Myths about Rock Art [1 ed.] 9781784914752

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Myths about Rock Art Robert G. Bednarik

Myths about Rock Art

Robert G. Bednarik

Archaeopress Archaeology

Archaeopress Publishing Ltd Gordon House 276 Banbury Road Oxford OX2 7ED

www.archaeopress.com

ISBN 978 1 78491 474 5 ISBN 978 1 78491 475 2 (e-Pdf)

© Archaeopress and Robert G. Bednarik 2016

Cover illustration: The meaning of rock art cannot be established by the cultural outsider: this composition depicts the babies of the rock python. Mandangarri Site, Kimberley, Australia.

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Contents

A Little Epistemology������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 1 Introduction���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 1 Epistemology of archaeology������������������������������������������������������������������������� 7 Setting the scene������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 11 Animals and Pareidolia������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 13 Tales of dragons������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 13 Identifying zoomorphs��������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 20 Archaeological Folklores about Dating������������������������������������������������������������ 37 The bulls and horses of Iberia���������������������������������������������������������������������� 37 The Palaeolithic obsession��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 44 Myths about rock art age������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 53 Archaeological excavation��������������������������������������������������������������������������� 53 Iconographic identification��������������������������������������������������������������������� 54 Stylistic sequences���������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 55 Use of analytical methods����������������������������������������������������������������������� 61 Axiomatic Confusions��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 64 Misidentification of non-anthropic rock markings��������������������������������������� 64 ‘Explanations’ of cupules����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 78 Other mistaken interpretations��������������������������������������������������������������������� 86 Misidentifications by combining motifs������������������������������������������������� 86 Invented rock art sequences�������������������������������������������������������������������� 89 The Venus figurines�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 92 Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends�������������������������������������������������������� 97 Sensationalist claims ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 97 The writing on the wall������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 103 Seeing things: pareidolia����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 110 Reaching for stars and gods������������������������������������������������������������������������ 114 The importance of being Palaeolithic���������������������������������������������������������� 121 Rock Art Fairy Tales������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 129 About shamanism and rock art�������������������������������������������������������������������� 129 i

Myths about mythologies���������������������������������������������������������������������������� 132 Neuropathologies and rock art�������������������������������������������������������������������� 134 Autism���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 134 Asperger’s syndrome����������������������������������������������������������������������������� 136 Schizophrenia����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 137 Bipolar disorder������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 139 Brain disorders in human evolution������������������������������������������������������� 141 Sinister myths about rock art����������������������������������������������������������������������� 142 Generic Issues�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 152 Effects of fakes, misconceptions and falsities��������������������������������������������� 152 Neuroscience and ‘identifications’ in rock art interpretation����������������������� 155 The myths are here to stay�������������������������������������������������������������������������� 160 Conclusion�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 163 References������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 167 Index���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 213

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Chapter 1

A Little Epistemology Introduction Numerous conferences or symposia have been held about the myths supposedly depicted in the rock art of the world, when in fact there is very limited credible ethnographic information available to that effect and most of these scholarly pronouncements are themselves little more than myths. Globally, very little is actually known about the mythologies that may have been externalised in the world’s rock art, and authentic information is limited to a very few geographical regions, most notably to Australia. It is particularly instructive to note that the rock art researchers of that continent are much more reluctant to interpret rock art than their international colleagues, and to invent meanings for it. There is obviously a lesson in this contradiction: the message that perhaps the archaeologists and rock art interpreters of the rest of the world would be well advised to consider the reasons for this Australian reluctance. If one were to write a book about the myths to which rock art can credibly be attributed, it would be a rather slim volume. By contrast, the ethnographic study of the creators of the myths about rock art, describing themselves as rock art researchers, would provide a vastly more fertile area of research, and one that has been afforded no concerted attention at all until now. The present book is intended to fill this void, and in doing so impress on the reader the need to exercise restraint in the interpretation of the manifestations of early world views. It is self-evident that the urge to interpret rock art is universal. The most pervasive human reaction to rock art, irrespective of the age, ethnicity or conditioning (academic, social, cognitive, religious, political etc.) of the beholder, is to try to figure out what it depicts and what it means (Bednarik 2013a). The neuroscience of this process has not been adequately explored, and is in any case never considered by those doing the interpreting, who implicitly feel that they have the authority to create authentic understandings of the rock artist’s intention. It is never made explicit how the interpreter thinks he or she may have acquired this ability — for instance what part of archaeological training would equip him or her to make these determinations, or why a palaeontologist should be assumed to possess any special aptitude to establish which species a pre-Historic artist intended to depict. These exclusive faculties are taken for granted without evidence, despite the rational stance that they are entirely imagined. The experiment conducted by Professor Macintosh, the only ‘blind test’ ever undertaken of the proposition that a cultural outsider is able to determine what is depicted in rock art, established 1

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Myths about Rock Art unambiguously that outsiders of the culture that produced the rock art are incapable of establishing what a motif means or depicts. Moreover, these guesses are in any case not testable, hence not scientific. Macintosh was a distinguished professor of anatomy who recorded and ‘identified’ numerous painted biomorphs (having the shapes of living creatures) of Beswick Cave in the Northern Territory of Australia (Macintosh 1952). Over two decades later he discovered that the authentic meaning of the rock art was still known to a highly initiated Djauan, Lamderod, whom he took to the site and asked him to explain the rock art imagery of 81 figures in detail, in order to test his own expert interpretations. In doing this he demonstrated that he was a true scientist, testing his own propositions that had through the unusual circumstance become available for testing. He conceded (Macintosh 1977) that he had failed to diagnose correctly the individual painted items in 90% of the site’s vast inventory, and he stated that “the mental code of the artists’ schematisation cannot be cracked without keys provided by highly initiated informants”. For instance Macintosh discovered that anthropomorphs (human-like figures) he had thought were males actually depicted females. One ‘female human’ was a gen-gen or water lizard, a ‘kangaroo’ depicted a stone-country possum, while other figures were entirely undecipherable to an alien, but easily explained by Lamderod. A ‘marsupial head’ was in fact a Rainbow Serpent. Macintosh also discovered that images had more than one meaning: a sacred interpretation not accessible to females, who were given an alternative, simpler meaning. Elements in different parts of the rockshelter portrayed aspects of the same myth, presenting “a most involved fusion of several myths, rituals and concepts” (Macintosh 1977: 192). At Tandandjal Cave, a second site in the area 19 km away, Macintosh (1951) also benefitted greatly from the interpretations of a Ngalgbun songman and ritualist, and arrived at the same conclusion. A 10% success rate in identifying images correctly is no better than a random result, suggesting that even the most highly trained cultural outsider has little chance of interpreting even the formal attributes of rock art motifs correctly. And yet it is even more difficult, far more difficult, to comprehend the depicted narrative, the intended relationships of motifs to each other, or to other aspects of the site. The point is well illustrated in further examples, such as the following provided by Mountford (1976). He is the only Australian researcher who witnessed the production of cupules, which are small depressions of sphericaldome shape hammered into rock that usually occur in groups (Bednarik 2007a). In 1940 he observed a ritual of making cupules on a large boulder near Nantaguna springs, also in the Northern Territory. The boulder is the totemic body of Tukalili, the cockatoo-woman (Figure 1), bearing in a recess around sixteen horizontal cupules. They are the result of pulkarin rituals conducted to cause

A Little Epistemology the pink cockatoo (Cacatua leadbeateri) to lay more eggs. This is accomplished through the mineral powder rising into the air as the cupules are pounded. The dust represents the kuranita of the rock and, as it is thus released, it fertilises the female cockatoos. Kuranita (life essence) can rise like a mist into the air from any ‘increase site’, impregnating a specific plant, animal or natural force the site is associated with, through its release by an appropriate ceremony. It then increases the supply or strength of that entity, which can range from a plague of head lice to bring down on one’s enemies to the supply of an edible tree gum.

Figure 1. The Tukalili increase site near Nantaguna springs, Northern Territory, Australia. The precise emic significance of the cupules has been recorded (1940 photograph by Charles P. Mountford).

This is one of very few ethnographic explanations of cupules (Bednarik 2008) and the only one available from Australia. What it illustrates is the general impotence of archaeology in explaining archaeological phenomena. Without the recorded ethnographic observation, an archaeologist could not even in a lifetime’s search expect to formulate the correct, authentic explanation for the surviving phenomenon. All proper interpretations of the residue that archaeologists chose to call ‘archaeological remains’ are just as remote and unfathomable as is the correct interpretation of the cupules at Tukalili’s site, but this applies most particularly to ideological aspects of such remains. Another example of the incredible complexity of the correct (emic or originally authentic) explanation of rock art is presented by Doring with Nyawarra (2014) in his magnificent account of the deep meanings of Kimberley rock art in north-western Australia. For over half a century anthropologists had argued that the Gwion rock paintings of the region are an extinct art form about which contemporary Aborigines had no knowledge. The Gwion tradition (formerly called Bradshaw figures) is in fact so sacred to its owners that they chose to plead ignorance about it when interviewed, when in truth it is the very foundation of their Wunan law, the moral and legal code by which they have lived for millennia.

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Myths about Rock Art What eventually forced them to release snippets of this ancient knowledge was the requirement, by Australian law, to demonstrate their connection to the land if they wanted to secure native title to it. Doring has been instrumental in negating the prevailing academic view that the Kimberley tribes possess no knowledge of the meaning of Gwion rock art, providing glimpses of its cultural intricacies and historical connotations. For instance he ascertained the identities of three concrete personages involved in the establishment of Wunan law (Wodoi, Jungun and especially the artist-visionary Wibalma), he located the site where Wunan law was founded (the stone table at Dududu.ngarri), and discovered that the Aborigines possess historical knowledge of the period before tribal boundaries were established by Wunan law (the seventeen tribes were named after birds). Above all, Doring’s account shows that the information blithely reported by anthropologists can be evasive, or amount to a simplistic version considered suitable for ignorant foreigners. I have encountered similar experiences on various occasions. In the Pilbara of Western Australia, especially near the Dampier Archipelago, I have worked with many octogenarians who at the time (in the 1960s) were the very last people in the region who had been born and initiated in a traditional tribal setting during the 19th century, and thus possessed impeccable cultural knowledge (the destruction of traditional cultures was particularly swift in the wake of the Dampier massacres of 1868, which had involved the genocide of an entire tribe, teaching the Pilbara tribes how ruthless the colonisers could be). A great deal of what these elders, the region’s last of the ‘men of high degree’ (Elkin 1945), taught me cannot be published; it was often made clear to me that this was restricted knowledge (Bednarik 2006a). Much of this referred to the deeper meanings of petroglyph motifs or the significance of specific sites. About one third of the rock art is sacred, and correct information is only available to certain people, most often initiated males. Like Macintosh and several ethnographers, such as Professor A. P. Elkin, I also found that within one explanation of meaning there may be others, and the one provided to a questioner would be commensurate with his perceived level of understanding. A generic relevant consideration is that the communication between the informants and the recorder is always by means of translation. Even where the interviewer speaks the language of the people being studied, he or she is usually not very proficient in their language. He certainly has little or no linguistic access to those aspects of the culture that are avoided, or indeed taboo. Because he has an inadequate understanding of these limitations, his interpretation of what he does have access to will be affected by these complications. In many cases he uses a third party, an interpreter, and what he obtains is quite literally an interpretation, and not factual information. He then interprets this interpretation in a way that makes sense in

A Little Epistemology his own linguistic and cognitive framework. Moreover, extant traditional cultures do not permit outsiders access to all aspects of their metaphysical world. For instance, students of the oldest surviving culture on earth, that of the Australian Aborigines, have found to their surprise that the knowledge bestowed on them is deliberately limited in several directions. Not only in the sexual sense, because of the strict gender divisions in cultural knowledge (there are restrictions according to the gender of both informant and interviewer), but there are also explanations within explanations, in the fashion of Russian dolls: upon opening one, there is always another one inside. Thus I have found that the same informant used a different, more elaborate explanation for a phenomenon many years after he had given me a simpler one. When questioned about that, he would say, “but twenty years ago you didn’t know much” (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Traditional custodian Monty Hale, senior elder responsible for the Abydos petroglyph complex in the Pilbara, Western Australia, with the author.

In effect the explanations given to ethnographers are commensurate with a researcher’s perceived competence or ‘status’. For instance, a rock art motif may have several meanings, beginning from a very simple level. This is rather like an explanation a contemporary urban Western parent would give to his or her small child. Once it had grown up, a more advanced explanation is considered appropriate, and so on. In many indigenous or tribal societies around the world, knowledge is of restricted access, secret or sacred in nature, with different levels of severity. In societies such as the Australian Aboriginal people, serious breaches of sacred matters were traditionally punishable by death, and are often seen as more serious crimes than murder, for instance. It is therefore inconceivable that information at the level of sacred knowledge would be passed on to uninitiated alien researchers, simply to satisfy their strange curiosity. In effect all published ethnographic evidence of such metaphysical knowledge of any tribal people is of the type given to people of poor understanding of the society in question. It

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Myths about Rock Art should be obvious that this mechanism would have contributed to a simplification of ethnographic accounts: not only did the informants regularly observe the restrictions of tribal laws; they would have often felt obliged to simplify interpretations for untutored outsiders. There are times, in my experience and that of others, when they are forced to deceive their questioners, in order to protect sacred knowledge. Ethnographers, often naively unaware of these factors, base their professional reputation and standing on their findings, and they may not be willing to admit these severe limitations inherent in their accounts. Therefore in indigenous societies the separation of religious and profane matters is not remotely as clear as it is in modern urban societies. Since native societies possess various levels of restrictions on metaphysical knowledge we must accept that these also affect the nature of the information which can be provided to uninitiated outsiders, such as researchers. This applies to many aspects of indigenous cultures, and that includes the ultimate meaning of rock art motifs, the subject of this book. Before considering so-called ethnographic information as it is found in the anthropological literature it needs to be established how reliable it might be: how close was the researcher to the community in question, and over how many decades did he work with its members? Much of such information was collected for the purpose of personal advancement within academia, and for that reason alone it may be unreliable or at least culturally trivial. In my experience a researcher who delves deeply into the ontogeny of an indigenous community is likely to shed his ambitions along the way, over the decades, and by the time he attains a comprehensive understanding of a belief system he has lost his desire to boast with his knowledge. He has realised that to expose the deeper intricacies of an elaborate ontology to the glare of ‘rationality’ is to inaugurate its destruction. As one Aboriginal elder once said to me, it took him 80 years to “become” an Aboriginal; why would he tell some visitor from a university all he knew? Since Professor Macintosh’s clarification was published in 1977, Australian rock art researchers have adopted the convention of always placing their ‘determinations’ of motif meanings in quotation marks, a practice which their colleagues in the rest of the world have not yet espoused. This is of particular significance when it is remembered that Australia is the only country where comprehensive knowledge about the meaning of rock art has remained available to the present time. The onus is on those who choose to interpret rock art to demonstrate what special ability they possess to do so correctly, and why anyone should take their contentions seriously. In this volume we will review and analyse some of the mythologies rock art interpreters have created. This is such a rich source of information illustrating the flaws of the humanities that it is hard to believe that no book has ever been

A Little Epistemology written to analyse them. This vast topic amounts to virtually millions of false claims presented in the published literature, over the past two centuries. It is this veritable mother-lode of published scholarly mistakes that will be explored here. Epistemology of archaeology For well over a century, ever since prehistorians grudgingly accepted the Pleistocene age of the Altamira cave art in Spain (Cartailhac 1902), after first ruining the life of its discoverer, Don Marcelino Santiago Tomás Sanz de Sautuola (1831–1888), rock art has been subjected to interpretation by archaeologists (Bednarik 2013b). Throughout this time, archaeologists, art historians and others have treated rock art as art, essentially in the sense of modern Western perception of what art is. And yet, the producers of the world’s rock art, from traditional or indigenous societies, have no concept of art in the Western sense, and the art-like productions of their societies, in some cases tens of millennia old, do not constitute art as we perceive it. They are not commodities, they have no ‘art histories’, their makers were not professional artists, and they cannot be simplistically understood by alien commentators. Indeed, their makers referred to different constructs of reality as we shall soon discover. The main reason for the widespread belief among archaeologists to be able to understand palaeoart production, even to communicate with the palaeoartist (e.g. Mithen 1998), appears to be the purported naturalism of some of the FrancoCantabrian cave art in south-western Europe. While it is true that some rock art traditions, such as those of the San of southern Africa, some of the pastoralists of the Sahara, or the Gwion palaeoartists of the Australian Kimberley present high levels of realism in their imagery, the Final Pleistocene palaeoart of Europe is particularly remote conceptually. The self-deception practised by archaeologists is easily explained. If adequate clues are detected in a motif to invite its ‘identification’, it is considered to be figurative or iconographic, and it is then interpreted on that basis. Clearly the process is greatly expedited by high realism in depiction, but it still reflects the values, mental constructs and visual responses of the beholder rather than the producer of the rock art motif. This is then a subjective procedure that can only tell us about the cognition, perception and mental world of the former; it tells us absolutely nothing about the mute maker of the object, his or her worldview or beliefs. But the key to understanding the epistemological flaw in the process of ‘identifying’ the intent of rock artists is that the world’s rock art was typically produced by illiterate people, whose brains differed significantly from those of literates in how they were organised, interconnected and integrated (Helvenston 2013). Those of non-literates operate largely through ‘magical thinking’, whereas

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Myths about Rock Art the operation by cause and effect reasoning is acquired ontologically. On the basis of neuroscientific considerations, the most reliable modern interpreters of rock art should be expected to be infants, followed by illiterates. The least qualified are modern academic sophisticates, such as archaeologists or palaeontologists, who are not only literate but have in their life time (ontogenically) undergone massive conditioning (Bednarik 2011a, 2012a, 2013c). The plasticity of the human brain facilitates its modification by ontogenic experience. Neuroscience has unambiguously demonstrated that cultural activity modifies the chemistry and structure of the brain through affecting the flow of neurotransmitters and hormones (Smail 2007) and even the quantity of grey matter (Maguire et al. 2000; Draganski et al. 2004; Malafouris 2008). In short, a modern brain is not a suitable medium to communicate with the brain of a rock artist. Moreover, most rock art traditions of the world are far from naturalistic in the modern Western sense, but appear to be highly stylised, schematised or conventionalised. Depending on the degree to which such cultural treatment departs from ultimately Eurocentric conventions, meaning tends to be inaccessible to the cultural outsider, including and especially the modern scholar. The belief that there is an iconographic cut-off point up to which representational intent can be determined by the investigator is a falsity, besides being untestable and thus unscientific; it derives from purported authority and ethnocentric perception. The meaning of rock art for which an emic (authentic in the world view of the rock art producer) explanation is lacking is simply not accessible to the alien investigator. Although this is already clear from purely rational considerations, we have sound empirical verification of this fundamental precept in the form of the abovementioned blind test conducted by Macintosh. If a distinguished professor of anatomy can concede that he failed abysmally in correctly identifying most of the painted biomorphs of Beswick and Tandandjal Caves, the prospects of mere archaeologists, lacking his relevant proficiency, of correctly determining what has been depicted in rock art appear to be very slim indeed. But even if they did have that expertise, they would face yet another hurdle: how could they possibly present their explanations as falsifiable propositions, which is essential for them to be scientific propositions? Epistemology addresses standards or norms for justification and reasoning (including logic and probability theory), ideals of rationality, and the effects of specific philosophies (e.g. empiricism, relativism), among other things. It seeks to determine the origins and nature of ‘knowledge’, examining the methods used in gathering it, its validity and scope. Such a clear understanding of what is all too easily defined as knowledge is of fundamental importance in assessing the millions of false claims that have been made about rock art. As historically

A Little Epistemology and culturally situated creatures we cannot easily step outside our concepts, standards and beliefs to appraise their fit with some mind-independent reality of Kantian ‘things-in-themselves’, or some illusory ‘objective reality’. A number of philosophers and social scientists (e.g. Quine 1960; Hollis 1967; Davidson 1984) have even argued that we can only understand or interpret others if they largely agree with us about what is true, reasonable or justified. The academic endeavour has resulted in a variety of schools, the disciples of which are separated by ‘logical gaps’: “They think differently, speak a different language, live in a different world” (Polanyi 1958: 151). Or to quote Kuhn, “the proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. … Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same direction” (Kuhn 1970: 150). Some of these branches of the academic project have chosen to operate under a collective umbrella framework, called science; others have developed their own various frameworks, such as the humanities. Science, today, favours a normative epistemic relativism over an over-simplified absolutism, but demands specific procedures of refutation and repeatability of experiments, and strives for refutable theories cast in terms of causes. After all, quantum theory implies that determinism fails and that objects need not always have determinate locations in space and time or determinate magnitudes (like a particular momentum or energy or spin). In all of this, the issue of testability of hypotheses is utterly paramount, involving two components: first, the logical property that is variously described as contingency, defeasibility or falsifiability (which means that counterexamples to the hypothesis are logically possible); and second, the practical feasibility of observing a reproducible series of such counterexamples if they do exist. Thus a hypothesis is testable if there is some real hope of deciding whether it is true or false of real experience. This is the crux of the matter: any determination of what is depicted in rock art, or of any other intent on the part of its creator, can only be validated if it is made by someone of the culture or worldview sharing the reality construct of the artist. If the determination is made by anyone else its validity cannot be ascertained or refuted; it is untestable, it is unfalsifiable — hence it is not scientific. The principal epistemological characteristic of archaeology as it has been conducted until now is its inability to offer internally falsifiable propositions (Bednarik 2013b). Relativism decrees that this does not render archaeology in some way inferior; archaeology is simply an epistemic framework that has chosen to eschew the scientific demand of testability in favour of a framework operating on a different basis. However, epistemologically archaeology as it has been conducted so far differs from all other disciplines in that they all endeavour to define real entities, whereas in archaeology, particularly when dealing with early phases, there should

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Myths about Rock Art not even be pretence of that. Its defined entities, such as artefacts, are observerrelative or ‘institutional’ facts (Searle 1995). As Searle illustrates by example, an object may be made partly of wood, partly of metal, which are its ‘brute facts’. Its property of being a screwdriver exists only because the person who makes or uses it represents it as such. Precisely the same applies to an object made in the Pleistocene or early Holocene; it has factual properties, and socially constructed, observer-relative properties. However, there is no evidence that the latter are shared between the ancient maker and user of the object, and its modern-day archaeologist interpreter. The term déformation professionnelle refers to this issue: professional training, which as a process mimics the neuropsychology of obsessive compulsive disorder (Bednarik 2011a), also results in a distortion in the way the world is perceived. Confirmation bias (Wason 1960; Evans et al. 1983) can only add to the sophistry. Observer-relative definitions, attributions and claims about the distant human past are clearly not in themselves of scientific utility; they need to be subjected to metamorphological analysis (Bednarik 1995a, 2013b), which so far has not occurred in a systematic fashion. This severe epistemological impediment to archaeological claims of knowledge is universal to all periods up to the introduction of extensive written records. For instance the tool types named and identified can only form etic or observerrelative taxonomies, they are not real or emic classifications (Clark 2009: 26). Precisely the same applies to motifs of rock art or items of portable palaeoart. Archaeologists then compound the mistake by defining specific combinations of implements as ‘cultures’, which begs the question why they think cultures should be characterised by tools. Obviously this is not the case today, why should it have been so in the distant past? Moreover, the people who supposedly used these fictitious cultures are then labelled as if they constituted discrete tribes, ethnic groups, language groups, nations or some other definable political or social entities. It does not seem to occur to archaeologists that, first, cultures are determined by cultural variables (art, language, mode of relating to reality etc.), and second, that assemblages of (invented) tool types express, at best, technological responses to life’s challenges, i.e. they are intra-cultural variables. If one adds to this the many other epistemological shortcomings of archaeology, such as the lack of testability of its pronouncements about excavated strata (every sediment parcel can only be excavated once, therefore most claims made about it are untestable), or its responses to heretics, it becomes evident that it is conducted outside of science. It imports a great many scientific propositions from the hard sciences, but that does not make it a science any more than industry becomes a science because it uses sciences. Or as a famous archaeologist once poignantly stated, having a wooden leg does not turn someone into a tree (Clarke 1978: 465).

A Little Epistemology This is not to be seen as a critique of archaeology, which as a humanity has little choice but to operate on that basis. It is simply a clarification of its epistemology, establishing that an archaeologist has no special insights into what a rock art image depicts. Similarly, because the opinions of zoologists and palaeontologists have often been cited in support of identifications of zoomorphs (motifs providing adequate visual information to contemporary humans as resembling animal form) in rock art, it needs to be stated upfront that they are trained to recognise species or genera of animal specimens and their parts; they possess absolutely no proficiency in ascertaining which animal has been depicted in rock art. It is absurd to presume them to have such authority, when the issue, clearly, is about an alien graphic convention they cannot be expected to be familiar with or to cognitively comprehend. Setting the scene The above considerations, in a sense, establish the parameters for this book on the mythologies that have been created about rock art. First and foremost, they have established the incommensurability between the true meanings of rock art and the notions a modern beholder is likely to form about them. There are numerous reasons for that, but the principal ones are perhaps the following: 1. The brains of the creators of rock art and its modern viewers differ significantly, and effective communication between them is no more possible than equitable interaction as equals is possible between coloniser and colonised. This is clearly established by a review of the relevant neuroscience, and modern rock art beholders who ‘communicate’ with the artist or ‘know’ his intent are victims of self-deception and autosuggestion. 2. Ethnographic interpretations of rock art are of variable quality, which is determined by the individual researcher’s level of acceptance by the indigenous society concerned. Where a culture restricts access to the meaning of rock art, as appears to be often the case, published information is likely to be tainted or trivial. 3. Free-standing interpretation of rock art by a modern viewer is essentially a source of information about that person’s perception, cognition and construct of reality. In a scientific sense its only relevance is in defining these variables, and it has very little relevance to what is on the rock surface, or to aspects of the rock artist’s culture. 4. The epistemological nature of archaeology excludes it categorically from being able to tell us what a rock art motif depicts or what it means. Archaeology only creates observer-relative or etic explanations that are unfalsifiable propositions. The separation of what might reasonably count as fact from what is evidently closer to fiction will be considered on all pages of this volume. None of the above

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Myths about Rock Art is to imply that the correct meaning of rock art is necessarily inaccessible and will always remain so. However, such access is contingent upon the destruction of false interpretations, because these are the first major impediment to such access. What has been said is that the methodology so far brought to bear on this subject is inadequate in such a task, the second major impediment to effective rock art study. The scientific research of rock art remains in its earliest infancy and some sections of the archaeological community have resisted its introduction. Scientific approaches to rock art have so far remained limited to a few areas, and are not well established even in those (Bednarik 2007b). Before they can be applied more systematically it is essential that the accumulated deadwood in the field of rock art research be eliminated. And before that can be done, it needs to be identified. That, in a nutshell, is the purpose of this book.

Chapter 2

Animals and Pareidolia Tales of dragons Let us start from the beginning. Long after light, heaven, land, then stars and finally creatures were created — not necessarily in the stated order — there appeared dragons on the Earth, also known as dinosaurs (Niermann 1994). There is a long-standing disagreement between those who believe that the creation of the world occurred around 6000 years ago, making the dinosaurs in the order of 5000 years old, and those who believe the sauropods became extinct 65,000,000 years ago (Archibald and Fastovsky 2004). There are a number of ways of testing the two propositions, but the one preferred by the first camp is that if it can be demonstrated that humans and dinosaurs coexisted, the palaeontological version is disproved. There appears to be one sure way of verifying this creationist view: if people depicted dinosaurs in their rock art, they must have seen them. This seems such a reasonable argument and yet it needs some qualification. There are a few known cases where a rock artist seems to have painted depictions of ornithopods without having seen such animals, or even its skeletal remains, as we shall see later. However, the more immediate question is, do dinosaur depictions occur in world rock art? Reportedly they do, and interestingly most of the examples that have been reported are from the United States. That observation coincides with the fact that this is also the only country apart from western Europe where fakes of Pleistocene (Ice Age) palaeoart are common. The perhaps earliest claim of dinosaurs or pterosaurs in rock art concerns a pair of paintings first described by the French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet of a creature called the Piasa bird (Marquette 1855). They saw them on a cliff on the Mississippi near Alton, Illinois, in 1673: As we coasted along rocks that were awful for their height and length, we saw on one of the rocks two painted monsters that made us afraid and upon which the hardiest savages dared not long rest their eyes. They are as big as a calf, they have horns on the head like deer [or possibly goats], an awful look, red eyes, a beard like a tiger’s, the face something like a man’s, the body covered with scales, and the tail so long that it makes a turn all around the body and passes under the head and returns between the legs and ends in the tail of a fish (Marquette 1855, translation by Phil Senter). Marquette’s observation is the first published record of rock art in North America, north of Mexico (Bednarik 2007b: 8). By 1698 the images were nearly effaced, 13

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Myths about Rock Art according to missionary J. F. Buisson de Saint-Cosme (Temple 1956), due to the practice of passing Native Americans to fire arrows and bullets at them. Eventually, in the middle of the 19th century, the cliff bearing the remains of the large images was quarried. Only fanciful impressions of the images survive (Figure 3). Armstrong (1887) saw them as depicting pterosaurs (Rhamphorhynchus), as did Gibbons and Hovind (1999) much more recently. Senter (2012) has shown persuasively that the most likely meaning of the two motifs is that they depicted Underwater Panther or Mishipizhiw, a mythological creature of the Great Lakes region. It possesses horns and is probably related to the horned serpent theme widespread in North American mythology. Another claim of a sauropod depiction in rock art originates from members of the 1924 Doheny expedition into Havasupai Canyon, northern Arizona, who reported an image of Diplodocus. Samuel Hubbard, Curator of Archaeology at the Oakland Museum in California, initially advanced this proposition (Hubbard

Figure 3. Rather fanciful reconstruction of two rock paintings near Alston, Illinois, attempted decades after their destruction (after Armstrong 1887).

Animals and Pareidolia 1927). His reasoning was that ‘[t]he fact that the animal is upright and balanced on its tail would seem to indicate that the prehistoric artist must have seen it alive’ (Hubbard 1927: 9). The petroglyph motif is simple and schematic, and whatever it depicts, it offers little anatomical detail to assign it either to Diplodocus or Edmontosaurus, the latter interpretation favoured by Taylor (1987). Since the presentation of this ‘sauropod’ image, Beierle (1980) has described a second motif from the same panel and at a similar level as an unspecified dinosaur. He considered the first motif to possibly depict a llama. Senter (2012) has examined both petroglyphs and considers the first to be of a bird, the second of a bighorn sheep, noting that the second image does not resemble any known kind of dinosaur (Figure 4a and b). One of the most spectacular misidentifications of rock art as depicting sauropods is the alleged pterosaur painting in Black Dragon Canyon, Utah (Barnes and Pendleton 1979: 201). Warner and Warner (1995) have analysed the assemblage and determined that five separate red pictograms, two anthropomorphs and

Figure 4. Rock art motifs interpreted as depicting dinosaurs: (a and b) Havasupai Canyon, USA; (c) Agawa Rock, Canada; (d) unspecified site in Tanzania.

three zoomorphs, have been combined as one hypothetical motif. The false impression is emphasised by some areas of pigment wash and the effort of one rock art interpreter who has helpfully drawn a chalk line around the area he or she perceived as a single motif. Senter (2012) confirmed the observations of the Warners and his recordings are reproduced in Figure 5. In the context of reviewing the myths that have been invented about rock art it is important to note here that the misidentification of rock art by mistakenly combining two or more

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Figure 5. Analysis of the Black Dragon Canyon ‘pterosaur’ by Senter (2012), confirming that it consists of several separate motifs.

motifs is quite common, for instance we will meet it again below in the mistaken interpretation of a ‘Zaglossus figure’ in Australia. Then there is the purported sauropod petroglyph at Kachina Bridge in the Natural Bridges National Monument, also in Utah (Swift 1997; Taylor 1999; Butt and Lyons 2004; Lyons and Butt 2008; Isaacs 2010; Nelson 2011). Senter and Cole (2011) have debunked this myth by showing that the ‘legs’ of the perceived image are natural mineral stains and the body consists of a pair of sinuous, snakelike petroglyphs. Further afield we have one more claim by Gibbons and Hovind (1999) of a dragon or dinosaur, from the Agawa Rock site in Lake Superior Provincial Park, Ottawa (Figure 4c). It occurs together with several other motifs, the meaning of which is known from the testimony of Anishinaabe informant Chingwauk, given to geographer and ethnographer Henry Schoolcraft in the early 19th century (Dewdney and Kidd 1967; Meurger and Gagnon 1988). The group of pictograms depicts a lake crossing by a war party, and the horned creature represents Underwater Panther, already mentioned above. Implied sauropod rock art images have also been reported from various parts of Africa. Those from Tanzania and Zambia (Mackal 1987) are of no great interest; the former are much more likely to depict giraffes (Figure 4d), the latter are too vague to credibly assign to any animal.

Animals and Pareidolia These examples would tend to speak against the presumption that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, as would, conversely, the testimony of all palaeontologists in the world. But perhaps I could throw the creationists a ‘lifeline’. As surprising as it may seem, we do have three authentic depictions of dinosaurs in world rock art, all three quite probably created by the same San or Bantu-speaking artist. They were painted in black pigment at Mokhali Cave in Lesotho, southern Africa, apparently depicting an ornithopod extinct for more than 65 million years (Ellenberger et al. 2005). How is that possible? Together with them is a reddish rock painting of one of the many fossil sauropod tracks found nearby; Ellenberger, a rock art recorder and ichnologist, has described some 58 rock slabs bearing such fossil footprints from the region, the nearest set of tracks being 3 km away. Moreover, there is a dinosaur skeleton preserved in the sandstone wall near the eastern end of Mokhali Cave. So the logical explanation is that the artist, who can be assumed to have been an expert tracker (as is very common among his people), observed such fossilised tracks carefully and tried to deduce from them the kind of animal that would have made them. That explanation may not find the approval of creationists, but it is actually much more interesting than their alternative would be (which thankfully was never proffered as they were simply not aware of this evidence). The artist’s reconstruction of the ornithopod is superb: not only did he deduce from the tracks that the creature walked on two legs ending in birdlike feet, he also predicted a body shape that is rather close to reconstructions based on extensive skeletal material (Figure 6). The deductive ability of this indigenous palaeontologist is utterly remarkable (cf. Lockley 1991, 1999). In fact his reconstructions of the ornithopod are clearly superior to those of palaeontologists of the calibre of Sir Richard Owen. Although Gideon Mantell had realised that many dinosaurs were bipedal, Owen insisted on them being quadrupedal (and placing Iguanonon’s large thumb on its nose as a horn). The ethnoscientist who left his reconstructions in Mokhali Cave outperformed him significantly, and we will below meet another of Owen’s misshapen fossil species. Dinosaur tracks have been depicted in a number of cases in rock art: in southwestern Utah such a pictogram (Figure 7) occurs in a shelter just below sets of fossil dinosaur footprints, at the Flag Point pictogram site in the Vermillion Cliffs area (Thybony 2002; Lockley et al. 2006). One dinosaur track site in Utah is named tsidii nabitin by the Hopi (‘bird tracks’) who believe the tracks are by Kwaatoko, the man-waterbird. Petroglyphs of sauropod tracks are also said to have been found in Arizona and Wyoming, in areas where fossil dinosaur tracks occur. In Algeria legends of a colossal bird relate to Cretaceous dinosaur tracks in that region; while in Australia, the legend of Marella, the emu-man, derives from theropod tracks in the Kimberley in the northwest of the continent (Figure 8). According to Aboriginal beliefs, the nearby fossils of seed-ferns of the same period represent the feathers of the emu-man (Mayor and Sarjeant 2001; the emu

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Figure 6. Three reconstruction attempts by a San/Bushman of an ornithopod, based on fossil footprints, the likeness of one of which was also painted at the site Mokhali Cave, Lesotho (after Ellenberger et al. 2005).

is a large flightless bird). In Poland some petroglyphs occur next to a dinosaur footprint and have been suggested to have been prompted by the fossil track at the site Kontrewers, a place described as an ancient sacred site (Gierlinski and Kowalski 2006). As we will see in the following sub-chapter, the practice of applying the conditioned alien perception of the modern beholder to the work of rock artists always provides a seriously flawed epistemology. Typically commentators select from an image to whose meaning they have no credible access a few aspects that support their preferred interpretation, claiming them to be diagnostic while ignoring those that either overwhelmingly contradict it, or demonstrate that the image as a whole is not naturalistic. These qualifications apply to all rock art images but they become especially acute when the proposed depictions of dinosaurs or pterosaurs in rock art are considered. In general these have found no support among archaeologists, for the obvious reason that such creatures became extinct some 65 million years before humans began creating pictures, but this has not prevented numerous such proposals from others. The epistemological issue, however, is identical in all identifications of rock art motifs by cultural outsiders, irrespective of whether the ‘interpretation’ is not credible, as in the case of claimed dinosaur depictions, or is credible. Credibility, therefore, is no justification for claiming to have ‘identified’ a rock art motif.

Animals and Pareidolia

Figure 7. Rock painting of a large track at the pictogram panel of Flag Point site, Utah, showing (inset) one of nearby fossil sauropod tracks.

Figure 8. One of numerous ornithopod tracks near Broome, north-western Australia, interpreted by Aboriginal people as being of Marella, the emu-man.

