On Sun, 03 Nov 1996 19:12:09, Glenn Morton wrote:
>
>GM>I ran across the following a few weeks ago. It is the oldest
>reported possible artwork from the anthropological literature that
>I am aware of. It would have had to have been made by Homo
>erectus.
According to Jim Foley's Hominid FAQ, "300,000 years ago" would be
at the extreme range of "Homo erectus" but well within the range
of Archaic homo sapiens and Neandertal man:
"H. erectus existed between 1.8 million and 300,000 years
ago...Archaic forms of Homo sapiens first appear about 500,000 years
ago...Neandertal man existed between 230,000 and 30,000 years ago".
Marshack himself appears to believe it was the work of Neandertal
man:
"Marshack (1989) has traced Upper Paleolithic art to the Neandertal
Mousterian period. He believes that the beginnings of artistic
expression started with Neandertals and developed from their work to
the brilliant art of the Upper Paleolithic." (Nelson H. & Jurmain
R., "Introduction To Physical Anthropology", West Publishing
Company: St. Paul, Fifth Edition, 1991, p541)
>GM>Considering that Homo erectus probably made the Golan
>venus from circa 300,000 years ago, this second piece would not be
>as unexpected. (for the Golan Venus see,Desmond Morris, The Human
>Animal, (New York: Crown Publishing, 1994), p. 186-188.)
Homo erectus
The "Golan venus" is a piece of volcanic rock that Morris admits is
"extremely crude":
"The newly found sculptural object the most ancient man-made image
in the world - is a small stone figurine of a woman, unearthed at an
archaeological site on the Golan Heights. It is extremely crude,
but the head is clearly separated from the body by an incised neck,
and the arms are indicated by two vertical grooves, apparently cut
by a sharp flint tool. It is a find that establishes the even
greater antiquity of the human fascination with symbolic
images." (Morris D., "The Human Animal: A Personal View of the Human
Species", ISIS: Oxford UK, 1994, p192)
At least one anthropologist, Pelcin, believed that the "figurine"
was just a piece of naturally shaped rock:
"In his note on the Berekhat Ram figurine, excavated from a late
Acheulian level and dated at ca. 230,000 B.P. CA 3 5: 674-75),
Pelcin argues that the figurine is scoria, as it was generically
described in the initial publication. He documents the fact that
scoria can acquire odd shapes and natural grooving and therefore
recommends that the Berekhat Ram figurine be subjected to
microscopic analysis." (Marshack A., "On the `Geological'
Explanation of the Berekhat Ram Figurine," Current Anthropology,
36:3, June, 1995, p495)
Indeed, so subtle is the "artwork" that it requires microscopic
analysis to determine whether it was caused by a flint tool or
whether it was just natural grooving. At the time of the above
article, Marshack himself was still preparing the publication of his
own microscopic analysis:
"I performed such microscopic analysis in the summer of 1994 and am
preparing the results for publication." (Marshack, 1995, p495)
The other problem is the date. The "figurine" was embedded
in a matrix of welded scoria, so it was apparently involved in some
form of volcanic activity, which may make its location, and
hence its dating, unreliable:
"When I presented the results to Sergio Peltz of the Geological
Survey of Israel Jerusalem, a specialist in scoria and the
pyroclastic materials of Israel, he examined the figurine and
reported (personal communication, October 23, 1994) that `the
material of the figurine was part of the matrix of a welded scoria
deposit, but specifically the figurine is not a scoria.' "
(Marshack, 1995, p495)
In fact, Marshack himself recommended that the debate be not about
the "Golan Venus" which was dated at "ca. 230,000 B.P." but rather
about another, later discovery:
"Until publication of these analyses, the debate on possible
pre-Upper Paleolithic symboling may perhaps best be addressed not by
suppositions at a distance but through the microscopic analysis of a
late Middle Paleolithic incised composition from the site of
Quneitra, Israel. I pointed to the Quneitra analysis in my recent
criticism of the Eurocentric presumption that there was a
punctuated, apparently genetic "species" shift in symboling capacity
at the Middle/Upper Paleolithic transition" (Marshack, 1995, p495)
This was precisely the item that was dated at only "54,000-year
old", which I posted a few weeks ago:
"The creation of the first artistic images is usually credited to
early Europeans, who some 33,000 years ago began carving vulvas and
animals on rock and ivory in France and Germany. The discovery of
this 54,000-year old, three inch wide engraved flint may change that
perception. The flint was excavated near the Syrian town of
Quneitra; in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights by Naama
Goren-Inbar of Jerusalem's Hebrew University. Both Neanderthals and
anatomically modern humans lived in the region when this image of
four nested arcs were engraved-with another piece of flint And both
were tool users and hunter-gatherers. But archeologist Alexander
Marshack of Harvard's Peabody Museum says it's most likely the
artist was a more modern human since known Neanderthal artifacts to
date, aside from tools, have been limited to things like beads and
worked ivory. Marshack doesn't know what the image represents.
