horse and a wild goat. Researchers are ecstatic. Dr Nigel Mills, manager of Cresswell Heritage Trust, said:

"It's like waking up one morning and finding the Mona Lisa on your garage door."

Others described it as the Ice Age's "Sistine Chapel'. More important, perhaps, this solves a problem that has concerned archaeologists for some time.

"During the ice age, Britain was connected to the rest of Europe and was periodically occupied by hunter gatherers. But while they left bones, tools and some portable art, they left no cave engravings or paintings. Elsewhere, our Magdalenian ancestors were busy. Paintings of stampeding bulls and horses were found at Lascaux and Chauvet in France in 1940 and 1994, other paintings were found in caves at Altamira, Spain, in 1879. "There has always been a dogma that cave art is restricted to northern Spain and southern France and was possibly not undertaken by ice-age societies elsewhere in the upper Palaeolithic," says [Dr. Paul] Pettitt."

The find at Creswell closes the gap. However, interpretations of the marks on the wall are not uniform.

"To me, the more interesting ones are highly stylised depictions of naked females," [Pettitt] says. "We find these boomerang shapes which represented women bent-kneed, thrusting out their bottoms. I interpret at least two of those long-necked birds as women – possibly some ritual dance undertaken by females, and possibly in the cave itself." Pettitt says there are similarities with other schematic women found in German prehistoric art which show buttocks and breasts more clearly. The Creswell nudes are a simpler form, but, like the German nudes, have no heads or legs below the knee. [His partner, Dr. Paul] Bahn is not convinced. "This is not an exact science. Paul sees resemblances with schematic women, but the rest of us do not agree. I think four are birds, but one may be a woman."

Cave art, both here and in other sites around the world, are generally considered to be an indication of symbolic thought as well as art. This seems fair. But the art with which we choose to decorate oursleves, our bodies, seems to me more an indication of self-knowledge, especially the knowledge of what makes us feel good. In China, archaeologists have unearthed earrings that date to about 8,000 years ago -- the oldest earrings yet found anywhere.

"The jade rings, called "Jue" in old Chinese, have diameters that measure 2.5 to six centimetres. Liu Guoxiang, head of an archaeological team under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said it was "magnificent" that the earrings were found in pairs that were almost similar in size and weight. The most exquisite pair were identical in weight and in their inner and outer diameters, he said. "It is almost unimaginable that without modern tools, people in ancient times managed to achieve such a feat," Liu was quoted as saying ...

Because the earrings unearthed have reasonably large diameters, experts speculate the wearers at the time would have pierced bigger holes in their earlobes and must have already known how to treat inflammation, said jade culture expert Tang Chung at the Chinese University of Hong Kong"

Interesting link there between fashion and health. A more direct link of course is between health and food, and there has been much work on paleolithic diets. Common wisdom is that grains became a staple of humankind's diets only around 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture. However, as Science Times describes the problem:

"Paleolithic humans subsisted mainly on small- to medium-size hoofed animals. Scientists have surmised that these early hunters must have eventually expanded their food repertoire in order to sustain a growing population, but exactly when they began turning to plants for fuel was unknown."

Now, researchers in Israel are suggesting that grain and grass collection was prevelant more than 20,000 years ago, double the previous estimate.

"The authors note that the finds not only provide evidence for broad spectrum plant collecting, “but also push back the evidence for significant grass collecting 10,000 years earlier than previously had been known.” Among the ruins were pieces of acorns, almonds, pistachios, wheat, barley, berries, figs and grapes."

Update: see also Innovations

Talking of grapes, I found another interesting article about Patrick McGovern's researches into the earliest known wine-making about 8,000 to 10,000 years ago, which I wrote about earlier.

"McGovern's current focus on eastern Turkey reflects his hypothesis that grape domestication, and its attendant wine culture, began in a specific region and spread across the ancient world. He calls it the Noah Hypothesis, as it suggests a single locality for an ancestor grape, much as the Eve Hypothesis claims that human ancestry can be genetically traced to a single African mother. In the Bible, Noah landed on the slopes of Mount Ararat (in what is now eastern Turkey) after the Flood. He is described as immediately planting grapevines and making wine. Neolithic eastern and southeastern Turkey seems to have been fertile ground for the birth of agriculture. "Einkorn wheat appears to have been domesticated there, one of the so-called Neolithic founder plants—the original domesticated plants that led to people settling down and building towns," McGovern explained. "So all the pieces are there for early domestication of the grape."

Previously in this series.