The Daily Mail is running a pictorial showing hominin reconstructions from Kennis and Kennis, who are being featured in a show in Dresden, Germany: "Meet the grandparents: Researchers use forensics to rebuild 27 faces of man's ancestors, stretching back 7 million years".
Their reconstructions have an emotive quality that really appeals to me, and it's shame the pictorial doesn't ever name the artists!
Today's sketchbook:
KNM-ER 1802 mandible, in occlusal view. This mandible is attributed to the genus Homo, often placed in Homo habilis, although those who believe in Homo rudolfensis generally include this mandible. From the Upper Burji Member of the Koobi Fora Formation, it dates to around 1.9 million years ago.
Brian Switek reviews the book, Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time, by Richard Milner: "Charles R. Knight’s Prehistoric Visions".
Knight’s successes were hard-won, but, as Milner’s biography illustrates, the artist could not have done anything else. Knight’s undeniable passion was painting prehistory into life. A few snippets in the book provide some insights into Knight’s process. For dinosaurs, at least, Knight would often study the mounted skeletons of the animals and then, on the basis of this framework, create a sculpture. He could then study this three-dimensional representation for the play of shadow across the body under different conditions, and from this model Knight would then begin painting.
Copy of the "Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel", at the American Museum of Natural History
The Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel is one of the most famous pieces of Paleolithic art ever found. Der Spiegel has a story about the specimen, which is being reassessed after the discovery of new fragments that may alter its shape and archaeologists' interpretations.
The new discoveries came after archeologists once again turned their attention to the Stadel cave. They sifted through all of the rubble from 1939, explains excavator Claus-Joachim Kind -- and the results were sensational. "We found about 1,000 pieces, which presumably belong to the statue," Kind says.
...
The figurine will be taken to the State Conservation Office in Esslingen, near Stuttgart, where it will be completely taken apart. The old glue joints will be dissolved and the filler made of beeswax and chalk, which was used as a placeholder, will be removed.
Then the statue will be reassembled piece by piece, a task that those involved await with great anticipation.
The article picks the "Lion-Man or Lion-Woman" angle, but I think a more broadly interesting question is why this time and place had a proliferation of ivory artifacts. The Lion-Man is not the only anthropothere, and the appearance of such images so early in the record of artistic representation would seem to show that such combinations are fundamental to the human imagination.
I know that some readers are starting to wonder if I've forgotten about paleoanthropology lately. Let's just say that the Neandertal and Denisova genomes have me very busy, and I don't think you'd want it any other way.
But on the paleoanthropological front, Science has released a paper by Chris Henshilwood and colleagues [1] describing two toolkits used by ancient MSA people more than 100,000 years ago to grind pigment and mix it with animal fat, presumably for painting.
I want to share a picture from the article (credit G. Moéll Pedersen), which shows one of the two toolkits in situ. I want to make a point about it that would be difficult without seeing the photo:
That photo shows Tk1, the first toolkit. Now, here's the description of what Henshilwood and colleagues were able to interpret from the artifacts in the photo:
We infer that manufacturing proceeded as follows: Pieces of ochre (FS1 and FS2) were rubbed on quartzite slabs to produce a fine red powder, and some were knapped with large lithic flakes. The ochre chips resulting from the latter were crushed with quartz, quartzite, and silcrete hammerstones/grinders. Quartzite grinders were used to crush goethite or hematite-rich lutite. Medium-sized mammal bone was crushed, probably with a stone hammer. The red or reddish brown color and cracked, flaky texture of some of the trabecular bone suggest that it was heated before crushing, probably to enhance the extraction of the marrow fat. The hematite powder, charcoal, crushed trabecular bone, stone chips, and quartz grains and a liquid were then introduced into the Haliotis shells and gently stirred (figs. S5, S25, and S26). Charcoal is rare in the layer-CP matrix, suggesting that it was a deliberate addition to the mix. The quartz and quartzite chips, produced during the action of crushing the ochre, and the quartz grains may have been incidentally incorporated.
You can see how the complex interpretation was made possible by finding these things in association as part of one feature. If one or two of these pieces had been found separately, many archaeologists would be skeptical of such a story. Indeed, even the interpretation of this toolkit might appear incredible were it not for the second toolkit also found at the site. Archaeologists are conservative that way, they don't like to overinterpret the evidence. Even this series of events -- grinding, heating, mixing, and so on -- isn't very complicated compared to many activities that humans do every day. It's an example where Henshilwood and colleagues have advanced what archaeologically can show beyond a shadow of doubt about ancient people, but still leaves a gap in our understanding of the ancient cultural system.