"When I looked at it for the first time, it looked like a rainbow
with rain, but that's not what I'm saying it is," he says. "If I am
correct, and this is an early depiction, then you have evidence that
art did not begin in Europe. And if it was there in the Middle
East, it was probably also in Africa and Australia and in Asia.
Europe was not the beginning of everything." ("Early Etchings",
Discover, Vol. 17, No. 7, July 1996, p26)
As I said, since in July 1996 Marshack is making much of this
"54,000 year-old" etching, as "evidence that art did not begin in
Europe", one can reasonably conclude that the "Golan Venus" of
"300,000 years ago" has not stood up to Marshack's own "microscopic
analysis" or dating?
>GM>Mary Leakey writes: "In concluding this review of the lithic
>material from Oldowan and Developed Oldowan Sites the grooved and
>pecked phonolite cobble found in Upper Bed I at FLK North must be
>mentioned. This stone has unquestionably been artificially shaped.
>But it seems unlikely that it could have served as a tool or for any
>practical purpose. It is conceivable that a parallel exists in the
>quartzite cobble found at Makapansgat in which natural weathering
>has simulated the carving of two sets of hominid-or more strictly
>primate- features on parts of the surface. The resemblance to
>primate faces is immediately obvious in this specimen, although it
>is entirely natural, whereas in the case of the Olduvai stone a
>great deal of imagination is required in order to see any pattern or
>significance in the form. With oblique lighting, however, there is
>a suggestion of an elongate, baboon-like muzzle with faint
>indications of a mouth and nostrils. By what is probably no more
>than a coincidence, the pecked groove on the Olduvai stone is
>reproduced on the Makapansgat specimen by a similar but natural
>groove and in both specimens the positions of the grooves correspond
>to what would be the base of the hair line if an anthropomorphic
>interpretation is considered. This is open to question, but
>nevertheless the occurrence of such stones at hominid sites in such
>remote periods is of considerable interest."~M.D. Leakey, Olduvai
>Gorge 3 Excavations in Beds I and II, 1960-1693, (Cambridge:
>Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 269
>GM>The reference to the Makapansgat pebble is to an amazing piece of
>stone which was apparently collected by an Australopithecus 3
>million years ago and carried 4.8 kilometers to his rock shelter.
>(~K. P. Oakley, "Emergence of Higher Thought 3.0-0.2 Ma B.P.",
>Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B, 292, 205-211 (1981), p. 205-206)
>This distance of transport is much farther than Chimpanzees ever
>carry rocks. The farthest I have been able to find that chimps
>carry objects is half a kilometer. (~C. Boesch and H. Boesch,
>"Mental Map in Wild Chimpanzees: An Analysis of Hammer Transports
>for Nut Cracking", Primates 25(2):160-170, p. 162)
Morris says of the "Makapansgat Pebble":
"The earliest evidence we have of this activity is a staggering
three million years old. In 1925 a strange object was found in a
rock shelter at a site known as the Limeworks Quarry in the
Transvaal in southern Africa. It was a water-worn, reddish pebble
that seemed curiously out of place. Investigations revealed that it
could not have come from the cave where it was found and must have
been carried from a location about three miles away. What made it
special was that it had the shape of a human skull, on one side of
which were small cavities that looked like a pair of sunken
eye-sockets above a simple mouth. There is no suggestion that this
"face" had been artificially manufactured but its accidental
resemblance is so striking that it seems certain the object was
collected and brought back to a favoured dwelling place as a
"treasured possession". Known as the Makapansgat Pebble, after the
site where it was found, it is thought to be the most ancient art
object in the world. What makes it so extraordinary is that the
cave where it was discovered was not occupied by prehistoric man but
by the early man-apes known as the Australopithecines. They may not
have been capable of fashioning a model head themselves but they
were at least able to see one in the natural surface-weathering on a
pebble and to be so impressed by the image that they were moved to
carry it home with them, over a long distance. In performing this
seemingly simple action of collecting an unusual pebble, those
primeval man-apes were in reality taking a giant step. They were
seeing a face that was not a face. They were reacting to something
that stood for something else. By responding to the image on the
pebble they were indulging in a primitive form of symbolism. They
were struck by a resemblance, by an accidental echo, and were so
fascinated by it that they carried it for three miles. This long
journey, carefully transporting the pebble, reveals that their
interest in the pebble-face was not a fleeting reaction but a
serious preoccupation." (Morris D., "The Human Animal: A Personal
View of the Human Species", ISIS: Oxford UK, 1994, pp191-192)
Of course it is always possible that the Australopithecines were
simply interested in the "reddish" colour of the pebble, and the
Homo sapiens archaeologist noticed the "face".
