- A flint object with a striking likeness to a human face
may be one of the best examples of art by Neanderthal man ever found, the
journal Antiquity reports.
-
- The "mask", which is dated to be about 35,000
years old, was recovered on the banks of the Loire at La Roche-Cotard.
-
- It is about 10 cm tall and wide and has a bone splinter
rammed through a hole, making the rock look as if it has eyes.
-
- Commentators say the object shows the Neanderthals were
more sophisticated than their caveman image suggests.
-
- "It should finally nail the lie that Neanderthals
had no art," Paul Bahn, the British rock art expert, told BBC News
Online. "It is an enormously important object."
-
- Nose and cheeks
-
- It is described in Antiquity by Jean-Claude Marquet,
curator of the Museum of Prehistory of Grand-Pressigny, and Michel Lorblanchet,
a director of research in the French National Centre of Scientific Research,
Roc des Monges, at Saint-Sozy.
-
- The mask was found during an excavation of old river
sediments in front of a Palaeolithic cave encampment. Tool and bone discoveries
suggest Neanderthals used the location to light a fire and prepare food.
-
- Triangular in shape, the object shows clear evidence,
the researchers say, of having been worked - flakes have been chipped off
the block to make it more face-like.
-
- The 7.5-cm-long bone has also been wedged in position
purposely by flint fragments.
-
- Marquet and Lorblanchet tell Antiquity: "We think
that this is indeed a 'proto-figurine'; that is, a small flint block whose
natural shape evokes a crudely triangular human face - or a mask if one
notes that it is primarily the upper part of the face that is concerned,
like a carnival mask, or, rather less clearly, an animal face, perhaps
a feline?
-
- "It was not only picked up and brought into the
habitation, but was also modified in various ways to perfect its resemblance
to a face: the forehead, the eyes underlined by the bone splinter, the
nose stopped at its extremity by an intentional flake-removal, and the
rectified cheeks."
-
- Over and over
-
- The standard view of Neanderthals ( Homo neanderthalensis
) is that they lacked the thought processes capable of producing art -
certainly to any real level of sophistication produced by modern humans
( Homo sapiens ).
-
- Clive Gamble, an expert from Southampton University on
the early occupation of Europe by human species, says science has been
reluctant to see Neanderthals as great conceptual thinkers.
-
- "The great problem with all the Neanderthal art
is that they are one-offs. What is different about the art of modern humans
when it appears 35,000 years ago is that there is repetition - animal sculptures
and paintings done over and over again in a recognisable style.
-
- "With Neanderthals, there may have been the odd
da Vinci-like genius, but their talents died with them."
-
- Bahn, on the other hand, believes the Roche-Cotard mask
should set the record straight on Neanderthals' artistic capabilities.
-
- "There are now a great many Neanderthal art objects.
They have been found for decades and always they are dismissed as the exception
that proves the rule."
-
- "This is not just a fortuitous bone shoved into
a hole in a rock. Whether the Neanderthal artist saw a rock that looked
like a face and modified it, or conceived the thing from the start - who
knows? Either way it is pretty sophisticated."
-
- Abstract thought
-
- Perhaps the oldest example of modern human art generally
accepted by the scientific community would be the 77,000-year-old engraved
ochre pieces found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa.
-
- There are claims for even older items, dating back 200,000
years or more, that comprise mainly rock objects apparently sculpted to
look like the human form.
-
- But many sceptical researchers believe these objects
are merely accidents of geological processes, and doubt they have been
intentionally modified in any way by a human hand.
-
- However, earlier this year, scientists announced the
discovery of the oldest Homo sapiens skulls. These 160,000-year-old fossil
bones had been polished after death.
-
- This mortuary practice suggests at least these early
people were abstract thinkers, capable of analysing ideas of life and death.
-
- © BBC MMIII
-
- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3256228.stm
|
