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,,,,,Oldowan
,,,,,Early Paleolithic
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Publications and Studies (PDF files)
OriginsNet BLOG - New Discoveries, New Theories
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| 2008 |
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January 18, 2008
Announcement. I've posted a gallery for Koonalda Cave, Australia, to indicate the rich array of art dating between 16,000 to 27,000 years ago at this site. These dates are contemporaneous with European Ice Age cave art of the Gravettian and Solutrian, and points to much older traditions of palaeoart. Koonalda Cave art has multiple petroglyph motifs (digital fluting, lattices, fans, concentric circles), stelae and zoomorphic/anthropomorphic standing stone sculptures. Koonalda was a site for both 'flint' mining and religious rituals.
I placed the gallery in the Middle Paleolithic section of OriginsNet because Australian stone tools of the time continue a Middle Paleolithic technology and because of the remarkable similarities between Koonalda and Har Karkom -- including flint quarrying at each site and stelae and zoomorphic/anthropomorphic standing stone sculptures. This suggests the existence of a shared Middle Paleolithic artistic and spiritual tradition across the Southern Route from Africa to Australia.
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January 5, 2008
Happy New Year!
How about some palaeoart sculptures at the Calico site? I happened to be looking at the official Calico website, calicodig.org, and think I can spot four zoomorphs.
Today I've posted a Calico webgallery of images, drawing on the images and descriptions from calicodig.org. I propose identification of four sculptures: one bison, two mammoths, and a horse. The bison is the most identifiable; the others I think more tentative.
Calico is now dated by both OSL and U-Series, making it one of the better dated sites in North America. The two dates suggest the primary occupation occurred in the Sangamon/Eemian OIS 5, with earlier occupations. Bison, mammoth and horse are known fauna during this period, and a mammoth bone was excavated at the site.
Contrary to those would seek to discredit the site as only 'nature-facts' (even Wikipedia suggests this), I have presented text giving the contrary position, which to me is the most valid interpretation. I mention the discovery of an apparent hearth in the early excavation report, one of many facts ignored by the 'Clovis police'. To me the stone assemblage presented at the calicodig.org website appears to reflect not-atypical flake and blade technologies of Final Acheulian Period/Early Middle Paleolithic technology of Eurasia. The gallery images include some of these tools.
Associates of OriginsNet have sent in confirmatory and alternative figural interpretations of the four zoomorphic pieces, and I will post these in a revised gallery soon.
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| 2007 |
August 23, 2007
If confirmed and supported by additional studies, the discovery accounced today (see abstract below) will have major repercussions for the dating of the stages of human evolution.
If accepted by geneticists, it would appear to push their timescale, which is based on best hypothesis for dating of split of hominids from apes, back from 8 MYA to 11 MYA or roughly 40%.
Such a 40% redating for the genetic emergence of Homo habils, erectus, archaic sapiens and sapiens sapiens would result in DNA-dating more in line with the palaeoart and stone sculpture evidence for 'earlier and longer chonology' that we have presented on OriginsNet.
Here's the abstract.
A new species of great ape from the late Miocene epoch in Ethiopia
Nature 448, 921-924 (23 August 2007)
Gen Suwa, Reiko T. Kono, Shigehiro Katoh, Berhane Asfaw & Yonas Beyene
"Most genomic-based studies suggest a late divergence date—5–6 Myr ago and 6–8 Myr ago for the human–chimp and human–gorilla splits, respectively10, 11, 12, 13, 14—and some palaeontological and molecular analyses hypothesize a Eurasian origin of the African ape and hominid clade15, 16. We report here the discovery and recognition of a new species of great ape, Chororapithecus abyssinicus, from the 10–10.5-Myr-old deposits of the Chorora Formation at the southern margin of the Afar rift. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first fossils of a large-bodied Miocene ape from the African continent north of Kenya." … "The combined evidence suggests that Chororapithecus may be a basal member of the gorilla clade, and that the latter exhibited some amount of adaptive and phyletic diversity at around 10–11 Myr ago."
Full abstract at
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v448/n7156/abs/nature06113.html
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July 31, 2007
New Discovery of UP Rock Art in 'European style', Qurta, Egypt, 15,000 BP.
This Antiquity article announces a major re-discovery of rock art petroglyphs at Quarta, Egypt on the Upper Nile. They are done in a style said to be similar to that of Magdalenian rock art in Europe. The are dated to 15-16,000 BP based on comparison of depicted fauna with similar faunal remains at nearby Upper Paleolithic sites of that date.
Here is the Antiquity article: http://antiquity.ac.uk/ProjGall/huyge/index.html
The themes are interesting. Primarily aurochs and birds. There are several female figures. I note that they are in the style of Gönnersdorf, Lalinde and Fontales. Marija Gimbutas interpreted figures in this style as representations of a Bird Goddess, which continues from UP to the Neolithic. She noticed that sometimes the large buttocks has an egg depicted in it. There is at least one European image, I think its from Fontales, where the egg is depicted in the buttocks. Marija put this image in her Language of the Goddess. Marshack has also done a very good microscopic analysis of the way these images were constructed.
