Cave masterpiece rewrites art history
2001-10-04 13:59
Paris - Masterly strokes of charcoal on a cave wall in central France, depicting horses, rhinoceros and a deer, are 30 000 years old, a discovery that should prompt a rethink about the development of art, researchers report on Thursday.
The spectacular drawings by an unknown hand were found in 1994
when a trio of potholers stumbled upon a narrow entrance to several underground chambers in a rocky escarpment in the Ardeche region.
Scientists led by Helene Valladas of the Laboratory for Climate
and Environment Studies at the France's CEA-CNRS research centre at Gif-sur-Yvette carried out a dating of tiny fragments of the
charcoal.
They used accelerator mass spectrometry, which separates and
counts carbon isotopes found in dead animal and vegetal matter, and found the drawings are between 29 700 and 32 400 years old.
Arguably the most famous cave paintings in the world are the
Lascaux caves in the Pyrenees, southwestern France, which are
around 17 000 years old.
But the dating of the paintings in the Chauvet caves in the
Ardeche shows that early European dwellers were just as skilled at art as the humans who followed 13 000 years later, say the Valladas team.
"Prehistorians, who have traditionally interpreted the evolution
of prehistoric art as a steady progression from simple to more
complex representations, may have to reconsider existing theories
of the origins of art," they write.
Their study is reported in Nature, the prestigious British
science weekly.
The oldest known objects considered to be art are far older than
the cave paintings, however, and they precede the rise of
anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens.
A tiny stone carving found in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights
in 1981 is estimated at 233 000 years old.
And pigments and paint-grinding equipment found in a cave in
2000 at Twin Rivers, near Lusaka, Zambia, are believed to be
between 350 000 and 400 000 years old. - AFP
- SAPA