>GM>While the human archaeologists noticed the pebble because of its
>red color and its naturally weathered "human" face carved on it,
>when the object is turned upside down, an australopithecine face
>appears.
As Mary Leakey points out above, each is not a "human" face", nor an
"australopithecine face" but merely a "`primate' face".
GM>Raymond Dart writes:
>
>"A complete perceptual transformation had taken place. The two
>little rounded 'eyes' retained their visual status though their
>contours looked more square and adult. The huge 'brain' and
>ridiculously pinched infantile 'mouth' that had involuntarily
>prevented us sapient observers from orientating it otherwise, were
>now replaced by a dwarfed, flattened, and indented 'skull- cap',
>above a broadly-grinning, robust and typical australopithecine
>'face'. Its broad 'cheeks' and gaping 'mouth' have become so wide
>that even the total absence of nostril openings would have been
>incapable of preventing any perceptive Australopithecus from
>recognizing it as anything other than a caricature of one or another
>of his extremely flat-faced male or female relatives in a positively
>hilarious mood. "The 'facial proportions' from this new aspect are
>thus in excellent general agreement with those that reconstructional
>efforts have caused each modern artist, with minor variations, to
>produce for Australopithecus. This concordance of itself is
>sufficient justification of the inference that conceptual processes
>of a similar nature caused an australopithecine to transport the
>pebble to the cave at Makapansgat. In addition, the curious and to
>some extent corroborative fact is that once one admits the
>possibility that an Australopithecus had the intellectual ability to
>detect the presence of a face on this alien natural stone, then the
>social responses that capacity evoked, follow. The pebble would
>have had no point without an ability on his associate's part to
>comprehend and share the emotional reactions, the puzzlement and
>amusement, that the discoverer had had. And from this it may also
>be deduced that he and his fellows at the australopithecine phase of
>human evolution had already reached a humanoid level of
>self-realisation and self-awareness."~R.A. Dart, "The Waterworn
>Australopithecine Pebble of Many Faces from Makapansgat," South
>African Journal of Science, 70(June 1974), pp 167-169, p. 168
As Prof. Dart himself observes, it is not a good likeness, but
rather a "caricature". Maybe the resemblance is more in the mind of
the anthropologist?
>GM>While the Makapansgat pebble was not manufactured, the phonolite
>pebble reported by Leakey was manufactured. Its poor quality can
>be ascribed to the extreme hardness of phonolite and the difficulty
>chipping it.
Or maybe that it is just a piece of stone that was on its way to
being a tool, but never made it? As Mary Leakey notes, "a great
deal of imagination is required" to see the 'face', and at best
"With oblique lighting" all that can be seen is a "baboon-like
muzzle with faint indications of a mouth and nostrils". If a highly
intelligent, highly trained, Homo sapiens like Mary Leakey has
trouble seeing the "face", what reliability is there in the
assumption that an Australopithecine would see it?
I don't know why Glenn thinks this supports his 5.5 mya Homo
habilis/erectus Adam theory. Oakley's article he cites is "Emergence
of Higher Thought 3.0-0.2 Ma B.P.", but according to Glenn's theory,
2 million years before this Homo habilis/erectus had already built
a three-decker Ark.
Glenn's theory is that all technological knowledge was lost after
the Flood, but here the anthropologists are talking about *mental
ability*. If man had the mental ability to build an Ark 5.5 mya, he
would hardly be reduced to picking up pebbles that vaguely resembled
primate faces 2 million years later.
God bless.
Steve
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