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Myths about Rock Art Dinosaurs are not the only extinct species averred to have been depicted in rock art. Numerous Pleistocene (Ice Age) animals, even Tertiary species, can be added to the list of unlikely candidates. These assertions are typically intertwined with contentions about the rock art’s great antiquity, often taking the format of circular reasoning: the motifs are very old, therefore they might depict extinct fauna, and since the images seem to do just that, it proves their great age, which in turn reinforces the identification. This reasoning has been applied in many parts of the world, from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, but here we will focus especially on two countries, the United States and Australia. In view of the Australian researchers’ reluctance of attempting etic interpretation of rock art, the Antipodean examples are of particular interest, because they illustrate that even the most hesitant rock art interpreters can still be enticed into this fallacy of pareidolic reading of rock art. Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving the perception of a defining pattern in random visual or audible sensory input. It is a form of apophenia, the tendency to seek patterns in random information, which is of fundamental importance to the ability of a species to process sensory input (for more on pareidolia, please see Chapters 5 and 7). Susceptibility to pareidolia varies greatly among individuals, and while at one end of the spectrum, it is indispensable to the brain’s ability to create order in the sensory stimuli it processes, at the other end it can prompt strong psychotic convictions. We have it because it bestows evolutionary advantages (Sagan 1995: 45), for instance in the recognition of faces. The Rorschach inkblot test is an application of pareidolia attempting to gain access to a person’s mental state (Zusne and Jones 1989: 77– 79). Rock art, obviously, consists of patches of applied pigment or humanly made depressions in rock surfaces, presumably arranged intentionally to form a pattern. The archaeologist or other rock art interpreter believes to be able to detect the intent of the rock artist. Let us see how they fare in this quest. Identifying zoomorphs Many attempts to interpret Australian rock art refer to endeavours of estimating the age of motifs by assuming that they are depictions of Pleistocene animals or their tracks. Such claims have been made throughout the 20th century and continue into the present century (Bednarik 2013d). Basedow (1904, 1907, 1914) was the first to recognise both the existence of Pleistocene rock art in Australia and the presence there of humans in that period. He first suggested that large bird track-like petroglyphs at Balparana in South Australia could be of Genyornis, a giant bird that became extinct at least 45 ka (45,000 years) ago. He later added the presumed tracks of Diprotodon at Yunta Springs and Wilkindinna, two more sites in the region. However, the lithology of the sites renders such great ages highly unlikely; they occur on low metamorphism rocks such as tillites, slates, mudstones and schists, offering little resistance to weathering. Moreover, the

Animals and Pareidolia petroglyphs do not resemble the tracks these species would presumably have made, based on their reasonable palaeontological reconstructions. Diprotodon was a massive marsupial resembling a large wombat (Figure 9), and it is very unlikely that hunter-gatherers, who tend to be expert trackers, would present such a misshapen track. It most likely depicts the footprint of a mythological creature, a subject often encountered in Australian rock art. More detailed was the claim that a complex petroglyph in the same region of South Australia, at Panaramitee North, depicts the head of a crocodile, Crocodylus porosus (Mountford 1929). However, the nearest finds of the species are from 1400 km north of the site, and no form of crocodile is known to have ever existed south of latitude 30°. Therefore even Mountford’s proposal that the rock art image might depict the sutures on a crocodile skull is without empirical support. Moreover, the correct meaning of the motif was obtained in 1942 from a Ngadjuri elder: it depicts a yarida magic object, which represents the spirit body of a human being as well as other things (Berndt 1987). Mountford removed the petroglyph from the site, using explosives, and reassembled the fragments in the South Australian Museum where it is now stored (Figure 10). Mountford (1928) also described a motif from Yunta Springs as a marine turtle, and Mountford and Edwards (1962, 1963) added to this a marine fish from Panaramitee North. In support of these ‘identifications’ the opinions of specialist zoologists were cited, as if this testimony provided additional weight to the determination. However, as we have already noted, zoological or palaeontological qualifications are irrelevant to the matter, which can only be decided through special understanding of the perception, iconographic convention and graphic

Figure 9. Basedow’s depiction of a petroglyph he thought represents a Diprotodon track, on left, compared with the tracks of a similar but smaller marsupial, the extant wombat.

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Figure 10. The complex petroglyph motif from Panaramitee North, South Australia, described as the image of a crocodile head, and Mountford’s recording of it. The image is in fact of a magical object.

strategies of the artistic precepts of the culture in question. On the basis of having identified two marine creatures and noting that the sea is at present over 100 miles from the sites, Mountford and Edwards (1964: 850) proposed that the images must have been made at a time when the sea was much closer to the sites. However, the last time the sea was anywhere near these places was in the Early and Middle Eocene transgression, some 51 million years before humans first appeared in Australia. This renders the claim particularly interesting, because it hinges on the zoological verification, and it needs to be asked why the experts consulted were certain that the two images were of sea creatures. The zoological opinion of the fish expert, that a sea bottom species was depicted, was most probably prompted by the placement of both eyes on what was intuitively perceived as a dorsal view (Figure 11). This illustrates one of the most common errors in interpretation attempts of rock art, the misapplication of anatomical canons to alien systems of perception and depiction. The depiction of both eyes on profile views of all animals is a very common feature in Australian rock art, as is the convention that is often called ‘twisted perspective’ (Derȩgowski 1995). It

Animals and Pareidolia

Figure 11. Recording of the ‘fish’ petroglyph at Panaramitee North, interpreted as a sea bottom fish by Mountford and Edwards.

is amply apparent that most zoomorphic rock art of the world does not consist of naturalistic imagery of the type one would see in a zoological textbook. Rather, most iconic rock art conforms with cultural conventions that are very different from contemporary European or Western standards. For instance the eyes, if that is what they are, on the Panaramitee North fish, if that is what it depicts, are not placed to imply that it represents a demersal fish, such as a flounder (in which one eye migrates to the other side of the body during metamorphosis). This is simply a graphic convention typical of Aboriginal rock art. Similarly, in attributing the presumed petroglyph of a turtle to a marine species, the commenting curator of reptiles may have been guided by such anatomical details as the shape of the flippers, when in fact such features would be unimportant to someone who has never seen a marine turtle (Figure 12). The mistake of assuming that all rock art motifs are precise graphic depictions of real objects is at the root of most misdiagnoses in rock art interpretation. Not only are they schematised and conventionalised abstractions, many of the objects depicted do not even exist in the real world. Biomorphs may depict mythological creatures, and tracks may indicate their footprints. Other objects may portray perishable artefacts that we cannot even know once existed. Therefore rock art interpretation by cultural aliens is likely to lead to false assumptions prompting false hypotheses. We have to contend with literally thousands of these in the academic literature about rock art. The next example concerns a set of nine presumed tracks of Genyornis at Eucolo Creek, also in South Australia. First published by Hall et al. (1951), Tindale (1951) proposed this identification on the basis of the large size of the tracks, about 45 cm. There are several objections to this proposal. To begin with, it is illogical, because the footprints are much larger than those Genyornis would have made, therefore size is not a valid variable. The petroglyphs of the site also include distinctive tracks of the dingo, the native dog that was introduced into Australia less than 4 ka (4000 years) ago — at least 40 ka after Genyornis had

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Figure 12. Apparent zoomorph at Yunta Springs, South Australia, ‘identified’ as a marine turtle by Mountford and Edwards (1962).

become extinct. The rock art is not likely to survive for such a long period on the unstable metamorphic rock, and it also fails to resemble the tracks the longextinct species would have made. Finally, Genyornis does not even seem to have occurred that far west. More recently Gunn et al. (2011) presented a water-damaged, poorly protected rock painting from a site in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, and suggested that it depicts Genyornis newtoni. The extinction date of the large bird is well known because of the many hundreds of dated fossil eggshell fragments that show that it disappeared rather abruptly at 50 ± 5 ka ago (Miller et al. 1999; cf. Gillespie 2004). Besides, its distribution was limited to south-eastern Australia, and its range never extended to the north or west of the continent, so the claim stands on rather shaky evidence. The almost unprotected location of the image, in a region that experiences seasonal torrential rains, as well as the seepage of interstitial water from the sandstone’s bedding planes that is readily evident suggest that the painting can only be up to a millennium or so old. Similarly, the sandstone stack forming the site is subject to relatively rapid granular as well as mass exfoliation. No rock painting in the entire world has been shown to have survived from the Pleistocene in such a vulnerable and erosion-susceptible location. In fact the literature on the taphonomy (relative survival conditions) of such rock paintings implies their swift deterioration, and they can disappear within a few centuries (e.g. Trezise and Wright 1966; Donaldson 2012). The notion that this one painting should be in excess of 50 ka old is unrealistic, and it is contradicted by the characteristics of the motif itself. For instance it features indications of x-ray treatment, which would place it in the last few millennia. A line across the body could be either an alimentary canal or a wing-line. In the former case it

Animals and Pareidolia indicates a recent antiquity; in the latter it refutes the identification of a flightless bird. However, the most important objection to Gunn et al.’s ‘identification’ is that, very clearly, the image is not naturalistic, as indicated by many of its defining features. For instance there is the ‘twisted perspective’ of its feet, the obvious fact that its point of gravity would render it impossible to stand as it does, the absence of tail feathers (present in all flightless large birds), and the shape of the head and the neck would exclude classification as Genyornis. While this latter argument is invalid, precisely because it cannot be known which attributes are diagnostic, it does expose the crucial issue: the pareidolic reading by a cultural alien latches onto aspects of an image that confirm the ‘identification’ the visual centre of his brain has already made, and ignores all those that contradict the favoured impression (Figure 13). This, of course, applies to all iconographic determinations of meaning in rock art — or in seeing Rorschach inkblots. Recently archaeologist Bruno David has established that the rock mass that through its exfoliation created the panel on which the aviform image occurs fell to the ground much more recently than the extinction of the bird, which refutes the claim further. Murray and Chaloupka (1984) considered the possible depictions of several Pleistocene megafaunal species in the painted rock art of Arnhem Land, but failed

Figure 13. Gunn et al.’s recording of an aviform pictogram they interpret as Genyornis, indicating some of the diagnostic features they disregard.

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Myths about Rock Art to present any persuasive examples. These paintings also occur in poorly protected sandstone shelters and nothing suggests that any of them could be more than a few millennia old. More relevantly, none of the motifs considered by these authors exhibit any diagnostic features of the species or genera concerned, Palorchestes, Thylacoleo, Protomnodon or Sthenurus. The authors concede themselves that scientific confirmation is lacking, that “images are suggestive but not conclusive”, and that “it must be made very clear that the connection at present is of the most tenuous kind” (Murray and Chaloupka 1984: 112, 114). They are somewhat more confident concerning the case for Zaglossus, but then admit that even if that is what was depicted, it would not demonstrate a Pleistocene age. Most of the taxons they consider probably were extinct by 41 ka ago. This is suggested not only by the actual fossil evidence (Roberts et al. 2001; Grün et al. 2009; Prideaux et al. 2010), but also by the disappearance at that time of Sporormiella fungus spores, deriving mainly from the dung of mega-herbivores, in cores taken from Lynch’s Crater in Queensland (Rule et al. 2012). Again, this magnitude of antiquity is simply unrealistic for the Arnhem Land rock paintings. Moreover, Murray and Chaloupka made several crucial errors in recording the rock art imagery they rely on, which have been explained by Lewis (1986). In their interpretation of the ‘Zaglossus’ motif they combined elements of two separate zoomorphs and read them as forming a single motif. We have noted this kind of error before, in the combination of several pictograms to form the image of a ‘pterosaur’ in Utah, and as it is a common mistake in rock art interpretation which we will encounter again. In all probability, Murray and Chaloupka’s recording of Palorchestes is attributable to the same kind of misreading. Then there is the proposition by Trezise (1993) that an image from Cape York Peninsula is of Diprotodon. The painting in question presents almost no anatomical feature attributed to that species and appears to be very recent, possibly being of a pig, an introduced animal in Australia. This myth never found its way into the archaeological literature, in contrast to the possibly most absurd of these Australian megafauna claims, those by Akerman (1998, 2009; Akerman and Willing 2009). This author seems to have a fixation with finding Thylacoleo carnifex images: he found no less than three at various times. That species is thought to have become extinct about 43 ka ago and there are no fossils known from the region where Akerman purports to have found its images, the Kimberley of north-western Australia. The paintings he describes are exposed to the rain, are certainly less than 2000 years old, and feature no details reminiscent of Thylacoleo (Figure 14). But it is especially Akerman’s convoluted reasoning that needs to be considered here. His “indisputable evidence”, as he calls it, consists of his opinion that the image resembles his preferred interpretation more than it resembles Thylacinus

Animals and Pareidolia

Figure 14. (a) Akerman’s recording of a zoomorph lacking a tail tip, to which he added another tail tip and then determined from that detail the species, even though the tail implies another species. (b) Reconstruction of Thylacoleo by Murray (1978).

cynocephalus, and that the ‘tufted tail-tip’ points to the purported Thylacoleo depictions of Murray and Chaloupka. The presence of a tail-tip tuft of hair on thylacines is historically known (they survived to the 1930s in Tasmania), but nothing is known about the appearance of the tail of Thylacoleo. Similarly, the distinctively striped markings of the thylacines are well known (hence its name Tasmanian tiger), whereas nothing is known about the fur, if any was present, on the alternative genus. The tail-tip tuft on two Arnhem Land images previously presented by Murray and Chaloupka (1984), which also resemble Thylacinus more than Thylacoleo, provides no support for the depiction of Thylacoleo. Moreover, the tail detail Akerman attributed to the image is not even from the same motif, but belongs to another, largely incomplete motif nearby (Figure 14a), which he interprets as a second individual of the same species from a body part that is lacking on the first figure. His eagerness to confirm his own 1998 claim has led to this careless reasoning, instilling new meaning in the proverb ‘painting the lion from the claw’: Akerman identifies an image from a body part not present on the image, that is not even diagnostic for the species he names, but for another he eschews, and which also bears the striped body depicted in the motif. Also, the prominent and pointed ears Akerman himself observes are unlikely to be of his favoured genus, but occur on many of the generally accepted rock art images of thylacines. Having not even seen this Kimberley figure (he only had photographs of it, provided by a tourist) or examined its context or the state of claimed superimpositions, Akerman’s report was premature and its precipitate publication in an international archaeology journal preserved imaginative statements proper refereeing would have challenged (Akerman and Willing 2009). Not content with ‘identifying’ two images of Thylacoleo in the Kimberley, Akerman (2009) went on to present yet another example of this genus, this time from the lower reaches of the Drysdale River. The painting he illustrates closely resembles both the living animal and other images presumed to depict thylacines, including the only example known from Victoria (Gunn 2002: Fig. 10). He associates the zoomorph with what he states represents a multi-barbed spear, a

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Myths about Rock Art weapon probably of the most recent history of Australia (Davidson 1934), and his only support of the notion of great antiquity is that there is no spearthrower depicted. This conflicts with the view that Pleistocene Mungo man (WLH-3) suffered from ‘woomera elbow’, i.e. severe osteoarthritis in the right elbow (cf. Habgood and Franklin 2008). Another rather confused archaeological interpretation of Australian rock art concerns the depiction of an exotic megafaunal species at a Kimberley site called Deer Rock or Reindeer Rock. There is a long line of biomorphs that appear to be quadrupeds bearing antlers. Since deer have never existed in Australia prior to 1860, archaeologists decided that this ‘procession of deer’ must have been created by an Aboriginal who had travelled to the Indonesian islands, seen deer there, and returned to the Kimberley to depict them on rock. It was even suggested, without any credible evidence, that the paintings are many thousands of years old, but as deer were introduced on the Wallacean islands only 4000 years ago, this limited their potential maximum age to that order of magnitude. This provides another example of the convoluted reasoning rock art interpretation has generated. It was a non-archaeologist, David Welch (2012), who pointed out that ethnographic evidence implies that the figures depict in fact dancers engaged in a specific ritual involving dancers with elaborate headdresses moving on all fours (Figure 15). Thus the example of Deer Rock provides a fair indication of the bizarre explanations pareidolic rock art interpretation can engender. The same applies to the thousands of other ‘identifications’ of animal species in world rock art: they are based on pareidolia and autosuggestion. While in Australia their incidence is comparatively rare, and limited to the above listed examples, they are considerably more common elsewhere. A case in point is the United States, from where only a small sample can be offered here. Images of proboscideans have been frequently reported in the rock art and portable palaeoart of that country, usually with the implication that these and other purported megafaunal depictions imply a Pleistocene antiquity. The figurative quality of these presumed depictions of elephantine zoomorphs varies considerably. For instance two petroglyphs at the Track Rocks site near Barnesville, Ohio, present relatively life-like representations, clearly forming discrete motifs, featuring what resemble trunks, tusks, full bodies, tails and legs, all consistent with anatomical details of elephants (Figure 16). Other such imagery in the rock art of the USA is considerably less detailed, presenting only doubtful proboscidean aspects, or it may even comprise fortuitous combinations of several unrelated features that have been collectively interpreted as forming the image of a mammoth. The Barnesville ‘mastodon’ images occur together with both pre-Historic petroglyphs and more recent images made with metal implements, and the

Animals and Pareidolia

Figure 15. Some of the many biomorphs at Deer Rock, Kimberley, which depict Aboriginal dancers with headdresses on all fours, not deer (photograph by David Welch).

sandstone site features many inscriptions and dates of the 19th and 20th centuries (Read and Whittlesey 1877; Swauger 1974). A microscopic study of the inscribed dates (Bednarik 2015a) established that the taphonomic threshold of retaining fractured quartz grains is currently between 1860 and 1880 CE, and the frequency of impacted grains retention rises gradually through the subsequent decades to reach its maximum in the early 20th century. This provides a rough but reliable calibration for the undated elements present at the site, be they inscriptions or petroglyphs. The probable elephant depiction in Figure 16 has yielded adequate data for a probability curve that suggests the image was executed after 1910 CE, but that it may have been made as recently as in the 1970s. The second proboscidean figure is also of the 20th century. Similarly, two more proboscidean petroglyphs seem to be relatively naturalistic depictions of elephants and appear comparatively recent. One is an elephantine figure with raised trunk, ear, eye and all four legs indicated, shown within a rectangle, at Rainbow Rocks in Pennsylvania (Bednarik 2015a: Fig. 9). The other is a similarly detailed pecked outline from an unspecified site in New Mexico, also appearing to be modern (Carol Patterson, pers. comm.). The principal significance of this issue is that when proboscideans are perceived in North American palaeoart, this is likely to be cited in support of a Pleistocene age

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Figure 16. Proboscidean petroglyph at Track Rocks site east of Barnesville, Ohio, USA, purportedly depicting a mastodon. Direct dating attributes it to the 20th century and it represents perhaps an elephant.

of the imagery, because such species are thought to have become extinct before the Holocene (Faith and Surovell 2009). Propositions of this kind are certainly not limited to this continent. Therefore the purported megafaunal likenesses need to be considered on their own merits: there are no such credible claims from South America, and only two authentic graphic depictions and one figurine are known from the Pleistocene of Asia (Bednarik 2013e); while from Africa animal depictions supposedly attributable to the Pleistocene are so far limited to two sites (Bednarik 2013f). Designations of American petroglyphs as proboscideans have appeared throughout the 20th century and into the present. Both the Columbian mammoth and mastodon were certainly met by the early colonisers of the continent, but none of the proposals of their depiction could so far be credibly substantiated. The next examples are the two purported mammoth petroglyphs at the Upper Sand Island site near Bluff, Utah (Malotki and Wallace 2011; cf. Malotki and Weaver 2002: 2). They occur at a height of about 5 m on a vertical cliff of Navajo Sandstone, which rendered close examination difficult until Ekkehart Malotki arranged the erection of a scaffold at the site in May 2013. This rendered intensive microscopy of one of the two images possible, also involving various other anthropogenic and natural markings of the surrounding panel. About 1 m below the main focus of the investigation, an arrangement of various marks defined as ‘mammoth 1’ by Malotki and Wallace, occurs a stylistically very distinctive anthropomorph, executed in typical ‘hocker’ or ‘orant’ attitude. It is safely attributable to the

Animals and Pareidolia Puebloan period and possibly dates from around 1200 CE (Malotki, pers. comm.). Pueblo II and III people, dating c. 850–1300 CE (Bostwick 2001: 428; cf. Malotki and Weaver 2002: Fig. 3), developed their characteristic cliff dwellings, and there are numerous postholes cut into the cliff of the site. Metrical determination of the macro-wanes on the edges of the Puebloan anthropomorph allowed calibration of the age of a zoomorph superimposed over ‘mammoth 1’ (Figure 17) to between 3700 bp and 2870 bp. The underlying arrangement interpreted as a mammoth figure is slightly older, but still well under 4000 years old (Bednarik 2013g, 2015a). Therefore the purported mammoth figure falls very significantly short of the currently proposed extinction time of the Columbian mammoth, which is in the order of 10 to 13 ka bp (Faith and Surovell 2009). This is confirmed by the geological context, which renders a Pleistocene antiquity of the supporting rock panel beyond credibility (Gillam and Wakeley 2013). Moreover, microscopic examination established that what is easily seen as a single motif is in fact a combination of five separate elements, one of which is a natural feature, the others being of different ages. What is seen as the front of the head and the trunk of a mammoth is a solution feature related to a natural fissure in the rock, and this as well as the other four elements is repeated in isolation elsewhere on the same panel. The vertical internal barring of the main element is a feature thought to be typical of the Glen Canyon outline style, which is undated but has been attributed to various mid- or late Holocene antiquities. One of the more credible and recent estimates places it between 3000 and 400 BCE (Cole 2009: 45; cf. Turner 1971). Some of the American elephant images, such as the purported mastodon engraving on a pendant made of whelk shell from Holly Oak, Delaware, are clearly fakes. This object, supposedly found in 1864 (Kraft and Thomas 1976), was eventually radiocarbon-dated to about 1500 years bp (Griffin et al. 1988). Further unambiguous fakes are the two red elephant paintings at Birch Creek, Ferron, Utah (Malotki and Weaver 2002: 192). They and a series of deer, bison and ibex at another, nearby site were, according to local residents, created in the 1950s by a named individual “with the clear intention of misleading certain archaeologists”. Hubbard (1927), the Curator of Archaeology who presented the dinosaur image from Havasupai Canyon as reported above, also described, in close proximity to that motif, “an elephant attacking a large man”. The petroglyph of a mastodon near Moab, Utah was reported by Gould (1935), but has been partially destroyed by vandalism subsequently, and more probably depicts a bear with a fish in its mouth (Malotki and Weaver 2002: Pl. 200). An elephant-like image in Yellow Rock Canyon, Nevada (Tuohy 1969; Clewlow and Uchitel 2005), was probably made in the 1840s (Layton 1976). A petroglyph at China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station presented as a possible proboscidean by Kaldenberg (2005) has also been refuted by Malotki and Wallace (2011), as has been another from Hieroglyphic Canyon, Arizona, and one more from near

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Figure 17. (a) Petroglyphs of the Upper Sand Island site interpreted as ‘mammoth’ and ‘bison’ images by Malotki and Wallace (2011). (b) Deconstruction of the ‘mammoth 1’ arrangement at Upper Sand Island, showing an amoeba-like outline with internal barring, possibly a Glen Canyon-style zoomorph (black); a superimposed densely pecked shape (red); a double-arc motif (green); a possible further line (blue); and a groove caused by water-induced accelerated granular erosion (yellow).

Suwanee, New Mexico. Malotki and Wallace also discredit the elephantine status of a ‘mammoth’ image at Manila, Utah (Thompson 1993), and the ‘mastodon’ at Craneman Hill near Mayer, Arizona. All of these images are thought to depict something other than proboscideans, and Malotki and Wallace (2011) correctly attribute these ‘identifications’ to pareidolia. This leaves just one more American palaeoart depiction of a proboscidean, the engraving on a bone fragment from the Old Vero Site, Vero Beach, Florida. Although the precise provenience of the unidentified bone fragment of 40 cm

Animals and Pareidolia length is unknown, Purdy et al. (2011) have provided persuasive evidence, in the form of rare earth element analysis, that the bone could well derive from either stratum 2 or 3 of that site — although the divergence in La, Ce, Pr and Nd is of concern (Purdy et al. 2011: Fig. 2). So is their reliance on factors such as uniform coloration and the distinctive microscopic difference between original grooves and a replication groove made with a razor blade (op. cit.: Figs 4c and 4d); or that a metal tool was not used in the making of the image. An astute forger would have little difficulty using a stone tool, or in weathering the object and providing it with artificial patination. In the end Purdy et al.’s case rests mostly on the continuity of mineralisation across the indentations (op. cit.: 2011). Their suggestion that this find may support the case for direct Pleistocene connection between North America and Europe is very farfetched indeed, and while there are a few roughly matching mammoth images in Franco-Cantabrian caves, those from Siberia would be far more relevant. They do not, however, resemble the Vero Beach engraving (Bednarik 2013e). Nevertheless, the specimen from Florida remains the best-supported claim for an authentic American proboscidean image. Numerous other claims have appeared over more than 100 years (Bednarik 1990a), besides those of ‘elephants’, involving several other extinct megafaunal species or genera. While there can be no doubt that humans met and hunted megafauna of the Final Pleistocene in North America, evidence of figurative Ice Age rock art from that continent remains as elusive as it does from most other continents. Claims of the depiction of Pleistocene fauna in North America range from bovines to camelids, from horses to antelopes, and include even one rhino, an animal that never existed in that continent. Among these assertions are those of Whitley (1996), that the extinct western horse has been depicted at Legend Rock, Wyoming; or that a partially patinated petroglyph at Surprise Tank, California, is of a camelid (Whitley 1999). The second claim cites the opinion of a palaeontologist in support (Whitley 2009), which as we have already noted is of no relevance. Palaeontologists or zoologists are trained to identify species or their remains; they have no innate understanding whatsoever of alien palaeoart imagery and their pronouncements about it are less relevant than those of illiterates or infants (Bednarik 2011a). Even more fantastic are the interpretations Urbaniak (2013) offers for a number of “unidentified” petroglyphs in Utah and Arizona. They include the African roan antelope (Hippotragus equinus); the bluebuck or blue antelope (Hippotragus leucophaeus), also from Africa but now extinct; Aepycamelus, a camel genus of the Miocene of much of the USA that became extinct 4.9 million years ago; Camelops, a western United States camel genus that disappeared with the end of the Pleistocene; Deinotherium, a proboscidean from parts of Eurasia and Africa that never existed in the Americas and survived only to the Early Pleistocene;

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Myths about Rock Art and saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica), which did occupy Alaska and the Yukon in the Late Pleistocene. Urbaniak explains the inclusion of Asian candidates by arguing that rock artists in the American Southwest might have remembered the species from before they left central Asia, although he is silent on why he also considers two African species. Equally, he does not elaborate on the relevance of species that disappeared long before North America was first colonised by humans. The following example illustrates particularly well how the logic of using animal ‘identifications’ to establish the age of the rock art can lead to the most bizarre deductions. Some Chinese archaeologists recorded a group of petroglyphs in Inner Mongolia and defined them as images of giraffes (Figure 18). Figure 18. Recording Because giraffes became extinct in China during of ‘Tertiary giraffe’ petroglyphs from northern the Tertiary period, millions of years ago, they then China. concluded that the images must have been made in the Tertiary (i.e. prior to human presence in Asia; Liu 1991). Before this is seen as an extreme example it needs to be recalled that there are numerous instances when it was claimed that rock art images are of the much earlier dinosaurs. The generic importance of this is that there is no logical difference between the claim that an image of a group of giraffes proves its antiquity, and the claim that an image of any other zoomorph proves its age. Clearly in both cases the question is: what prompts the interpreter’s belief to know the meaning inherent in patches of pigment or arrangements of anthropogenic (man-made) depressions on rock? Using the same logic it could be proposed that a panel of rock paintings in the Kimberley of north-western Australia (Figure 19) also depicts giraffes, because that is what they resemble. Fortunately the reporting scientist was David Welch, who correctly identified the ‘giraffes’ as Aboriginal dancers, saving Australian researchers the embarrassment of having to explain the presence of giraffe depictions by assuming that the artist had travelled to Africa and back home (Welch 2012). In concluding this subchapter we return to the Australian contribution to the misidentification of zoomorphs, but this time with a different twist. Conventional wisdom suggests that kangaroos, endemic to that continent and nearby islands, indicate an Australian connection. Now, if our perception were able to recognise

Animals and Pareidolia

Figure 19. Not Antipodean giraffes, but a queue of Aboriginal dancers (photograph by David Welch).

Figure 20. ‘Kangaroo images’ of the world. (a) Rock art image of a ‘kangaroo’ at Tsodilo Hills, Zimbabwe, emphasised by D-Stretch treatment (photograph by Anne Stoll). (b) Painting of a ‘kangaroo’ in Chaturbhujnath nala, Madhya Pradesh, India. (c) and (d) ‘Kangaroo’ petroglyphs from Cristobal Farm, New Mexico, USA. (e) ‘Kangaroo’ motif from Comanche Gap, New Mexico, USA, with author (photograph by Jean Clottes).

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Myths about Rock Art what is depicted in rock art, images that resemble kangaroos, an anatomically very distinctive family, should be limited to Australia. But when we look around the world, we can find numerous motifs that offer initial likenesses of macropods (Figure 20). Of course we know that they cannot be kangaroos, so we soon find some ‘logical’ explanation why the first impression must be wrong; but this is only possible because we are almost instantly able to suppress the immediate pareidolic intuition. Without that reaction to an obvious geographical incongruity we would complete the visual recognition process by finding confirming aspects of the image, irrespective of whether the image actually depicts what we think it does. In other words, a ‘reasonable’ interpretation may be just as false as an unreasonable one. The difference is simply that we would accept it without considering contradictory elements. Or to rephrase this insight: reasonableness of an ‘interpretation’ is an insidious variable, and may be the worse of two evils.

Chapter 3

Archaeological Folklores about Dating The bulls and horses of Iberia There is full continuity between the previous Chapter and the present: the interpretation of rock art and its dating are intimately intertwined, sometimes reasonably so (e.g. when exotic artefacts are depicted in the ‘contact art’ of colonised regions), but more commonly without good reason. As we have seen, zoomorphs are often ‘identified’ in order to justify attributing Pleistocene ages to them, and the chronological sequences derived from such determinations are then applied to dating other rock art. This is such a widespread practice that it would be unrealistic to attempt detailing the thousands of such contentions here. The practice is more common in various parts of Asia (India, Mongolia, central Asia, Azerbaijan) and in Europe than it is in Africa or South America, or even in Australia — despite the details given in the previous Chapter. But to be realistic, instances of it occur practically everywhere rock art is being studied. Based on the superficial belief that the Pleistocene cave art of south-western Europe is typified by animal figures (numerically they account in fact only for a small part of the corpus), there is a global expectation that Ice Age rock art should generally be of zoomorphs. This has led to many attributions of animal figures to the Pleistocene, from central and eastern Europe to India and China, and even in North America. The perhaps most common example is the ‘identification’ of bovid images as aurochs. Cattle images were a favoured subject in many agrarian societies, and rock art interpreters then often perceive these as wild bovids. Although the aurochs only became extinct in 1627 and was still common across much of Europe in Roman times, there is a tendency to regard their depiction in rock art as indicating a Pleistocene age. The issue is complicated further by the existence, particularly in Iberia, of extant bovid breeds that rather closely resemble the aurochs, including the Spanish fighting bulls, the Tudanca cattle of Cantabria, the semi-feral Pajuna in Spain, or the Maronesa breed of northern Portugal. These match the aurochs in body shape, horn shape and coat colour, and very probably in many genetic respects. Yet any bovid zoomorph in the rock art of the Iberian Peninsula is automatically attributed to the extinct species Bos primigenius, which has led to some dramatic developments in rock art research and to some rather consequential mistakes. Much the same applies to the depiction of horses: although very common since they were re-introduced across Europe during Neolithic times (Bednarik 2012b), rock art equids, especially in Europe, are generically attributed to wild horses 37

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Myths about Rock Art (Equus ferus solutre­ensis, presumably derived from E. remagensis remagensis). Danish rock art researcher Bjarne Stig Hansen (1997) reported the occurrence of hundreds of horse petroglyphs on a four-metre-high wall that is almost two kilometres long, at Castro near the Spanish village of Yecla de Yeltes. The site has never been investigated “as some of the owners are wary of archaeologists” and refuse them access. These ‘horse’ petroglyphs can only be of Roman or later age, based on the antiquity of the structure (Bednarik 2016a, 2016b). There would be so much potential to declare these images Palaeolithic, as archaeologists are prone to do. For instance at the nearby site Siega Verde, a number of zoomorphs occur along the Agueda river over a stretch of 1300 metres, on both sides of a most impressive masonry bridge. Their number is variously defined as 60, 440 and 560, depending on whom to believe. None of them can be described as being of Palaeolithic style, but as they consist mostly of horses and Spanish fighting bulls, archaeologists universally proclaimed them to be of the Pleistocene and over 20 ka old. Hansen reports that the villagers of nearby Castillejo de Martin Viejo, who had always known that the rock art was made by “shepherds whiling away the time”, had had a good laugh when archaeologists (such as Manuel Santoja and Rosario Pérez) told them that the images were Palaeolithic. The archaeologists, in turn, were not deterred by the objections of such ‘ignoramuses’, as they regarded the villagers, and their argument that the site could bring the riches of tourism to the economically depressed region prevailed. It is not suggested here that the archaeologists conspired with the relevant authorities to mislead UNESCO into declaring the Siega Verde a World Heritage Site in 2010; the circumstances suggest that the gatekeepers of the human past involved in the ‘authentication’ and eventual nomination of the site were genuinely ignorant. The acceptance of the Siega Verde petroglyph site as World Heritage under the false pretext of Pleistocene antiquity shows two things. First, UNESCO is incapable of securing balanced advice on such issues, and this is not the first time that it has accepted properties on the basis of false pretences. Secondly, and more importantly, is the concept that rock art is of particular merit to exemplifying cultural heritage of world significance when it is (a) located in Europe and (b) is of the Upper Palaeolithic. The first part of this does not come as a surprise: UNESCO is Eurocentric and the World Heritage List demonstrates this beyond doubt. The second criterion is much more interesting. It seems to be based on a view that the older a cultural relic is, the more important it is. And yet no rock art older than the Upper Palaeolithic is on the List. There are thousands of Pleistocene rock art sites in the other continents, especially in Australia and southern Africa, yet not any of them are on the World Heritage List. Many of them are of Middle Palaeolithic provenience, some even of the Lower Palaeolithic, so they are older, and that includes even one in Europe, the Mousterian petroglyph site of La Ferrassie in France (Peyrony 1934).

Archaeological Folklores about Dating The attribution of the Siega Verde petroglyphs to the Pleistocene is entirely based on the iconography and pareidolic species determination of the images (Balbín et al. 1991; Balbín and Alcolea 1994; Bahn and Vertut 1997: 130). No archaeological occupation evidence has been reported from the site. Most images seem to depict horses and Spanish bulls, as well as a few goats and deer. It has also been claimed that there are images of woolly rhinoceros, bison, megaceros, reindeer and felines, but these were not published, nor are there in fact any images at the site that resemble these animals by any stretch of the imagination. Even UNESCO admits to having doubts about the interpretation of the last-named animal figures (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/866). The style of all zoomorphs at the site is decidedly not Palaeolithic, and the idea that the actual rock panels on which they occur could be of the Pleistocene is geologically incongruous. The narrow valley is being gauged into the soft slate bedrock by coarse quartz sand and detritus carried by a dynamic river flooding regularly to depths of six to eight metres. All petroglyphs occur within this flood zone and it is ludicrous to assume that they could have survived this erosional onslaught for millennia. In fact most of them are of shallow single-incision scratches, less than a millimetre deep. The site has been completely concealed during its recent history by a terrace deposit containing Roman shards, and it is self-evident that both the deposition and eventual removal of this sediment would destroy such faint images. Moreover, the highest lying of the few pecked figures are on deeply patinated rock faces, but bear no patination. They are superimposed over very shallow bundles of subparallel incisions that are fully patinated (Figure 21). The filiformes, as they are called, occur at other sites in the region where they are attributed to the Iron Age (e.g. at Vermelhosa; Abreu et al. 2000). Comparative colorimetry (Bednarik 2009a) suggests that the filiform patterns are in the order of twenty times older than the superimposed zoomorphs. Two obvious questions arise then: if the zoomorphs were of the Upper Palaeolithic, how old would that make the earlier filiformes? And, why has not a single one of the many commenting archaeologists noticed any of these aspects? The most disturbing aspect of the Siega Verde fiasco, however, is that in the year before UNESCO inscribed the site on its List in 2010, a scientific assessment of the rock art’s antiquity was published in a foremost archaeological journal (Bednarik 2009b). It reported that most of the site’s petroglyphs are of the 20th century, and almost none are likely to be in excess of 200 years old. This finding was based on several factors, but mostly on a metrical analysis of the fluvial erosion of hundreds of rock inscriptions that are also present at the site. Many of these were conveniently furnished with dates by their makers, facilitating precise calibration of the river’s abrasive action at different elevations above the normal water level. This showed conclusively that by about 200 years ago, even the deepest inscriptions would begin to disappear completely within the elevation

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Figure 21. Detail of two pecked, almost unpatinated lines that form part of the neck of a supposedly Upper Palaeolithic equid petroglyph superimposed over much earlier, deeply patinated incised lines, possibly of the Iron Age. Siega Verde, western Spain.

of 6 m above the normal river level. The same process operates on the deeply hammered petroglyphs, so the calibration curve established from the known dates of the inscriptions can be safely applied to the rock art. Yet this finding, which confirms all other credible age indicators for the rock art, was simply ignored by UNESCO. This is not the only such failure of the international agency, which has been consistently implicated in measures to deliberately preserve the fantasy of the notion of European primacy in the introduction of rock art. For an illuminating comparison, early in the 20th century Europeans revelled in the belief that humans first evolved in England, based on the 1912 Piltdown fraud that enthralled archaeologists for decades (Bednarik 2013b). It prompted the disregard of the 1924 discovery of Australopithecus in South Africa until Weiner et al. (1953) unmasked the swindle. In the field of Pleistocene rock art, the falsehood that it originates in south-western Europe still persists to this day, and is being

Archaeological Folklores about Dating perpetuated by such practices as listing dozens of European sites as Palaeolithic on the World Heritage List, even though many of them are not even remotely of the Pleistocene. Apart from Siega Verde, there is a whole series of petroglyph sites in the nearby lower Côa valley of northern Portugal. Like the Agueda, the Côa is a southern tributary of the Douro that has been deeply cut into soft metamorphics along its lower course, where any rock exposures can only be of the Holocene period. And yet the petroglyphs of all these sites, which resemble those at Siega Verde, were also all attributed to the Pleistocene, and on the same basis. Again, there is not a single image of an extinct animal, and there is not a single specimen of Palaeolithic ‘signs’, the pictograph-like or hieroglyph-like geometric designs that quintessentially define the rock art of the Upper Palaeolithic. Again there are numerous inscriptions, many of them with dates, and some of these are clearly more weathered and patinated than the adjacent purported Pleistocene zoomorphs (Bednarik 1995b). There are also numerous depictions of clocks, locomotives, bridges, crucifixion scenes and so forth, and they are often clearly older than the purported Pleistocene zoomorphs (Figure 22). Concerning the numerous horse and bull images in the Côa valley, there is at least one horse figure wearing a bridle, and although one archaeologist has argued that horses were domesticated in the Pleistocene, this is universally rejected by

Figure 22. Some of the petroglyphs of the ‘Palaeolithic’ rock art sites in the Côa valley, northern Portugal.