A complex behavioral pattern that is actually found cannot have been an isolated instance. Complexity implies a tradition of which these toolkits are only miniscule remnants.
In this light, I should point out that the Blombos evidence is by far earlier than other evidence of pigment grinding and heating, but not unique in the South African MSA. Last year I linked to a Jennifer Viegas story about red ochre production at Sibudu Cave, South Africa. This is Lyn Wadley's work [2], and the research paper has since been published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Also in that journal last year was a paper by Francesco d'Errico and colleagues [3], which described pigment nodules found in the Middle Paleolithic in Mt. Carmel site of Skhul, Israel. We have quite a lot of circumstantial evidence about pigment use in these early contexts both inside and outside Africa, and more is building all the time.
The archaeological record is bad in many ways. The wooden artifacts preserved at Abric Romani, Spain, are another example of an exceptional archaeological find. I've been meaning to write about them since Julien Riel-Salvatore mentioned them last month. Archaeologists have been working the Middle Paleolithic for nearly 150 years, yet we know next to nothing about wooden artifacts. Abric Romani is not entirely alone, but is enough to show the existence of a broader tradition occupying this blind spot, because the extensive shaping of artifacts and labor used to create them implies a cultural knowledge and utility.
Several stories last week related the story (from a conference talk by Jessica Cooney) about evidence that very young children had left finger grooves in the Grotte de Rouffignac. Alan Boyle's gives the most details: "Prehistoric kids left marks in caves".
Like Lascaux, the 5-mile (8-kilometer) Rouffignac cave network has plenty of drawings, depicting mammoths, rhinoceroses, horses and even a cave bear. But Cooney focuses on a different kind of art: impressions left behind in clay or "moonmilk" — a soft, white, crystalline precipitate that forms inside limestone caves. The ancient artists created the impressions by pressing or dragging their fingers through the soft material on the cave walls. Those markings are what Cooney and her research colleague, Walden University's Leslie Van Gelder, used to estimate how old the artists were.
Rouffignac is an immense cave network. The main tourist route into the cave involves riding on an electric train for nearly a kilometer into the hillside. One problem posed by the cave is that tourists have been coming into it for hundreds of years -- there is graffiti dating to the 18th century on the ceiling near some of the most famous artwork. But it is an amazing place, in part for that long history of people interacting with the very ancient art.
Dale Guthrie's wonderful book, The Nature of Paleolithic Art, discusses the idea that children and adolescents were involved in making much of the classic "cave art" in Europe. The famous paintings and engravings with high levels of technical execution are really exceptional, and are usually surrounded or accompanied by vastly more numerous, cruder, representations. Many of those can be analogized to art created by children today, some of them actually occur in areas where children are the most likely artists. And already we know about children's footprints in some caves, and handprint-negatives sized for young people.
L'Abbé Henri Breuil is pictured, center with the cane. This photo is from Men of the Old Stone Age, by Henry Fairfield Osborn, publication date 1915. L'Abbé Breuil, known as the first archaeological expert of Paleolithic art, was one of a number of scientists who hosted Osborn on a tour of southern France and Cantabria. The book draws heavily on Osborn's exposure to the record in this area.
A piece of historical reconstruction:
This is a Neandertal reconstruction by Charles Knight. It is the frontispiece of the 1911 book by Henry Fairfield Osborn, Men of the Old Stone Age.
The Guardian today ran an interesting article giving several examples of artists collaborating with scientists...to make art "When two tribes meet: collaborations between artists and scientists".
It was a radical departure for portraiture. Certainly few sitters contribute, as Sulston did, a sample of DNA from his sperm. That sample was cut into segments and treated so they could be replicated in bacteria. The bacteria was spread on agar jelly and placed under glass, forming a portrait about A4 size. "Some say it's an abstract portrait, but I say it's the most realistic portrait in the National Portrait Gallery," says Quinn. "It carries the instructions that led to John and shows his ancestry back to the beginning of the universe."
"Well, yes," says Sulston, "but DNA gives the instructions for making a baby, not an adult. There's a lot more to me than DNA."
