Beyond bones & stones
About 12,000 years ago in the Near East, the emergency of farming, animal domestication and subsequent changes to prehistoric human lifestyles emerged. This is known as the Neolithic revolution. This culture spread through Europe, along the Danube and the Mediterranean coasts by 5,000 to 4,500 years ago. Little was known about how the carriers of... Continue Reading →
A pile of hundreds of broken stalagmite pieces found deep inside Bruniquel cave, France were made by humans from about 176,000 years ago. The ancient structures are actually made of more than 400 pieces of stalagmites, located about 300 meters from the cave's entrance. All the stones are similarly sized, piled up, and arranged in... Continue Reading →
Scientists from Leiden University and Delft University of Technology conducted compositional sediment analyses of a 50,000 year old Neanderthal site, Pech-de-l'Azé I in Dordogne in southwest France. Their results are published here. They found these guys were deliberately selecting manganese dioxide to start fires, not for coloring. We do not know based off of the... Continue Reading →
A team of French geologists and paleontologists and led by Jean-Michel Geneste, published in PLoS One that they believe that they have identified the oldest known images of erupting volcanoes, daubed in red and white pigments over other cave paintings in south-eastern France cave site, Chauvet, around 36,000 years ago. The curiously abstract images were first found... Continue Reading →
A new paper in the journal Science questions if it were Neanderthals or humans who created the oldest known artworks found in the caves of Europe. The lead author is Alistair W.G. Pike who worked with Joao Zilhao and nine other authors on this study. The authors addressed this question in, "U-Series Dating of Paleolithic Art in 11 Caves... Continue Reading →
A couple weeks ago, proof of the oldest examples of human art made the rounds. I did not publish a post about that on here because I did not find the evidence compelling enough to warrant a discussion. Today, however, another archaeological story does deserve a nod. The Journal of Human Evolution published a paper... Continue Reading →
Another video to share with you, this time the trailer to Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. This is a 3D film shot inside Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in southern France. These are some of the oldest cave paintings known. The film seems to have good reviews on IMDB and is set to be released on March 25th, 2011 in... Continue Reading →
Eugène Morin of Trent University has just published this paper in PNAS, "Evidence for declines in human population densities during the early Upper Paleolithic in western Europe." He studied the fluctuations in the zooarchaeological record from the Saint-Césaire site in France. And he found remains of rodents that live in the tundra species which indicate... Continue Reading →