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Myths about Rock Art all others. Another decisive impediment to great age is the fact that numerous Côa petroglyphs dissect lichen thalli, which means that they must postdate them. All of the rock art concentrations in the valley coincide with the distribution of water mills in recent centuries. Some of the ‘Palaeolithic’ images have been claimed to be made with tools of carbon steel (Eastham 1999). Archaeologists fervently believing in the Palaeolithic age of the corpus commenced a massive excavation campaign in 1996, digging hundreds of trenches at numerous sites in the hope of finding petroglyphs covered by occupation deposits. They failed in all cases. They did find ceramics, the earliest being of the Neolithic and extending down to bedrock, together with numerous Neolithic microliths. There are simply no earlier sediments along the entire floor of the lower Côa valley. The excavators claimed that they found numerous hearths, yet to this date not a single radiocarbon date from charcoal has been reported. This factor alone implies that all data conflicting with the Pleistocene claims have been withheld. Nor are there any human or faunal remains, pollen analyses or any other of the kinds of studies usually forming part of such major Palaeolithic studies. In late 1999, as the water of the Pocinho dam adjacent to the Côa valley was lowered temporarily, a densely engraved panel of petroglyphs was found at the site Fariseu. Sediments covering part of the assemblage were excavated and it was found that “sterile fluvial levels alternate with colluvial deposits” (Anonymous 2000). In this colluvium some stone tools are said to have been recovered, but they have never been published. They are, in any case, irrelevant to the age of the rock art, because a colluvium is a sediment deposit that accumulated as a result of gravity, i.e. it derives from upslope and its time of deposition cannot be established: all of its components must be older, often very significantly older, than the time of sedimentation. So if a dinosaur tooth were found in the Fariseu colluvium, no doubt the archaeologists would claim that the rock art must be of the Mesozoic period. Similarly, the “sterile” fluvial deposits, resulting from the silting of the Pocinho reservoir, are irrelevant: we know that they must be younger than the completion date of the dam, 1982. Amazingly, the petroglyphs bear no patination whatsoever and look as if they had been made in the 20th century — which very probably they have (Figure 23). Nevertheless, the archaeologists claimed that some of the stones from the colluvium had been heated and secured thermoluminescence dates from them. They are, of course irrelevant, as are the ‘ages’ of all components of fluvial and colluvial sediments: they do not relate to the time of the sediment’s deposition. It is incredible that professional archaeologists should make such beginner’s mistakes. In the absence of any credible pre-Neolithic archaeological evidence, of any Pleistocene sediments and the many other factors pertaining to the series of Côa petroglyph sites the case for a Pleistocene antiquity seems doomed. And

Archaeological Folklores about Dating

Figure 23. The completely unpatinated and unweathered petroglyphs at Fariseu, Côa valley, falsely claimed to be 24,000 years old.

yet, this series of sites was inscribed on the World Heritage List in 1998, with the following incredible statement: “The exceptional concentration of rock engravings from the Upper Palaeolithic period, from 22,000 to 10,000 BC, is the most outstanding example of the early manifestation of human artistic creation in this form anywhere in the world”. Apart from the age attribution being spectacularly wrong, the authors of this statement have probably never heard of such sites as Lascaux, Chauvet, Cosquer or Altamira caves. There are many more images of Spanish fighting bulls, horses and goats engraved on open-air schistose rock panels around Iberia and into the Pyrenean mountains (Bahn 1995a, 1995b). The majority are horse figures, and their attribution to the Upper Palaeolithic has been reported in Spain from Domingo García (Martín Santamaría and Moure Romanillo 1981) and the nearby sites Carbonero Mayor, Bernardos and Ortigosa (Ripoll Lopez and Muncio Ganzalez 1994); Piedras Blancas near Escullar, Almería (Martinez 1986/87); in France from FornolsHaut, Campôme, in the French Pyrenees (Bahn 1985); and from Portugal at Ocreza. The last-mentioned site probably sums up the status of these claims: its sole image is a highly schematic zoomorph without head on rapidly eroding slate and it is completely inexplicable what could inspire the conviction that this

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Myths about Rock Art must be a Pleistocene motif. It brings to mind the claim that a few animal figures in Escoural Cave and a solitary equine motif at Mazouco, both also in Portugal. After the Mazouco figure was attributed to a Palaeolithic period (Jorge et al. 1981) that age was rejected by Baptista (1983: 63) when he found a stylistically similar equine motif at Vale da Casa (near the confluence of Côa and Douro), in what he defines as a clear Iron Age context. Scientific resolution is impossible because the Mazouco figure has been vandalised. The small group of zoomorphs in Escoural has long been viewed as being of the Pleistocene, although its style is not reminiscent of authentic Palaeolithic cave art. Escoural only contains occupation evidence from two periods, the Middle Palaeolithic and the Neolithic (Lejeune 1997). The former is restricted to the area of the previous entrance, which is now collapsed, and among the large boulders outside this area. Further finds from the Middle Palaeolithic and Neolithic occur, together with Chalcolithic material and cupules from the fortified settlement on the hill above the cave (Araújo and Lejeune 1995). While the rock art in this cave may still be of the Pleistocene, this does not appear to be likely and so far no evidence favouring that view has been presented. The Palaeolithic obsession All of this follows a long history of misdating another Iberian rock art corpus during much of the 20th century, the rock painting tradition of eastern Spain, called the Levantine rock art (Beltrán 1982). Again, there are no Palaeolithic ‘signs’ featured at any of the hundreds of sites, no extinct animal species, or any other indications of Pleistocene age. And yet this art was attributed not only to the Palaeolithic period, it was initially assigned to the very earliest part of the Upper Palaeolithic. Breuil (1948, 1952), for instance, placed the early Spanish Levantine paintings into the Perigordian (which effectively begins with the Neanderthal Châtelperronian and leads to the Gravettian), partly because of its stylistic similarities with the paintings of Lascaux which he mistakenly also regarded as Perigordian. He and others perceived this entire art corpus as essentially early Upper Palaeolithic. Martínez Santa-Olalla (1941), Pericot (1942), Bosch Gimpera (1956, 1967) and Hernandez Pacheco (1959), by contrast, placed it in the Holocene, usually the bulk of it in the Mesolithic, and both Almagro (1966) and Ripoll Perello (1964, 1968) agreed with this assignment, even extending the duration of the Levantine figurative art to the Neolithic. Jordá Cerda (1964) went further still, concurring with Martínez Santa-Olalla that the art is Neolithic and Bronze Age, with the ‘schematised’ figures extending into the Iron Age. After the rejection of the Pleistocene age, the Levantine shelter art was widely accepted as being of Mesolithic age for several decades, and published as such on countless occasions. Only during the late 1980s was this attribution finally

Archaeological Folklores about Dating abandoned, especially through the work of Beltrán (1982) and Hernández Pérez et al. (1988). The entire art corpus remains essentially undated, but the present consensus favours an age of Neolithic or younger. This is a classic example of a well-known, extensively studied and published major regional rock art tradition that has been attributed to virtually every single archaeological period from the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic to the Iron Age, i.e. to practically all preHistoric periods of the region for the past 40,000 years. The complete absence of any credible proof of Pleistocene antiquity did not prevent these claims, which are now assumed to be false, and which were based largely on stylistic assumptions and faulty archaeological reasoning. They were pure myths, as are any finite claims made about the age of this corpus even today. The obsession with attributing rock art to the Upper Palaeolithic is not at all restricted to Spain and Portugal; it is evident in many other countries. In reviewing Bahn’s list of European sites he claims to be of the Ice Age (Bahn and Vertut 1997: 42–43) it is evident that many of those outside of France and Spain provide no such proof. The two German sites he lists, Geißenklösterle and Hohler Fels, need to be deleted. Hahn’s (1988a, 1988b, 1988c, 1989; Conard and Uerpmann 2000) assertion of fragments of exfoliated rock paintings from the first site has been refuted; these are natural phenomena whose components have been identified (Bednarik 2002). The numerous exfoliated wall fragments from the Aurignacian layers of Hohler Fels (Figure 24), proposed to bear anthropogenic engravings on cave bear polishes (Hahn 1991, 1994), have been shown to feature only marks caused by coarse quartz grains embedded in the shaggy fur of the bears (Bednarik 2002a). This raises a new dimension to the subject of myths about rock art: the misidentification of natural rock markings as rock art, a subject we will consider in detail in Chapter 4. Bahn also needs to delete from his list the examples from Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Russia. The proposal of possible Palaeolithic paintings in Mladeč Cave (Oliva 1989) has been refuted by Bednarik (2006b), that concerning Bycí Skála by Svoboda et al. (2005). There has never been a credible claim from Cuciulat Cave, and those from Kapova and Ignatiev Caves in the Urals have also been proposed without much support. First questioned by Bednarik (1993a), they may no longer be justifiable now that Steelman et al. (2002) have provided three Holocene radiocarbon dates from three Ignatievskaya paintings (ranging approximately from 6030 to 7920 years bp). The most recent claim for Palaeolithic rock art in Germany was also supported by Bahn (Welker 2015), yet the equine petroglyphs of Gondershausen have been shown to be only a few centuries old (Bednarik 2016a). There have been other assertions of Pleistocene ages for central European rock art. Examples are the Kleines Schulerloch (Birkner 1938: Pl. 13) and Kastlgänghöhle (Bohmers 1939: 40) in Germany, refuted by Bosinski (1982: 6) and Freund (1957:

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Figure 24. One of numerous exfoliated rock fragments of cave bear polish with incisions made by quartz grains embedded in the animals’ fur, Hohler Fels, Germany. The markings have been interpreted as geometric engravings.

55); and two sites in Austria. Kohl and Burgstaller (1992) attributed Palaeolithic provenance to rock art at Stubwieswipfel on the Warscheneck mountain and in Kienbachklamm, a canyon near Bad Ischl. The animal heads at the first site, on rapidly eroding limestone, are no different from hundreds of other recent engravings made by hunters in the northern limestone belt of the Alps. The Kienbachklamm is a rich repository of recent historical petroglyphs but my exhaustive search failed to locate the motifs Kohl and Burgstaller imagined they saw, and from their publication it is almost certain that they interpreted natural features as images. This has perhaps happened more often than we might be tempted to think. An example is provided by Bahn himself, when he describes the ceiling of Church Hole, one of the caves at Creswell Crags, in England as featuring “the most richly carved and engraved ceiling in the whole of cave art”, bearing well over a hundred images (Ripoll et al. 2004). Noting the significant flaws in this and their previous report (Bahn et al. 2003), I questioned their reliability and deigned to suggest that some of the photographs showed natural features, not anthropogenic marks (Bednarik 2005). Bahn’s team responded with abuse (Ripoll et al. 2005) and presented yet another unsatisfactory recording of the main figure (Figure 25) — but they did abandon their false claims subsequently. By 2007 the number of motifs had shrunk to ten, of which only three were defined as “recognisable images”. However, the scientific information I had specifically requested remains unavailable, and there is no objective way to assess the “murky landscape of unsupported and untestable a priori, premature claims” (Montelle 2008) about a few engravings in this cave. Instead an irrelevant uranium/thorium date, not related to any rock art, has been provided. No explanation has been offered for the now withdrawn excessive claim of motif numbers, but from the patchy information available it appears that eighty or ninety ‘motifs’ are now regarded as natural surface features by Bahn and Pettitt (2007).

Archaeological Folklores about Dating This is not the first ill-fated British proposal of Pleistocene rock art. In 1912 H. Breuil and W. J. Sollas thought they had found Palaeolithic cave paintings in Bacon’s Hole, in Wales. It turned out that the red stripes, which were indeed of ochre, had been made by a workman only eighteen years previously. A claim of Palaeolithic rock art in the Wye Valley (Rogers 1981) was found to relate to natural grooves, and the “malachite inlay” consisted of green algae (Sieveking 1982). The Church Hole debacle was followed by a more careful proposal that an arrangement of natural features in Gough’s Cave (a site previously examined by the Church Hole team without finding this marking) was modified with an engraved line to resemble the back of a mammoth (Mullan et al. 2006). The groove in question does not, however, resemble the flow of an engraved line, judging from the photograph. Finally, more recently it has been proposed that a highly schematised possible zoomorph in an unnamed cave on the Gower Peninsula might depict a Figure 25. Three different reindeer (Nash et al. 2011). However, the published versions of the principal interpretation of the image is debatable, and ‘Palaeolithic’ motif in Church it certainly does not stylistically resemble Hole, United Kingdom, all having been produced by Bahn, Pettitt and authentic parietal art of the Pleistocene. A uranium-series determination suggests that Ripoll. All are unsatisfactory. the lines were engraved more than 12,500 years ago, but as we will see below, such results remain provisional. Even the attribution of some of the French parietal rock art to the Pleistocene is not beyond reproach. For instance it is often carelessly stated that the Lascaux 600 paintings and 1500 engravings are around 17 ka old, but the reality is rather different. Firstly, no rock art in this famous cave has been credibly dated. Initially, as noted above, Breuil and Peyrony placed the Lascaux art into the Perigordian (Bahn and Lorblanchet 1993), i.e. the earliest Upper Palaeolithic, but after charcoal from the poorly conducted excavations in the cave was analysed, the age of the art corpus was halved. Although substantially younger charcoal occurs in abundance in the cave, and often together with ochre, it was assumed without

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Myths about Rock Art good reason that all the art relates to the earliest charcoal found. Not only is this quite unlikely in a logical sense, Bahn (1994, 1995c) has convincingly argued that the Lascaux corpus comprises considerable cultural diversity. The sediments were haphazardly excavated to allow access by tourists, and later carbon isotope analysis of the mostly un-provenanced charcoal has provided many Holocene dates, beginning at about 7500 years bp. The cave was open during much of the Holocene, and visited and probably painted in by humans. To then assume that all of the art is of the late Solutrean or early Magdalenian tool traditions has no basis. It is more likely that the most recent visitors created the most recent art, and even that Holocene art might dominate. The recent huge bovid figures are unique in Palaeolithic art, and if they depict aurochs they cannot be of the age usually assigned to them. That species has not been found in south-western France between the Gravettian and the very final Magdalenian (Delpech 1992: 131, cited in Bahn 1994). Breuil already noticed the resemblance of these figures to bovid depictions of the above-mentioned Levantine shelter art, which is precisely why he assumed that both were Perigordian (Figure 26). The same applies to the recent Lascaux cervids, for instance in the way their antlers are detailed. But while it is accepted today that the Levantine art is of the late Holocene, the myth that the entire Lascaux corpus is of the Ice Age continues, despite the complete absence of any proof to support it. It is true, as Bahn suggests, that the older painting phases of Lascaux are likely to be Pleistocene, but it is quite unlikely that this also applies to the more recent art phases of that site. Some researchers deny the possibility that stylistic aspects one might be inclined to regard as Palaeolithic may have continued to be used after Palaeolithic times (e.g. Ripoll 1997; Rosenfeld 1997), while others accept that this occurred (e.g. Lorblanchet 1989; Beltrán 1992; Marshack 1992; Bahn 1997). Many authors have reported finds of perceived Palaeolithic style that are clearly post-Palaeolithic (Vilaseca 1934; Martin 1973; Couraud 1985; Aparicio Pérez 1987; Fullola I Pericot et al. 1987; Lejeune 1987; Lorblanchet and Welté 1987; Roussot 1987; Villaverde Bonilla 1987; Marshack 1991; Beltrán 1992; Otte et al. 1995). A significant issue is the flawed concept that the ‘Palaeolithic’ was followed by a ‘Mesolithic’, which is at least partially attributable to a taphonomic misunderstanding. More than half the world’s Pleistocene human population may be safely assumed to have lived at elevations of less than 140 m above prevailing sea level, i.e. in regions that have been repeatedly inundated during interglacials and interstadials. These areas provided optimum conditions for population density and relative sedentism of human societies, about which we know absolutely nothing: the sea destroyed all evidence. But with the final rise of the sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene, the previous coastal people with their more developed technologies and cultures were pushed inland and then appear, for the first time in hominin history, on the archaeological record. These are the ‘Mesolithic’ traditions.

Archaeological Folklores about Dating

Figure 26. These large bovid images in Lascaux are among the most recent paintings in the cave, and they do not resemble Pleistocene styles, while showing features of Holocene styles.

Finds of palaeoart, be they of rock art or portable ‘art’, that resemble ‘Palaeolithic art’ but postdate the Palaeolithic occur not only in south-western Europe. Such animal motifs of ‘naturalistic style’ have been reported from regions that were never occupied by humans of the final Pleistocene (e.g. Scandinavia), or from site contexts where they cannot be of such age (e.g. alpine Austria, see above). Moreover, such ‘naturalistic art’ occurs also outside of Europe, where it has on occasion been assigned a Pleistocene age. The best-known example is perhaps the ‘bubaline tradition’ of the Sahara, which Mori (1974) and others have assigned to the Pleistocene, based on the ‘naturalistic style’ and the apparent preoccupation of the artists with hunting aspects. Muzzolini (1990) has convincingly shown that this art must be Neolithic, and that it postdates 6000 bp, by demonstrating that it includes many presumed depictions of domesticated sheep. Moreover, the apparent depiction of animals the artist is said to have been closely familiar with, often cited as evidence of hunting art, provides by itself no resolution: hunting was practised by all human societies up to very recent times, and in many regions it still is.

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Myths about Rock Art In central Siberia, a few painted animal figures selected from the large rock art site of Shishkino have been pronounced Palaeolithic on the basis of style, and again these are horse and cattle figures (Okladnikov 1959, 1970; Okladnikov and Saporoshskaya 1959). At another Siberian site, Tal’ma, Okladnikov recorded what he thought was the figure of a rhinoceros. The figure does not even resemble the published image which itself does not resemble a rhinoceros (see also H. Breuil’s similar mistake at Minateda, Spain, and the false claims of a rhinoceros image at Siega Verde mentioned above). This figure, like the Shishkino paintings, occurs among other painted and engraved figures (Figure 27); the latter were made with metal tools and often depict recent motifs, especially horses with riders. As in Siega Verde, the local villagers claim that shepherds made the pictures in recent times, and again I tend to agree with them, and not with the claims of archaeologists. At the Siberian sites the paintings are fully exposed to the weather and the fragile sandstone is subjected to rapid destruction in this harsh climate. Microscopic examination of the paint residues renders it extremely doubtful that these figures are any older than the engraved motifs around them (Bednarik and Devlet 1992, 1993). There are hundreds of other claims of Pleistocene art in Asia, for portable as well as rock art, which I have refuted, including claims involving dozens of ‘engraved’ ostrich eggshell fragments in India, a ‘female figurine’ at Lohanda Nala, also in India, and 600 supposedly engraved bone objects from wenhua Shiyu, China. In China, claims not only of Pleistocene rock art, but also in one case even of Tertiary rock art have been made, as mentioned above. None of those made prior to the late 1980s deserve any serious consideration (Bednarik and Li Fushun 1991). A recently investigated claim concerns a series of paintings in a small shelter called Dunde Bulake Site 1, in the far north-western Xinjiang Province, only a few kilometres from the Siberian border (Figure 28). Again there are equine and bovid figures, attributed to the Pleistocene just as in western Europe, but close examination of the site revealed that its earliest paintings must be less than 3000 years old (Bednarik 2015b). On the other hand, Chinese cave art of distinctly ‘naturalistic’ animal figures that would be perceived as Palaeolithic in Europe has been more correctly described as being 2000 or 3000 years old (Figure 29). These paintings were found near Hutiaoxia, Huayi, and Yinbiruo in Lijian (Peng Fei 1996). About thirty sites on the Kalguty River of the Ukok Plateau in south-western Gorniy Altai, only a short distance from the Chinese Dunde Bulake site complex, were attributed to the ‘Stone Age’, possibly even the Palaeolithic, again on purely stylistic grounds (Molodin and Cheremisin 1993, 1994). Similarly, Novgorodova (1983) described the petroglyphs of Delger-Muren and Tes in the same general region as Mesolithic. Kubarev (1997) refutes both claims, showing that all central

Archaeological Folklores about Dating

Figure 27. ‘Naturalistic’ petroglyph at Shishkino, central Siberia, which has in fact been made with a metal tool.

Figure 28. Supposedly Palaeolithic pictograms that are in reality under 3000 years old, at Dunde Bulake Site 1, Xinjiang Province, north-western China.

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Figure 29. Cave painting of a ‘naturalistic’ zoomorph in Lijian Province, China, which in Europe would be attributed to the Pleistocene. The Chinese researchers reported its age as being late Holocene.

Asian rock art west of China is either of the Bronze Age or younger. Supposedly Pleistocene petroglyphs in Mongolia (Jacobson-Tepfer 2013) postdate the most recent glacial striae on their support panels and cannot date from a period when the region was covered by glaciers. One of the “earliest manifestations” of rock art in central Asia, in the Zaraut-Kamar Rockshelter in southern Uzbekistan, has been attributed to the late 19th century (Jasiewicz and Rozwadowski 2001), in a correction similar to that relating to Siega Verde or the Côa valley site complex mentioned above. This list of examples is far from exhaustive, but it should suffice to show that the problem of attributing more recent rock art to the Pleistocene is very widespread in Eurasia. It is, however, not limited to that region, and claims of Pleistocene art have also appeared in the Americas. I have refuted those relating to Pedra Furada in northeastern Brazil, of 32,000 years for paintings of the late Holocene, but accepted a final Pleistocene/early Holocene age for another site in the region, Perna 1 (Bednarik 1989). In the previous chapter we have already visited a series of similar claims from North America, all of them from the United States, together with the relevant corrections. And we have seen that even in Australia, where most rock art researchers tend to be more restrained, there has been a series of megafaunal depiction proposals that dissolve on close examination. Besides the megafauna issues, there has been a prominent contention of a set of final Pleistocene engraved limestone plaques from the cave Devil’s Lair in Western Australia (Dortch 1976, 1979a, 1979b, 1980, 1984; Dortch and Dortch 1996; Dortch and Merrilees 1973), but detailed microscopy of these objects has shown that the markings are all of taphonomic (i.e. natural) nature (Bednarik 1998a). Claims of Late Pleistocene antiquity of petroglyphs at three sites in the Olary

Archaeological Folklores about Dating region of South Australia (Nobbs and Dorn 1988) are now essentially invalid, since the analyst concerned has discredited his own results (Dorn 1996), as will be shown in the next section. Myths about rock art age This brings us right to one of the most fertile areas of mythological claims about rock art. The estimation of rock art age is generally acknowledged to be one of the most ferociously complex issues relating to rock art research, and yet it has attracted myriad unsupportable proposals over the last two centuries. The underlying issue is that without having at least a broad idea of the antiquity of rock art, it simply cannot be related to archaeology, which is heavily dependent upon a credible chronological framework. Therefore archaeology has long endeavoured to find ways of reliably estimating rock art ages, but with only very limited success. There are essentially four ways in which this has been attempted. First, it is hoped that archaeological excavation at rock art sites might uncover petroglyphs concealed by sediments, and that these overlying deposits could yield dating evidence such as charcoal fragments. Second, the purported iconographic content of the rock art is ‘identified’ with the specific objective of providing some insight into the most likely antiquity of the motif in question. Third, archaeologists have designed stylistic sequences, sometimes by assumed connections with dated portable ‘art’ objects, and provided them with assumed relative or absolute chronologies. Finally, another approach has been to apply analytical methods provided by one of the sciences. There are specific problems with all these endeavours. Archaeological excavation The principles of this approach seem straightforward, yet there are significant limitations with it. To begin with, suitable conditions have been very elusive, and I am only aware of some twenty-two cases in which this has produced reasonably credible results over the past 120 years or so. The ages of in-situ petroglyphs have been estimated, at least in terms of order of magnitude, on the basis of excavation in just fourteen cases (Daleau 1896; Lalanne and Breuil 1911; Lemozi 1920; David 1934; Passemard 1944; Ampoulange and Pintaud 1955; de Saint Mathurin 1975; Anati 1976: 34, 41; Rosenfeld et al. 1981; Cannon and Ricks 1986; Steinbring et al. 1987; Crivelli and Fernández 1996; Steinbring 2013; Benson et al. 2013). Pictograms are very rarely preserved below ground, but they were convincingly minimum-dated through concealing sediment at Perna 1, Brazil (Bednarik 1989; Pessis 1999). Exfoliated fragments of petroglyphs have been located in datable strata in seven cases (Capitan et al. 1912; Hale and Tindale 1930; Mulvaney 1969: 176; Thackeray et al. 1981; Roberts et al. 1998;

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Myths about Rock Art Bednarik et al. 2005; Coulson et al. 2011), whereas similar claims for exfoliated fragments of pictograms are less persuasive (e.g. O’Connor 1995). This, however, only applies in broadest chronological terms, and it must be remembered that archaeological excavation does not provide age estimates for rock art: at the very best, and under favourable conditions, it might furnish minimum ages. The fact that rock art was found to be concealed under sediment does not tell us how long before the sedimentation event it was produced, and the difference could easily be many millennia. Moreover, there are even numerous difficulties in establishing the age of the sediment in question, because the results of the dating methods employed may not necessary relate to the time of its last deposition. All archaeological sediments are aggregates of various materials of greatly varying ‘ages’. We have already noted that the deposition dates of colluvials and alluvials cannot be determined at all by analysing their components. The chronological relationship between the dating criterion, which may be derived from 14C analysis of charcoal, OSL analysis of quartz grains or any of a number of other methods, is not at all certain, or readily testable. Such relationships are often assumed to be obvious, but they are always based on inductive reasoning. For instance fragments of charcoal in a rock-shelter floor deposit may have experienced a great deal of turbation (by trampling, aeolian or water transport, or through the activities of animals ranging from termites to rodents to wild pigs), causing the lighter charcoal to travel upwards. Similar qualifications apply to all other scientific methods applied to the sediments. For instance thermoluminescence analyses of sand grains provides certain scientific data, but relating these to the most recent deposition of the sediment is not at all straightforward, as we will see below. In short, excavation of stratified soils covering rock art motifs can provide conservative estimates of minimum age for rock art, but has done so in only very few cases historically, and in most of them only in the broadest terms. The inability of determining the relationship between the scientific criterion and the ‘target event’ (Dunnell and Readhead 1988), in this case the sedimentation event and the production of the rock art, limits the utility of this approach considerably. Iconographic identification The credibility of attempted determinations of the meanings of ancient rock art is even more tenuous, as already indicated at the beginning of the first chapter of this book, and later with the ‘identification’ of animal images. Professor Macintosh refuted his own identifications of numerous biomorphs at two sites in the Northern Territory, Australia, in the only blind test ever conducted to assess the ability of a cultural outsider to correctly determine what rock art motifs depict. Anyone else wanting to interpret rock art scientifically would be well advised to produce significantly better credentials than Macintosh, a distinguished professor of

Archaeological Folklores about Dating anatomy. In practical terms, the only epistemologically sound information about what rock art means can only be provided by a cultural ‘insider’ — essentially a participant in the cultural tradition concerned, preferably the artist himself. In the absence of such information all interpretation is untestable and unfalsifiable, hence simply not scientific. In a scientific framework, the observer-relative or etic explanations offered by children, tourists and archaeologists are only of interest to the neuroscientist who wishes to study the cognition and perception of such people. There are some qualifications to this basic impediment. While most rock art traditions are clearly not naturalistic, there are a few exceptions in which images of objects seem depicted in such great detail that interpretations may be more plausible, although still not scientifically sound. In such cases discretion is required, and claims made should be appropriately qualified. Another form of credibility occurs in those rock art traditions that are called ‘contact art’ in various parts of the world, where late rock art includes the depiction of numerous types of introduced objects, such as steel tools, firearms or domestic animal species. Finally, there is one more form of rock art permitting plausible explanations: when an image or scene is accompanied by a decipherable inscription explaining the imagery. For instance the Thamudic inscription petitioning a deity to “preserve us from the lion” at Yatib, northern Saudi Arabia, together with the image of a large, apparently carnivorous zoomorph with a much smaller quadruped, leaves little room for incorrect interpretation (Figure 30). There are very numerous such palimsests in the rock art of the Middle East and the Sahara, but surprisingly limited use has been made of them. An example is the Parthian inscription with a Kal Jangal petroglyph in south-eastern Iran, a naturalistic depiction of a man wrestling a lion (Ghasrian et al. 2014). Stylistic sequences To illustrate this issue, we continue with a prime example from Arabia. The traditional and most-cited chronology of Arabian rock art (e.g. Thomson 1975; Zarins 1982; Zarins et al. 1980, 1981; Jung 1991a, 1991b, 1994) was produced by an author who has never been to the region (Anati 1968a, 1968b, 1972, 1974), instead deducing the history of this vast corpus from a selection of 232 photographs obtained by the Philby-Ryckmans-Lippens expedition in 1951–52 (Ryckmans 1952, 1954; Lippens 1956; Grohmann 1962). Planned by J. B. Philby and led by Gonzague Ryckmans, the expedition departed from Jiddah and ended in Riyadh, meandering its way through Makkah, Ta’if, Abha, south to Najran, Qarya, Wadi Dawasir and Masil. Most of the rock art was recorded at or near Jabal Qara, north of Najran. Based on enlarged projections of diapositives made from the negatives of the Philby expedition, Anati examined the images of about

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Figure 30. Petroglyphs with explanatory commentary in Thamudic script, Yatib, Near Ha’il, Saudi Arabia.

200 engraved panels. Believing to identify patina shades, techniques, styles and superimpositions, he ‘identified’ at least twenty “stylistic groups” of which over ten “belong to pre-literate times” (Anati 1968a: 4). He grouped the entire sequence into four major chronological units: an “Islamic” period (after 622 CE), a “literate” period associated with “south-Semitic” writing (South Arabian script), a “herding-hunting” group which he divided into about ten styles and attributed to non-literate peoples, and an “early hunters” group. The last is made up of three styles, two of which largely lack human figures. The “oval-headed” assemblage, which he singled out for special attention, belongs to the “herding-hunting” phase of this sequence. He further stated that his “literate” period might date from about 2300 bp to 1800 bp, and that several of his ‘herding-hunting’ styles are 3000 to 5000 years old, while the late part of this main-phase dates to 2000–3000 years bp. Roughly contemporary with his ‘oval-headed’ anthropomorphs, Anati perceived other major ‘styles’, found in the same area, which he called “realisticdynamic style” and the tradition of the fat-tailed sheep (1968b). On the other hand, he noted (1968a: 169, 171, 173) that there can be considerable differences in the patina colour of ‘oval-headed’ figures on the same panel, implying a very great duration of this ‘style’. He also conceded that there are anthropomorphs that

Archaeological Folklores about Dating cannot safely be attributed to, or excluded from, his ‘oval-headed’ style (1968a: 173). These factors question the integrity of the styles he perceived even before the issue is examined scientifically. The exorbitant nature of Anati’s claims, perfectly illustrating how myths are created about rock art through over-interpreting extremely patchy information, becomes apparent when he proposes that the ‘oval-headed’ people may have been one of the Cushite tribes mentioned in the Bible; that they “identified themselves with the ostrich, which may have been for them some sort of totemic animal” (Anati 1968a: 184); that they performed elaborate cult ceremonies connected with an ox worship, with sexual rituals and with hunting magic. Their purported cults also concerned the use of some unknown flower or fruit, perhaps connected with the use of some narcotic. Anati thus creates aspects of an entire civilisation of a people whose existence is purely hypothetical, from his own subjective interpretations of an often very ambiguous iconography. He even invents a dating for this hypothetical tradition, again without valid justification, placing it from the beginning of the third millennium to the advent of the first millennium BCE. He defines these invented people as a “Negroid” ethnic group, again purely on the basis of his fantasy; there is in fact no acceptable evidence of such an ethnic attribution, be it historical, ethnographic, cultural, anthropological or genetic. His description of them “as beautifully built people of high stature, with elegant body features, slender and long legs and harmonious shapes and movements” (Anati 1986a: 180) is of particular interest because we can sometimes encounter this kind of characterisation elsewhere in the fringe literature on rock art. His view that these people “seem to have been fully conscious of their physical beauty as is emphasized by their depictions” (ibid.) can be found in that of another invented “race” of rock artists, propagated by Walsh (1994) in the Kimberley region of Australia. Anati’s chronological formulations are just as abstruse. Whilst he suggests that the late phase of his fictitious “oval-headed Negroids” might overlap with literate times, he also postulates a “pre-literate” and post-“oval-headed major group” of petroglyphs (1968a: 143). These two formulations seem to be mutually exclusive. His temporal framework is predicated largely on the superimposition sequences he believes to recognise in the photographs available to him, and on his iconographic ‘identifications’ of objects in the art, which range widely from the plausible to the thoroughly implausible. For instance, an object frequently depicted crossing human torsos diagonally at waist height (1968a: 134–5), pointed at the lower end and with a variety of morphologies at the upper end, would appear to depict quite naturalistically rendered swords (Figure 31). For Anati, however, these objects are “giant toggle-pins”, and he notes the occurrence of (very much smaller!) toggle-pins from Tepe Gawra and Maayan Baruch in Israel,

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Figure 31. Examples of anthropomorphs with Anati’s “giant toggle pins” from Jabal Qara sites.

thousands of kilometres away. There, such pins are not found more recently as the late third millennium BCE. He thus regards these “toggle-pins” as “good hints as to the age of the figures” in the rock art — a far-fetched proposition by any standards. Not only does the absence of evidence in Israel not demonstrate evidence of absence, these sites are geographically remote from southern Saudi Arabia. But most importantly, Anati’s iconographic interpretation of the objects depicted with the anthropomorphs is most probably false. To base chronologies of rock art on such ‘interpretations’ is a practice often encountered in naive rock art ‘studies’, particularly in Europe, and is one of the most frequently published myths about rock art. Anati (1968a: Fig. 87) interprets an indeterminate motif as the head and forelimbs of a large rodent, yet neither the petroglyph itself nor Anati’s rendering of it justifies this fanciful description. His claims for various cultural activities are generally untestable and spurious. For instance the claim of worship of oxen is based on a single bovid depiction (not of an ox, conversely; the testes of the bovid are prominently shown; cf. Anati 1968a: Fig. 39) providing no such objective evidence. Similarly, the claim for the use of narcotics is based on one

Archaeological Folklores about Dating singular image of what resembles a branch held by an anthropomorph. All the claims concerning ritual sex, dances, hunting-magic and supernatural beings are presented without any hard evidence or objective justification. They simply reflect Anati’s cortical processes of locating and interpreting iconicity in a corpus of rock art to which he has no valid interpretational access. They have therefore no currency in rigorous research, because Anati’s (or our) perception is of no relevance to the discipline. Their only scientific role is in the study of Anati’s (or our) perception. Leaving aside that his interpretations merely reflect the pareidolic nature of Anati’s perception, he has had to contend with various other adverse conditions. For one thing, the photographs that provided his only data bear neither a size scale nor a colour reference device, so he had to guess the true sizes and colours of the motifs, and especially their patination colours. The latter aspect is complicated by his misunderstanding of the patination process: he perceived rock varnish deposition, which occurs largely as extraneous matter attracted by microorganisms, as part of surface modification processes, such as oxidation. Moreover, the information available to him lacked details of site geography, topography, geomorphology, petrography and panel orientation or exposure. He was therefore comparing relative patination without any context, and without being able to colour-calibrate the photographs. But perhaps most important of all, Anati applied circular reasoning in constructing his styles. For instance, he defined his ‘oval-headed’ style by selecting from the photographs 74 anthropomorphs he felt featured some similarities in head shape, irrespective of the great range of patination they showed (as he admits himself), and defined them as a single style. From this he deduced that “[t]he ‘Oval-headed’ people appear to have been primarily interested in man, and more particularly, in themselves” (Anati 1968a: 6), without realising that he himself had created the bias he attributed to his oval-headed people. He then used the consistent features he had arbitrarily selected to determine the morphology of the invented “race” and found that these racially “compact and autonomous” people were “preoccupied with themselves”. In reality his conclusions are in every respect merely reflections of Anati’s own mental and deductive processes, and the model he produces is completely fictional. This applies even more to his various further pronouncements about the ‘ovalheaded’ people he had created, such as where they came from, who they were, who displaced them, or to where they migrated. All of this is without any factual basis. In all probability, no such distinctive ethnic group existed any more than a distinctive rock art tradition of ‘oval-headed’ people such as Anati describes. His photographic record is neither comprehensive nor does it represent a random sample. It is simply a set of photographs taken by travellers who located a series of sites along their route through the desert, and who recorded only panels they found interesting or worthwhile. It is obvious from my own surveys of the region

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Myths about Rock Art that they ignored some of the panels they must have seen, presumably because they were not considered photogenic enough or they were in the shade at the time. It is even more obvious that they managed to locate only a minute number of the petroglyph sites in the general region. Thus their record was never intended to be a representative sample of the area’s rock art. Anati then emphasised the bias already inherent in their data by focusing even more on over-represented features, and then inventing styles, phases and a complete chronology covering the entire Holocene. Scientific dating work in Arabia began in 2001, in northern and central regions of Saudi Arabia (Bednarik and Khan 2002), but was three years later extended to the far south of the country, including the sites where the photographs had been taken that formed Anati’s only data (Bednarik and Khan 2005, 2009). Khan (1998) had already earlier noted that Anati applied his stylistic constructs inconsistently, ascribing stylistically consistent motif types, such as the region’s very distinctive ‘long-haired female’ figures, to several different periods. Khan also rejected Anati’s attribution of the ‘oval-headed’ anthropomorphs to the 4th millennium BC, placing them into the 1st millennium BC and the literate period (Khan 1998: 436). Direct dating demonstrated that most of the rock art in the vicinity of Jabal Qara postdates the beginning of the most recent phase allowing the retention of surface water, which this work determined at 3580 ± 250 years bp by OSL analysis at Ain Jamal (Liritzis et al. 2013). Anati’s ‘oval-headed’ figures are generally under 3000 years old (and in some cases only a few centuries) and coincide with Thamudic and Islamic inscriptions, and all his ‘pre-literate styles’ are in fact of literate periods, with the possible exception of early outline zoomorphs. Some perceived stylistic entities, such as the ‘oval-headed’ anthropomorphs, the long-haired females or the wusum (tribal emblems, often marking livestock) are evidently diachronic phenomena, which is already sufficient to refute the basis of Anati’s styles. The refutation of Anati’s Arabian rock art chronology has been considered in some detail because it exemplifies very well the general pattern of how stylistic sequences in rock art have been postulated. Similar constructs have been created in many parts of the world, often on similarly flimsy empirical support, and rarely engaging scientific data. Many examples pertain. For instance most of the rock art of Scandinavia is universally attributed to the Bronze Age, without any scientific proof. There are few world regions where such probably false chronological sequences of rock art have never been proposed. Many rock art sites, as we have seen, have been declared Palaeolithic, simply because they feature animal figures regarded as ‘naturalistic’. In some cases rock art that is around a century old has been declared to be Pleistocene, and the most common argument in favour of such significant errors is one of perceived style. This pattern seems to indicate that rock

Archaeological Folklores about Dating art style is not a reliable guide to age (Bednarik 1995c). The notion of stylistic sequences seems to have been borrowed from art history, where historically documented art styles can assist in dating artworks. While it is no doubt true that specific societies tended to favour particular stylistic conventions, this is far from universal. Reliable ethnography of contemporary producers of rock art has shown that the members of a clan or language group, even of a single family, may use quite distinctive styles in their work (e.g. Mulvaney 1996; Novellino 1999; cf. Ucko 1987; Layton 1991, 2001: 315; Whitley 2001: 25). But perhaps more importantly, the constructs of style are etic creations of the archaeologists in question, in the same way as other designations of ancient artefacts (e.g. stone tools) are ‘institutional facts’ (Searle 1995), derived from socially constructed, observer-relative properties that seem valid to the observer, but may lack any objective validity. In their applications to rock art, especially large corpora that have not been separated into discrete phases, these imposed orders yield myths perhaps more often than not. Use of analytical methods Since the advent of rock art science in the 1980s (Bednarik 2007b: 12) the importation of scientific propositions (those that are falsifiable) into archaeological reasoning about rock art has gradually become evident, but not necessarily to the advantage of the discipline. The Jinmium affair was probably the most prominent archaeological blunder in Australia; its spectacular claims were reported all around the world. According to them the site, in the westernmost part of the Northern Territory, was occupied by humans 176,000 years ago — three times as long ago as the hitherto proposed first colonisation of Australia. An exfoliated rock fragment with cupules was found in the excavation of the Jinmium rock-shelter at a level corresponding to TL dates of 58 to 75 ka ago (Fullagar et al. 1996). I rejected these findings even before they appeared as front page news (Rothwell 1996a, 1996b, 1996c) and several rock art specialists concurred. However, a British archaeology journal, against better advice (from me and others), insisted on publishing the false claims two months after they had appeared in thousands of newspapers. They were subsequently refuted by more detailed scientific analysis of the site and its sediments, which showed unequivocally that the rock art and the entire sediment sequence is of the Holocene (Roberts et al. 1998). In this case scientific data were used to generate archaeological claims. The problem was in the interpretation of the results of an analytical method, not in the method itself. TL, or thermoluminescence analysis, endeavours to determine when mineral crystal grains, usually of sediment, were last exposed to daylight. The sediment in a sandstone shelter is largely made up of grains originating from the sandstone, but only those that exfoliate singly are fully exposed to daylight.