The examples aren't especially very inspiring as art. And they seem to be exclusively one-way: the scientists aren't getting much from the artists in these cases. It all seems forced.
I find art tremendously inspiring to my science, but my sense is that art that is useful in this way doesn't get much appreciation in the art community.
Sheila Coulson, Sigrid Staurset and Nick Walker [1] (doi isn't working yet, so here's a PDF link, 12 MB) have published a long summary of findings from Rhino Cave, in the Tsodilo Hills of northern Botswana. These hills are huge isolated rock formations, or inselbergs, that jut out of relatively flat surrounding countryside. That makes them highly visible in the folklore and traditions of local people, and some caves in them have been used by people for tens of thousands of years.
Coulson and colleagues describe the setting of Rhino Cave, named for a rock painting within it.
It is...easy to understand how the site evaded detection, as it is perched high on the northernmost ridge of Female Hill and can only be approached by scrambling over, or squeezing between, massive boulders. Gaining entry to the cave is only slightly less arduous. On the western side of the ridge there is a raised, narrow, crawl space that ends with a considerable drop into the site. Alternatively, the wider eastern entrance offers two options: a two-meter jump or a slide down a steep boulder face, followed by a scramble over a rock-strewn opening near the present day floor.
I love these kinds of sites where you know that every lithic was brought in by people. That can tell you a lot about how people used the site, and the authors use that to advantage. But Coulson and colleagues do not yet have new dates for the deposits. The old dates appear too recent and are problematic because of their mismatch with other local MSA sites such as White Paintings Shelter and ≠Gi, both between 66,000 and 95,000 years old. The Rhino Cave assemblage may be comparable to these in age. The paper reports that substantial amounts of exotic stone materials including silcrete and chalcedony must come from more than 50 or 100 km away, respectively.
Some of the flakes made from exotic raw materials, Figure 5 from the paper. All photos in the article copyrighted and used courtesy of Sheila Coulson.
There is a lot to the lithic collection besides the points, but I think these are interesting and certainly visually striking.
Coulson and colleagues noticed that many of the points were burned, and this was not easily explained by the incidental presence of fires in the cave, nor did it particularly appear to be explained in terms of the "heat-treating" that people used to make silcrete more suitable for artifact production at some other MSA sites.
In summary, there is a very distinctive pattern of burning at this site. A group of 26 MSA points and their associated debitage are heat damaged to the point of destruction. However, they have not been exposed to long-term burning of the type that is commonly found when an artifact is discarded into a hearth -- a common feature on any number of Stone Age sites. It is suggested that these MSA points and their associated manufacturing debitage were selectively and intentionally burnt in short-term restricted fires that caused their coloring to change to various reddish hues.
This is part of what Coulson and colleagues tentatively call evidence of symbolic or ritual behavior at the site. People climbed up to this out-of-the-way place with colorful stone from far away. The manufacturing debris shows that they made stone points in the cave. And they then left many of those points in the cave, some of them burned and destroyed or abandoned. At a minimum, it's curious. Adding everything together (including the cupules discussed below), it seems clear that the site was not used for purely utilitarian purposes. What that means about ancient social or cognitive systems is not obvious.
The article is open access, and full of amazing full-size color photos. I don't know why everyone doesn't publish their sites this way. For example, here's a photo of the site and night, where Coulson and colleagues experimented with flickering light against the carved wall:
This stone face, which has been pecked at and scooped out for many thousands of years, is the most distinctive aspect of the site. Coulson and colleagues believe that some of the existing marks reflect very great antiquity, and they have natural spalls of the rock face that broke off in MSA times and integrated themselves into MSA layers. Some (maybe most) of the cupules are recent, and the pictorial art inside the cave is also late. But at least some of the surface carving appears to have been MSA in age.
Cupules in rock face, detail.
The paper discusses some evidence for pigment grinding at the site, including smooth-edged pieces of specularite and several small striated sandstone slabs (say that fast five times) presumably used as grindstones. Color goes together with the burning (to enhance color?), but this combination is not found elsewhere. Rhino Cave is in that way unique.
They indicate that the rock face is exposed to flickering daylight through a shaft at certain times, which they attempted to simulate with the flickering light photograph. Really I can't think of any better way to give readers an impression of what it would be like to visit the site.