The dating by comparison of faunal remains to local UP site seems plausible.
The fact that this art at this date is in Egypt will force a major rethinking about Upper Paleolithic art.
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Fiedorczuk et al in the March 2007 Antiquities Journal publish a find of 'strangulated blades' interpreted as female figurines, from the Magdalenian site of Wilczyce, Poland. This is said to be the first discovery of female figurines made in flint as opposed to the well-known examples in bone and ivory.
http://archaeology.about.com/od/upperpaleolithic/a/0307_venusfig.htm.
http://archaeology.about.com/od/artandartifacts/ig/Wilczyce-Figurines/index.htm.
The journal Archaeological Berichten (Netherlands) and associates have published many examples of female figurines made on blades, 'strangulated' or otherwise, for example see A. Lefebvre-Bara, The pre-historic stone-industries from the marine deposits of Coquelles (Calais, France) in Archaeological Berichten No. 19 (1989):134-186. The Coquellian, recognized by Breuil, Pielenz, Baudet and others from Baltic to Calais, appears to be a Clactonian-with-blades that evolved during one of the interglacials (Holsteinian to Eemian or Later Acheulian period to Middle Paleolithic). Archaeological Berichten No. 20 (1990):104 illustrates Upper Paleolithic blades shaped into female and polymorphic figurines from multiple UP sites, including de Baanen (Federmesser). Clearly Upper Paleolithic female figurines belong to a tradition well-over 100,000 years old.
Fiedorczuk et al interpret the figurines as 'stylized voluptuous female outlines' probably made by young men, i.e., as pornographic fantasy. Besides being sexist, this view is not falsiable and hence not science, but simply a male projection fantasy.
I have presented a detailed scientific analysis of these female figurines based on my deciphering of Magdalenian geometric signs. Upper Paleolithic (European) figurines can be decoded into a set of six basic female and six male spiritual transformations. The Gönnersdorf type should be designated 'The Self-Seeding Goddess' and contrasted by the falsely-labeled 'Venus' type , which is actually a form of the 'Double Goddess'.
Fiedorczuk et al should become aware that the classic type site of the Self-Seeding Goddess at Gönnersdorf occurs in a site context of religious ritual (two huts connected by the pathway of engraved broken plaquettes, with the figurines found in pits protected by fox pelts, in groups of 3, and so on). Gönnersdorf along with El Juyo, Cantabria represent the two best examples of religious ritual sites in the Magdalenian setting aside the parietal rock art.
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| 2006 |
Major African Palaeoart Discovery:
A team of archaeologists led by Drs. Sheila Coulson and Nick Walker, University of Oslo, have discovered "evidence of humankind's oldest ritual" at Rhino Cave in the remote Tsodilo Hills of Botswana. Finds include: cupules and abraded grooves on a rock surface that is interpreted as having shape of a python, a creator being in San mythology, and in the excavation just below it beautifully made Middle Paleolithic points, with those of red color intentionally burnt and destroyed, and also engraving tools that appear to associate to the petroglyphs. By tool comparison the dating would be similar to the nearby site of &Mac173;Gi, which has TL dating at 77,000 years ago.
http://www.hf.uio.no/iakh/for-ansatte/avis/2006/oktober/botsw.html
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/12/061222-python-ritual.html
This is an extremely important find that supports the view that there was a common and global artistic/religious symbolism that blossomed from Africa to Australia during the Mid-Middle Paleolithic (associated with early Homo sapiens sapiens).
For European Middle-Paleolithic religious stonework, see Middle Paleolithic
Palaeoart Image Galleries.
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Email, September 2006. The identification of 'baboonheads' in proposed Early Paleolithic stone sculptures from NW Europe is questioned on the basis that there is no evidence for primates other than ancestral humans and macaque monkeys in Europe during the Pleistocene. I have done a websearch on this and updated my comment on Pampau artifacts proposed to represent cercopithecids and apes. In brief, we have recently two 'giant baboon' finds in Europe, Theropithecus oswaldi, Cueva Victoria, Spain (ca. 1 MYA) and Theropithecus sp. (?) at Pirro Nord, Italy (ca. 1.3-1.6 MYA).
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Email, August 2006, Ursel Benekendorff sends for discussion images of Pampau figurine, ca. 500,000 BP, clearly worked and suggesting it be identified as either bison or musk ox, with flaking possibly to indicate giving birth. Serendipitously, my partner, Patricia Reis, had just returned from a rafting trip on the Sheenjek River, Alaska, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and brought back photos of a musk ox. We received additional musk ox photos from a trip participant, Peggy Braun, and my vote is that the Pampau figurine is a stunningly good representation of a musk ox.
(Click here for OriginsNet Pampau Musk Ox Gallery, with comparison photos from Alaska musk ox.)
(Click here for Benekendorff Website)
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