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Myths about Rock Art The inner grains of sandstone fragments get to see no sunlight, but as the fragments decay in the soil the grains are freed. Because these were last exposed to light millions of years ago, the mean ‘age’ of the sediment appears to be significantly greater than it really is. One way to guard against such significant errors is to use an alternative method, OSL (optically stimulated luminescence), in which each grain is separately analysed and the results that are much too great are simply discarded. Another is to check the results against another dating method, such as radiocarbon analysis. The Jinmium team attempted neither. There are many other examples of the misuse of scientific methods in rock art research, especially in the dating of rock art. Two more are cited here as illustration. A method of estimating probable maximum rock exposure ages is by measuring the presence of cosmic ray-caused radiation products in rock, namely 3He, 10Be, 14C, 21Ne, 26Al, 36Cl or 41Ca. This can never provide actual age estimations of rock art, and even the claims that it can offer exposure ages of rock surfaces need to be care­fully qualified. There is a prefer­ence for using more than one radionuclide in tandem, and in particular the pair 10Be and 26Al is thought to give good results from quartz (Nishiizumi et al. 1989). Applications of cosmogenic radiation products analysis to rock art at Stonehenge (WilliamsThorpe et al. 1995) and in Portugal’s Côa valley (Phillips et al. 1997) produced apparently false results in both cases (Bednarik 1998c). This is very probably due to their reliance on the 36Cl nuclide, which is among the most soluble and mobile in a rock. There are also significant error sources attributable to the unloading history of a present rock surface: its subsurface contains residual radiation products predating the most recent exposure. Moreover, the method assumes a rate of erosion retreat (Phillips et al. 1990), while in reality any surface retreat of the rock would effectively exclude the survival of any petroglyphs present (Bednarik 1998c): most petroglyphs are under 5 mm deep. The development of another ‘CR’ method of rock art ‘dating’ in the early 1980s seemed to hold great promise for about a decade. Cation-ratio dating sought to calibrate the leaching of the cations potassium and calcium versus the supposedly stable titanium in rock varnishes and similar ferruginous deposits over petroglyphs. Although only providing minimum ages (bulk age of the patina formed over the rock art), it seemed to provide credible age estimates. But after reporting some rather sensational results from a series of South Australian petroglyphs it began to attract critical attention, which led to its abandonment by its inventor and advocate in the mid-1990s. There were intimations of fraud rather than misinterpretation of results, and this episode is perhaps best forgotten. As a footnote to it, the originator of this method admitted years later, in a court of law and presumably under oath, that he was unable to determine whether a petroglyph is recent (less than a hundred years old) or ancient.

Archaeological Folklores about Dating As these examples show, the use of a scientific analytical method provides no more assurance than archaeological interpretation of whatever kind. Valid methods may be misapplied or their results misinterpreted, especially by archaeologists all too keen to prove their pet theory or to provide sensational results. Alternatively a method may, on the face of it, appear sound and be widely accepted by archaeologists, but on close examination by scientists it may dissolve in a puff of smoke. Using analytical methods is simply not a matter of getting archaeologists to work together with scientists. If archaeologists want to avail themselves of such methods they need to learn how they work, and most particularly what the precise qualifications are that apply to the results. These qualifications may be quite intricate. Without understanding them fully even the use of perfectly legitimate scientific methods may only lead to yet more myths about rock art.

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Chapter 4

Axiomatic Confusions Misidentification of non-anthropic rock markings In the previous Chapter we considered very briefly the scratched ‘designs’ found on cave bear polishes, caused by quartz grains embedded in the fur of these massive animals and ‘identified’ as humanly made engravings by archaeologists. The cave bear (Ursus spaeleus), a mostly European herbivore of the Ice Age, used to hibernate deep in caves, moving distances of up to a couple of kilometres in their complete darkness. To accomplish this, the animals followed established paths, and where their bodies rubbed against rocks over hundreds of millennia, they produced polished surfaces called Bärenschliffe. In this the sand and silt embedded in their long and shaggy fur acted as an abrasive (Bednarik 1993b). Where it contained quartz grains of larger fractions, these sometimes created erratic patterns on the smoothened areas. In the Hohler Fels cave of Germany such panels later exfoliated and the fragments became stratified in the cave sediments. When they were excavated in the stratum that also contained stone tools of the Aurignacian tradition they were described as geometric engravings made by the people using such tools (Hahn 1991, 1994). Having observed similar fortuitous markings in numerous caves (Bednarik 1993b) I was able to correct the error (Bednarik 2002a). However, this is only one of numerous examples in which archaeologists have described as rock art markings on rock that are in fact not made by humans, or at least not made deliberately. Rock markings produced by non-human animals are much more common in the world than anthropogenic rock marks. Two types can be distinguished: polished surfaces made with bodies, such as those made by cave bears, and linear engravings made with claws or other body parts (Bednarik 1981, 1991a). Those made with claws, the most frequently found, are also those most frequently misidentified by archaeologists. The discrimination of claw markings in caves from humanly made engravings is a specialist task, demanding considerable relevant experience and is well beyond the abilities of most archaeologists. This is partly attributable to the tendency of cave markings to be subjected to very common alteration processes, the products of which vary greatly. The common occurrence of animal scratches in limestone caves, like the presence of Pleistocene rock art in them, is a taphonomic phenomenon, i.e. attributable to selective survival. Although rocks are far more often marked out of caves, the protected locations and the stable climates of caves can preserve even faint 64

Axiomatic Confusions scratches for up to tens of millennia. In addition, some caves act as natural animal traps, preventing the escape of animals of poor climbing abilities. The most numerous animal markings in caves, however, are those of airborne individuals, especially bats. Chiroptera produce rock markings on soft surfaces with their wings as well as with their digital claws, while birds mark such surfaces with their primaries, claws and possibly their mandi­bles. Ungulates do so with horns and antlers on occa­sion, and elephants consuming mine­ral deposits in caves have been observed marking the walls with their tusks. Rhinoceroses use boulders or other rock surfaces to sharpen their horns, which over long time spans can lead to the formation of sets of deep linear grooves that resemble human handiwork. Clawed animals which have marked cave walls include reptiles, but the claw markings of mammalian species are the most common, ranging from those of the tini­est rodents or bats to those of extinct megafau­nal species. The most common among the latter are those of the cave bear, which I have studied in detail in about fifty caves (Bednarik 1993b). In some cases they have been mistaken for human engravings, for instance one short set in Bara Bahau, France (Bednarik 1986a: Fig. 6), has been described as the oldest work of art in the world by several writers who mistakenly thought it depicts a human hand. Megafaunal cave markings are also common in other continents, for instance in south­ern Australia. Some have tentatively been attributed to species on the basis of claw spacing and size, inferred mobility of forelegs, body size, apparent climbing ability, and occur­rence of skeletal remains within the caves in question. Two intersecting sets of presumed Thylacoleo scratches on the ceiling of Robertson Cave, South Australia (Bednarik 1994: Fig. 1), have been interpreted as the letter ‘W’. On the other hand, extensive finger markings in Orchestra Shell Cave, Western Australia (Bednarik 1987a), were deemed to have been made with hand-held animal claws (Hallam 1971). This followed previous controversies concerning the status of cave markings in Cutta Cutta and Kintore Caves, Northern Territory (Walsh 1964), Koonalda and Tantanoola Caves, South Australia (Sharpe and Sharpe 1976), and New Guinea 2 Cave, Victoria, which were resolved by extensive studies of both natural and human cave markings by the Parietal Markings Project (Bednarik 1986b, 1991a) extending over more than three decades. Nevertheless, some researchers whose ideas were contradicted by that work have remained unconvinced by its findings and have sought to preserve their favoured alternative interpretations (e.g. Sharpe 2004). It is self-evident that effective discrimination of the two types of marks — human and nonhuman — is the crucial precon­dition for any informed assessment of the rock art component, and for some researchers this remains an obstacle. In Australia, four types of mammal­ian scratch marks are defined, apart from bat mark­ings: ‘climbing marks’ (primarily by possums), ‘gouged symmetrical

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Myths about Rock Art marks’ (by certain extant species lacking any climbing ability), ‘megafaunal marks’ and ‘exploratory marks’ (Bednarik 1991a). These distinc­tive forms do not comprise the entire spectrum of marks present; they are merely frequent, prominent and typical modes of occurrence. Obviously the types of animal marks differ in various parts of the world, according to regio­nal animal species, their respective ethologies, geomorphologi­ cal factors and local preservation conditions. Our knowl­edge differs according to the amount of credible research conducted locally, which is inade­quate in a few regions, and practically absent in the rest of the world. In the same way that rock art in caves may have suffered considerable modification through time, animal scratches may have been greatly modified over the millennia, and their visual appear­ance altered by one or more of several speleo-morphological processes. Without understanding the effects of these, archaeological pronouncements about cave markings are of limited value. Rock surfaces polished by animals are not limited to those of cave bears. Others involved include the extensive rock polishes in the Unites States that appear to be attributable to mammoths and other megafauna and were reported by Parkman (2002). The production of rock polish by elephants is known from Africa, and the habit of numerous smaller species, such as buffaloes and pigs, of rubbing their bodies on rock to rid themselves of parasites has yielded smoothened surfaces in thousands of rock-shelters and on rock outcrops the world over. Even plants can produce rock markings, by a variety of processes, which may be — and on some occasions haven been — mistaken for petroglyphs. Such natural marks can be of a kinetic or chemical origin. The energy in the first case is provided by the wind: a pliable limb of a tree, or a stalk or tuft of some plant may perform a semi-circular movement for months and years, and this can result in distinctive arcuate marks even on hard rock, such as granite (Twidale et al. 1983: Fig. 8). Another such phenomenon, sometimes considered to be of human origin, occurs when a tree growing on the margin of sandstone rock hugs the rock for support with its roots. Every time it sways in the wind there is a minute movement in its main roots just below the ground. Together with silt and fine sand acting as an abrasive, this is sufficient to produce quite deep grooves on the rock, which in turn improve the tree’s hold on its support. Over the tree’s lifetime, such grooves can become over 10 cm deep. After the tree disappears and the soil erodes, the grooves remain, consisting of some­times under-cut but usually quite short, meandering and randomly orientated, rounded furrows that can have an artificial appearance (Bednarik et al. 2010b). Plant markings of chemical origin can derive from the symbiotic associations between the mycelium of fungi and plant roots. In endotrophic mycorrhiza, the fungi pene­trate deep into the internal cells of the root, while in ectotrophic

Axiomatic Confusions mycorrhiza they only enter the epider­mis. The respiratory carbon dioxide of these microorganisms reacts with moisture in the soil to form carbonic acid, which dissolves calcium carbonate and specific other minerals locally, aiding the plant’s metabolism. In limestone caves this has led to the formation of surface grooves that may resemble petroglyphs. Hundreds of markings on sand­stone near Remarkable Cave, Tasmania, which had earlier been considered to be rock ‘carvings’ (Reid 1962), have also been identified as root marks (Both 1963), although it is not clear whether these are chemical or kinetic grooves. At another Tasmanian site, this time on granite, presumed petro­glyphs (Sharland 1957) appear to be the result of both plant abrasion and ‘acid leaching’, although the process has not been elaborated upon (cf. Ellis 1958). I have reported groove markings made by tree roots in Tasmania, at Sydney and in Cape York Peninsula, all in Australia, and observed them at hundreds of sites elsewhere. Humans, too, have produced myriad rock markings unintentionally, often as by-products of utilitarian activities, which on a good number of occasion have been misidentified as petroglyphs by archaeologists. For instance mining tools produce a variety of rock markings, as does construc­tion machinery and other heavy equipment: rock drills, core drills, steel tracks of track-mounted vehicles, or gouge marks where a vehicle brushed past a rock face, drag marks on rock pavements, or grooves cut by steel cables being pulled over rock. In short, there is a considerable vari­ety possible and, particu­larly if such marks have become weathered, they may easily resemble petro­glyphs. Surprisingly, such rock markings have posed significant difficulties for some researchers, the most common misidentifications referring to drag-marks and circular marks. A classic example of the first occurred when a petroglyph site in Russia was examined by over twenty archaeologists in 1990. A one-metre-long groove was discovered on the slope of a granite hill overlooking a lake, on the top of which was a lighthouse. The petro­glyphs were all on the lakeshore below, and this solitary mark was half way up the hill. Its authenticity was accepted by the group, but as the lone dissenter I argued that the groove had been made by abrasive uphill motion, presumably as some heavy piece of equipment had been dragged up the hill towards the lighthouse. Later it was confirmed that artillery was positioned on the hill, which has no road access, during World War 2. In North America, plough marks have occasionally posed problems for archaeologists. With a long duration of mechanised agriculture in that continent, such marks may be quite weathered and thus appear more ancient than they actually are. Circular rock marks also may resemble petro­glyphs, and again several examples of misidentifications come to mind. Rotating machine tools, such as core drills, can produce perfectly circular marks, which will be distorted if the tool slipped later­ally whilst it was applied to the rock surface. Such marks have been found on

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Figure 32. Circular rock markings identified as petroglyphs by archaeologists, at Sutherland Creek, Victoria. They are in fact made with a rotating circular steel tool.

both horizontal and verti­cal rock surfaces, and in one case, from Germany, were of about one metre diameter. The circular rock marks found on a sandstone slab at Sutherland Creek, near Geelong, Australia (Bolger 1979), were authenticated by archaeologists and compared to circular petroglyphs in Tasmania and Northern Terri­tory. Yet the markings had been cut with rotating metal tools of two distinc­ tive (imperial) sizes (Figure 32). It would be impossible to repro­duce them with stone tools, with their verti­cal walls in each groove and the narrow groove widths of only a few millimetres (Bednarik 1994). A very different type of circular mark, also from the Geelong district, consists of countless narrow, concentric circular marks of varying diame­ters, forming a deep depres­sion on a boulder of basalt. When consulted by an archaeologist I judged it to be the result of a rotat­ing metal object, suggesting that it might have served to test an early type of rock drill. Some months later I was informed that the type of machine that produced such marks had been identified: a 19th century rock drill. However, some types of utilitarian rock markings may actually be of direct interest to archaeologists, even though they are not rock art. Among them are stone axe or hatchet grinding grooves, usually found on sandstone. Another example is the occurrence of rock grooves designed to drain rainwater away from axe reduction workshops, keeping them dry, crystalline and hard (Bednarik 1990b: 3). Such grooves have been found in many Australian sites and can extend over several metres, essentially marking ‘self-maintaining axe-grinding workshops’. Then there are the mining marks of pre-Historic miners of chert and ochre (Bednarik 1992b), but these and various other types of utilitarian rock marks made by early people have not been mistaken for petroglyphs so far.

Axiomatic Confusions The same cannot be said about geological marks of several types. These can be conveniently divided into petrographic markings (inclusions in igneous rocks and naturally enhanced inherent markings), weathering markings (solution marks and exfoliation marks) and kinetic markings (taphonomic and clastic movement marks). Inclusions in igneous rocks or xenoliths are attributable to distinctive localised variations Figure 33. Xenolithic rock marking on basalt in the rock’s texture. Formed during solidification of magma near Maryborough, Victoria. by selective crystallisation, they reflect bubbles or impurities in the magma. A variety of visually and often morphologically distinctive formations may be the result, and where they become truncated and exposed on a rock surface, they may resemble artificial rock markings, most frequently of circular forms. Numerous examples have been described (Bednarik 1994, 2007b). An example used here for illustration is on basalt near Maryborough, Australia (Figure 33). The discrimination between xenolithic phenomena and petroglyphs is sometimes hampered by the occurrence of real petroglyphs in the former’s vicinity, probably prompted by the ancient geological feature. Another factor in the misidentification of these natural formations is their tendency to occur in localised groups, and this clustered distribution might emphasise their apparent artificiality and the concept of ‘site’. An example are the “whale and fish petroglyphs” at the Cana­ dian litto­ral site Point no Point (Hill and Hill 1974: 63), which occur on a single panel and which are certainly petro­graphic marks that have not been enhanced by humans. The issue is rendered even more complex by the occasional modification of xenoliths by rock artists, as in the case of a large and spectacular xenolith on a dolerite block at the very remote site Mary Tarn in the Central Highlands of Tasmania (Figure 34). This natural feature consists of a series of concentric ovals, maximal 3.7 m high, overlooking a small lake. The lower parts of two of the grooves have been modified by impact, as shown by my microscopic study in March 2010. So the arrangement is a xenolith and a petroglyph at the same time, indicating that the separation of the two is not always applicable, and is in any case the preserve of scientific specialists. Conversely, Aboriginal people make no distinction between natural rock marks and petroglyphs, attributing the creation

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Myths about Rock Art of both to a time “when the rocks were soft”. From a scientific perspective, however, the distinction is of importance and the frequent misidentification of unmodified xenoliths as petroglyphs is of concern. Also, a clear differentiation is not possible between such inclusions in igneous rocks and naturally enhanced inherent rock markings, i.e. those based on structural differences that are not limited to the surface of the rock, but extend into its depth. The latter designation simply applies to examples that only become apparent through weathering processes that Figure 34. Unusually large xenolithic feature emphasise such differences on on dolerite, Mary Tarn, central Tasmania. the rock’s exterior. Recently I have shown that a group of three sites featuring distinctive circular markings on sandstone closely resembling petroglyphs comprised numerous natural markings deriving from as yet unexplained concretion-likes structures (Figure 35). Other examples identified by archaeologists as petroglyphs range from the xenoliths in the extrusive basalt cone at the very summit of Mt Loch in the Australian Alps; the weathering-emphasised laminations in sandstone at various locations; xenoliths found on granite at numerous sites; and the eroded hemispherical recesses south of Horsham, also in south-eastern Australia, which were interpreted as cupules (see next subchapter) (Bednarik 1994). Such rock markings may be the result of inter­play of the geometries of a geological disconfor­mity, and the relief or topogra­phy of the rock surface where the two intersect. To illustrate with an exam­ple, a sequence of parallel rock lamina­tions transected by a concave surface will result in concentric arcs or semicircles, which may add to the impression that the grooves were made by humans. Tectonic fracture lines may be emphasised at the surface by solution and other processes resulting in grooves that sometimes resemble petroglyphs. We have seen an example of this in Chapter 2, where such a groove at the Upper Sand Island in Utah was interpreted as the trunk of a mammoth image. Another prominent example was mentioned in Chapter 3, reporting the discovery of “the

Axiomatic Confusions first examples in Britain of Palaeo­ lithic parietal cave art” (Rogers 1981). This brings us to the generic topic of rock weathering markings that have been misidentified as petroglyphs. There is considerable scope for this error, in the form of both solution marks and exfoliation marks. Weathering processes that are active at the interface of lithosphere and atmosphere are particularly effective on sedimentary rocks, such as the limestones or dolomites of karsts. One of the karst phenomena often seen are Karren: linear, subparallel or radiating grooves of relatively regular spacing, always orientated in the direction of natural water flow (Figure 36). Figure 35. Circular marking inherent in the The regularity of their arrange­ sandstone, closely resembling a petroglyph, ments can be very suggestive but of purely natural origin. Gariwerd of artificiality, parti­ cularly in (Grampians), Victoria, Australia. such regions where similar arrangements are known to occur in rock art. Rillenkarren are sometimes found in sites featuring similar-looking rock art, for instance in Orchestra Shell Cave near Perth where they coincide with finger flutings (Bednarik 1987a). Once again discrimination of such markings is the preserve of highly experienced specialists. Other karst weathering phenomena, such as Kamenitza and Verwitterungswannen (solution pans) have on numerous occasions been mistaken by archaeologists for grinding grooves, mortars or petroglyphs, in numerous countries, and the same applies to potholes (see next sub-chapter). Other types of solution marks have led to spectacular misidentifications by archaeologists and epigraphers, the latter nota­bly in North America. One of the better-known contro­versies concerns the purported Phoenician messages on the ‘written stones’ of Quebec, which are among the literally hundreds (or, more probably, thousands) ‘deciphered’ by epigraphers. Having been interpreted in

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Figure 36. Rillenkarren on Miocene limestone near Picaninnie Cave, southeastern South Australia.

1974 as Phoenician by an archaeologist from Laval University in Canada who had identified several such ‘writings’ along the American Atlantic coast, they were then identified as Libyan and deci­phered by another archaeologist, famous for his ‘deci­phering’ of inscriptions (most of which, conversely, were no inscriptions at all). Dubois (1985), who investigated these two panels as well as several other, similar finds in the area, reports that the markings occur on strata with nume­rous solution grooves that are narrow and distinc­tively V-shaped in section. Many of the lines contain constric­tions that render a production even with metal tools entirely impossi­ble. Similar markings were found on granite and gneiss as well as on sandstone. In the former rocks they were attributable to selective weathering of aligned plagio­clases, in the latter to the corrosive spray of seawater. Dubois’ conclusion is relevant to all potentially doubtful rock markings: “While the issue may have been archaeology, the object of attention was rock and, as such, subject to geomorphological processes”. It is interesting that natural processes that result in such ‘inscriptions’ occur of course in all conti­nents, but the phenomenon of their identification as writing seems almost ende­mic to North America. Most of them appear to be natural markings and plough marks (see Chapter 5 for the generic issues of rock inscriptions). Although the great majority of misidentifications refer to natural rock markings perceived as petroglyphs, the obverse can also apply. An example is the rejection of two cupule sites in the Blue Tier mountains of Tasmania, the preferred name

Axiomatic Confusions of which is Meenamatta (Bednarik et al. 2007). Although this refutation attempt was not by archaeologists, it was published in a supposedly refereed archaeology journal (Field and McIntosh 2009). It sought to explain away the cupules as the result of some unspecified solution process. The authors admitted that they had failed to find the principal site and their objections were politically motivated: as employees of the forestry management authority they tried to reject the authenticity of the petroglyphs because the Aboriginal traditional custodians demanded their protection. This is not the only known instance when issues of rock art identification were sought to be decided on the basis of politics, but the generic issue will be considered in more detail in Chapter 6. Exfoliation of rock surfaces occurs through several processes, varying according to rock type and environmental conditions and ranging from flaking of minute particles to mass-exfoliation of tonnes of rock. Whereas solution is a continuous or periodic process, exfoliation of each particle is an instantaneous event. Granular exfoliation, the shedding of mass grain by grain, is particularly effective on sandstone rocks, and it is with them that misidentification of such markings has been most prominent. For instance the controversy of the pits on several tessellated sandstone pavements in northern Sydney seems unresolved, with some researchers still clinging to the belief that these thousands of pits are cupules, i.e. man made. We will consider them in the next subchapter. Next we need to review other types of natural rock markings that have been misidentified as petroglyphs. Kinetic rock markings, occasioned by the movement of clasts, are not as easily identifiable as one might be tempted to think; they have presented great difficulties for archaeologists. This applies especially when an unusual context responsible for them exists no longer, and if they are sufficiently complex they can be baffling even for the specialist. Kinetic markings are always attri­butable to the movement of an active component (the marking element) relative to the passive component (the rock being marked). The former is often harder than the latter, but not necessarily so, especially where a great deal of kinetic force is involved. Numerous agents have been responsible for kinetic markings, ranging from cryoturbation (movement within soil caused by freezing or regelation); solifluction (caused by movement of sloping watersaturated sediments); trampling (by humans and non-human animals); other activities of animals, such as burrowing; movement of clasts by gravity or water transport; and so forth. Perhaps one of the most common of these rock markings are glacial striae, resulting from the transport of clasts over rock pavements under the enormous weight of glaciers. They range from fine grooves to examples that are more than one metre wide and can be hundreds of metres long, and they occur in their billions worldwide. Such glacial pave­ments are most common in the Northern Hemisphere, and they often form the support surfaces of petroglyphs,

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Myths about Rock Art for instance in Val Camonica (Italy), Britain, Scandinavia, Karelia, Mongolia and Canada. The direc­tion of the striae is gener­ally uniform, because they are inevi­ tably aligned with the flow of the most recent glacier. Irres­pective of their size, glacial striae bear a number of distinctive morphological features. These permit the clear determination of the direction in which the marking point was moved over the rock, through the configuration of transverse tear marks, the serrated patterns at the longitudinal edges of the margins, and the form of the point of commencement, including comet-like marks. Some of these features are similar to those observed in other types of kinetic mark­ings, both natural and anthro­pic, and even on materials other than rock (e.g. on ostrich eggshell). The transverse tear marks, for instance, have been observed at the microscopic level in preHisto­ric engravings on portable stone objects (d’Errico 1988). They have also been reported, at the macroscopic level, in the finger flutings found on formerly soft speleothem (precipitate) deposits in caves (Bednarik 1986b, 1992a). These stress marks can be found even in the largest glacial striae. They are arcuate and always curved in the direction the boulder was dragged over the pavement (i.e. the convex side points in the direction of movement). Where a boul­der scraped over an elevated aspect of the panel topo­graphy, the impact mark is obvi­ously on the oncom­ing side. The comet-like arrange­ments sometimes seen at the point of commence­ment may indicate where the boulder first struck, and then either bounced or turned slightly, affecting the morphology of the resulting mark. A good example of kinetic rock markings are the tens of thousands of linear grooves found on exfoliated clasts of very fine-grained sandstone excavated in the occupation shelter Toca do Sítio do Meio, southern Piauí, in Brazil (Bednarik 1989a). They had been identified as anthropogenic (humanly made) engravings by the excavators, but my microscopic examination showed that the marks are of greatly varying ages, widths and depths, ranging from barely perceptible examples to 4m wide grooves. There are clear sets of two or more sub-parallel marks among them. Another hallmark of these typical taphonomic marks (i.e. caused by their buried context) is the point of commencement, with a distinct, impact-like impres­sion. They could be attri­butable either to tram­pling by humans or other animals; to movement of the slab relative to a rock surface, with loose quartz grains caught between the two surfaces; or to general detrital movement. Quite probably, a combination of these factors applies to the densely marked material, lacking any deliberate marking by humans. Australian examples of archaeological misi­dentifi­cation of taphonomic markings are the ‘engraved plaques’ from Trench 9 of Devil’s Lair Cave, in the south-western corner of the continent (Dortch 1976). They consist of extremely friable aeolian calcarenite and bear a network of random striations on one of the flat faces of each plaque. The rock is so soft that many striations were added when a specimen

Axiomatic Confusions was cleaned with a fine nylon brush. Dortch discounts natural causes of the numerous incised markings without discussion, but in 1996 he made the collection of six ‘engraved plaques’ as well as other controversial finds from Devil’s Lair available for specialist study (Bednarik 1998a). The presumed lime­ stone plaques were found to bear a variety of tapho­nomic marks as well as two types of animal scratch marks (Figure 37). The great variety of forms in which natural kinetic marks occur is illustrated by the following example. Cave divers had discovered a panel of incised markings in a limestone cave near Figure 37. Taphonomic markings on Mt Gambier, South Australia, limestone clast from Devil’s Lair Cave, under 7 m of water. If they were Western Australia, initially explained as human markings, as the divers humanly made engravings. thought, they would probably be of Pleistocene age, because the passage would have been flooded during the Holocene. However, my detailed examina­tion of them revealed no evidence of human involvement; they seemed to be taphonomic marks. Their occurrence on the wall of a recess in the passage seemed puzzling, but the water-filled caves in the region frequently contain ancient tree trunks with their roots and branches that had fallen into sinkhole entrances. Perhaps such an ancient log had become lodged in this position and, buffeted by water flow, produced the inci­sions with its limbs. It is not a proven explanation by any means, but perhaps the most realistic one under the circum­stances. Another cause of kinetic rock markings is attributable to tectonic adjust­ments. This applies especially in limestone caves, where several processes can effect large-scale detrital movement. Many cave systems form above a sub-floor phreatic reservoir, and where the clastic breakdown from roof falls causes the floor to settle progressively, blocks move not only relative to each other, but also down along the walls of the cave. This can result in deeply incised wall markings (for a photograph of a good example, see Maynard and Edwards 1971: Pl. 32). Similar movement of talus clasts is caused by seismic events, and even by

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Myths about Rock Art eustatic fluctuations. The aquifer level in coastal karst regions falls with the sea level, which means that huge masses of boulders that were submerged in water become exposed as the water drains from these systems. The boulder struc­tures may have been tectonically stable as long as they remained submerged, but they are not once they are above water. The deep incisions occasioned by gravita­tional move­ment of clasts or other detrital matter, be it in limestone caves or other types of sites, are fairly easy to identify where they are relatively fresh. However, if they are very corroded, patinated and considered in isolation it is quite possible to mistake them for anthropic marks, especially where several occur together and they seem to form ‘arrangements’. While examining the Siberian rock art site Tal’ma II (near the upper Lena river), I noted sets of vertically arranged parallel grooves high up on the vertical cliff face, about 6 m from the ground, on very smooth rock. Unable to reach them, I inspected them through binoculars to determine what caused them. However, I could not form an opin­ion: intu­ition told me the marks were natural, but they were evidently attributable to mecha­nical force or impact, and there seemed no natural agency that could have caused such repetitive marks. Subse­quently I located similar marks in two more Siberian petroglyph sites, again high on steep cliffs overlooking a river, managing in one case to climb up and examine them. They certainly looked like man-made impact grooves, but micro­scopic inspection revealed no evidence of actual impact. Rather, there was dense crushing of grains evident, as if the marks had been pressed into the rock with massive force. I then hypothesised that perhaps there had been, in the distant past, a rock tower leaning loosely against the cliff, and if a hard clast had become lodged between it and the cliff, it might have slowly wandered downwards with each minute movement, only to be pressed against the cliff by the weight of the tower, in each successive posi­tion. It seemed a desperate explanation at the time but it turned out to be valid. Soon afterwards I found a clast that had become stuck in such a position between a sheer cliff and a detached rampart, and had already produced several such pres­ sure marks. Each time there was movement in the tower, be it seismic, tecto­nic, or caused by temperature change, moisture, freezing or thawing, the clast dropped a few centime­tres. This observation shows poignantly how even the most unlikely explanation may turn out to be correct, and how judicious and wary the researcher really needs to be in pursuing natural explanations for unusual rock markings. It also shows again that the determination of such phenomena is a specialist task. In the vast majority of cases of natural rock markings having been mistaken for rock art this involved interpretation as petroglyphs (rock art having been made

Axiomatic Confusions

Figure 38. Lower part of vertical petroglyph panel of Rochester Creek site, Emery, Utah, USA. The present sediment level is indicated by the uppermost of the three carbonate accretions shown in black. The scale drawing shows the spatial relationships of (1) the uppermost carbonate band, which postdates some petroglyphs; (2) the middle carbonate band, which occurs below all petroglyphs and postdates feature 5; (3) the lower carbonate horizon; (4) the red patch misidentified as a pictogram, apparently contemporary with features 3 and 5; (5) scar of thin thermal spall; and (6), a natural fracture predating all five preceding features.

by a subtractive process), but there are also rare cases of natural marks identified as pictograms (rock art produced by an additive process). The classical example concerns the ‘identification’ of a reddish, roughly triangular patch of colour on the lower part of a petroglyph-bearing sandstone panel called Rochester Creek Site in Utah. It was identified as a rock painting by some dozens of scholars in the early 1980s. An archaeologist then secured a charcoal sample from nearby sediment and, assu­ming it to be stratigraphically related to the ‘painting’, obtained a radio­carbon date from the charcoal which he tried to relate to the red patch on the cliff. Microscopic examination of the site found, however, that no pigment deposition was evident (Bednarik 1987b). The entire panel was covered by a dark-brown varnish that had become locally discoloured within a small area of roughly triangular shape. Right above it was a scar where a flake had become detached by thermal fracture (Figure 38). It appears therefore that a fire had once been lit at the foot of the vertical panel, altering the rock varnish locally. Most likely this had involved the dehydration of goethite to haematite, which would account for the colour change from brown towards a reddish hue. Another example comes from Laurie Creek, in the North­ern Territory of Australia, where an AMS radiocarbon date was derived from what was defined as blood residues in a weathered dark-red paint residue. At the time the 20,000-year date was reported it was the oldest direct date in the world from any pictogram. Nelson

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Myths about Rock Art (1993), the reporting group’s radio­carbon scientist, was sceptical enough to resample the deposit, and found that it consisted neither of pigment, nor did it contain human blood as reported; in fact the material dated was not even proteinaceous. The deposit was simply a natural weathering product of iron oxides, and Nelson found that organic material was often present on the site’s rock surfaces. The date obtained has therefore no archae­ological significance whatsoever. Then there is the case of a French researcher who reported the discovery of paintings in a small cave on Mount Bego in the western Alps, which in 1996 led to a heated public debate with other researchers working in the area. One professor of archaeology who had worked in the region for thirty years argued that there were no paint­ings in the cave, only lichens and algae, but that there were some petroglyphs which his opponent had failed to detect. The conservator under whose jurisdiction the site was then recognised the existence of the picto­grams, but argued that the art was recent. Next, samples from the presumed paintings were analysed by two laboratories and the presence of ochres was confirmed. But when the first researcher returned to the site she reported that her paintings had disappeared, had been scraped off to discredit her. In the process of this vandalism, she claimed petroglyphs had emerged beneath the paintings. Two independent researchers were then called upon to resolve the matter, and they found no trace of paint, or any petroglyphs or sign of vandalism. These examples show tellingly that we need not necessarily accept pronouncements of rock art by presumed experts, and that intricate myths have been invented around natural rock markings of various types. ‘Explanations’ of cupules Cupules are usually, but wrongly, described as hemispherical, but are in fact roughly spherical dome or cap shaped, sharply defined depressions on rock surfaces that were made by direct percussion (impact with a hand-held hammerstone). They occur on vertical, horizontal or inclined panels and represent not only the most common rock art motif in the world, but also the most ancient surviving form of rock art (Bednarik 2007a). This is in all probability due to their longevity relative to other forms of rock art. Essentially there are two forms of myths to be contended with about cupules: those deriving from misidentifying natural features as cupules; and those addressing their ‘meaning’. Concerning the first, two types of weathering phenomena are likely to resemble cupules and have on occasion been ‘identified’ as such. In rare circumstances a layer of well-sorted and well-rounded large pebbles or small cobbles may be contained in a sandstone facies. When it erodes together with the overlying sedimentary rock, the negatives of the round stones may remain preserved as closely clustered, hemispherical recesses that can resemble horizontally arranged cupules (Figure 39).

Axiomatic Confusions

Figure 39. Cupule-like concave natural markings on sandstone that are the negatives of a conglomerate of large pebbles, near Horsham, Victoria, Australia.

More common is the second phenomenon, in which tiny depressions on a perfectly horizontal flat sandstone pavement retain rainwater just a little longer than the surrounding surface. This is sufficient to locally accelerate erosion, a process that is then hastened by the geometry of its own product: the longer moisture is retained, the more effective the breakdown of the sandstone’s cement, and the more rapid the development of the resulting pit. The outcome can be a circular, well-defined pit of sufficient size to offer significant potential for the dissolution of the cement, causing granular exfoliation, and various researchers have interpreted these as humanly made cupules. The best-known case is that of the thousands of pit markings on tesselated sandstone pavements in the Sydney region, which are the subject of an ongo­ing controversy. The tessellation itself does not concern us here, because it is generally agreed to be a natural phenomenon (Branagan and Cairns 1993), even though it remains unexplained by geologists (conversely, I explain the tessellation as a Voronoi-cell effect, see Chapter 5). These extensive lattices of deeply eroded grooves divide some twenty-five known pavements into mosaics of sometimes geometric accuracy, usually of polygons. The larg­est of these pavements, the Elvina Track Site, meas­ures about 6500 square metres (Figure 40). Most of its hundreds of polygonous panels bear a number of circular pits of 20– 50 mm diameter. Although many scholars perceive the pits as humanly made (Cairns and Brana­gan 1992: 29), most Australian rock art special­ists believe

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Figure 40. Cupule-like solution pits at Elvina Track Site, Ku-Ring-Gai Chase National Park, Sydney, Australia.

that they are natural markings (Bednarik 1990b). The aspect that most prompts observers to favour an anthropic origin is the pattern of distri­bu­tion of the pits within the polygon panels: none of the pits occur near the grooves bordering each poly­gon, and they seem often evenly, ‘intentionally’ spaced. This is perhaps a clas­sic example of selective natural proc­esses resulting in physical aspects of a regularity that leads to the idea that intentionality must be involved: the human propensity, even scientific predisposition, of percei­ving patterns impo­ses order and then inter­prets this very order as being deliberate, because natural processes are intuitively perceived as random — which of course they are not in reality. The fairly regular spacings of the pits from each other and from the polygon borders are simply a function of the developing watersheds of a relatively flat surface. The issue is then further complicated by the tendency of the massive sandstone slabs to slightly tilt as the supporting stratum deteriorates, so that the panels are no longer quite horizontal. Other forms of natural rock markings that have been falsely interpreted as cupules are potholes and, on one occasion, solution scallops. Potholes are hollows formed by fluvial abrasion caused by the grinding action of clasts caught in rock

Axiomatic Confusions depressions, scouring the bedrock in eddying or swirling water. They range in shape from cylindrical to hemispherical and sub-conical or test-tube shaped, and they can vary considerably in size (Gilbert 2000), but are most commonly in the order of 5 cm to 30 cm diameter; however, much larger examples do occur. These phenomena are found especially along turbulent rivers of high kinetic energy, but they occur also along marine and lacustrine shorelines. Kayser (1912) distinguishes between fluvial, glacial and marine potholes, and he divides them into three morphological types: shallow with convex floor, deeper with a flat floor and very deep with a bowl-shaped floor and spiral-shaped furrows in the wall. Fluvial potholes develop preferentially in rock channels, at waterfalls and at rapids, and they can only begin to form where an initial hollow exists that retains swirling sand or clasts (Elston 1917–1918). Rehbock (1917, 1925) initiated the complex study of hydraulic energy in potholes and Richardson and Carling (2005) limit the term to round depressions eroded by approximately vertical vortexes and through mechanisms other than plucking. The convex floor pothole is thought to result from the centrifugal force of the abrasive material (Ljungner 1927–1930). Springer et al. (2005, 2006) have explained the inherent laws of pothole formation. Potholes are frequently misidentified as cupules or mortars, and some of these errors are listed in Bednarik (2007b). What complicates the matter even more is that in some instances, cupules are found close to or even among potholes, and the resemblance can be so great that discrimination between the two forms of rock marking demands expert examination (Figure 41). Solution scallops are formed in limestone caves with flowing water and their size indicates flow velocity, smaller pits being formed by faster flowing water. The direction of water flow is indicated by the steeper upstream end. The concavities of solution scallops are formed through erosion by eddies in flowing water (De Serres 1835: 24; Curl 1966, 1974; Monroe 1970; Lowe and Waltham 1995; Mihevc et al. 2004: 522; Spate and Wray 2008). In some cases, when they are of the right dimensions, they can resemble very closely packed cupules, and in one instance these phenomena have been suggested to be cupules (Campbell et al. 2007). These are examples of myths created around the identification of cupules; however, those of interpreting their meanings are far more common. This issue offers a classical example of a whole category of pronouncements about rock art of which only a small percentage can even be seriously considered, and of which the great majority are complete and utter fantasies. And yet if this is pointed out, the advocates of these myths tend to defend their beliefs with considerable dedication and verve. Indeed, the more outlandish these interpretations are, the more strenuously they are defended. In order to evaluate the futility of nearly all of them, let us consider the following context.

