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!
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.
Within paleoanthropology, we often witness taxonomic clashes. Species that were named on the basis of a single fossil are later discarded. Now with genomics, we can see that the fossil "species" we named for Late Pleistocene humans in fact extensively interbred with each other. I have found it interesting over the last year to talk with artist reconstructors about the way they incorporate this information into their works.
I was pointed to an essay by James Prosek, a biological artist best known for his books illustrating fish (James Prosek's Amazon page). As he matured as an artist, he discovered that the lines in nature are sometimes blurry, and science sometimes changes much more than nature. The essay was originally printed in the March 2008 issue of Orion ("The failure of names").
As I painted trout through my late teens, major shifts in trout taxonomy were taking place. Through genetic analysis, which was fairly new in the early ’90s, it was discovered that rainbow trout (from the Pacific coast) and brown trout (introduced from Europe) were not as closely related as once thought. The genes showed that the rainbow trout was more closely related to Pacific salmon, fishes that die when they spawn, of the genus Oncorhynchus. The brown trout was more closely related to the Atlantic salmon, and remained in the genus Salmo. The native trout of my home state, Connecticut, the brook trout, was actually a whole separate genus, Salvelinus, more closely related to the Arctic char than to the rainbow or brown trout. Technically, it was no longer correct even to call the book I was working on Trout. I found myself wanting to ignore the namers because they were getting in the way of my own personal vision.
The essay recounts how Prosek surpassed this clash with taxonomy. He travelled extensively during the research for his second book, Trout of the World, and explored the variability within (and continuities among) taxonomic groups. His artistic process led him to experiment with visual forms that could communicate both the natural variation and science's
After drawing curvilinear lines, first emanating from the points on the body of a seahorse, I realized the lines were helpful as visual aids to point out particular parts of a creature that I wanted to bring attention to. The lines activated the space around the animal in a satisfactory way, erasing the need for the name to be written beneath. In this way, the lines became a very personal visual taxonomy, replacing the lingual one.
(via Karen James)
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.
From science illustrator Kalliopi Monoyios: "3 Marketing Mistakes Young Illustrators Make". Important: sign your work.
Think of every illustration you make as a potential marketing tool for your next great gig. If someone is moved by your work, they will want to find you. Give them a search term that will be sure to lead them to you instantly: your full name. Heck, these days it almost makes sense to save them a step and sign with your website URL.
A lot of this advice can be generalized. You never know when a piece of your work may get unexpected attention and cause people to look you up. If you haven't got a contact, they won't find you.
From Tom Benthin, Graphic Facilitator: "Rough and Hand-drawn: Alive and Inviting".
I’ll start by saying that I believe that drawings that are hand-made and loosely or roughly drawn engage us more, drawing us into the process of animating what we’re viewing. By “animating” I mean the way we bring a drawing to life in our mind.
Some examples at the link, drawing from the classics of animation. It is a lot of work to develop a distinctive simple look with characters for lecture visuals, but the personal touch can add immeasurably to people's engagement with the material.
In reaction to a speech by Google CEO Eric Schmidt, calling upon Britons to combine science with their art and humanities, the Guardian commissioned an essay by Timothy Stanley: "Science must embrace the humanities to regain its Victorian glory". He gives a raft of reasons why the naive blend of science and art of the Victorian era isn't coming back anytime soon.
Whereas the Victorians strove outwards into the realms of nature and the supernatural, modern research has turned inwards to the atom and the molecule. Schmidt might not believe it, but computer programming is not nearly as interesting as fairy hunting.
He leaves without suggesting a strategy for changing things in today's world of science and technology. I think some small steps would be useful: for example, why not assign the science-informed essayists and novelists in secondary humanities curricula?
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.
