Anthropology.net

News from Tamil Nadu, courtesy of ‘Frontline‘ magazine, relating how rock art that has been dated to between 3,500 and 4,000 years ago, was found there as recently as May this year. The sites were found after the four man research team asked amongst others, students and local people in outlying villages, particularly pastoral workers, if they had come across any cave paintings or rock art in the course of their daily travails.

Mavadaippu is the latest discovery by the team. It had discovered a prehistoric rock art site at Porivarai (2003), and ancient rock paintings at Salekkurai and Sundasingam (2005), near Karikkiyur, about 40 km from Kothagiri in the Nilgiris. In fact, the team was totally unprepared for what awaited it at Porivarai. It turned out to be the largest rock art site in South India with about 500 paintings in an area that is 53 m long and 15 m wide. Experts say the rock paintings at both Mavadaippu and Karikkiyur could be dated to 2000 B.C. to 1500 B.C.

The paintings in white ochre include a procession of bison, monkeys clambering up a tree branch, a herd of deer grazing, human beings welcoming one another with outstretched arms, a battle scene with men aiming at each other with bows and arrows, men on horseback engaged in battle, a shoulder-clasping dance after a successful boar-hunt, a man with a mask, the depiction of sun and its rays, a spiral, a tiger fighting another animal, and a man and his dog sleeping.

The site of Mavadaippu has been the subject of artists’ attentions for an estimated 3,000 years, and in some cases there is evidence of older paintings being modified by artists visiting the same site – applying their own touches of colour here and there. Now that these sites have been found there is some concern that members of the modern day public will further deface some of the images, by adding their own grafitti over the top of some of the petroglyphs, and there are calls for the sites to be given adequate protection against further damage. Technically, those people who have added the recent graffiti are merely carrying on a tradition which as we saw earlier, had been extant for some 3,000 years, but obviously such ancient sites are of a greater significance than the doodlings of ourselves, and should be protected and curated accordingly. Read the rest of this entry »

According to a theory proposed by Professor Helmut Ziegert, and reported in today’s ‘Times’ our ancient forebears, Homo erectus, constructed the first settlements known to mankind, at a time when such behaviour has popularly been considered too advanced for Acheulian equipped people, who lived 400,000 years ago.

Helmut Ziegert, of the Institute of Archaeology at Hamburg University, says that the evidence can be found at excavated sites in North and East Africa, in the remains of stone huts and tools created by upright man for fishing and butchery.

Professor Ziegert claims that the thousands of blades, scrapers, hand axes and other tools found at sites such as Budrinna, on the shore of the extinct Lake Fezzan in southwest Libya, and at Melka Konture, along the River Awash in Ethiopia, provide evidence of organised societies.

He believes that such sites show small communities of 40 or 50 people, with abundant water resources to exploit for constant harvests.

Professor Ziegert used potassium argon isotopic dating, stratigraphy and tool typology to compile his evidence. He will publish his findings this month in Minerva, the archaeology journal.

Although at first this news might seem surprising, it has become apparent in recent years that Homo erectus, both in Africa and Asia, was far more technologically and culturally enterprising and sophisticated than thought possible. Moreover, there are other sites dating to a similar age where it can be demonstrated that people were capable of erecting shelters, with the site of Terra Amata, near Nice in France, dating to between 200,000 and 400,000 years, and there is evidence from post holes at the German site of Bilzingsleben, which may date back to between 350,000 – 400,000 bp.

Other evidence from Lake Fezzan pointing to advanced and sophisticated behaviour by Homo erectus is detailed here,

Of a substantially greater antiquity are the three similar ostrich eggshell beads from El Greifa site E, in Wadi el Adjal, Libya (Bednarik 1997d). They come from a substantial sequence of Acheulian occupation deposits representing many millennia of continuous occupation of a littoral site, on the shore of the huge Fezzan Lake of the Pleistocene. This site has exceptionally good preservation conditions, with insect remains and seeds found together with bone. The typical Late Acheulian stone tool forms, including ‘handaxes’, confirm the dating of the occupation strata by Th/U analysis to about 200 ka. These are the earliest known secure disc beads in the world, and there can be no reasonable doubt that they are indeed man-made beads, and not some chance product of nature (Figure 3d-f). In addition to the three found initially, several more beads have most recently been recovered from the same site and period (M. Kuckenburg, pers. comm. Jan. 2000). ‘Beads And The Origins Of Symbolism‘ R. Bednarik

Back in March 2ooo, the BBC carried a story, detailing the discovery of what was claimed to be the ‘world’s oldest building‘, dating back to 500,000 years bp. (N.B.  Thanks to Doug who commented below,  pointing out the whole Japanese ‘discovery’ was nothing more than a not very elaborate hoax) Read the rest of this entry »