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Figure 41. Cupules (man-made) occurring among potholes (natural), at Caya Cayani Convento Roca Central, near Santivañez, central Bolivia.

The most comprehensive sound ethnographic explanation we have of cupules comes from a site in Australia, where Mountford (1976) actually observed their production in 1940. The reader will recall from Chapter 1 that on this occasion, a reliable ethnographer established that the purpose of the ritual was to induce a particular bird to lay more eggs. This was accomplished by fertilising the female cockatoo with the mineral dust created by pounding the rock. This explanation is not only correct; it made perfect sense to the Aborigines believing in it. It is, however, impossible for a cultural alien to discover this solution by any rational or deductive process. It may be hard to accept for archaeologists, but many of their explanation attempts of the human past are just as futile (Bednarik 2013b). This applies most particularly to rock art, and examples are the numerous explanations

Axiomatic Confusions offered for cupules. Here is a list of those I have found in the scholarly literature, grouped into particular classes: 1. Unspecified or specified cultic or magic rituals 1.1: Components of sacrificial altars (e.g. Anati 1968c: 17). 1.2: Human or animal blood sacrifices (e.g. Magni 1901: 91; Tschurtschenthaler 1934a: 63; Schwegler 1992: 14). 1.3: Meeting places of witch covens (e.g. Tschurtschenthaler 1934a: 62; Ricchiardi and Seglie 1987: 54). 1.4: Magical charms protecting dwellings against witchcraft (e.g. Schgör 1970: 332; Haller 1947: 272). 1.5: Fertility rituals related to rockslides, which are thought to occur widely in Europe, Africa and South America (e.g. Egger 1948: 59). 1.6: Ritual boring relating to the preparation of stone axes (e.g. Egger 1948: 57). 1.7: Snake symbolism (e.g. Pozzi 2000: 30). 2. Utilitarian preparation of substances 2.1: Preparation of paints. 2.2: Production of medicines of mineral or organic origins. 2.3: Pounding of pigments of mineral or plant substances. 2.4: Preparation of spices (Pohle 2000: 199). 2.5: Preparation of manioc (cassava) and palm oil (Lombry 2008). 3. Mnemonic or record-keeping devices 3.1: Measurement of time or as calendars (Innerebner 1937: 46; Parkman 1988). 3.2: Commemoration of major events, such as earthquakes (Magni 1901: 90). 3.3: Genealogical markers (Rizzi 2007: 93). 3.4: Recording of pregnancy months (Haller 1978: 168). 3.5: Records of stock animals (Magni 1901: 89; Šebesta and Stenico 1967: 127). 3.6: Records of administrators or warriors (Magni 1901: 89; Šebesta and Stenico 1967: 126). 3.7: Records of oaths, e.g. concerning land ownership (Gruber 1991: 23). 4. Elements of belief systems 4.1: Impressions of hands, feet or knees of saints (Fink 1957: 129; Casagranda and Pasquali 2003: 35, and Note 3). 4.2: Use of cupules as receptacles of holy water (Magni 1901: 88; Tschurtschenthaler 1934a: 63). 4.3: Use of the resulting mineral powder in amulets or talismans (Rizzi 2007: 110). 4.4: Use of cupules in funerary contexts (Magni 1901: 83, 85; Rizzi 2007: 111–114).

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Myths about Rock Art 4.5: Release of a life essence in the form of the resulting mineral powder (Mountford 1976). 4.6: Use of the resulting mineral powder to induce pregnancy (Stevenson T. E. 1887: 539–540; Stevenson M. C. 1904: 295; Fewkes 1891: 9–10; Barrett 1908: 164–165, 1952: 385–387; Loeb 1926: 247; Gifford and Kroeber 1937: 186; Heizer 1953; Grant 1967: 106; Hedges 1983a, 1983b). 4.7: Mixing haematite powder with water to cure infertility in women (Lombry 2008). 4.8: To influence wind and weather (Spier 1930: 21; Heizer 1953; Querejazu Lewis 2010). 4.9: To attract or replace thunder (Parkman 1992: 367). 4.10: Use in reported supplication rituals in recent years (Querejazu Lewis 2010). 4.11: To prepare the paint for an ancestor’s altar (Lombry 2008). 5. Depiction of heavenly bodies 5.1: Depiction of star constellations (Magni 1901; Leonardi 1954; Šebesta and Stenico 1967: 128; Dalmeri 1980: 95–97, 1985; Facchini 1993, 1998; Casagranda and Pasquali 2003: 40; Cairns and Branagan 1991; cf. Cairns and Yidumduma Harney 2003). 5.2: Depiction of the Moon or moon phases (Fink 1971: 254; Haller 1978: 172; Pace 1982: 39). 5.3: Depiction of the Sun (Pace 1982: 39). 5.4: Depiction of observed supernovae. 6. Depiction of topographic elements 6.1: Elements of pre-Historic maps (Anati 1994: 151). 6.2: Referents to nearby topographic features, including springs, peaks, rivers and mines (Rizzi 2007: 79). 6.3: Aids in orientation (Egger 1948: 57; Malfer 1976). 6.4: Markers of land property boundaries (Tschurtschenthaler 1934b; Haller 1972: 242–247; Ricchiardi and Seglie 1987: 64; Gruber 1991: 23). 6.5: Purported markers of deposited or hidden goods or treasures (Bednarik 2000). 7. Board games 7.1: Use in mancala games (Fu 1989: 179; Bandini-König 1999; Pohle 2000: 199–202). 7.2: Use in boa games (Odak 1992). 7.3: Games involving the use of marbles or coins (Rizzi 2007: 107). 7.4: Use in the board game huwais in Arabia (Rice 1994). 7.5: Use in the pursuit game mangura (Lombry 2008).

Axiomatic Confusions 8. Symbolisms which are no longer recoverable 8.1: Indeterminable cabalistic meaning (Magni 1901: 90). 8.2: Writing symbols or messages (Šebesta and Stenico 1967: 127; Haller 1972). 9. Receptacles for offerings 9.1: For offerings to deities or priests (Rizzi 2007: 97). 9.2: For offerings to goblins or lost souls (Magni 1901: 89). 9.3: For elves or spirits of nature (Šebesta and Stenico 1967: 127; Dondio 1970: 33–34; Santacroce 1987: 74). 9.4: For offerings by the sick (Tschurtschenthaler 1934a: 62). 9.5: To deposit supplication coins (Tscholl 1933: 440). 9.6: For offerings to flocks of birds to entreat them to spare the fields (Rizzi 2007: 98). 9.7: To place food tokens on the thresholds of churches (Wallnöfer 1946: 309; Egger 1948: 64). 9.8: For depositing coins or jewellery in cupules on stone crosses (Tschurtschenthaler 1934a: 61–63). 10. Specific symbolisms 10.1: Depiction of vulvae, occurring with or without anthropomorphs (Priuli 1983: 48). 10.2: To commemorate visit of a location (Mandl 1995: 65). 10.3: Production of cupules with coins to convert these into luck charms (Magni 1901: 102). 11. Other purely utilitarian purposes 11.1: Use as mortars (Huber 1995: 25). 11.2: Use as recess to keep door hinges in place (Huber 1995: 25). 11.3: Cooking of food (Magni 1901: 89). 11.4: Use as recess for salt for animals, such as cattle or deer (Fuchs and Huber 1995: 10). 11.5: Receptacles for bird food or to allow butter to melt (Rizzi 1994: 299). 11.6: Illumination or marking of paths with the aid of oil and a wick placed in cupules (e.g. Magni 1901; Bernardini 1975; Schwegler 1992; Pozzi 2000). 11.7: Receptacles of the first berries of the season (Fink 1983: 15; Rizzi 1994: 299). 11.8: Receptacles for smoke or fire signals (Haller 1972: 244). 11.9: Use as lamps (Egger 1948: 63–64; Tschurtschenthaler 1934a: 63; Rizzi 2007: 102–103). 11.10: Production of rock powder for ingestion (geophagy) by humans or other animals for medicinal purposes (Trost 1993: 57; cf. Callahan 2004). 11.11: Receptacles for food and water for chickens (Egger 1948: 68).

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Myths about Rock Art 11.12: Receptacles for pointed vertical posts in the construction of buildings (Rizzi 1995: Fig. 8, 2001, 2007). 11.13: Supports for the legs of beehives to prevent entry of specific insects (Egger 1948: 68; Rizzi 2007: 104). 11.14: Preparation for splitting of rocks (Dal Ri and Rizzi 1991: 626; Rizzi 2007: 104–105). 11.15: Use to measure quantity of grain (Trost 1993: 57). 11.16: Use as lithophones (Robinson 1958; Conant 1960; Singer 1961; Cooke 1964; Jackson et al. 1965; Montage 1965; Trost 1993: 94; Ouzman 1998: 38; Huwiler 1998: 148; Kumar et al. 2003: Fig. 2; Bednarik et al. 2005: Fig. 42; Bednarik 2008a: 74–76). This list of seventy-three potential explanations for cupules is far from exhaustive, but it provides a good indication of the great range to be found in the literature. Most of these rationalisations are pure speculations, a very small number have more or less credible ethnographic bases. This ratio can perhaps be extended from cupules to all forms of rock art: most published interpretations are simply conjectures or fantasies, and this is in addition to the many misidentifications of natural rock markings as rock art, including cupules. At this point we begin to appreciate the full extent of the huge scholarly mythology that has been created around rock art, and the true implications for our understanding of it. Other mistaken interpretations Misidentifications by combining motifs In Chapter 2, under the heading ‘Tales of dragons’, we considered the misidentification of several separate pictograms as a single pterosaur image in Black Dragon Canyon (Barnes and Pendleton 1979: 201), a canyon in Utah named after this purported image (Figure 5). Similar errors have occurred on numerous other occasions, which is not surprising considering that many rock art panels comprise large numbers of motifs, often partly superimposed over previous markings. Both petroglyph and pictogram accumulations offer countless opportunities for this common error, because many motifs co-occur; they are difficult to identify in the best conditions, and in the case of pictograms the area between them may feature pigment wash, i.e. areas where paint residues removed by rainwater were deposited. Since the visual process applied by the casual interpreter is the very same that underlies pareidolia, there is not a great deal of systematic analysis involved in the disambiguation of tangled assemblages of poorly preserved and defined images (concerning pareidolia see Chapter 2). These colour patches that remain on the rock are essentially like Rorschach inkblots: the visual system endeavours to detect margins, shapes and other features that resemble those of

Axiomatic Confusions

Figure 42. Some examples of visual illusions, illustrating the operation of the human visual system.

real objects, such as animals. So it detects a leg here, a head there, or perhaps an ear. If these perceived elements seem to be reasonably well articulated the occipital lobe records an Aha! moment: a ‘match’ is found and from there on every subsequent judgement is tailored to suit that preferred identification. This essentially involuntary reaction is an unscientific process in the sense that it seeks confirmation rather than disconfirmation. It needs to be appreciated that the brain always overrules the eye. Only 10% of the visual information processed by the human brain actually derives from the retina, the rest is recruited from within the brain. Effectively we perceive the world through a lens of the past, provided by our past experiences, and how any new information fits into the templates provided by them. This process works generally well, although it can easily be perceived, as any conjurer knows and as can be amply demonstrated by countless visual illusions (Figure 42). But when our visual system is confronted by ambiguous visual input, such as that provided by faded and washed pigment patches on a cliff, this process can easily fail us and convince us that we see something that was in fact not intended by the rock artist.

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Myths about Rock Art Another example is the identification of a kangaroo-like image in Arnhem Land as Sthenurus, a macropod megafaunal species (Murray and Chaloupka 1984). Lewis demonstrated that these authors had connected incomplete legs that were superimposed in a different pigment and technique to a figure that already had complete legs (Lewis 1986: 145). In Chapter 2 we have also considered the example of a perceived mammoth petroglyph at the Upper Sand Island site near Bluff, Utah, which in reality comprises several unrelated motifs of different ages as well as one natural groove (Figure 17). This group of rock markings bears an uncanny resemblance to a mammoth, but at certainly under 4000 years of age it is much more recent than the assumed extinction date of both the Columbian mammoth and the American mastodon. Van Gelder and Cooney (2013) have closely analysed an arrangement of finger flutings in Rouffignac Cave in France that has by many specialists of Palaeolithic cave art (including Nougier, Robert, Bar­riere, Plassard) been described as depicting a saiga antelope throughout the 20th century. They found that the several finger markings derive from the hands of three different children, and should be regarded as a fortuitous arrangement rather than an iconographic depiction. Misconceptions of this kind are rather common in rock art commentary, but there is another form also, based on the assumption that proximity implies correlation between motifs. In a recent example from southern Africa it was reported that a large human figure superimposed over very small figures had these “emerging from its armpit”. But the photograph showed that the two elements were of differently coloured and preserved pigments and very likely executed at quite different times, so their relative location to each other was fortuitous and had no bearing on the meaning of either. Far too many rock art ‘interpreters’ make not only the mistake of thinking they know what is depicted in the rock art, but also of reading meaning into apparent juxtapositions of motifs. They see a panel as representing a scene, a co-location as intentional, when in fact most juxtapositions in such arrangements are incidental. This capacity of imagining relationships where there are none, called apophenia or patternicity, is one of the most common myths rock art connoisseurs invent, often replete with concatenate fantasies of the meaning of, for instance, little people emerging from the armpit of a large anthropomorph. It is self-evident that this predisposition of ‘abnormal meaningfulness’ (Brugger 2001) offers endless potentials for imaginative interpretation, of which the fringe literature on rock art abounds. It needs to be clarified that apophenia offers evolutionary benefits, because when our patternrecognition systems misfire, they tend to err on the side of caution and selfdeception. It is simply advantageous to react to the detection of a threatening visual signal with an adrenalin boost and a flight response even if it turns out to be a harmless feature, such as a rock having the shape of a cave bear (Bednarik 1988).

Axiomatic Confusions

Invented rock art sequences In Chapter 3 we have in some detail considered the false stylistic sequence of the massive rock art concentrations in Saudi Arabia, and how it formed the mainstream model for the region even though it had been constructed without any credible evidence, by a scholar who had never been in the country. This may be an extreme case, but it needs to be added that false rock art sequences have been created and disseminated for many other world regions. Here I can only provide details where I have had the opportunity of examining these freestanding creations closely. Let us begin with my home country, Australia, where rock art research has been retarded for decades by an invented sequence. The wide adoption by archaeologists of Maynard’s (1979) tripartite model of Australian rock art and its three consecutive ‘developmental phases’ have hampered the establishment of a credible chronology since the 1980s. This model begins with a ‘Panaramitee style’, claimed to be of the Pleistocene and followed by ‘simple figurative’ and ‘complex figurative’ styles. However, it is not only contradicted by the superimpositions at countless sites across the continent, it is also inherently self-contradictory. Local traditions of simple figurative motifs are preceded by much more complex figurative motifs in various parts of the continent, whilst the ‘track and circle style’ of the Panaramitee can be the earliest or the most recent component of a site assemblage. Moreover, the three ‘styles’ are so loosely defined that they could refer to hundreds of rock art traditions in other continents. For instance the ‘Panaramitee style’, variants of which exist throughout the world, includes both simple and complex figurative motifs, including at its type site, Panaramitee North in the Olary region of South Australia (Figure 10). The ‘simple figurative’ sites, also a global phenomenon in rock art, are really no different from those defined as being of the ‘Panaramitee style’, except in the claimed relative proportion of perceived motif types. And the same can be said about the ‘complex figurative style’, also including large components of the two other ‘styles’. Maynard’s arbitrary three style constructs are therefore bereft of any chronological role. Her Pleistocene ‘Panaramitee style’ continues to survive into present times (Munn 1973; Mountford 1979), and direct dating at a site in its heartland has yielded late Holocene results (Bednarik 2010). The two other proposed styles could be any Holocene age and both are known to have been produced very recently. Maynard considered the possibility that her three styles might to some degree overlap chronologically, but subsequent commentators and advocates of her scheme have emphasised their consecutiveness. The inherent problem is that in their design, site corpora were treated as representing single traditions, when

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Myths about Rock Art in fact several traditions had often contributed to a given site’s repertoire. This conflating of the residues of different traditions has long made it impossible to address rock art chronology effectively in Australia (Bednarik 2002b, 2007b). It is akin to excavating the stone tools of several successive sediment layers and lumping them together as a single tradition, which no archaeologist would ever advocate. Yet when it comes to rock art its time depth is frequently ignored. Maynard’s ‘styles’ are combinations of different traditions that, in combination, show certain common vaguely expressed trends that are attributable to many sites having been used by people of the same traditions. All three ‘styles’ combine the same kinds of non-figurative, simple figurative and complex figurative motifs, differing only in their claimed relative proportions. The entire sequence is an archaeological myth, but for several decades it so dominated Australian rock art research that alternatives were systematically excluded from consideration. For instance Franklin (1991) defined opposition to the entirely fictional Panaramitee style as appearing “to be an attempt to inhibit research”. Defeating the tripartite Australian rock art sequence has been an exasperating but unnecessary experience: there was never any credible evidence in its favour, so why was it adopted so rigorously in the first place? Just as the invented stylistic rock art sequences of Arabia and Australia have for decades retarded scientific research in these regions, much the same applies in numerous other parts of the world. The original paradigm of how a stylistic chronology is created derives from the Franco-Cantabrian cave art traditions of the Upper Palaeolithic. As in Australia, this sequence extends over several tens of millennia, and throughout the 20th century a chronology based on perceived styles has been developed that seemed to permit the placement of any motif into an agreed timeframe. Tool traditions had been dated via the sediments they were found in, and had been ‘identified’, and the perceived rock art sequence was placed into this purported chronology. This was rarely by superimposition, but mostly through the similar styles ‘identified’ in dated mobiliary palaeoart and the ‘identifications’ of animal species presumed to have been depicted (Bahn and Vertut 1997). We have already considered the reliability of identifications, and the question arises how the claimed cave art ages stood up to testing, and indeed, how reliable the entire sequence turned out to be. Around 1990 the first direct dating of specific motifs was attempted (Lorblanchet et al. 1990; Lorblanchet 1994). Initial results already presented challenges to the established model, and contradictions began to accumulate over the next years. For instance the cave art of Chauvet Cave, discovered only in late 1994, was on stylistic evidence thought to be about 20 ka old, but was soon determined to be of the much earlier Aurignacian. The rock art in Cosquer Cave, believed to be Solutrean, turned out to be 28 ka old, clearly predating that ‘culture’; while that

Axiomatic Confusions of Zubialde Cave, attributed to the Magdalenian, is in fact a modern fake. The open air petroglyphs of the Côa valley in Portugal, which as noted in the first part of Chapter 3 were by all commenting archaeologists assigned to the Upper Palaeolithic on purely stylistic basis, are in fact of the late Holocene, mostly of recent centuries. A comparison of five rock art corpora providing direct dates by 1995 showed that all of them had been severely misdated by ‘stylistic analysis’ (whatever this word is intended to describe) and that their true ages are completely unrelated to all previous stylistically guided pronouncements (Bednarik 1995c). Since then, many further examples have accrued to confirm that stylistic age estimation yields essentially random results. Those who support it not only fail consistently in defining the process satisfactorily, but are also confused about its role. For instance Lorblanchet and Bahn (1993) embrace enthusiastically the concept that stylistic dating is mistaken, and Bahn supports the contrary dates from Chauvet (Bahn and Vertut 1997). But subsequently he became a principal opponent of the numerous Chauvet dates (Pettitt and Bahn 2003; Pettitt et al. 2009) and rejected the Aurignacian age of the best-dated corpus of rock art in the world, claiming that it is stylistically of the Magdalenian. Such ambivalence by commentators who both embrace and reject stylistic dating helps to illuminate the method’s incongruity and deficit of consistency. The principal argument in favour of the stylistic sequence of Upper Palaeolithic palaeoart in Europe recycles the teleological view that this body began with very primitive designs in the Aurignacian and gradually, over tens of millennia, became very complex and sophisticated towards the end of the Pleistocene. The Chauvet corpus and some similar others are undeniably far more advanced artistically than later traditions, fundamentally contradicting the traditional model developed for a century. But it had long been known that the mobiliary palaeoart of the Aurignacian is also highly sophisticated, particularly in a series of sites in south-western Germany. What complicates matters further is that this Aurignacian ‘art’ seems to have begun much earlier than first thought, and may be as old as 40,000 years (Bednarik 2007c; Sadier et al. 2012; Rodríguez-Vidal et al. 2014). Not only that, it appears to be of a culture by Neanderthaloid people, which is particularly damaging to archaeological dogma (Bednarik 2008b). The concept that Neanderthals produced paintings, petroglyphs and figurines that are artistically and cognitively more complex than the work of later ‘modern humans’ (whatever that term means) remains unpalatable to practically all archaeologists, despite its obvious strength (Bednarik 2007c, 2008b, 2011a, 2011b). Worse still, the clear evidence that most of this cave art was produced by young people (Bednarik 2008c) seems even harder to tolerate by most, which only confirms that Pleistocene archaeology is merely a myth-creating endeavour by people who prefer inventing fantastical explanations to realistic explanations. The very idea that palaeoart at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic traditions is significantly

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Myths about Rock Art more complex and developed than that of the subsequent ‘cultures’ remains inconceivable to many specialists of this topic, which indicates significant flaws in archaeological thought. And it consigns one of the most enduring myths about rock art, that of sound stylistic chronologies, to the academic dustbin. Nevertheless, during the century when it governed archaeological thought it became a global precept of how rock art research is to be conducted, and these principles spread around the world like a virus. For instance they were copied in India, a country immensely rich in rock art of many phases. Attempts to create a chronological framework satisfying the expectations of Europe led to various fiascos, such as the identification of the Lohanda Nala ‘Venus’ or ‘mother goddess’, bracketed by radiocarbon dates to between 20 ka and 25 ka (Misra 1977). It has been shown to be not a figurine, but a well-made bone harpoon that has suffered extensive damage in its very coarse sediment matrix (Bednarik 1992c, 1993c). It was also attempted to find ‘naturalistic art’ that could be attributed to the Pleistocene, and in the absence of realistic animal images a type of ‘dancing’ human figures were recruited for this purpose (Wakankar 1975). However, superimposition demonstrated that earlier rock paintings were generally nonfigurative, and finally these were attributed to the early Holocene. In short, the experiment to find a ‘naturalistic’ Pleistocene tradition in India failed, as it did elsewhere in both Asia and Africa, and the stylistic chronologies based on this ideology collapsed. Similar experiences pertain to Saharan rock art, where early semi-naturalistic traditions were attributed to Pleistocene hunters and gatherers (Mori 1974) until Muzzolini (1990) demonstrated that they could not precede the Neolithic, and therefore had to be of the Holocene. In southern Africa fairly naturalistic rock art does occur widely, but it is in all cases relatively recent and particularly the rock paintings seem to be exclusively of the most recent millennia. In short, wherever the European model was applied, it failed: most of the known Pleistocene rock art of the world is non-figurative (probably as much as 99%), and in a global perspective the figurative component of European cave art is merely a local aberration. The most realistic explanation, that the figurative content of European Palaeolithic ‘art’ was introduced by Neanderthaloid children and teenagers remains an affront to many archaeologists. And just as in Europe, when stylistic chronologies were tested by scientific age estimation methods they tended to fail almost everywhere else. The Venus figurines While the so-called Venus figurines are not a form of rock art, but are portable palaeoart objects, rock art is simply the immovable component of palaeoart.

Axiomatic Confusions Therefore mobiliary palaeoart is highly relevant here, and these statuettes of the Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia have been the subjects of such numerous myths that their examination here is certainly warranted and promises to be most productive (Figure 43). These supposedly female sculptures — most of them offer no proof of depicting females — come from Upper Palaeolithic contexts across much of Eurasia, from the Pyrenees to Lake Baikal (Hancar 1940; Tokarev 1961; Schielsky 1964; von Koenigswald 1964; Abramova 1967; Feustel 1971; Ucko and Rosenfeld 1972; Rice 1981; Gamble 1982; Gvozdover 1989; Duhard 1989; Bednarik 1990c, 1996; Hahn 1990; Dobres 1992). They provide a classical example of how perceived distributional, formal, statistical and compositional characteristics of undefined samples can become established memes in the minds of researchers as if they represented real categories that link cultures and ethnic entities. The myth holding the Venus story Figure 43. Presumed female together derives from interpretational fervour; figurine of the Aurignacian, c. is in most cases ideologically motivated and 33,000 years old, Galgenberg taphonomically naive; and derives from near Krems, Austria. It differs views by commentators who are inadequately in most respects from all other informed and often have not examined the ‘Venus’ figurines. material in question or its find sites. Moreover, the epistemology applied to this subject tends to be indeterminate or inadequate. For instance the number of included artefacts ranges usually from 100 to 140 items, although some pundits would include as many as 200 examples. So the sample itself remains undefined and there is no agreement on what is included or excluded, or on what basis. The sample is also not defined in terms of perceived cultural tradition or antiquity. Some examples are of the Aurignacian, the majority is attributed to the Gravettian, but significantly younger examples abound. In two cases even proto-figurines of the Lower Palaeolithic are included, despite one of them (Bednarik 2003) not exhibiting any indication of being female. Consequently the ‘sample’ includes specimens that are at least 20,000 years and 6000 km apart, but it will exclude those from the very same site and only a few millennia younger. It also excludes all other forms of female depiction of the same periods,

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Myths about Rock Art and will perceive differences in iconography as culturally conditioned, when in fact they are more likely the outcome of technological factors (Bednarik 1990). To analyse such an arbitrarily selected, chronologically and formally undefined, incomplete sample as this motley collection is not a scientifically promising procedure. Apart from usually a priori assumptions about meaning, it is not even clear what the sample is intended to be representative of (Bednarik 1996). The only factors that tie this collection together are the fertile Freudian minds of some investigators, and the tendency of others arbitrarily to select perceived common denominators, create imagined taxonomies on their basis, and then present these as the evidence of their preferred hypotheses in the form of circular reasoning. And there is no shortage of androcentric, gynocentric, heterocentric, feministinspired and Eurocentric polemic about these ‘Venuses’ (e.g. Dobres 1992; cf. Bednarik 1996). Most frequent are references to fertility, to a mother goddess cult, or to Palaeolithic pornography. Most of the figurines in question exhibit no clear evidence of female attributes, they are not corpulent or large-breasted as frequently claimed (most in fact have no breasts or vulvae at all, and one ‘male’ figurine also has small ‘breasts’), some appear to be fully clothed, very few might be pregnant, and fewer still could reasonably be classified as steatopygous. Some of them may be as yet undetected fakes (e.g. from Brassempouy; Bahn 1993; see Chapter 7). Of particular concern is that the taphonomic context of these ‘Venuses’ is almost universally ignored. With the exception of a few haematite, fired clay and steatite specimens, the collection of figurines consists essentially of organically derived, mineralised calcareous materials dominated by carbonates. Many in fact are entirely of carbonates. All of them have been excavated either in loess deposits, the high-pH regime of which is due to their carbonates (calcite and dolomite; Bednarik 2008e), or from the high-pH sediments of limestone caves. Thus the figurines have only been found in soil conditions conducive to their survival, and none have been found in soils of detrimental properties. Unless one was to propose that they had deliberately been deposited only in high-pH conditions, which would be absurd, it needs to be accepted that this corpus has been severely truncated taphonomically: it cannot possibly be a representative sample of anything. To illustrate the point, imagine that intergalactic archaeologists investigate human material culture. What would they make of groups of similar horse figurines, some of ivory and some of black plastic? If their thought patterns were as primitive as those of our archaeologists they would invent such interpretations as sexual dimorphism indicated by the two colours, they would invent religious and ceremonial but entirely etic explanations, perhaps androcentric, gynocentric or Marxist rationalisations. But they would never stumble upon the correct emic fact that these figures are the knights of chess sets. In other words, most archaeological explanations of cultural material representing complex exograms

Axiomatic Confusions (Bednarik 2014c) are likely to be false, on the basis of probability.

Figure 44. Three small figurines from Mal’ta (a, b) and Buret’, Siberia.

And this also applies also to the ‘Venus’ figurines. It is highly probable that they should not be subsumed under a single category, but were made for a number of different reasons. For instance nearly all those from Siberia were designed to be suspended from a string, in all likelihood worn around people’s necks, but always with the head downwards (Figure 44). This might imply that they were meant to be looked at and handled primarily by the wearer, and they were not worn for display.

On the other hand, the Russian sample and many of the central and western European specimens tend to be too large to be worn, and some of them were made by such consistent patterns that they resemble the results of serial production (Figure 45). It is simply misleading to place such dissimilar objects into one category, merely on the basis of archaeologists’ vibes. The analysis of a sample lacks any merit if the sample was defined by excluding those specimens that would contradict a desired finding. Hence one needs to start by defining the sample without anticipating what the findings might be. Since such a definition of sample cannot be free of theory, all ideological baggage would need to be abandoned. This has not been done in the study of the figurines colloquially known as ‘Venuses’. Consequently the interpretative literature on the supposedly female figurines of the Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic, with its references to fecundity and so forth, would be most fertile material for the epistemological research of heuristic dynamics in archaeology, and of how theories tend to grow, like mushrooms, in the dark. This deservedly harsh judgment does not extend to purely descriptive and ideology-free works on this material (e.g. Rosenfeld 1977; Bednarik 1989b, 1990c, 1996; Gvozdover 1995; Russell 2006), which are rare and receive rather less attention than the colourful interpretations. The figurines in question are of greatly differing formal attributes, antiquities, cultural affiliations, geographic provenience and materials. Almost certainly they do not represent a homogeneous tradition, but have been lumped together by scholars seeking confirmation of preconceived explanations. In short, this literature consists largely of a mythology and needs to be ignored in any serious review of the material in question.

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Figure 45. Palaeolithic female figurines from Avdeevo, Russia, seemingly made to a standardised pattern.

Chapter 5

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends Sensationalist claims Thousands of myths have been invented about rock art over the past couple of centuries, but most especially during the 20th century. The reasons for their proliferation are manifold. They range from sinister motives to religious convictions, from academic beliefs to self-promotion, from obsessive research priorities to impaired mental processes. Two factors need to be considered upfront. First, it is obvious that in most circumstances interpretative claims about rock art are not testable, and as such are not falsifiable. This aspect will be contemplated in Chapter 7; suffice it to say here that most propositions about rock art meaning cannot be internally contradicted and yet there is an immense wealth of them in the literature — and they tend to be vigorously defended by their advocates. Second, the neuroscience of rock art interpretation needs to be examined to understand why protagonists are so certain about their judgments. This will also be examined on later pages. One important category of false assertions, those designed to attract great attention, is aimed not only at fellow researchers but also, or especially, at the mass media. The underlying reason is usually academic advancement or a desire for renown, and of course these factors tend to be connected. The academic world is not just a venue of learning, it is also a vicious realm of ‘survival of the fittest’ — and fitness is often not measured in academic competence or merit. Frank Campbell, an influential Australian writer, bluntly characterises archaeology: Archaeologists dig up their own future. And there’s the rub: their careers depend on what they find, how important their finds and how others interpret them. Careers are at stake. There are very few decent jobs. There’s a nasty hierarchy to negotiate. ... From Wales to Australia to Jordan, the present molests the past for its own nefarious purposes (Campbell 2006). Of course the careers of vocational archaeologists depend very much on the perceived importance of what they happen to dig up, which immediately raises the question of how such importance is determined. In practical terms the most effective way is undoubtedly how it is perceived by the mass media, and this perception translates readily into personal recognition, in terms of advancement, opportunities and financial support. While academic peer review certainly does play a considerable role in the process, glowing media reports are a decisive factor. Any academic who wants to advance will find this much easier if he or she can attract the attention of the printed or electronic mass media. The 97

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Myths about Rock Art media, understandably, is focused on the potential of sensational value: will the announcement of the new discovery sell newspapers or attract the attention of viewers? In this the prospective purveyors of new knowledge can influence the ‘saleability’ of their startling finds or findings by embellishing them, through overconfidence and driven by ambition. There are numerous examples of this in world archaeology, but in the present context the myths invented about rock art in the pursuit of fame have precedence. Some case histories are considered. Ronald Dorn’s career as a rock art dating expert began in the early 1980s, when he developed an approach to estimating the age of patinae naturally deposited over petroglyphs (Dorn and Oberlander 1982). Such deposits consist of a cocktail of materials dominated by iron oxides and hydroxides that forms very slowly and postdates the rock art motif it conceals, providing a minimum date for it. It was assumed that weathering of the patina removes the more soluble cations (potassium and calcium) selectively, relative to the more stable titanium content (Dorn 1983, 1986, 1990, 1992, 1994). Therefore the ratio between them should be an indication of roughly how long the patina has been exposed to leaching. In reality this postulate is contradicted by dozens of factors (e.g. Bednarik 1991b, 2007; Bierman et al. 1991; Watchman 1992) and ‘cation ratio analysis’ as a dating method was always a delusional concept. However, because rock art dating is indeed a very difficult endeavour, Dorn was able to promote his method successfully, finding many supporters and eventually winning an award as the best young scientist in the United States. He published numerous academic papers before his good fortune began to change when he exported his method to Australia and began analysing the heavily coated petroglyphs of the Olary region in eastern South Australia (Nobbs and Dorn 1988). His ‘datings’ became increasingly more sensational but when Watchman (1992) re-sampled the same petroglyphs Dorn had subjected to analysis, he secured entirely different results. As alarm bells began to ring, Dorn’s method was subjected to detailed scrutiny. The cation-ratio readings from the petroglyphs have to be calibrated by radiocarbon dating from close to the petroglyphs, because the samples required to be taken are far too large to be permitted to extract directly from the petroglyph in question. When five physicists from the radiocarbon facility Dorn was using began taking a closer look at his samples, they noticed certain peculiarities (Beck et al. 1998). For instance the samples had been surprisingly large, so large in fact that ‘splits’ of them (left-overs) had been retained and could now be analysed chemically. They contained quantities of charcoal and black coal — even samples from Hawaii, a volcanic island on which black coal simply cannot occur naturally. Modern charcoal has a radiocarbon age of zero, while that of black coal is infinite, so if the two substances were mixed in a carefully calculated ratio, one would be

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends able to predetermine the assumed radiometric age of any mineral powder they were added to; one could have custom-made radiocarbon ages in this way. It is not suggested here that this is what Professor Dorn did for more than one decade, and it would even be careless to do so: he is known to be litigious. Scholars who have intimated that this is what occurred are of course mistaken: no scholar would do such a thing. But as an outcome of the controversy Dorn withdrew all of his rock art and geological ‘datings’ from 1982 to 1995 (Dorn 1996, 1997), declaring that he had lost all faith in carbon dating of accretionary mineral deposits. By implication this extends to the cation-ratio method he had introduced, because it relies on the calibration by radiocarbon content. However, Dorn’s repudiation of all his own work was quite superfluous. It had already been established before he began it that all weathered rock surface zones contain organic matter deposited naturally, and that the radiocarbon content of such accretions as rock patination reflects in no way the antiquity of such deposits (Bednarik 1979). In fact this paper had been sent to Dorn in 1986, but apparently he ignored it — to his considerable detriment. Had he read it carefully he would have realised that his dating method cannot yield valid results, and he would have avoided considerable embarrassment, to both him and the discipline. This kind of embarrassment is the result of premature and attention-seeking reporting of inadequately researched projects and the sensationalist claims they can lead to. In Dorn’s case he proposed ages of more than 40 ka for some petroglyphs in South Australia, which at that time would have made them the earliest rock art known in the world. Today we know that these traditions in the Olary region are only in the order of a few thousand years old at most (Watchman 1992; Bednarik 2010). Another sensational claim refers to a cupule site in the westernmost part of the Northern Territory of Australia, a shallow and small rock-shelter called Jinmium. Its wall features a large series of cupules, spherical dome-shaped, cup-like impact petroglyphs that are common among very early as well as many subsequent rock art traditions. As noted in Chapter 3, an excavation of the sediments below the wall yielded an exfoliated fragment of the rock art as well as other artefacts, and thermoluminescence (TL) analysis was applied to the sediments to estimate their ages. It attempts to determine the time tiny quartz grains were last exposed to sunlight. The results were truly spectacular and they created a sensation around the world. The lowest TL date implied that Australia had first been occupied by humans 176 ka ago, at least three times as long ago as previously assumed. The stratified cupule fragment was said to be deposited some time between 58 and 75 ka bp. That would have made it by far the earliest dated rock art in the world. The discovery and its age determination were announced with great fanfare to a select media, and immediately other media outlets were unhappy about such a scoop being made available to just two newspapers. They felt that as the project

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Myths about Rock Art had been conducted using public funding it would have been obligatory to make the sensational results available to all media interests. Journalists of other media groups asked me to comment, and I pointed out that it was also inappropriate to present such unpublished but sensational claims to the public without prior peer review, and that there were considerable scientific objections to them. Most importantly the analytical method used was inappropriate, because it assumes implicitly that all quartz grains analysed had been equally exposed to sunlight prior to burial. In a sandstone shelter whose floor sediment comprised mostly mineral grains from decomposing (regolithic) rock this is fairly unlikely. As each rock fragment falls from the shelter wall, only the grains on its surface have been exposed to the light. Once in the ground, the piece disintegrates gradually to revert to sand grains, but the quartz grains of the fragment’s interior have not been exposed to the sun, therefore their ‘TL clock’ has not been ‘reset’ (i.e. the electrons trapped in their crystal lattice defects have not been released). Their apparent TL age would then be extremely high, and the danger was that such apparently old grains would have been included in the analyses conducted on the Jinmium sediments. I suggested to the editor of the archaeological journal the work had been submitted to at the time (Fullagar et al. 1996) that in view of these irregularities (peer review by media plus the technical concerns) he would be perfectly entitled to cancel publication of the paper in his journal. But he responded by saying that he was “a proud member of the team” and was very happy with its results. Still I insisted that it might be wise to qualify the impact of the announcement by publishing one of two dissenting responses that had been submitted to him, but all to no avail: the editor was very convinced he had a watertight case and a sensational discovery that would revolutionise both archaeology and rock art research. By the time the article appeared in print it had already been discredited fairly effectively by some of the Australian newspapers, especially of one particular publisher. The number of relevant scientists expressing concerns had grown, and soon a team was assembled to test the now published claims made by Fullagar and colleagues. It re-sampled the site’s sediments and applied a different luminescence method, OSL (optically stimulated luminescence), as well as radiocarbon analysis to the deposit. In OSL, the trap of including many sand grains that had not been exposed to light is avoided by analysing each grain separately and discarding those that yield excessively great ages. Both OSL and radiocarbon analyses returned similar results, according to which the site’s entire deposit was of the Holocene (i.e. less than 10,000 years old) and the exfoliated rock art fragment had fallen from the wall around 4000 years ago.

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends The publication of these findings (Roberts et al. 1998) was not only a great embarrassment to Australian archaeology, which on the whole has a fairly good record of credibility. It also demonstrated, rather graphically, what happens when experts get carried away by the gravity of their discoveries or findings and over-interpret them, embellishing their sensational merits. This may occur subconsciously or it may be quite deliberate, thus increasing their ‘newsworthyness’ and potential public interest. Even the editors of academic journals may not be immune to such follies, as can be seen in the above example; they too may be goaded by their desire to capture a sensational development in their discipline. It did not come as a great surprise that in this case the editor’s tenure was not renewed soon after his error of judgment had led to the blunder. The whole affair would have been avoided had he considered my well-intended advice. A third example of this predisposition to present premature announcements about sensationalist claims might help illustrate this phenomenon further. It concerns the report of a rock painting in Arnhem Land, also in the Northern Territory, already considered in Chapter 2. The red, water-damaged image is said to be of a bird, and occurs on the wall of a large sandstone block. A shallow recess has been created by the spalling of some of the rock mass, and there are in fact two bird-like designs on the panel that is poorly protected against the region’s torrential rains. Rainwater runoff as well as interstitial water seeping from horizontal bedding planes have both taken their toll on the rock art, gradually washing the pigment away. It is clear enough that these two paintings can only be relatively recent, perhaps under a millennium in age. The smaller ‘bird’ has attracted no attention, but the rather similar larger creature has been defined as an image of Genyornis, an extinct giant bird of ancient Australia. The reason given for this was essentially that anatomically it differs from the smaller ‘bird’, which seems to resemble a magpie goose, a bird common in the region and favoured by Aborigines as food. The rock fragment whose exfoliation exposed the surface on which the ‘birds’ were executed still lies where it fell, and the time of its detachment could be determined from the age of the sediment on which it fell, which would provide a terminus post quem, or a conservative maximum age for the rock art. However, it was not attempted to secure such information, nor was any attempt made to acquire any other credible data to help in estimating the antiquity of the images. One of the two ‘birds’ was simply judged to depict the giant bird in question, entirely on the basis that it was said to feature a small number of attributes that reminded the reporting archaeologists (Gunn et al. 2011) of palaeontological reconstructions of Genyornis. Recently archaeologist Bruno David has excavated under the fallen block and thereby established that the panel on which the ‘bird’ is painted only became available relatively recently, long after Genyornis became extinct.

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Myths about Rock Art The opinion that the image in question was of an extinct species was published in an archaeology journal and then reported by much of the world’s mass media, as if this spectacular claim was credible because it had appeared in an academic journal. The problem with this notion is that such publication is certainly not a criterion of credibility. On the contrary, the majority of all the claims ever made in archaeology journals were in fact falsities, or can at least be reasonably assumed to be so. Authors, referees and editors are all fallible, and archaeology’s most endearing aspect is that it has been the source of more blunders than any other academic discipline. As this book seeks to demonstrate, making mistakes has been endemic in archaeology, for as long as it has been conducted, which adds considerably to its ‘entertainment potential’. While there is of course no decisive proof that the image is not of Genyornis, the probability of it being so is realistically negligible, and since it is only based on pareidolic perception and interpretation, and contradicted by all other factors, it is in fact unsupported. The all-important subject of the pareidolic interpretation of rock art imagery, which is responsible for so many of the myths created about it, will be addressed in detail later in this chapter and Chapter 7. Here it is more relevant to appreciate that spectacular claims in the media, which occur frequently in relation to rock art, need to be received with scepticism. Many sensational claims fortunately never make it into the world news, but those that do tend to be taken seriously because ‘they were made by archaeologists’. Since most claims ever made by archaeologists over the past two centuries were false, this points to the basis of the misconception. To illustrate the point, here is a similar example and its aetiology, the proposition of a young Chinese archaeologist presented at the Rock Art Society of China Congress in July 2014. He offered a patch of exfoliating red paint residues in which he perceived an image of a bird “biting” another animal, which he suggested to be a cervid species. Therefore, he figured, the bird would have to have been quite large, carnivorous and aggressive. He then considered three potential candidates of Tertiary to Pleistocene times (Phorusrhacos, Gastorni, Titanis), but discounted them and turned his attention to another, the cassowary (Casuarius sp.). Not deterred by the fact that this large bird of Australia and New Guinea is part of the Sahulian fauna and would have found it hard to cross Wallace’s Line to reach Asia, plus the fact that this bird is a vegetarian, he went on to reasoning that during the Ice Ages the cassowary may have crossed the sea via glaciers in Indonesia. Its remains may still be found in China one day, he proposed. Of course there were no such glaciers in the Pleistocene tropics, and one really needs to ask questions about the standards of archaeological education in various countries. The ideas of this archaeologist are not presented here to be tested; there is no realistic need for that. But what they do show us is how they develop and grow from an

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends initial misconception that continues to be embellished by more misconceptions, leading to the formation of elaborate myths. In reality, the pigment patches he refers to comprise various superimpositions and it is almost impossible to detect individual motifs. So in all probability there is no big bird, or even a small bird, no beak, and very probably nothing else his pareidolic perception detects in what is simply a patchwork of paint residues. And all this applies before we consider aspects such as Indonesian sea glaciers, which are simply inventions of a very fertile mind. Pareidolic interpretations need to be seen in this light, and the most pernicious ones are those that seem ‘reasonable’. The writing on the wall Fantasies about rock art and what its motifs depict do, however, come in many forms, and one of the most popular is the interpretation of both petroglyphs and pictograms as writing characters, i.e. as pictographs. There appear to be two types of myths about rock art: those that are more or less universal, and can be found in many or even most parts of the world; and those that are clearly region specific. An example of the latter are the identification of both natural and humanly made rock markings as writing characters. Obviously there are millions of genuine written records on rock surfaces, found in various parts of the world. Many of these, even those widely regarded as ‘graffiti’, have been very useful to rock art science, for instance inscriptions that include the date of their execution (Tang et al. 2014, 2016). These offer the potential of providing calibration data for various forms of rock art dating methods (Figure 46). In rare cases rock inscriptions have even furnished explanations of iconic imagery where no ethnographic access to the meaning of rock art is possible nowadays. However, here we are not concerned with authentic written characters, but with interpretations of nonwriting rock markings as pictographs, hieroglyphs or other forms of writing ostensibly attributed to some exotic peoples. This kind of misinterpretation is notoriously common in North America, Japan and, to a lesser degree, in Europe. Some examples do occur elsewhere, including in Australia, but there they tend to gain rather less attention. Perhaps the most common claims for exotic writing are those found in parts of the world where the people they allegedly refer to have not been demonstrated to have ever been. Most frequently they concern Ogham, Iberic, Tifinagh, Egyptian, Phoenician, Sumerian and Chinese writing. There are literally hundreds of books, papers and reports presenting the case for pre-Columbian non-indigenous contacts with North America, and there are similar claims for other parts of the world, though they are significantly less numerous. One only needs to consider two examples to appreciate the great number of such proposals: the Occasional Proceedings of the Epigraphic Society, which have reported numerous examples

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Figure 46. The Gan Gou inscription of 1548 CE, Ningxia Province, China, which was used to secure calibration for microerosion analysis at petroglyph sites.

of exotic rock inscriptions across North America since 1973; and the newsletter of the Japan Petrograph Society, The Petrograph News, which have regularly reported Sumerian scripts in over a hundred issues published. Perhaps the most famous decipherer of American rock inscriptions was Howard Barraclough (Barry) Fell, who founded the Epigraphic Society and remains its guiding light more than two decades after his death. Originally a marine biologist specialising in invertebrates, Fell attained considerable notoriety with his three books proclaiming epigraphic evidence for extensive Old World contacts before Columbus. Much of this evidence was, however, contrived or false, and there were in many cases simpler explanations available. Most importantly, the complete lack of credible archaeological evidence of such early visits is glaringly obvious, but what is more interesting is that there is such a high concentration of outlandish claims in North America, and most especially in specific parts of the United States (Williams 1991). We have already noticed this tendency before, in considering the rich mythology of American Pleistocene and even Mesozoic faunal rock art depictions listed in Chapter 2. Mainstream archaeology rightly rejects both types of myths, but this seems to have a limited effect on the public of a country where a large segment of the population rejects evolutionary theory or holds

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends non-rational beliefs. (Only 40% of Americans accept that humans evolved from other animals, compared to about 80% in most of Europe.) The only case of preColumbian European contact in North America accepted by archaeology remains the abandoned Norse site of L’Anse aux Meadows in northern Newfoundland. The status of one of the main contenders for supposed Viking remains, the Kensington rune stone, remains unresolved. Most mainstream scholars view the 91-kg slab of inscribed greywacke reported in 1898 from Minnesota as a fake, but have yet to convince those who believe in its authenticity, each side accusing the other of bias. The inscription on the rune stone is dated ‘1362’ and states that a party of thirty Vikings passed by after ten of their comrades had been killed. The arguments for and against the artefact’s genuineness make interesting reading, but remain inconclusive. However, the story that Vikings would have travelled so far into the continent’s interior is unconvincing. Of concern is the quality of the petrographic evidence so far tendered: it is certainly possible to differentiate between an inscription that has been subjected to weathering for over half a millennium from one that should have remained essentially unweathered. While it is true that the believers seem immune to epigraphic and linguistic argument, at the same time it is incredible that no thorough study of the object has been attempted. Much the same applies to the four Spirit Pond rune-stones, reportedly found by Walter Elliott in 1971 below Popham Beach in southern Maine, and to their various ‘readings’ and interpretations (Buchanan 1992; Chapman 1992; Nielsen 1992). There are numerous other finds of this kind from across the United States, and they often involve religious aspects and are fervently pursued by some. For instance the Newark ‘holy stones’, reported to have been excavated at various times in 1860 from Hopewell Palaeoindian burial mounds in Ohio, fall into this category. Four of them bear Hebrew inscriptions: the novaculite ‘keystone’, the ‘decalogue’ of black limestone (Bloom and Polansky 1980), and two more stone objects found years later. Also found with these artefacts were a small stone bowl and a sandstone box with lid that contained the ‘decalogue’. But the first object reported bore letters of modern Hebrew, and after this was pointed out in a newspaper article, the more elaborate ‘decalogue’ ‘found’ several months later featured archaic Hebrew script. The motivation for the probable hoax (Alrutz 1980), apart from gaining notoriety, could have been a perceived need to validate the Bible’s tale of the lost Jewish tribes, or to justify the proselytising efforts among the First Nations. Not satisfied with one decalogue, American religious devotees managed to produce at least one other (not counting the Book of Mormon), the Los Lunas decalogue rock. This obviously modern inscription occurs on the flat surface of a large boulder, was first reported by archaeology professor Frank Cummins

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Figure 47. The Los Lunas Decalogue rock, Hidden Mountain, 56 km southwest of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The first line was vandalised in 2006 (photograph by H. McCulloch).

Hibben in 1933 (the year he received his bachelor’s degree) who believed it to be authentic. Hibben has been accused of having fabricated evidence supporting his claim for pre-Clovis occupation of Sandia Cave (Bliss 1940) and his report that the Los Lunas rock was covered by lichen and patination is also not credible. A geologist, G. E. Morehouse (1985) suggested that the palaeo-Hebrew inscription could be 500 to 2000 years old, when in fact its patination is almost identical to that of some recent damage when the first line of the text was defaced in 2006 (Figure 47). It most probably dates from the early 20th century. Moreover, many epigraphic errors were made in its production: some of the word order is incorrect, the use of the caret is unknown in early Hebrew, there are more recent Greek letters, and several Hebrew characters are incorrectly used. There is apparently no shortage of fake inscriptions from the USA, but to continue with Hebrew examples, the Bat Creek inscription is cited next. It also derives

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends from a burial mound and is very neatly engraved on a thin piece of ferruginous siltstone, 11.4 cm long. It was found in 1889 by John W. Emmert, a Smithsonian Institution field assistant. Originally assumed to be in Cherokee script, in 1970 it was claimed to be palaeo-Hebrew by Professor Cyrus Gordon (1972). Robert C. Mainfort, Jr. and Mary L. Kwas explained that the letters are entirely inconsistent with a Hebrew origin, finding it to better resemble the Cherokee alphabet (which was developed by Sequoyah around 1820), but they also reject that attribution and define the object as a fake, most likely perpetrated by the finder. .

A rather larger inscription, and one that is more relevant in the present context, is that of Dighton Rock, a 40-tonne elongate and angular sandstone block in the riverbed of the Taunton River at Berkley, Massachusetts. In 1680, the Rev. John Danforth made a drawing of the petroglyphs and ten years later, Rev. Cotton Mather described the rock in a book, so there is no doubt about its authenticity. However, among the Amerindian petroglyphs are said to occur several written characters, and they have been the source of much controversy. Between 1783 and 2002 they have been variously interpreted as Phoenician, Hebrew, Norse, Portuguese and Chinese writing characters. In one version (Delabarre 1928) it was suggested that the Portuguese Miguel Corte-Real had reached the site and left a message in Latin, reading “I, Miguel Cortereal, 1511. In this place, by the will of God, I became a chief of the Indians”. He had set out with his brother Gaspar in 1500, enslaving 57 First Nation people and charting 600 km of Labrador’s coastline. Gaspar sent Miguel back to Portugal but then disappears from history. In 1502, Miguel mounted an expedition to search for his brother, but he, too, disappeared. Delabarre, who had himself commented in detail of how easy it is to be confused by the array of markings on Dighton Rock, did not live to see the refutation of his hypothesis by Morison (1971). The problem, as Delabarre perceptively accepted, is that almost anything can be read into the dense accumulation of marks, some of which are said to be natural, and there can be no doubt that many were added after the 17th century. Even a recording of the main figures made in 1830 shows almost nothing that could be seen as writing (Figure 48). Therefore the most logical explanation is the simplest: this began as a panel of First Nation petroglyphs and natural marks, to which Europeans have added ever since they occupied the region. Then there is the ‘Metcalf stone’, found by Manfred Metcalf at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1966, a 23 cm square sandstone slab with a variety of linear markings that have been ‘read’ as Minoan by the same Professor Gordon mentioned above (Gordon 1971). This is one of many of Gordon’s farfetched ‘readings’ of rock markings that are claimed to attest to pre-Columbian American Old World

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Figure 48. The Dighton Rock, Berkley, Massachusets, as recorded in 1830.

contacts, but in this case the markings are almost certainly taphonomic. They bring to mind the notorious case of the Written Stones of Quebec, which admittedly is outside the United States. Having been interpreted in 1974 as Phoenician by an archaeologist from Laval University in Canada who had identified several such ‘writings’ along the American Atlantic coast, they were then ‘established’ as Libyan and deci­phered by yet another archaeologist, famous for his deci­phering of inscriptions (which, conversely, were no inscriptions at all). Non-archaeologist Dubois (1985), who investigated the two Written Stones panels, found that the markings are in fact solution grooves, as noted in Chapter 4. It needs to be mentioned that professional archaeologists have a tendency of emphasising that these kinds of blunders are made by ‘cult-archaeologists’ or ‘amateurs’, so it may be useful to counter this impression by stressing that both groups are equally susceptible. Indeed, most corrections of professional archaeologists’ mistakes have historically been presented by non-archaeologists, from the 1840s to the present (Bednarik 2013b). The question that arises from these considerations is this: why are such extraordinary claims far more common in the USA than elsewhere. Certainly, there are isolated cases from almost anywhere in the world, but they do tend to be exceptions rather than the rule. For instance we have the ‘Phoenician’ Paraíba inscription in Brazil (which has never been located), or fake Egyptian petroglyphs from Gosford in Australia (not a hoax, just the result of someone’s unbridled creativity, I found). In the USA, such artefacts tend to become the objects of bitter debates and academic feuds, in which neither side shows much capacity to let go. Examples of these drawn-out disputes abound, and some are carried on for centuries. Consider for instance the Newport Tower, Rhode Island, a stone

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends structure that was a windmill in the 17th century, but which many prefer to see as pre-Columbian. It has been proposed to be the work of Chinese, Portuguese, Norsemen and medieval Templars, and as having served as an astronomical observatory. Or consider the amazing histories of the various ‘petrified humans’ reported in the USA. The best-known, the 3-m Cardiff Giant, is a 1868 hoax by the atheist George Hull in response to the Biblical claim (Genesis 6: 4) that giants once lived on Earth. The hilarious part of this story is that the owner of the farm where it had been buried and ‘found’, who knew of the hoax, then erected a tent over it and charged the public to see the plaster statue. Christian fundamentalists insisted that the find was genuine, and eventually Hull sold his interest for around half a million dollars (on today’s values). When showman P.T. Barnum’s offer of twice that much was rejected, he covertly made a plaster cast and claimed it was the real article, and the original giant was a fake. The saying that a sucker is born every minute refers specifically to those who paid Barnum to see the fake of a hoax. In December 1869, Hull released the truth to the press. This illustrates the unlimited gullibility of a public, particularly one imbued with religious beliefs, but it is further amplified by other American petrified bodies. The Solid Muldoon ‘found’ in 1876 was also Hull’s creation, who by that time had graduated to using a complex mixture of clay, ground bones, meat, rock dust and plaster. It was also commercially shown, and the purpose of the Taughannock House petrified man of 1877 was to promote that hotel. Then there was the 1892 petrified ‘McGinty’, exhibited by Jefferson ‘Soapy’ Smith, and the 1897 ‘petrified’ body of Civil War General Thomas Francis Meagher. None of this relates to the fantastical interpretations of rock art or natural rock markings as exotic scripts, but it does illustrate the capacity of people to believe what they want to believe, and it also shows how difficult it is to convince them otherwise. Much the same applies to believers in American rock inscriptions of pre-Columbian visitors. An interesting side issue is also that the Proceedings of the Epigraphic Society, one of the main vehicles of these myths, also carries many articles about shamanism in rock art (see Chapter 6 for that topic). A good example is provided by a recent book purporting that a series of American petroglyphs are Chinese pictographs (Ruskamp 2011). Essentially, the evidence presented in this book consists of selected images of aniconic (non-figurative) petroglyphs from various parts of the south-western United States, and comparing them with specific Chinese writing characters such as those found on oracle bones. So for instance simple ladder-like petroglyph motifs are interpreted as zhou (boat) pictographs, even though they lack the curved structure of the latter. Or any multiple zigzag lines are interpreted as shui (water) pictographs, even when they are vertically orientated. The anthropomorph forms sometimes called ‘orants’ resemble the Chinese mu (forest), wei (large tree) or guo (fruit tree), as which

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Myths about Rock Art they are interpreted, and so forth. In all of this it is ignored that these geometric rock art motifs are not limited to a small part of North America; they occur also elsewhere in that continent, and they are found in various other continents. To which the believers would probably respond by suggesting Chinese visits to all those other places as well. For instance rock art motifs that might conceivably resemble the mu, wei or guo symbols can be found in various parts of Europe, in Africa, Australia, and in the Andean region. The odd thing is that in all these parts of the globe, they occur together with the respective local traditions of rock art. In some places, notably in Australia, we also know the true meanings of such motifs. What does become obvious from Ruskamp’s arguments is that once a commentator has convinced himself of certain explanations he becomes immune to contrary evidence or rationalisations. In fact his resolve to oppose them becomes ever stronger the more his scheme is challenged. Seeing things: pareidolia We have in previous chapters, especially in Chapter 2, touched upon the issue of pareidolia in rock art interpretation, and we are to examine the phenomenon of pareidolia in more detail in Chapter 7 when we will consider the neuroscience of this important factor in the creation of myths about palaeoart. Here we are concerned with a quite specific effect of pareidolia, the predisposition of a great many individuals to perceive iconicity in random products of nature, especially in rock fragments. This susceptibility can be detected in respect of several other types of objects, including large granite tors, whole cliff faces or mountain shapes, even including aspects of heavenly bodies such as Mars, down to much smaller examples, ranging from burnt toast bearing the face of Jesus, to odd shapes on tree bark, vegetables of various types, and a great variety of other perfectly random shapes in the world around us (Figure 42). Pareidolia is not limited to our visual sense, but can to a much less important extent also affect the auditory sense. It has been commented upon by William Shakespeare in the dialogue between Hamlet and Polonius in Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2: Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel? Polonius: By th’ mass and t’is, like a camel indeed. Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel. Polonius: It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet: Or, like a whale?

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends Polonius: Very like a whale. Pareidolia is a form of apophenia, which occurs when we see meaningful patterns in what are in reality random or meaningless data, such as in clustering illusion or confirmation bias. In visual pareidolia, familiar objects are recognised in stimuli that are generally vague and sometimes random. This occurs because the visual system is conditioned for rapid disambiguation of the incoming information, to form a ‘first impression’ in case swift response should be required. So for instance an exposed tree root we are stepping over may, for a fraction of a second, appear to be a snake. This, obviously, is a sensory shortcut that offered considerable survival value in the human past: it was better to switch to flight response even if the apparent rhino turned out to be just a harmless rock. The misapprehension prompted by pareidolia tends to be clarified quite rapidly, but as it wears off the brain may dwell on its image, prolonging the apophenic illusion and consciously registering that there is indeed a meaningful pattern in what should be a random arrangement of visual clues. This is the phenomenon we need to examine here. The perhaps most common forms detected by pareidolia are faces, especially human faces. Facial recognition is of obvious importance in social animals and well developed in humans, unless they suffer from a cognitive impairment called prosopagnosia. Associated with the fusiform gyrus (in the lowest part of the brain), this condition may affect a much larger segment of the population than once thought, perhaps as much as 2%. Individual susceptibility to pareidolia varies considerably among people, and tends to be notably greater in subjects with religious convictions (cf. acheiropoieta). Interestingly, in Christian subjects the pareidolic illusions are usually of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, while Muslims tend to detect the Arabic word of Allah or Koranic verses in random arrangements. In other words, the cultural conditioning determines pareidolia’s course. A magnetoencephalographic study found that objects resembling faces evoke a 165 ms activation in the ventral fusiform gyrus, which actual faces do slightly earlier (i.e. after 130 ms), whereas other common objects fail to evoke such an activation altogether (Hadjikhani et al. 2009). This suggests that face perception of facelike objects is not a later cognitive reinterpretation phenomenon of ambiguous stimuli. Of particular interest is the reaction of those individuals who do detect the illusion of their pareidolic vision, but then are so fascinated by the apparent meaningfulness of the random pattern that they eventually manage to convince themselves that these are not random after all. This phenomenon is well known in the study of rock art and therefore requires examination here. The conviction is often developed into passionate belief that defies all opposition to it. An example is provided by the humanoid face some see on Mars, in mountains and their

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Myths about Rock Art shadows in the Cydonia region of that planet (which, conversely, is not the only ‘face’ some see on Mars; there is also a face of Gandhi, a smiley face and even a Kermit the Frog). First photographed in 1976 by the Viking 1 spacecraft, it was shown by the much better resolution images of 1998 to be a purely geological feature, yet some of the ‘believers’ insisted that this was a cover-up by a conspiracy, and still in recent years defend their belief steadfastly (Van Flandern 2015). The hundreds of collectors who have found thousands upon thousands of stone figurines of the Lower Palaeolithic experience the same conviction: once they see a face or animal shape in the stone, they are convinced that the effect of their pareidolic vision is not accidental, that the object must have been shaped by human hand. At least in Europe their belief is that these objects are generally of the Acheulian, and I must confess that I may bear some responsibility for their obsession. I was once asked to examine a stone from an Acheulian occupation near the southern Moroccan town of Tan-Tan that looked very much like a human figure. My assessment was that its shape was entirely natural, but five of eight grooves that emphasised its human appearance had been made or modified by human hand. Also, the object bore traces of red pigment that comprised iron and manganese compounds, the hallmarks of early pigment materials. So I defined the find as a manuport (a humanly transported object) that had been slightly modified because its iconic properties had been appreciated by people of the Acheulian technological tradition (Bednarik 2003). As so often happens, others allowed their enthusiasm to embellish that assessment, and soon the find had become the ‘Venus of Tan-Tan’, despite the fact that it offered not the slightest evidence of ever having been perceived as female. Unfortunately this story had another effect. There are hundreds of enthusiasts, mostly in an area comprising northern France, England, Netherlands and northern Germany, i.e. where flint from chalk deposits is plentiful; they have been collecting ‘Acheulian sculptures’ since the 19th century, which are generally rejected by mainstream archaeologists. Similar traditions of finding and curating stones believed to have been shaped also occur in other parts of the world, including in the United States and Australia, but they are much less organised there. These aficionados derived great comfort from my report of the Tan-Tan proto-sculpture (Bednarik 2003): after all, it ‘proved’ that Acheulians produced portable ‘art’. In this they failed to appreciate that there is a great difference between the ability of detecting iconicity, which can be found in animals other than humans, and the ability of fashioning a stone into an iconic likeness. Moreover, it is exceedingly difficult to successfully knap a piece of flint into a sculpture; this is rather different than knapping a flake from a core. Over recent years, many of these collectors have contacted me in the hope that I would accept

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends their sometimes quite voluminous assemblages as being art objects. I have seen thousands of photographs of these stones, and I have seen some of the actual collections. But I have never seen a single such object that I would regard as manmade, and almost all of them lack any archaeological context; that is to say, there is no occupation evidence or dating for them. Most are quite heavily bruised by transport in rivers, and most come from river gravels. In one case a man sent me a carton containing carefully packed river cobbles weighing 65 kg, and was most unhappy that I could not see a single animal form in any of the many stones. Thus all of these objects are ‘naturefacts’, fashioned entirely by natural processes, and in the majority of instances I found it hard to see what their owners perceived to be the iconic qualities, i.e. what they were supposed to depict. And yet, I have never found it possible to dissuade them from their beliefs, in fact they were often incredulous that I could not share their convictions. This is reminiscent of other ‘believers’ who have fallen victim to pareidolia. In several decades as the editor of the journal Rock Art Research I have seen many other forms of this fervent belief in pareidolic phenomena. Some of these experiences seemed quite bizarre. A woman from Australia reported that she found images within pebbles when she broke them apart, and she claimed that these pictures had been placed there by Aborigines. Unable to establish what it was that she saw, I suggested that she could send me a couple of specimens. Soon later a carton arrived with literally hundreds of small, pebble-sized stones that had been fractured by impact. The fractures revealed the kinds of patterning one always sees on such surfaces, and again I remained unable to see any images. Clearly this person had extremely high susceptibility to pareidolia and had never given any thought to how Aborigines would have made these images and concealed them in pebbles for her to find. This experience has a well-known precedent: in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japanese researcher Chonosuke Okamura published a series of reports describing his sensational discoveries in polished Silurian limestone from Mt Nagaiwa in Japan. He detected an entire ‘mini-world’ of fossilised animals and humans measuring only a few millimetres (e.g. Okamura 1980, 1983). Based on his numerous discoveries, Okamura proposed that humans existed in the Silurian, but were only 3.5 mm tall then. Similarly, he detected tiny fossils of numerous other creatures, including gorillas, dogs, dinosaurs and even dragons (Berenbaum 2009: 72–73). Examples of the species he discovered and named are Gorilla gorilla minilorientalis, Canis familiaris minilorientalis and Homo sapiens minilorientales. He thus discovered that all vertebrate life began 425 million years ago, as micro-forms, and for this he was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize (which is a parody of the Nobel Prize, conferred for scientific blunders) in biodiversity in 1996. All of his discoveries are attributable to pareidolia, which

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Myths about Rock Art caused him to see biomorphs in fossils of sectioned foraminifera and coral fragments in the limestone. A similar experience was recorded when I examined Cedar-by-the-Sea, a petroglyph site on Vancouver Island, on Canada’s west coast (Hill and Hill 1974: 99). It is on privately owned land, and the owner’s wife tried very hard to convince me that in addition to the site’s several petroglyphs, there is also very intricate decoration on the intervening rock surface. I could simply not see what she meant and it took some time to realise that the woman perceived the general, millimetrescale weathering patterns on the pavement as having been created by humans. My rather exhaustive explanation of the phenomenon was met with incredulity. However, the most dramatic case of pareidolia in rock art interpretation was only recently recorded in Inner Mongolia. The director of a university college had discovered a large corpus of petroglyphs near his summerhouse in the mountains, and had about 20 students record them. He called three international rock art specialists, including me, to determine their age and to assist him nominating them for World Heritage listing. Thousands of ‘petroglyphs’ had been recorded, including hundreds of ‘face’ or ‘mask’ images (Figure 49). The method used was not rubbing, but a form of stamping (Bednarik 2016), and the three specialists discovered that in this process, the rock art recorders projected internally generated images onto entirely undecorated rock surfaces. Prompted by their charismatic leader, they imposed their expectations of what should be on the rock, even though not a single one of the petroglyphs existed. Recorders tried so hard to see the imagery that others purported to see that they subconsciously traced what they thought was on the blocks, genuinely believing their own creations. In this form of mass hysteria they managed to convince themselves that the rock art must be present, and when requested to trace it they discovered elaborate patterns on rocks that bore nothing other than random impact occasioned by fluvial and glacial transport. Some of the examples cited herein are not, strictly speaking, attributable to pareidolia, but they help illustrate the steadfastness of ‘believers’ and their immunity to rational argument. This is not attributable to a mental deficiency; let us remember that people who are totally dedicated to any kind of strong belief will always be inaccessible to reason when their belief is challenged. Which raises the question of the neurological basis of pareidolia; this will be tackled in Chapter 7. Reaching for stars and gods The field of archaeoastronomy has long been a part of archaeological pursuits, but has always been plagued by its inherent inability to test its hypotheses effectively. Its propositions are essentially free-standing expressions of probabilities. There

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends

Figure 49. Some of the hundreds of stampings of ‘face’ or ‘mask’ petroglyphs recorded at Xiaojinggou, Inner Mongolia, suggestive of a distinctive regional style of rock art. None of these exist.

can be little doubt that ethnoscientists of the distant past observed astronomical phenomena of various types and were successful in posing and to some degree testing certain explanations. And there are numerous cases from various parts of the world in which the level of commensurability between physical evidence, such as alignments with astronomical phenomena (e.g. equinox) and the movement of heavenly bodies is so close that such connections seem very real. Basic astronomical understanding of many ancient societies of the Holocene has been demonstrated satisfactorily and certain beliefs of many traditional societies reflect such understanding. Bearing in mind that Australian Aborigines understood

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Myths about Rock Art that the Sun goes clear around the Earth, that the tides are caused by the Moon (Warner 1937; Wells 1964; Hulley 1996), and that what causes both lunar and solar eclipses is correctly defined in myths about the Sun-woman and Moon-man (Warner 1937; Bates 1944; Johnson 1998), it is reasonable to attribute similar understandings to other pre-Historic people. Indeed, an influential ethnographer of Aboriginal societies suggested that the indigenes of central Australia had known and named every one of the c. 400 stars up to the fourth magnitude (Mountford 1976). So the issue is not about the ability of the ancients to observe and understand astronomical phenomena; it is about demonstrating the astronomical function of specific features or artefacts. A significant part of archaeological claims about ancient astronomical abilities, very probably most of them, are not scientific, in the sense that they cannot be tested. This applies in general, and it applies equally, if not more so, in archaeoastronomical claims about rock art. These are very common indeed and are almost invariably untestable, being essentially attributable to a simple confirmation bias. For instance if there are random patterns of small discrete markings on a rock panel, such as cupules, the believer will sequester an arbitrarily selected number of them and contend that they form an arrangement that resembles a particular star constellation. As there are many such perceived constellations in the night sky, it is obvious that near ‘matches’ can be found in any random group of cupules or similar rock markings. Once such a group has been ‘detected’, confirmation bias ensures that any disconfirming evidence is negated as ‘added later’, as ‘incidental’ or error, or even as demonstrating the past presence of an additional heavenly body that must have once existed. In other words, not only is a false belief reinforced, it becomes virtually immune to disconfirming evidence. Once I participated in a rock art field trip in Bolivia, where an archaeologist led us to a newly discovered site of what he thought were cupules found in a dry river bed. As soon as we arrived at the place, a Swiss archaeoastronomer unpacked his surveying equipment and commenced to determine the orientations of what he perceived to be potential astronomical alignments (Figure 50). We observed his inspiring enthusiasm and I became concerned that he was going to make a fool of himself, as I had noticed upon arrival that the ‘cupules’ were in fact no cupules. I advised him that the large and very deep depressions were not man-made at all; they were potholes, i.e. natural hollows formed by the river: as captive stones swirl around in initially small indents, they cut deeper and deeper into the bedrock, until the depressions are 30 or 40 cm deep, or even deeper still. Therefore we could be sure that any arrangements or orientations must be entirely fortuitous; there could be no meaning in them, they were simply the results of local thalweg topography and the mechanics of water flow. At first our Swiss

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends

Figure 50. Site of potholes, i.e. natural features, near Cochabamba, Bolivia, being surveyed by an ‘archaeoastronomer’ in 2007.

colleague retorted that they must be cupules because an archaeologist had said so. If only he knew how many times archaeologists err in their pronouncements! So I had to explain two things: what potholes as geological phenomena are and how they form; and how random arrangements of them are not intentional products of human intervention, therefore cannot have astronomical properties. In Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park at Sydney, Australia, there are approximately twenty-five roughly horizontal sandstone pavements dominated by two features: a kind of tessellation by deeply eroded cracks forming a mosaic of polygons, especially hexagons, that average roughly one metre in size; and a vast number of pits, ranging in diameter from 20 to 50 mm, that avoid the proximity of the fissures forming the polygons (see Chapter 4, Figure 40). These patterns of cup-marks have been proposed to represent star constellations (Cairns and Branagan 1992; Cairns and Yidumduma Harney 2003). Again, there are two questions: what caused the tessellation and what is the nature of the pits. One of the two authors most effectively advocating the anthropogenic hypothesis is a professor of geology, yet he was unable to explain the tessellation plausibly and he mistakenly believed the pock marks to be artificial. In commenting on this issue, Clegg (2007: 58–59) observed that a degree in geology, by itself, does not make a good geologist. Branagan (1968, 1973, 1983) described the tesselation cracks as having been caused by some type of syneresis. That process, also known as subaqueous shrinkage, describes the expulsion of a liquid from a gel-like substance and it has been described specifically from mudstone facies.

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Myths about Rock Art However, this process forms no continuous lattices of geometric shapes, as in the Sydney sandstone; its cracks are random, discontinuous and filled with sediment. The Sydney tesselation, however, is a desiccation-like phenomenon (Bednarik 2008f: 64) that reflects Voronoi diagrams (Voronoi 1908), also called Dirichlet tessellation (Dirichlet 1850): in such Euclidian diagrams, the Voronoi cells are determined by ‘seed’ sites governing their sizes and shapes. For each seed there is a corresponding region consisting of all points closer to that seed than to any other. Voronoi diagrams have countless applications in the sciences, and have even been cited in archaeology, but again erroneously so (Clarke 1978: Fig. 116) — as so often, archaeologists have misinterpreted or misused scientific concepts. In the case of the Sydney tessellation, the distances of the ‘seed’ sites are determined by the tensile limits of the sandstone stratum, which explains the fairly regular spacing of the polygon cells; the process of their formation follows the same principles as the formation of geometric forms in the drying mud cover of a desiccating floodplain or river bed. The second issue with Cairns and Branagan’s views concerns the tens of thousands of pits occurring on these pavements, fairly regularly spaced but always avoiding the tessellation grooves. Cairns and Branagan (1992: 27) cite a good number of geologists and archaeologists who have examined some of the sites and agree with these authors that the pitting is artificial, comprising cupules. However, a site visit by over thirty archaeologists and rock art specialists on 12 November 1989 arrived at the consensus view that the pits were natural, without being able to explain them (Bednarik 1990b). Because these pavements are perfectly horizontal (unless they have been subjected to tectonic displacement), rainwater drainage is slow and facilitates differential granular exfoliation, emphasising slight depressions through longer moisture retention. The process develops watersheds according to the micro-topography of each polygon cell, and establishes regularly spaced foci of erosional activity (Bednarik 2008f: 65). The nature of the pits is well demonstrated by their often vertical and even undercut walls, which cannot be created by human percussion impact, but are the result of solution by standing water. There are also thousands of larger solution pans on the pavements, in some cases ranging up to 4 m across, but most are in the order of 15–25 cm in size. They are all the result of the same process. The problem of interpretation begins with the question of intentionality: some observers perceive the way the pits avoid the grooves and are fairly evenly spaced as demonstrating the involvement of a deliberate action, when in fact the patterning is a natural phenomenon. This is a very common form of apophenia, the perception of meaningful patterns in random occurrences. In fact it could be reasonably said that archaeology itself is an expression of apophenia: as a discipline it is dedicated to detecting meaning in randomness — a rather sobering

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends thought (Bednarik 2013b). Here, however, we are specifically concerned with the apophenia that arises when such natural, randomly spaced rock markings as the Sydney pits are interpreted as star charts, or as individual star constellations. Once the believer perceives them as such, he or she is likely to defend this understanding against challenges, unable to appreciate that star patterns are themselves entirely random phenomena of nature, and that similar configurations can be detected in most random arrangements of this kind. Much the same applies to other astronomical claims about rock art, such as the frequent contention that asterisk-like and other motifs, e.g. in the American Southwest, are records of the sightings of historically known supernova events, such as those of 1006, 1054 or 1604 CE (e.g. Brandt and Williamson 1979). This kind of reasoning (e.g. Lapaz 1948; Eddy 1974; Britt 1975; Ellis 1975; Mayer 1975; Wellman 1976) then tends to lead to derivative hypotheses: for instance if the precise age of the ‘supernova’ image is known, it places the assemblage it occurs with chronologically (e.g. Crosby 1975). Needless to say, these are very probably houses of cards based on flawed documentation, pareidolic perception and biased reasoning. Even less credible are the many claims about the religious functions of rock art, another fertile ground for a great many hypotheses that can then be used to prop up derivative explanations of the meaning and purpose of rock art. The most common religious rationalisations about rock art concern are those attributing it to shamanism. That topic will be examined in Chapter 6, here it should suffice to note that there is no evidence, from anywhere in the world, that any shaman created rock art: there is no ethnographic, archaeological or any other such proof. Shamanism has been studied extensively and by many researchers, and not one of them has provided factual information relating to rock art. Shamanism is not a phenomenon purely of the past; thousands of shamans still exist today in various parts of the world. None of those that I have met has even seen rock art, much less created any (Figure 51). Secondly, we have countless examples when the producer of rock art is known and has been recorded, together with the time of such rock art production. In no case has shamanism been involved in any form. So we know that much rock art is non-shamanistic, but we lack any examples of authentic shamanistic rock art. Although this does not, obviously, prove that no rock art was ever created by a shaman, it does place the burden of proof on the shamanism advocate. No such empirical proof has ever been provided in the massive amount of literature of supposed shamanistic involvement in the making of rock art, which consists entirely of argumentation. The greatest question in this matter surely is why so many authors pursue this line of ‘enquiry’ when it seems so patently immune to empirical modes of investigation. The second-most applied line of religious reasoning about rock art is an extension of the more virulent forms of biblical archaeology, the pursuit essentially dedicated

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Figure 51. The author (with back to camera) participating in an elaborate ceremony conducted by a female shaman, in which she implores the spirits to protect a crew of twelve on an impending dangerous mission. All other men are Moslems, but for this purpose the power of a shaman is decisively preferred.

to proving the Bible true. Properly conducted biblical archaeology raises more questions about the historicity of the Hebrew Bible and even the New Testament than it provides answers. For instance many of the key biblical personalities, such as Abraham, Moses, Joshua or Solomon probably never existed (Dever 2006), as applies possibly also to Jesus. Proper biblical archaeology has detected no evidence that the Israelites, as a group, were ever in Egypt (Herzog 2006), and of course most of the key events featuring prominently in the Bible never occurred: the creation of the world 6000 years ago, Noah’s great flood, the Exodus and so forth are all fantasies. However, within the wide range of scholarship found in biblical archaeology, there are still many archaeologists who persist with the original agenda of this field, of demonstrating the historical veracity of the Bible, and some of them are active in rock art studies. A prominent example is Professor Emmanuel Anati, who ‘discovered’ that Har Karkom, a hill in the Negev Desert, is the biblical Mount Sinai. It is there that he recorded rock art and other evidence that showed the site to have been an extensive religious sanctuary (Anati 1984,

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends 1985, 1993, 1995, 2013, among many others). Indeed, he even ‘demonstrated’ it to have been used in Palaeolithic times (Anati 2012). The importance of being Palaeolithic In all of this it does not seem to be apparent to Anati that if the Exodus of the Israelites never occurred, neither did a deity’s appearance to an imaginary Moses at Mount Sinai. So this incredible effort to prove the unprovable is likely to yield a mythology, just as are the ancient texts it is based on are legends. Of interest to the next considerations is the endeavour to place Anati’s Har Karkom ‘sanctuary’ in the Palaeolithic. It is symptomatic of a whole swathe of mythologies about rock art as well as portable ‘art’, which we considered in quite some detail in Chapter 3. But whereas the valid response of many mainstream archaeologists to the various types of myths listed above and in previous chapters is likely to be that these peculiar beliefs are most often the preserve of ‘folk archaeologists’ or archaeological ‘amateurs’, the mythology addressed next is situated squarely in the domain of mainstream archaeologists. It is the extraordinary status, in Eurasia and especially in Europe, of material ascribed to the Palaeolithic period. Most particularly this involves the palaeoart of the period archaeologists call the Upper Palaeolithic. To be or not to be rock art of that period determines the level of its importance to the point that such issues can be of national significance (Bednarik 2009c). This is not an exaggeration. Here are the basic facts. There are no impassioned debates on whether some rock art is of the Holocene (under 10,000 years old) or of the previous Pleistocene in the Americas or in Australia, while in Africa, which has the earliest evidence of hominins, this differentiation has attracted particularly little enthusiasm. There are small numbers of such discussions from various parts of Asia and eastern Europe, and a good number of false claims for Pleistocene paleoart. But western Europe is undeniably the great focus of these debates about ‘Palaeolithicity’, the property of being Palaeolithic, and here these debates tend to become so acrimonious and downright nasty that it can fairly be described as astonishing. And here the debaters are not just general mainstream archaeologists; they would define themselves as ‘Palaeolithic art experts’. Perhaps the first clue to solving the reasons for this impasse already lies in this perception: any suggestion that one or the other pronouncement in this area might be wrong imperils the promoter’s status as such an expert. Freeman has very aptly characterised the process of deciding which rock art is Palaeolithic: validation resembles the way religious shrines are validated in some religions, especially in Roman Catholicism, i.e. it is based on authority (Freeman 1994). Not being a rock art expert (I know hundreds of rock art specialists in the world, but the only rock art experts I have ever met were traditional indigenes, especially Aboriginal elders), I have no reputation of

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Myths about Rock Art authority to defend. Be that as it may, the importance of being Palaeolithic (i.e. Pleistocene) is the issue that needs to be elucidated. Most archaeologists seem unaware that most of the world’s surviving Ice Age rock art is not even located in Europe, but in Australia (Figure 52), and that in all probability the corresponding corpora of Africa and Asia also exceed the quantity of Pleistocene rock art in Europe. So they suffer from the delusion, which is precisely what it is, that Ice Age ‘art’ is largely a European phenomenon. Within their colonialist perception of the world it was always readily conceivable that art must have been invented in western Europe, just as earlier on it was readily acceptable that hominins should first have evolved in England (the Piltdown finds refer), and not in southern Africa. The primary role of archaeology in serving the nation states has always been to help create the myths that explain the origins of their cultures (Trigger 1984, 1989; Kohl and Fawcett 1995; Bednarik 2015c). As the study of the world’s palaeoart was appropriated in the service of reinforcing European cosmovision and ideology, it came to be dominated by a humanist program dedicated to inventing origins myths, the core of which is the notion that culture was invented in south-western Europe in a period archaeologists call the Early Upper Palaeolithic. The political effects are readily apparent. The public perception mirrors the misconception of archaeologists, as does, for instance, the UNESCO World Heritage List: European Ice Age rock art sites admitted to it greatly outnumber all other types of cultural properties listed. Although the actual number of Pleistocene rock art sites is far greater in the rest of the world, not a single one has ever been nominated for listing. The scandalous distortion evident from this deliberate imbalance bears witness to the Eurocentrism of UNESCO’s effort. The myth of Europe’s cultural primacy is also reinforced and perpetuated through the world’s school and university curriculums and is so deeply embedded in our archaeo-lore (the mythology of what happened in the human past) that it dominates humanity’s thinking about cultural origins. The role of the rock arts of other continents seems to be mainly to provide ‘ethnographic analogies’ for European, especially Upper Paleolithic, rock art — subtly emphasising the otherness of those ‘exotic’ traditions. Thus the first misconception to be cleared up is that palaeoart first appeared in western Europe during the Aurignacian technocomplex, with the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, roughly 40,000 years ago. This is false even in Europe, where the currently earliest known rock art is from the earlier Mousterian period in the cave La Ferrassie, France (Peyrony 1934). But what does this mean in the context of evidence from other continents? Recently similar petroglyphs at two sites in the southern Kalahari Desert have been credibly attributed to an interglacial 410,000

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends

Figure 52. Pleistocene rock art of about 20,000 years age in Australia: Traditional Custodian Monty Hale knows its meaning, but it is not disclosed to the uninitiated.

years ago (Beaumont and Bednarik 2015), while those in two quartzite caves in central India are thought to be much earlier again. There are literally hundreds of palaeoart finds preceding the Aurignacian, from four continents (Bednarik 2013e, 2013f, 2014a, 2014b). The second misconception of all Eurocentric archaeologists is the notion that this palaeoart of the Pleistocene is ‘symbolic’ and that it is ‘art’. But the term ‘art’ derives from an ethnocentric concept: ‘the status of an artefact as work of art results from the ideas a culture applies to it, rather than its inherent physical or perceptible qualities. Cultural interpretation (an art theory of some kind) is therefore constitutive of an object’s arthood’ (Danto 1988). Westerners cannot even establish the status of recent ethnographic works with any objective understanding (Dutton 1993): interpretation is inseparable from the art work (Danto 1986: 45). Concerning the symbolic function of palaeoart (i.e. involving referent and referrer), perhaps it was symbolic, but nobody has demonstrated this so far. A much more viable alternative is to treat palaeoart as the surviving traces of exograms: externalised memory traces akin to engrams (Bednarik 1987c, 2014c; Donald 1991). This places a very different epistemological framework on the evidence, one that is not governed by a Eurocentric construct of reality. The question, is anything art or not, then becomes as irrelevant as it should always have been, having no scientific merit.

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Myths about Rock Art The third misconception about Palaeolithicity in rock art concerns the widespread belief that the glorious figurative palaeoart of Europe was introduced with the beginning of the European Upper Palaeolithic by invading Africans. This notion derives from the ‘African Eve’ model, which states that all people living today descend from one African female whose gracile progeny either annihilated or out-competed the robust Europeans, the Neanderthals. This is a particularly fascinating belief, because it illustrates how these models are predicated on the lack of knowledge of their protagonists. There is no evidence that the Aurignacian traditions were introduced by what are naively called ‘anatomically modern humans’ from Africa (Bednarik 1995d: 627), but we do have evidence that these as well as the many other traditions of the entire first half of the ‘Upper Palaeolithic’ were by robust humans — Neanderthals or their direct descendants (Bednarik 2007c, 2008b, 2011a, 2013c). Indeed, the entire ‘Eve’ hypothesis is without supporting evidence, be it archaeological, palaeoanthropological, cultural or genetic. It derived initially from the hoax of disgraced German archaeologist Professor Reiner Protsch (Bednarik 2013h) and the entire discipline adopted this genocidal idea. In reality the most spectacular cave art and portable ‘art’ of Europe is the work of Neanderthaloid (robust) humans, and has no connection with the purported ‘modern’ humans in any case (Bednarik 2007c; Sadier et al. 2012; Rodríguez-Vidal et al. 2014). These ‘anatomically modern’ humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, were not invaders from Africa who exterminated all other humans on earth; they became gracile in a very short time, through neotenisation (Bednarik 2008b, 2008d, 2011a). That process is still continuing today, is accelerating and has led to a dramatic decrease in cranial volume (Bednarik 2014d), as well as hundreds of other effects which I have detailed in numerous recent publications. The fourth delusion about Palaeolithicity in rock art concerns the misapprehension that it is indicated by ‘naturalistic’ animal depictions (Rosenfeld 1997). To begin with, no rock art is truly naturalistic, in the sense the drawings in a zoology text book are: all include aspects that are not true-to-life and our visual system simply latches onto those we believe to be so. But even if we ignore this, it is simply a fact that the great majority of genuine Upper Palaeolithic palaeoart is non-figurative, as far as we can tell. It is dominated by the so-called ‘signs’, repetitive geometric symbols that occur in no other tradition, and are the real hallmark of ‘Palaeolithic art’. Relatively life-like animal figures, on the other hand, are found in numerous more recent traditions, even in regions that were covered by glaciers in the Pleistocene (e.g. Scandinavia; Figure 53). In western and southern Europe we have numerous portable ‘art’ images that are safely dated to the Holocene period, but are of purported Palaeolithic style (Beltrán 1992: 409). Some examples are the deer image from Cave F-155 near Fratel, Portugal; the bird head from Nerja, Malaga; the doe and bovid images from Sant Gregori de Falset (Vilaseca 1934; Fullola I Pericot et al. 1987); the five animal engravings from Tossal de la Roca

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends (Alicante); those from Matutane Cave (Castellon) and Barranc (Aparicio Pérez 1987; Villaverde Bonilla 1987). Then there are several specimens from Murat de Rocamadour (Lorblanchet und Welté 1987), Point d’Ambon und La Borie del Rey (Roussot 1987); and the equine images found in Grotte de Gouy (Martin 1973), all from France. In Italy we have the Holocene bovid from Grotta Genovese (Couraud 1985), in Belgium the one from Trou du Frontal (Lejeune 1987), and in Holland the female human figure from Geldrop III-1 (Marshack 1991), which Figure 53. Some Scandinavian rock art is are also of ‘Palaeolithic style’. relatively naturalistic, but it cannot possibly Even in Turkey we find postbe of the Pleistocene: all exposed rocks Palaeolithic palaeoart that appears in that region were scoured clean by the to be of Palaeolithic style (Otte glaciers of the Late Pleistocene. et al. 1995). And even the much celebrated cave art in Lascaux Cave is not, for the greater part, 17,000 years old as is widely claimed. It remains in fact undated, and the charcoal from the badly excavated floor ranges in age from 7510 ± 650 years to just over 17,000 years. Most of it is under 10,000 years old, and the Holocene deposit also yielded pigment remains. The most recent rock art of Lascaux is very probably also of the Holocene, and among it the very large aurochs images cannot even be of the final Pleistocene, when that species did not live in the region. Both these figures and the deer paintings resemble the style of the Levantine tradition in eastern Spain, which was initially attributed to the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic, and has since been assigned to every single ‘period’ from then to the Iron Age (Hernández Pérez et al. 1988). In summary, the Upper Palaeolithic ‘art’ of Europe is certainly not the oldest such tradition known; there is no proof it is either an art or consists of symbols; it was not introduced by invaders from Africa; and it is not dominated by animal images. If we add to this that it was introduced by Neanderthals, and that most of it was probably made by youngsters, rather than shamans (Bednarik 2008c), we can fairly say that almost all archaeological beliefs about this prominent corpus belong into the realm of mythology.

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Myths about Rock Art But not only has the myth that artistic culture began in Europe blinded the discipline of Pleistocene archaeology, it has also led to the described obsession with Palaeolithic art and the aberrations this has led to. The incredible fixation on the significance of this European Pleistocene rock art, responsible for the politically motivated subliminal message that culture began in western Europe, has also led to the listing as World Heritage of rock art sites that are not even remotely Palaeolithic, but were falsely claimed to be so by the Palaeolithic art lobby in its efforts to have them listed. The many sites of the Côa valley in northern Portugal, for instance, were specifically nominated for their purported Ice Age rock art, and yet there is no credible proof of a Pleistocene human occupation in that region, nor any suggestion that some of the rock art might be of that period (Bednarik 1995b; Watchman 1995, 1996). Similarly, the nearby Spanish site Siega Verde has been inscribed in the World Heritage List for precisely the same fake justification, yet it has been demonstrated that the petroglyphs there are mostly of the early 20th century, and none can possibly be older than the 19th century (Bednarik 2009b). All commenting archaeologists have brazenly claimed these modern petroglyphs to be Palaeolithic. So not only is the Upper Palaeolithic rock art of western Europe not the oldest such evidence in the world; the rock art at many of the sites so defined is not even of that period. Apart from Siega Verde and the Côa sites, there are many others in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, England, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Czech Republic, Romania and Russia (Bahn and Vertut 1997) that have been anointed by the high priesthood (Thompson 2014) of the Palaeolithic art lobby as being of the Pleistocene, in precisely the fashion Freeman has identified so well: Those special beliefs and feelings [about Palaeolithic art] are held by the professional prehistorian as well as the average citizen. Neither is particularly good at self analysis. ... There are reasons to believe that the behavior associated with the Palaeolithic sites is not directly modeled on that surrounding Christian shrines, but that these two manifestations of belief, reverence, and validation of experience have the same origin at a deeper structural level. I still can not pretend to understand that origin; I believe it to be promising material for further serious investigation. (Freeman 1994: 341) In each and every false claim made about the Palaeolithicity of rock art, no scientific dating evidence has been offered in support of such an antiquity. The pronouncements were always based on some mysterious but undefined property called ‘Palaeolithic style’, and all attempted scientific analyses have rejected the notion of great age. The scientists conducting such tests sometimes found themselves attacked and defamed as a result. Western Europe is not only the region where false claims of Pleistocene palaeoart are found (if we include the above-mentioned stone ‘figurines’ there are virtually

Sensationalist Myths and Fringe Legends tens of thousands of such claims from that region); it is also where most fakes of palaeoart originate (see Chapter 7 for details). There are some examples of such fraudulent objects in the United States, but not a single instance is known from Africa, Asia, Australia or South America. In three of these continents, such early palaeoart is well attested, even older than in Europe, as noted. It is particularly interesting that not a single fake is known from Russia, including Siberia, where a great corpus of portable Palaeolithic ‘art’ objects are known, yet there are such large numbers of fakes in western Europe, many of which have no doubt still to be exposed (Bahn 1993; Bahn and Vertut 1997: 77–83). It thus appears that the reason for these many fakes is closely connected to the high number of false claims made about Pleistocene age: the importance of being Palaeolithic governs both issues (Bednarik 2009c). Another related aspect of this phenomenon is that, almost invariably, when the pronouncement of Pleistocene age is questioned or contradicted, the protagonists favouring it express great disquiet and may resort to extreme measures in defending their chronological assertions. But this does not seem to apply to cases in which an assumed Holocene age is corrected to a Pleistocene age. In other words, the implication seems to be that, when a Holocene age is proposed for purported Pleistocene art, this constitutes a personal criticism of those who support the initial view, but not when a Pleistocene age is proposed for purported Holocene art. Clearly, then, this is not only about the implication of being wrong; there are more complex psychological factors at work here, as Freeman predicted. The perceived importance of Pleistocene age seems to lack a rational justification, and it is contradicted by most alternative worldviews. For the traditional indigenous peoples of the world, it is the most recent rock art that is the most important. It demonstrates the continuity of their society’s expressions of material culture and thus validates legitimacy, e.g. in their connection with the land and their right to claim the land. It is also the most recent rock art they can best relate to historically. From their point of view, the concept of the oldest ‘art’ being the more important would necessarily seem illogical. Similarly, various non-traditional societies perceive the rock art in their regions as part of their own cultural heritage, as having been made by their own ancestors (e.g. in Scandinavia, Britain or China). Even researchers may express similar preferences; for instance the members of Verein Anisa, a research group operating in parts of Austria and southern Germany. They specialise in the study of rock art and rural, especially montane, settlement patterns of recent times, and for this purpose find pre-Historic rock art considerably less interesting. Therefore it seems that the principle of the earliest rock art of a region being the most important reflects the bias of Palaeolithic rock art connoisseurs of quite specific regions, most especially of south-western Europe. They have been very

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Myths about Rock Art effective in establishing their bias in mainstream archaeology, and in buttressing it politically to uphold the myth of European cultural hegemony. By the same token they have reinforced the role of their priesthood (sensu Thompson 2014) as arbiters (sensu Freeman 1994), and thereby defied the scientific process (which requires testing of hypotheses and eschews claims from authority). It emerges from all of this that many key assumptions about the significance of Pleistocene palaeoart of western Europe are simply falsities. One of the most frequent claims made about this magnificent corpus is that it is attributable to shamans. The shamanists seem unaware that there is not even much empirical evidence for this palaeoart being the work of adults. But there is a great deal of evidence that it was made by young people, teenagers, children, even infants as young as three. In fact, every form of this Pleistocene palaeoart that permits legitimate deductions about the ages of the artists has so far categorically excluded fully adult people from consideration (Bednarik 2008c): in all verifiable cases, the artists were youngsters. Moreover, the foot, heel, finger or handprints found in the soft deposits of no fewer than eleven caves (e.g. Clottes 1997: 31; Clottes and Courtin 1995: 175; Roveland 2000) confirm this observation. Although many of the tracks are rather faint and not well suited for metric determination, it is amply evident that the overwhelming majority, certainly over 95%, derive from children or teenagers, and very few can be attributed to adults (Bednarik 2008c). There goes another of the very many myths that have been created around ‘Palaeolithic art’. The large edifice the ‘experts’ have created over more than a century, extolling the profundity of their subject, is based on mis-conceptions, misdatings, misunderstandings and wishful thinking. Most of it needs to be banished from proper science, and belongs into cult-archaeology. And this mythological edifice with all of its absurdities is the work almost exclusively of professional, mainstream archaeologists.

Chapter 6

Rock Art Fairy Tales About shamanism and rock art The previous chapter ended with the observation that the ‘cult of Palaeolithic art’ ignored far too many empirical aspects of the subject of its idolisation to provide credible witness accounts. For instance there is the far greater body of Pleistocene rock art outside Europe (e.g. in Australia; Bednarik 2010: 113–115) than that of western Europe. Most of the world’s surviving Pleistocene rock art is not even of the ‘Upper Palaeolithic’ (a Mode 4 technocomplex); it was made by people of Mode 3 (‘Middle Palaeolithic’) technological traditions. It was also ignored that we have no evidence that the early part of this Franco-Cantabrian corpus must be the work of ‘anatomically modern’ humans, but that there is good evidence that it was made by Robusts (Bednarik 2007c). Instead of noticing that all forensic aspects of this ‘art’ that permit the estimation of the ages of artists suggest that these were juveniles or teenagers, and that the great majority of imprints of human body parts in the caves are of children (Bednarik 2008c), a vast mythology of deeply religious, ideological and ceremonial meanings of the images was invented by archaeologists. Indeed, the much-debated shamanism to which it is attributed derives from such misguided searches for meaning, a category of myths not even raised in the previous chapter. In essence, most of what has ever been written about the Palaeolithic cave art of western Europe falls precisely into this class of mythology. Therefore the consensus model presently professed by mainstream archaeology, concerning the origins of palaeoart and human modernity, is so severely flawed that it deserves to be fully ignored. The exograms (Gregory 1970: 148; Goody 1977; Bednarik 1987c, 2011a: 154–157, 2014c; Carruthers 1990, 1998; Donald 1991: 124–161) of palaeoart have been in use for hundreds of millennia, long before Homo sapiens sapiens can be detected. Every major claim made about the advent of palaeoart appears to be a falsity: most of it is not in Europe; most of its Pleistocene component predates the Mode 4 technologies (‘Upper Palaeolithic’). Any notions concerning the introduction of palaeoart refer to an invalid timeframe, to invented and thus irrelevant ‘cultures’ (in reality technocomplexes), and to an inconsequential understanding of the role or nature of the earliest palaeoart. It also remains profoundly unknown at what point in human history the practices we define as shamanism were introduced, and to which this corpus of palaeoart has been attributed by many. Isolated claims for Holocene evidence of shamanism are unconvincing (e.g. Porr and Alt 2006), and there are none concerning the 129

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Myths about Rock Art Pleistocene, except those derived from circular reasoning. But there are alternative, logical methods of investigating the role of shamanism in rock art. Such a review needs to begin with a fundamental insight: in the entire ethnographic world literature there is not a single report of a shaman having produced rock art. There are, however, numerous cases of rock art production having been observed and recorded, or where the authors of the ‘art’ may be known to us (e.g. Haskovec and Sullivan 1986; Mulvaney 1996; Bednarik 1998b: 26; Novellino 1999). In all such cases no shamans were involved, and the utilitarian or ceremonial purpose of the rock art, where it is known, lacks any connection with shamanism. Indeed, one of the most obvious prerequisites for considering what the characteristics of shamanic art might be is a definition of its ethnographically demonstrated idiosyncrasies. In the absence of such an explicit index we lack any definitive way of identifying authentically shamanic art traditions; we simply do not know the properties of shamanic art. Moreover, most of the world’s rock art occurs in regions from which no shamanic practices are known ethnographically. Although none of this demonstrates that no rock art was ever produced by shamans, the proposition that significant quantities of rock art are the work of shamans (Lewis Williams and Dowson 1988) is unwarranted by the empirical data, and it is of course untestable. Thus the null hypothesis, that most rock art is not shamanic, has empirical support; the favoured shamanic hypothesis has none. Of particular concern are the endemic modes of polemic presented by the shamanists. Rather than citing ethnographic information they ‘reinterpret’ the original texts creatively (as noted by Hromnik 1991; Solomon 1999, 2000; Le Quellec 2006; Helvenston 2012a, 2012b) and replace key terminology with their own preferred words. For instance, Lewis-Williams replaces the terms ‘sorcerer’, ‘witchdoctor’, ‘medicine man’ or ‘healer’ (and even ‘teacher’) with his preferred word ‘shaman’, even though there are very significant differences between these concepts. But he believes that is what the ethnographers (e.g. Orpen 1874; Bleek 1933, 1935, 1936; How 1962; Lee 1967; Marshall 1969; Katz 1976, 1982; Katz and Biesele 1986; Prins 1990) meant when they wrote of sorcerers and medicine men, and that they were too ignorant to understand that these words were merely metaphors. He also mistranslates the word ‘medicine man’ used by an old Xhosa or Mpondomise woman in relation to the rock art painters (Lewis-Williams 1986; cf. Jolly 1986). When she reported that medicine men went into a river to catch a snake whose fat they ate and rubbed on their bodies, Lewis-Williams interpreted it as a metaphor for entering trance (the ‘manipulated evidence’ Hromnik 1991 refers to). Lewis-Williams conflates hallucinogen-induced trance with trance involving no drugs, confusing analogical effects with identical causes (LewisWilliams 2002). Similarly, he projects the ethnography of the Kalahari San, who produced no rock art, onto the extinct /Xam of the Northern Cape, who practised very little rock painting, and then applies his contrived interpretations to rock

Rock Art Fairy Tales paintings elsewhere. Hromnik demonstrates that much of the rock art LewisWilliams attributes to San is more likely the work of Hottentots or Khoisan. Just as Lewis-Williams ‘reinterpreted creatively’ the early ethnographers of the /Xam, he ignored the more recent studies of the Ju/’hoansi by Katz (1982) and Katz and Biesele (1986), who found no justification for the use of the words ‘shaman’ and ‘trance’. Similarly, Lewis-Williams continues to ignore the advice of those genuinely engaged in the study of authentic shamanism (Eliade 1964; De Heusch 1965; Rouget 1980; Hamayon 1982, 1990; Hultkrantz 1993; Francfort et al. 2001), although he lacks first-hand knowledge of shamanism. Shamans are specialists, outsiders of society, who have undergone considerable training to attain their powers, often exercised in seclusion. The dances among the San Bushmen, by contrast, are communal affairs, with as many as half the people present participating. There are very few parallels between on the one hand genuine shamanism in Eurasia or the Americas, and the southern African practices Lewis-Williams and his many followers consistently misinterpret. None of these ‘shamanists’ seems to have in fact ever met a shaman, or made any attempt to review the living profession, even though thousands of shamans exist today. The present author has worked with and studied shamans in various parts of the world, and not a single one had ever produced rock art, or even seen any rock art. He has never observed nosebleeds, and most of shamans do not ‘dance’, although they might move in ways one might so interpret. However, the strange body movements of shamans are not a form of ‘possession’, as in trance; they are part of their performance. Trance is not necessarily a part of their technique, and in fact the most powerful among them (as best reflected in the degree of the respect they command in their community) neither dance or trance (Hamayon 1995: 420), or conduct themselves in any ecstatic way resembling the reductionist view of shamanism Lewis-Williams and his followers have conjured up. But I have observed that their power and social influence can be so potent that they eclipse very strongly ingrained religious practice. Helvenston (2012a) most pertinently observes that ‘when faced with uncertainty and the unknown the San resort to supernatural powers, when faced with familiar tasks like gathering food, or building huts, their approach is scientific’. In a very similar way I have experienced that when the members of a strictly Islamic society are faced with taking a life-threatening risk, they turn to the local shaman for protection. The mere continuation for centuries of shamanism in such religiously rigid societies speaks for itself, and illustrates the continuing innate power of shamanism (Figure 51). The communal dancing of the San Bushmen and even their healing trance are entirely different from the phenomenon of authentic shamanism. As Consens (1988) observed in his comment on the very first major paper proclaiming Lewis-Williams’ simplistic shamanist explanation of rock art, ‘[t]his kind of paper clarifies the limits beyond

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Myths about Rock Art which we fall into science fiction’ — or, as neuropsychologist Helvenston (2012b, cf. 2015) remarks, into pseudoscience. Until the shamanists in rock art research present a credible account of what true shamanic art looks like, and especially what shamanic rock art looks like, they have presented no scientific case. Myths about mythologies Much rock art has been suggested to represent aspects of mythologies — the collected stories of groups of people with which these explain nature, history or their customs and religions. This is a reasonable proposition, much in the same way as it is legitimate to argue that much art of recent millennia reflects religious convictions, which of course it does. The problems arise, generally, when rock art interpreters believe they know what myths are depicted in a particular corpus of rock art, without having any informed access to the traditions in question. In most circumstances we do not really know the mythologies of the time in question, while at the same time the rock art cannot be attributed to a specific people in most cases. After all, nearly all of the world’s rock art remains essentially undated, or only ‘dated’ by means not acceptable to rigorous research standards. So, even if we did know the myths of historically remote societies, it would not help much if a body of palaeoart could not be reliably attributed to them. Since none of the past customs of preliterate societies are known to us, we can only speculate about them, and the means of doing so in a testable format are severely limited. What is therefore usually cited are practices associated with modern, or at least ethnographically recorded mythologies of other societies, and it is then sought to detect evidence of such practices from the perceived iconography of palaeoart. So for instance if we know of a cultural custom such as bull-leaping (jumping over a charging bull) as practised today in south-western France (course Landaise) and Spain, and we find images in the Bronze Age of Minoan Crete and Hittite Anatolia, or in the Levant, India or Afghanistan, seemingly depicting bovids and humans interacting in similar ways, we are prone to assuming that this refers to similar practices. Perhaps it does, but as there is no documentary evidence for this, alternative explanations are possible. It is just as likely that the claimed depictions of bull-leaping in antiquity are simply decorative or metaphorical. Perhaps the ancient frescoes depict cultural or religious events, rather than displays of athletic skill. After all there are significant differences: the French sauteurs rarely if ever handspring over the animals, as seems to be depicted in the ancient paintings, and they prefer using cows rather than bulls. But the problems are compounded when purportedly corresponding details are detected in rock art, interpreted as recording similar practices and presented as

Rock Art Fairy Tales

Figure 54. Bull-leaping depicted in a fresco in the Great Palace of Knossos, Crete.

justifying cultural diffusion or connections. Hardly any of the world’s rock art is as detailed as the frescoes of a Minoan palace, and the cultural norms of expressing iconicity in preliterate societies are profoundly unknown to us. It is simply not acceptable to apply modern-day strategies of detecting meaning in ancient rock arts, and this is a universal theorem foreclosing legitimate interpretation of all rock art. None of the rock art motifs claimed to depict bull-leaping are even remotely detailed enough to allow identifications of motifs with the confidence expressed by rock art ‘interpreters’ (Figure 54). And precisely the same applies to most other ‘interpretations’ of rock art motifs and ‘scenes’. That very same issue is faced by those who seek to interpret rock art as evidence that aspects of one or another myth have been depicted in it. When this is combined with the inability of knowing how old the rock art actually is, as well as our complete lack of knowledge about the myths of the rock artists, the entire enterprise comes across as an attempt of triangulation of a problem in which the location of all three reference points is essentially unknown. When we add to this desperate state the realisation that the brain of the illiterate rock artist differed substantially from that of the present-day beholder of the rock art (discussed in the concluding chapter of this book), the hopelessness of the endeavour becomes fully apparent. This is not a scientific pursuit by any definition of the term; it is simply a creation of myths about myths. Nevertheless, it is actively pursued by many students of rock art, and it is disturbing to note that at major international rock art conferences, the number of participants in symposia purporting to be about the ancient mythologies depicted in rock art is greater than the number attending the same event’s scientific symposia. If this is a true reflection of the priorities in the field of rock art ‘studies’ I fear that a large segment of that field is, for all practical purposes, worthless. Creating myths about rock art, including about the myths it is supposed to portray, may be fun; but to science it is only of interest in what it can reveal about the minds of rock art connoisseurs.

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Neuropathologies and rock art One of the most fascinating sets of myths archaeologists have invented about rock art revolves around the idea that it was created by people with mental illnesses. This can be found interwoven with the notion that shamanism derives from such neuropathologies, and as already noted that shamans are responsible for rock art production. This is intriguing for essentially two reasons: the ideas have been strongly promoted by archaeologists; and yet in their marketing, virtually no empirical supporting evidence has been presented. These beliefs have only been presented as thought bubbles. Of the many disorders impacting on human societies, several have been implicated in rock art production: Asperger’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, autistic spectrum disorder, schizophrenia, schizotypy, neurosis, hysteria and epilepsy. Here we will briefly examine the merits of these propositions. Autism Margaret Bullen (2005) once pointed out that there are features of deep trance that mimic autism, quoting Bogdashina (2003) to the effect that deprivation of sensory stimulation can lead to autistic-like behaviours. The human brain condition autism (Hermelin and O’Connor 1970; Frith 1989; Baron-Cohen 2002, 2006; Allman et al. 2005; Grinker 2007; Burack et al. 2009; Helvenston and Bednarik 2011; Bednarik and Helvenston 2012; Matanova and Stoyanov 2015) has often been proposed to have been instrumental in introducing Pleistocene palaeoart (Kellman 1998, 1999; Humphrey 1998; Haworth 2006; Spikins 2009; Bogdashina 2010: 159–160; cf. Marr 1982; Treffert 2010). Of these, Humphrey’s proposal is perhaps the most detailed. Although his 1998 paper presents no convincing case for a nexus between Pleistocene cave art and autism, he does raise some very pertinent and interesting points. One concerns the ingrained belief that the Upper Palaeolithic artists shared our modern ‘mind’. Pleistocene archaeologists often use such terms as ‘modern behaviour’ or ‘modern mind’ but it is becoming increasingly apparent that there is no agreement as to what they mean. Some authors refer to human modernity as a set of variables one can reasonably expect to find a million years ago, even earlier (Bednarik 2011a, 2011b). Others favour a much narrower definition, attributing a ‘pre-modern mind’ even to the cave artists of the early Upper Palaeolithic (see Humphrey 1998 and debate therein) and suggesting the ‘modern mind’ to postdate 20 ka bp. Bearing in ‘mind’ that it is not clear what the mind is (what is its appearance, location, weight or composition?) and that this is probably intended as a shorthand generic term for mental processes occurring in the human brain, the concept of ‘modernity of mind’ needs to be clearly defined. If ‘mind’ refers to the state and operation of

Rock Art Fairy Tales the neural structures that are involved in moderating behavioural patterns, these must have been essentially modern at least since the end of the Lower Pleistocene (Bednarik 2011a). But human behaviour is not only determined by the intrinsic neural and endocrine systems giving rise to it. These are influenced by ontogenic experiences of the individual and their effects on these neural configurations (Maguire et al. 2000; Draganski et al. 2004; Smail 2007; Malafouris 2008). The brain of literate conspecifics, we have seen, is differently organised from that of any pre-literate individual (Helvenston 2013), and there are even significant differences between present individuals of ‘magical thinking’ and those with well-integrated cause and effect reasoning. The archaeological claims placing the advent of the ‘modern mind’ 30 or 40 millennia ago are therefore false, however it is defined: ‘We have never been modern’ (Latour 1993). It is doubtful that a scientific (testable) case can be made for a connection between the exceptional skills sometimes (but very rarely) found in autistics (Waterhouse 1988; Mottron and Belleville 1993, 1995; Mottron et al. 1999; Happé and Vital 2009) and the abilities of the graffitists of the Franco-Cantabrian caves. Perhaps a better case could be presented by engaging the finding that there is very limited evidence that the cave art involved adults (Bednarik 2008c), but that has not been attempted in this context. Humphrey’s challenge of archaeologists’ ‘received view’ (Dennett 1998) — to show why they assume that Upper Palaeolithic palaeoartists must have shared present-day perception and reality — is of particular interest. So is Dennett’s observation that ‘[i]t will be interesting to see if the defenders of the received view have such facts in reserve to salvage their case, or whether they will have to fall back on simply citing various eminent opinions in favour of the received view’. Certainly the responses of archaeologists following the presentation of Humphrey’s hypothesis have failed to offer such ‘facts’. Another fascinating aspect of Humphrey’s contentions arises when he quotes Mithen as stating ‘that modern humans … were capable of the type of symbolic thought and sophisticated visual representation that was beyond Neanderthals’. Two issues arise from this statement. First, the art of the ‘Aurignacians’ provides no testable proof of symbolic thought. It only provides evidence of depiction, no more. That is not to say that the ‘Aurignacians’ were not capable of symbolling, but the proof for that is to be (and can be) found elsewhere. Second, we have no evidence of any kind that ‘Aurignacian’ palaeoart was produced by ‘anatomically modern humans’, because all Late Pleistocene human remains of Europe predating approximately 26 ka are either of Robusts (usually called Neanderthals there) or of intermediate forms (Bednarik 1995d, 2007c, 2008b, 2011a, 2011b), whereas the Aurignacian had ended 30 ka ago. Therefore Mithen’s claim is probably wrong on both counts and merely expresses the inherent defects of the replacement hypothesis he embraces.

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Myths about Rock Art Humphrey presents only a single example of an autistic child with advanced artistic abilities (Selfe 1977), although some others have long been known (e.g. Pring and Hermelin 1993; Kellman 1998, 1999; Happé and Frith 2010), and he also seems unaware of any other authors pursuing the same issue (many did; see above). Moreover, his hypothesis suffers from his lack of awareness that such abilities in children are certainly not limited to autistic savants, but are also well known as ‘precocious realism’ in the art of non-autistic children (Selfe 1983; Drake and Winner 2009; O’Connor and Hermelin 1987, 1990; contra Snyder and Thomas 1997). Seen in that overall context, Humphrey’s hypothesis loses its appeal. If his suggestion that the palaeoart of the early ‘Upper Palaeolithic’ implies an absence of language use, because of their naturalism, were applied to, say, the realistic rock art attributed to the San/Bushmen, its absurdity becomes apparent. Similarly, he seems to be unaware that throughout the world, the images we tend to regard as naturalistic are preceded by traditions that lack iconographic elements. Finally, the extremely rare occurrence of autistics of exceptional depictive abilities does not explain why 99.99% of autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) patients lack them. After all, ASD has recently become a very common illness, affecting one in 110 children now (Weintraub 2011; a more reliable study reports incidence being as high as one in 38; Kim et al. 2011). The epidemic increase in this diagnosis, from one in 5000 in 1975, cannot be entirely attributed to changing diagnostic criteria (cf. Buchen 2011). The explanation offered by Bednarik (2011a; exponential increase in human neuropathology due to suspension of natural selection) is perhaps the most eligible. Asperger’s syndrome Spikins’ (2009) ‘different minds theory’ endeavours to explain ‘modern behaviour’ as the rise in cognitive variation within populations through social mechanisms for integrating ‘different minds’. She focuses particularly on one form of autism, Asperger’s syndrome, because it does not inhibit the effective use of language or cognitive development, and the associated attention to detail enables patients to compensate for the deficit of empathy. Subjects with autistic conditions (as well as schizophrenics; Brüne 2006) have cognitively based deficiencies in ‘theory of mind’ (ToM), which defines the ability to attribute mental states — beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge etc. — to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one’s own (Baron-Cohen 1991; Frith and Happé 1994; Ozonoff and Miller 1995; Happé et al. 1996; Happé 1997; Baron-Cohen et al. 1997; Jarrold et al. 2000; Jacques and Zelazo 2005; Bednarik 2015d). Spikins’ main contention is that autism is a spectrum of differences displayed across the modern population, and that modern behaviour arose when autistic

Rock Art Fairy Tales modes of thinking were integrated into the practices of human societies. Focusing on Asperger’s, a form of ‘mild autism’ (Rodman 2003; Bednarik and Helvenston 2012), she emphasises the analytical and mathematical thinking it involves and attributes to it the changes she detects in technology: ‘Rigid analytical thinking (both by autistic individuals and through their influence) might improve technology and foraging efficiency’ (Spikins 2009: 190). She cites projectile weapons, bladelets, bone artefacts, hafting, ‘elaborate fire use’, exploitation of marine resources and large game, apparently unaware that all of these have been demonstrated from the Lower Palaeolithic, together with palaeoart and ‘personal ornamentation’. Nevertheless, she feels that these are all attributable to the ‘attention to detail, exceptional memory, a thirst for knowledge and narrow obsessive focus’ of autistics, particularly when coupled with their desire for social isolation. However, these proficiencies are obviously not limited to people with ASD, a condition that also happens to include diagnostic characteristics such as inflexibility in thinking, difficulty with planning and organisation, and rigorous adherence to routine (Pickard et al. 2011), which impede originality and innovative thought. The creativity Spikins invokes is impoverished in ASD patients (Frith 1972; Craig and Baron-Cohen 1999; Turner 1999) unless fostered, and the savant skills ascribed to a very few of them need to be nurtured and are specific to the ordered cultural context of modern life (Baron-Cohen 2000; Folstein and RosenSheidley 2001; Thioux et al. 2006). Moreover, the neuropsychiatric disorders of humans, absent in other extant primates (Rubinsztein et al. 1994; Walker and Cork 1999; Enard et al. 2002; Olson and Varki 2003; Marvanová et al. 2003; Bednarik and Helvenston 2012), are a deleterious by-product of more recent ‘evolution’ (Bednarik 2008b, 2008d, 2011a, 2011b, 2012a; Helvenston and Bednarik 2011; Bednarik and Helvenston 2012) and may not have been genetically established in the early Upper Palaeolithic. The phylogenetic timing of the introduction of ASD is the crucial issue here: to influence society the illness had to exist, but to do so society and selective processes had to first tolerate it. The lack of social skills typical of ASD in societies heavily reliant upon social dynamics would tend to select against it, socially as well as genetically. Thus Spikins’ hypothesis runs up against the classical Keller and Miller paradox (see below) — which applies to all neuropathologies. Schizophrenia Another such effort to attribute the origins of palaeoart to neuropathology (and to shamanism) cites schizophrenia (e.g. Kroeber 1940; Demerath 1942; Silverman 1967; Scheff 1970; Le Barre 1970, 1972). The altered states in (North American) shamanism were perhaps first recognised by Oesterreich (1935:

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Myths about Rock Art 295). Peters and Price-Williams (1980: 397) examined them across 42 cultures. Loeb (1924), Radin (1937) and Devereux (1961) defined shamans variously as epileptic, hysteric or neurotic, whereas Silverman (1967) introduced the notion that shamanism is an acute form of schizophrenia. His hypothesis attracted criticism immediately (Handelman 1968; Weakland 1968; Boyer 1969) and was followed by later work rejecting it. Lex (1984) suggested that the popularity of the notion that schizophrenia provides an explanation for shamanic experiences and behaviour appears to emanate from distorted and ‘romantic’ interpretations of the significance of hallucinatory symptoms. Noll (1983), in examining altered states of consciousness, demonstrated that the anthropological ‘schizophrenia metaphor’ of shamanism and its altered states is untenable. Significant phenomenological differences exist between the shamanic and schizophrenic states of consciousness. Despite these authoritative rebuttals the notion that there is a connection between shamanism and schizophrenia continued to be pursued in recent years (e.g. Polimeni and Reiss 2002; El-Mallakha 2006). Twin and adoption studies have conclusively shown that schizophrenia (Os and Kapur 2009) is a genetic disorder (Cardno and Gottesman 2000; Kennedy et al. 2003; Riley and Kendler 2006). However, because its underlying physiological abnormalities remain inadequately understood, a properly integrated aetiological and pathophysiologic model does not yet exist. Although a number of schizophrenia susceptibility genes have been identified (NRG1, NRG3, DTNBP1, COMT, CHRNA-7, SLC6A4, IMPA2, HOPA12bp, DISC1, TCF4, MBP, MOBP, NCAM1, NRCAM, NDUFV2, RAB18, ADCYAP1, BDNF, CNR1, DRD2, GAD1, GRIA1, GRIA4, GRIN2B, HTR2A, RELN, SNAP-25, TNIK, HSPA1B, ALDH1A1, ANK3, CD9, CPLX2, FABP7, GABRB3, GNB1L, GRMS, GSN, HINT1, KALRN, KIF2A, NR4A2, PDE4B, PRKCA, RGS4, SLC1A2, SYN2; e.g. Yoshikawa et al. 2001; Spinks et al. 2004; Cho et al. 2005; Li et al. 2006; Xu et al. 2006; Ayalew et al. 2012) they are of small or non-detrimental individual effects; the illness is of a polygenic nature. These genes may prompt changes in attention, memory, language or other cognitive functions through small effects on neurotransmitter function, cerebral structural organisation, brain metabolism or connectivity as they interact with nongenetic factors. Susceptibility alleles only constitute increasing risk for schizophrenia through aggregating, be it by chance, assortative mating, or by other mechanisms (Cannon 2005). They may be individually associated with normal or increased fertility or be operating under positive selection, unlike full-fledged schizophrenia. Carriers of small numbers of schizophrenia susceptibility genes are far more numerous (about 15% of any population) than cases of the actual disorder (0.3–1%), and the advantages selected for in first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients have been suggested to include creativity (Horrobin 2001; cf. Heston 1966; Karlsson 1970; Schuldberg 1988, 2000; Brod 1997; Nettle 2001). Schizotypal diathesis,

Rock Art Fairy Tales which may lead to actual illness under specific environmental factors (Tsuang et al. 2001), but in most cases does not, is therefore more convincingly implicated in creativity, much in the same way as mild forms of autism can yield highperforming individuals. Thus schizophrenia, ‘the very embodiment of maladaptive traits’ (Keller and Miller 2006), is most likely the result of complex polygenic inheritance and environmental susceptibility factors. Schizophrenia occurs in all cultures, which all perceive it as a serious maladaptive dysfunction (Pearlson and Folley 2008). Introvertive anhedonia, a typical symptom of schizophrenia (Schuldberg 2000), decreases creative activity significantly, thus providing a clear separation between creative and clinical cohorts. Therefore the notion that schizophrenia fosters creativity or artistic production has little or no credibility, and if shamanism derived from that illness, the explanation of rock art as the work of shamans loses all support. However, the involvement of schizophrenia or schizotypy in shamanism deserves further examination. The discovery of the rubber hand illusion (RHI) in schizophrenic patients (Peled et al. 2003) has considerable implications for the notion of out-of-body experiences (Thakkar et al. 2011). It has been suggested that a weakened sense of the self may contribute to psychotic experiences. The RHI illustrates proprioceptive drift, which is observed to be significantly greater in schizophrenia patients than in a control sample, can even lead to out-of-body experience, linking ‘body disownership’ and psychotic experiences (e.g. floating outside one’s own body). This derives from the internal body image in the superior parietal lobule in the right hemisphere and the operation of mirror neurons (cf. somatoparaphrenia, anosognosia). Although there is no credible empirical evidence linking schizophrenia with palaeoart production, just as there is none linking shamanism with it or with schizophrenia, susceptibility to proprioceptive drift can be shown to be linked to schizotypy, and may well account for certain experiences of shamans. Bipolar disorder Only one archaeologist, David Whitley (2009), has attributed the origins of rock art to bipolar disorder so far, and apparently with much less justification than any of the above proposals. Whitley’s collation of ‘mad geniuses’, ‘first religion’, shamanism and mood disorders may well derive from his long-standing dedication to proving the shamanistic origins of rock art. Bipolar disorder has been less popular as an explanation of shamanism because its aetiology renders it less likely. It also differs from schizophrenia in a number of crucial ways. For instance, although chronic, it is not neurodegenerative with advancing age, in contrast to schizophrenia. In schizophrenia there is increased neuronal density in the prefrontal cortex, whereas in bipolar disorder there is decreased neuronal

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Myths about Rock Art and glial density in association with glial hypertrophy (Rajkowska 2009). Both illnesses are highly heritable (Edvardsen et al. 2008), as shown by monozygotic twin studies (Kieseppä et al. 2004), and they are clearly polygenic as indicated by the wide spectrum of their manifestations. The bipolar range stretches from bipolar I through bipolar II and to mild forms of cyclothymia. It is reflected in the lack of resolution in decisively determining the genetic basis, although regions of interest identified in linkage studies include chromosome 18, 4p16, 12q23-q24, 16p13, 21q22 and Xq24-q26 (Craddock and Jones 1999; Craddock et al. 2005; Saito et al. 2001), and genes DRD4, SYNJ1 and MAOA have been implicated (Muglia et al. 2002; Stopkova et al. 2004; Andres et al. 2004; Cho et al. 2005; Preisig et al. 2005; Jansson et al. 2005). Just as autism and schizophrenia comprise spectra rather than discrete illnesses, much the same applies to bipolar disorder, and probably for the same reasons: numerous genetic predispositions (Schulze 2010) and a range of environmental factors determine any patient’s specific condition. Whitley’s proposition that shamans are bipolar has been refuted by neuropsychologist Helvenston (2012b), who emphasised that this is a very serious disorder and even today it is not well controlled in a large group of people suffering from it (see also Bullen 2011, 2012). During the manic or depressive phases, the individual is almost completely disabled, and unlikely to be creating anything, let alone outstanding art. Bullen (2011) asks, ‘are we any nearer to knowing how [palaeoart] started?’, a topic requiring a vastly more comprehensive response than Whitley’s simplistic and naive shortcut. For instance Whitley contends that both shamanism and bipolar disorder tend to run in the family, thus suggesting that if two discrete characteristics are heritable they must be somehow connected. The basis of this kind of reasoning is that any coinciding heritable characteristic would be related to bipolar conditions, for instance having green eyes or black hair. Whitley is the principal American advocate for rock art being shamanistic, and his work has also come to our attention in claiming that Ice Age megafaunal species are depicted in American rock art (Chapter 2). Indeed, a careful analysis of this pattern of interpreting rock art would be immensely valuable in learning to understand modern reactions to rock art: why are its interpretations as the work of extraterrestrials or of shamans so popular? More fundamentally, why are modern people so strongly inclined to interpret rock art? Modern beholders of some forms of ancient palaeoart tend to delude themselves into believing that it communicates with them, through a form of autosuggestion, and this process deserves careful analysis. The shamanic hypotheses play on this susceptibility, and on the perception that such keys to rock art interpretation (see Le Quellec 2006) provide codes of meaning.

Rock Art Fairy Tales

Brain disorders in human evolution The perhaps most fundamental problem with the shamanic, bipolar, schizophrenic, Asperger’s and autistic ‘explanations’ of rock art is that their advocates make no attempt to determine whether these conditions actually applied in the Pleistocene, at the time palaeoart became established (Helvenston 2012b: 109). This is not just a question of clarifying when neuropathologies began to have a significant impact on the human genome, but more importantly why they were not selected against. The mental and cognitive developments in the human brain rendered humans vulnerable to neurodegenerative diseases as well as frontal lobe connectivity problems, to demyelination or dysmyelination, Mendelian disorders — in fact to around 8000 syndromes and disorders endemic to humans. Why their rise was not vigorously selected against by natural evolution is the Keller and Miller (2006) paradox, which was resolved soon after it was formulated precisely (Bednarik 2007c, 2008b, 2008d, 2011a). In a species fully subject to the canons of natural selection such numerous disadvantageous mutations would surely tend to be suppressed vigorously. They include thousands of Mendelian (single gene) disorders, but also countless somatic changes, such as cleidocranial dysplasia or delayed closure of cranial sutures, malformed clavicles and dental abnormalities (genes RUNX2 and CBRA1 refer), type 2 diabetes (THADA); the microcephalin D allele, introduced in the Final Pleistocene through a single progenitor copy (Evans et al. 2005); or the ASPM allele, another contributor to microcephaly, which appeared around 5800 years ago (Mekel-Bobrov et al. 2005). Indeed, most changes from Robusts (such as Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) to Graciles (Homo sapiens sapiens) have been maladaptive: significantly reduced brain volume (by ~13%; Bednarik 2014d) and cranial as well as other skeletal robusticity, and greatly reduced physical strength. Why did natural selection fail to cull the alleles underlying hominin neotenisation and ‘devolution’ that marks the last forty or fifty millennia of human ‘evolution’? (In reality, evolution is dysteleological, therefore biological devolution is impossible, whereas cultural devolution certainly does occur.) The suspension of human evolution determined by natural selection has remained completely unrecognised until recently because Pleistocene archaeology and palaeoanthropology have pursued the replacement hypothesis with such enthusiasm, when it has no genetic, skeletal or cultural justification whatsoever (Bednarik 2008b) and is attributable to a hoax (Bednarik 2013h). That hypothesis demands that natural selection and genetic drift (Bednarik 2011c) governed recent evolution and speciation, when in fact the emergence of the Graciles involved no speciation; they derive from Robusts via intermediate forms (as implied by recent genetic findings, beginning with Green et al. 2010), gracilisation being a gradual process. The distinctive changes during the final third of the Late Pleistocene are

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Myths about Rock Art almost entirely the result of self-domestication caused by the determination of breeding patterns by rising cultural imperatives that have been adequately defined (Bednarik 2008d). Domestication promotes unfavourable alleles (e.g. Horrobin 1998, 2001; Andolfatto 2001; Lu et al. 2006), and it can even account for other unexplained features, such as the abolition of oestrus in females. Assuming that it was under the auspices of this process that predispositions for brain illnesses were protected from natural selection, which is the rational explanation, such pathologies must postdate these developments. It would then be expected that most appeared less than 40 ka ago and are endemic to Homo sapiens sapiens (Bednarik 2008b; Helvenston and Bednarik 2011). Where relevant genetic indications are already available, they confirm this prediction. For instance the genes CADPS2 and AUTS2, involved in autism, appear with Graciles, and NRG3 (schizophrenia) is also absent in ‘Neanderthals’ (Voigt et al. 2006). Using the human haplotype map to test for selective sweeps in regions associated in genome scans with psychosis, such as 1q21, is promising (op. cit.). Such selective sweeps tend to yield relatively recent aetiologies, of less than 20 ka. Some conditions, such as schizophrenia, have been suggested to be much more recent (Bednarik and Helvenston 2012), and so far no known relevant susceptibility alleles have been reported from Robust human remains. Therefore at this stage none of the more severe brain illnesses should be expected to be found in hominin populations prior to the suspension of natural selection, which on present indications may have begun, initially on a small scale, between 40 ka and 30 ka ago. It is therefore unlikely that by the time the Chauvet Cave or l’Aldène rock art was created (Bednarik 2007c; Sadier et al. 2012), any of the brain diseases to which it has been attributed could have even taken root. The shamanism that is claimed to have given rise to it could have been established only much later if it derived from neuropathologies, and its occurrence in any Pleistocene society has not been demonstrated or even proposed, except via circular reasoning. As noted, all types of the European Pleistocene palaeoart that are capable of providing empirical evidence about the age of the artists were demonstrated to have been produced by children or teenagers, which renders it highly likely that the same applies to much of the rest of this palaeoart. This hypothesis offers testability, whereas the hypotheses involving brain illnesses are lacking in falsifiability or sound epistemology. Whether it is Asperger’s syndrome, bipolar syndrome, autism or schizophrenia, neurosis, hysteria or epilepsy, none of them seem to account for either palaeoart or shamanism, nor does shamanism account for palaeoart. All of this is an archaeological mythology. Sinister myths about rock art So far in this book, all the cited mythologies invented about rock art appear to be attributable to genuine mistakes or beliefs, be they errors of fact, over-

Rock Art Fairy Tales interpretations, unwarranted deductions, or simply fantasies of one kind or another. Whatever their background or motivation, the purveyors of these myths seem to have believed the stories they had concocted. But some of the most fascinating myths ever created about rock art have been the result of deliberately misleading arguments or data. They may be ascribed to a variety of motivations, but they have one factor in common: their inventers had sinister motives. The first example concerns two cupule sites in Meenamatta, or the Blue Tier mountains of north-eastern Tasmania. These heavily wooded granitic batholith structures north of St Helens have for decades been the scene of a battle between conservationists, who want them protected as a national park, and the logging industry of Tasmania, which had control over most Tasmanian forests until the 1980s. Since that time the loggers have lost ground continuously, having gradually had to surrender most of the land as many forested regions of Tasmania became protected parks. In the case of Meenamatta, the forestry department tried to preserve its control by establishing a public relations program of facilitating public access through establishing walking tracks and picnic facilities in the forest. In 2005, conservationist Stephen Cameron noticed some rock markings near the highest peak of Meenamatta and, by stripping away the turf layer concealing most of the site’s bedrock, discovered a panel of petroglyphs (Bednarik et al. 2007). These include several series of cupules, some occurring in alignment, as well as linear grooves forming ‘convergent lines motifs’ of a kind found in Pleistocene cave art of the Australian mainland (Figure 55). In the following year, the forestry department planned to establish a walking track nearby. The local Traditional Custodian, Aboriginal leader Gloria Andrews of the Noiheener Group based in St Helens, requested that the walking track be re-located away from the site the Aborigines regard as sacred. Unfortunately both Forestry Tasmania and the Forest Practices Authority have an exceptionally poor record in dealing with indigenous issues, and were understandably very irritated by the report of rock art in the bitterly contested mountains (Bednarik et al. 2010a, 2010b): it improved the prospects of the mountains becoming protected, to the complete exclusion of logging. Recognising this threat to their influence in the matter they devised a devious plan: if they could discredit the identification of the petroglyphs the case for the two cultural heritage sites would crumble. Even a partial success, i.e. bringing sufficient doubt on the evidence, would help their case. So the logging industry decided to commission a paper discrediting the report of the petroglyphs, claiming that these were rock markings made by tin miners about a century ago. Unable to secure the help of any credible scientists, two servants of Forestry Tasmania

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Figure 55. Geometric alignments of cupules at one of the Meenamatta sites, north-eastern Tasmania.

were requested to produce a ‘refutation’ of the rock art report. The senior author, Jo Field, the consultant wanting to construct the walking track, had already cultivated an antagonistic relationship with the Aboriginal group concerned, and she wrote the critique with Peter McIntosh, an employee of Forestry Tasmania. Both of them have no knowledge of archaeology, rock art or even geology, so it is not surprising that their effort was hopelessly naive and uninformed. The age of one of the petroglyphs had been determined by microerosion analysis as being E1687 +188 / -281 years bp (Bednarik et al. 2007), which obviously rendered their sub-modern age claim absurd, so they sought to discredit the scientific data.

Rock Art Fairy Tales The result was a rather predictably ingenuous essay by two neophytes about a subject they had never before encountered. All of this is fully understandable and it is not suggested that the two logging industry authors should be blamed for the fiasco. Culpability falls to the editor of the journal they submitted their essay to, Australian Archaeology. Sean Ulm, the editor, was obliged to subject the paper to review by five referees, which apparently he neglected to do: the paper was so amateurish that it would be impossible to find five archaeologists who would all fail to detect its significant deficiencies. His own understanding of the archaeological issues is obviously not adequate either, which raises the question, why was he elected editor of the journal. And why did he allow a supposedly academic journal to become the venue of a political stunt denying the Noiheener Group their traditional cultural heritage? Incredibly, Field and McIntosh (2009) admit freely that they were unable to find the dated cupule site, so they are challenging a scientific paper when in fact they had been unable to examine the main site analysed in it. This is a fair indication of Ulm’s incompetence as an academic editor: he accepted a paper for publication whose authors conceded that they had not seen the evidence they were trying to reject. They managed to find the second site and confidently declared that the cupules there are natural pits that had formed by ‘slow dissolution of the softer minerals of the granite’. They made no attempt to explain this mysterious ‘dissolution’, and it is clear from their essay that they lack any understanding of geological weathering processes. They also fail to explain why battered and cracked quartz grains occur in some of the cupules; or why the pits are occasionally arranged linearly; or why they occur not only on horizontal surfaces, but also on sloping and vertical panels (Bednarik et al. 2010a). In this Tasmanian example of a disturbing motivation for inventing a myth about rock art, the objective was not so much to discredit the report of the petroglyphs, as to simply muddy the water so as to create doubts in inexperienced readers, and to thus undermine the claim of Aborigines to their cultural sites. All of this was for economic gain and political power, i.e. over logging rights in a disputed forest. However, apart from the actual protagonists, this is not a particularly important issue of far-reaching consequences. The next example, also from Australia, is of a very different scale and significance. It concerns, among other things, the battle over the future of the country’s largest cultural heritage monument, and the world’s largest art gallery. It also involves the question, who is to make decisions about the survival or protection of the cultural remains of a nation’s indigenous people, and who owns these remains. In the case of Australia’s largest monument this is a particularly poignant question, because its creators, the Yaburara people, were massacred in the late 19th century. The story of the Dampier Cultural Precinct is as incredible as is the account of how it was eventually saved, in

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Myths about Rock Art spite of the lies and machinations and myths concocted to defeat the campaign to preserve the continent’s most unique heritage. The Dampier Archipelago, off Australia’s north-western coast, harbours the largest concentration of petroglyphs in the world as well as the country’s greatest collection of megalithic structures (Figure 56). Almost half a century after I rediscovered this priceless cultural legacy, its true size remains unknown and the number of academic publications about it, apart from my own, is two papers and one in-house booklet. Despite the expenditure of around $15 million on archaeological surveys, the number of both petroglyphs and stone structures remains unknown to this day. The only survey that attempted a comprehensive headcount remains my own endeavour of the 1960s, when I recorded 572 rock art sites representing over 80% of the petroglyphs on the main island, Murujuga. According to my research conducted 1967 to 1970, there were around 390,000 petroglyphs. The archipelago comprises another 41 islands, and the total of rock art motifs can safely be assumed to have been in excess of one million figures in 1967 (Bednarik 2007d). Although Dampier has seen almost as much archaeological work as regions such as Egypt or Mesopotamia, where this work yielded thousands upon thousands of tomes of literature, almost nothing has been published about Dampier. Nearly all this archaeological work is owned by resource companies, contravening ideals of academic freedom, having been collected under conditions of significant bias. How did this come about? In 1962, in response to a proposal to construct a deep-water port on Depuch Island, east of the Dampier Archipelago, the Western Australian Museum conducted an impact study. It found concentrations of rock art on Depuch and the plan was abandoned, but it also reported that there is almost no rock art in the Dampier Archipelago (Crawford 1964). This blunder is the reason for the massive destruction of the Dampier cultural heritage that began within a few years. It resulted in the obliteration of about 90,000 petroglyphs and an unknown number of stone arrangements over the next half century. Most of it was demolished in the course of the construction of a harbour, a town, a pelletising plant, later an LNG plant and further industrial installations, together with railways, roads and service corridors. A smaller part fell victim to pilfering and vandalism, and a few thousand rocks were ‘salvaged’ and removed from their cultural and scientific context. I began petitioning government agencies in 1970 to oppose the carnage of the immense cultural precinct, a century after its creators were annihilated by police missions. My appeals were unsuccessful until the early 1990s, but in 1994 my proposal to establish a national park at Dampier and to return the land to the Aborigines found the support of four federal ministers. However, these hopes were dashed in late 2001, when the state government of Western Australia decided to turn Dampier Archipelago into the largest industrial complex of the

Rock Art Fairy Tales

Figure 56. Petroglyph panel on Murujuga, under threat of destruction by industrial development that could easily be placed elsewhere.

Southern Hemisphere. Had this plan succeeded, the remaining three quarters of rock art on the main island would have been decimated. In early 2002 I began what has become known as the Dampier Campaign (Bednarik 2006a; see http://www.ifrao.com/save-dampier-rock-art/). I dedicated an entire decade of my life to this endeavour in which I defeated not only the state government, but also some of the largest corporations in Australia. On 3 July 2007, after 39 months of bitter opposition from many quarters (including much of the archaeological establishment), the Federal Minister for the Environment approved my nomination of the unencumbered Dampier land for listing on the National Heritage. I managed to convince the state opposition leader of the need to preserve the cultural precinct, and then the vandalistic state government lost the next election after five of its ministers were sacked for corruption. The new Premier, Colin Barnett, kept his promise and asked me to help him decide what to do with Dampier. I suggested that it should become a national park run by the local Aboriginal community; that it should be given an indigenous name and, most importantly, the land should be returned to the community. On 17 January 2013, Barnett’s government declared the Murujuga National Park, to be managed by the Murujuga Aboriginal Corporation, the new owner of the land. I had also requested that all the relocated rock art should be repatriated under indigenous supervision, and this extensive operation was completed on 11 October 2014, at great expense to the culprit company that had spirited away most of the rocks.

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Myths about Rock Art In short, I had my way in practically every detail, but this was at great personal cost to me. Because my action was significantly detrimental to their lucrative ‘consultancies’, many Australian archaeologists began to loathe me as an enemy and sought to destroy my credibility. Some threatened me with litigation, as did at least one state government bureaucrat and a senior company employee. One of the huge resource companies threatened me with assassination. A historian claimed that the Dampier stone arrangements were natural formations; other researchers invented the myth that the name ‘Murujuga’ was a fabrication by me and had no historical currency. Another even questioned that I had ever worked at Dampier. The pressure applied to me to abandon my quest to expose deficiencies and improprieties was quite incredible, while at the same time the support I enjoyed was sporadic and largely limited to the mass media. But what riled me more than the personal attacks was the consistent endeavour to deny my statistics of the level of destruction of the monument. Here even my few supporters sought to discredit my numbers, and my opponents invented all sorts of myths to doubt my contention that 24% of the rock art on Murujuga had been lost. The counter claims ranged from 2% to 13%, and yet not one of them was from someone who was actually there in the 1960s, during the early stage of the destruction. This mythology, so crucial to concealing the magnitude of the carnage, is deeply disturbing, because it was demonstrably deliberate: the purveyors knew that it was false, and among them were nominal supporters, such as Green politician Robin Chapple. It is generally agreed that 39% of the land surface of Murujuga has been developed in one form or another; so how could it be that 39% of the area had only contained 2% of the rock art, when the petroglyphs are in fact distributed fairly evenly across the landscape? This points to deliberate misrepresentation, and one needs to ask why it was so important, even to people who felt that the surviving rock art needed to be saved, to conceal the truth. In my view, the observation that a supposedly civilised nation has allowed a quarter of the world’s largest indigenous monument to be wiped out was simply too abhorrent to contemplate. Particularly in combination with the historical fact of the genocide of the artist tribe, this flies in the face of the widespread myth that Australia was colonised peacefully. And it implies that we were not content killing the original inhabitants; we also seem compelled to turn a blind eye when faced with the destruction of their massive surviving patrimony. But the myths invented to contradict me, sinister as they are, are also understandable: they preserved a national self-delusion. Nevertheless, it is also true that other nations have managed to face up to terrible atrocities in their past; perhaps Australians, too, need to face their own past with greater courage and honesty. Another academic mythology about rock art I have sought to oppose concerns a series of petroglyph sites in the lower Côa valley of northern Portugal. These are among several further sites in the Iberian Peninsula which share the following

Rock Art Fairy Tales characteristics: they are all open sites rather than caves, they are all on schist, and they all feature engraved animal figures (mostly horses and some cattle). The figures are all claimed to be of the Upper Palaeolithic and around 20,000 to 25,000 years old, yet they seem to be much more recent. All direct dating efforts have so far indicated that most of these petroglyphs are modern to sub-modern in age, with a very small component possibly up to Neolithic age (Watchman 1995, 1996; Bednarik 1995b, 1998c, 2009b). Not a single one of these images is of a species that does not exist in Iberia today; and there is not a single instance of the dominant motif type of genuine Upper Palaeolithic rock art (the so-called signs, which are geometric, standardised patterns of unknown meaning that outnumber the Palaeolithic zoomorphs significantly). Moreover, most of the images were made by impact (genuine Palaeolithic petroglyphs were made by abrasive engraving) (Figure 57). The assertions, shared by apparently all commenting archaeologists, that these dozens of petroglyph sites across Iberia are of the Pleistocene are entirely based on one single variable: the style of the equine and bovid motifs is said to be Palaeolithic. We have in the previous chapter considered the obsession of many Eurasian archaeologists with trying to prove the Palaeolithic age of rock art that

Figure 57. Dating of petroglyphs at Penascosa, lower Côa valley, Portugal, showing that they are at most a few centuries old. One of the motifs was clearly made with a tool of carbon steel (Eastham 1999).

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Myths about Rock Art is clearly much more recent. The credibility of these ‘Paleolithic art experts’ hinges precisely on their ability of divining Palaeolithicity in rock art. If that ability is called into question, they are likely to react emotively and will rely on the traditional deficiency of their field: the inherent lack of falsifiability of such pronouncements. Although the failure of the stylistic dating argument has been demonstrated in respect of Palaeolithic (and other) claims (e.g. Bednarik 1995c), the world’s Palaeolithic art experts show no inclination of accepting the limitations to their self-declared faculty of deciding whether an image is Palaeolithic or not, simply from its perceived formal characteristics. They ignore that all these Iberian sites are on very soft rock subjected to rapid weathering, fully exposed to rain and in many cases to wear by river gravel. They ignore that many of these purported Pleistocene images dissect and therefore postdate lichen thalli that can only be a few hundred years old at most. And they pay no heed to the evidence that engraved dates at these sites are often much more weathered than the adjacent petroglyphs. At the Spanish petroglyph site Siega Verde, also attributed to the Pleistocene and not far from the Côa series, occur numerous such dated inscriptions. Both they and the petroglyphs among them are subjected to identical abrasion by fluvial sediment, and the rates of this process have been calibrated against the known inscription ages (Bednarik 2009b). This showed unambiguously that the animal figures were pounded less than 200 years ago, and the majority of them date from the first half of the 20th century. The Palaeolithic art lobby believes that any images on natural rock of what seem to be horses must be Palaeolithic (Figure 58). For instance the single headless zoomorph at the Portuguese schist site Ocreza must be so (Bahn and Vertut 1997), even though it may not even depict a horse. Yet by the same token the hundreds of horse petroglyphs at a nearby Spanish site have never been suggested to be Palaeolithic. The Castro at Yecla la Vieja, less than 50 km from the Côa sites, is a major fortification, whose more than 1-km-long stone walls bear hundreds of equine petroglyphs (González 1995). But here we know that the structure was commenced only in the 4th century BCE, by Celtic Vettones, and then expanded in Roman times and up to the Middle Ages. The petroglyphs can only have been added later, after the completion of the walls, so they are of historical age and quite probably less than a millennium old. This illustrates the illogical reasoning of the Palaeolithic art ‘experts’: if the context excludes a Pleistocene age, none is proposed, but if there is no readily apparent contextual information, similar figures are pronounced Palaeolithic — because the experts say so. Indeed, both the Côa complex and Siega Verde have been included on UNESCO’s World Heritage List on the recommendations of the experts disseminating these myths. UNESCO has been hoodwinked by archaeological myths.

Rock Art Fairy Tales

Figure 58. Petroglyph resembling a horse, showing none of the characteristics defining it as Palaeolithic, yet attributed to the Palaeolithic; it is at most 200 years old.

But why are their fantasies included here under the heading of ‘sinister’ myths? Once the myths of Pleistocene antiquity had been made, their protagonists were trapped in them and rather than accepting the overwhelming weight of scientific findings and simple common sense, they opted to defend their myths at all costs. Nominating such sites for World Heritage listing helped preserve the myth of European art origins, and raised the stakes correspondingly. Now it became even more obligatory to uphold the falsehoods: to preserve the authority of these deluded researchers, and to preserve their Eurocentric perspective. The scientists opposing their claims were described by them as fraudulent and corrupt, they were attacked in many ways and by many members of the ‘high priesthood’ (Thompson 2014) of Palaeolithic art. And that is where the matter still stands today and probably will continue until the protagonists are all dead. Anyone contemplating the question of veracity in Pleistocene archaeology needs to take into account Max Planck’s observation: “A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it”.

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Generic Issues Effects of fakes, misconceptions and falsities The contents of this book suggest that there may have been many reasons for the tens of thousands of myths invented about rock art, and about palaeoart generally. A few, we have just noted, are deliberately mischievous, designed to mislead, but the great majority are attributable to wishful thinking, false beliefs, epistemological delusions, pareidolia, autosuggestion and other causes suggesting that the promoters of these myth genuinely believed in them. Understanding these fallacious beliefs involves an investigation of the underlying generic reasons for them, and this will be attempted next. There is no intention here of disparaging those who hold such beliefs — on the contrary, it will soon become apparent that accountability for the causal factors may well be attributable to those calling themselves scholars and experts, and on whose accounts others tend to rely. First, let us look at a subject very briefly touched upon in Chapter 4, in connection with the ill-named ‘Venus’ figurines: the issue of undetected fakes. We know that there have been many fakes presented as palaeoart, even fake rock inscriptions do occur. To define the problem, let us look at the ‘Venuses’ more closely. As we noted, the distributional, formal, statistical and compositional characteristics of what is essentially seen as the ‘sample’ of these objects are in themselves misconceptions, and this is well expressed in their incongruous collective name. A large segment of the sample shows no indication of sex, and many are barely recognisable as human figurines. Thus the whole notion already breaks down at the taxonomic level, and the inane naming reflects the endeavours of modern Westerners to understand something they are ill-equipped to comprehend. I have indicated in Chapter 4 that no boundaries of the ‘sample’ have actually been established, because it has not been defined in any objective sense: by age, cultural affiliation, style or even formal traits. So somehow a collection of objects has been grouped together on the basis of some rather faint notion of being similar. Now, it stands to reason that most of these diverse objects are more or less peripheral to the central idea of what archaeologists define as ‘Venuses’, and if we imagine them represented in a scattergram a rather smaller number of them are located centrally. Having seen more of these finds than any other researcher, I can confirm that this is indeed the case. Here is the problem: if these objects include a number of fakes, where would they be located on the scattergram? Anyone producing a fake can safely be assumed to favour characteristics considered to be central to the Venus concept formed by archaeologists, and adopted by the public. It would not be a rational course for an aspiring faker to take to offer a 152

Generic Issues fake for consideration that clashes with this concept. Therefore we can say that any fakes in the ‘sample’ can be expected to conform with accepted beliefs, reinforcing them even more.

Figure 59. The ‘Emmanuel Venus’, which turned up in an American antiques shop. It seems to be a fake, although in many of its attributes it matches the notions of what a Palaeolithic ‘Venus’ figurine should look like.

This same principle extends to other forms of evidence: to succeed, fakers of archaeological material have to be proficient, and the international trade in archaeological fakes churns out millions of articles every year. Good fakes, the ones most likely to remain undetected, need to confirm the expectations of archaeologists. Prominent fakes are only challenged if they present controversial implications. For instance, some years ago I was asked to travel to Israel to attempt scientific dating of an inscription on a stone coffin purported to be the sarcophagus of Joseph, brother of Jesus (Bednarik 2013b: 27). Anticipating a forgery I found an excuse not to participate, but some months later I learnt that Professor Yuval Goren had succeeded in tracing the coffin to a major factory producing archaeological forgeries on an industrial scale. The forgers had simply overreached themselves by creating an artefact that attracted far too much attention. Had they been content with generating orthodox articles that met archaeological expectations, and not produced an artefact of great religious significance, they would still be in business today.

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Myths about Rock Art In 2014, an antiquities dealer from the United States named Emmanuel contacted me, because I had been introduced to him as an ‘expert on Venus figurines’. He had found a female stone figurine in a shop and had purchased it for a pittance from the previous owner who had no idea what it might be. My contact had been unable to establish where the object had come from, but he wanted to know whether it could be authentic. Would I be willing to examine it? I accepted the challenge and he sent the object to me (Figure 59). In this case we have no information why the fake was produced, but what is clear from its dimensions is that the faker had based its design on a few figurines, especially the Lespugue specimen from France, which he or she seems to have seen in illustrations that lacked a size scale. This is apparent because the ‘Emmanuel Venus’, as I shall call it, is larger than any of the Pleistocene specimens, and in its weight of 1.22 kg not even matched by the largest of the Kostenki limestone figurines (Bednarik 1990c: Fig. 1f), which is the largest in the ‘sample’ (Figure 60). Its size of 28.8 cm, compared to the 15 cm long ‘Lespugue Venus’, seemed to exclude affiliation with the established corpus of female Pleistocene figurines, but I realised that this would pre-empt the issue in favour of the accepted consensus opinion. Nevertheless, there were several other factors speaking against authenticity: the coarse surface condition differentiates it from all known specimens, the presence of eyes and a mouth, the sparse work traces

Figure 60. Female figurines from the early Upper Palaeolithic, Kostenki, Russia; the specimen on the right is the largest known ‘Venus’ figure.

Generic Issues indicating the use of a metal tool, and the presence of latex traces on the back of the figurine all confirmed its modern origins. This fake was relatively easy to discount, because it was too peripheral in the scatterplot suggested above, but what about those that cluster around its core area? It is right to ask, to what extent do undetected fakes help reinforce scholarly constructs of types? This applies not only to female figurines; the same factor determines all other ‘types’ archaeologists perceive. Essentially these constructs would tend to be reinforced by fakes, because well-made ones will feature centrally within the ‘sample’ in many or all of their variables. Neuroscience and ‘identifications’ in rock art interpretation Of all the myths that have been created about rock art, those regarding the meaning of the motifs are by far the most commonly encountered; they number in their millions. Indeed, ‘interpretation’ of motifs, of what they were intended to depict, is the preoccupation of most people who concern themselves with rock art, be they children, site tourists or scholars. Trying and figure out what it depicts and what it means is the most pervasive human reaction to seeing rock art, irrespective of the age, ethnicity or conditioning of the beholder. If adequate pareidolic clues are spotted in a motif to invite ‘identification’, it is considered to be figurative or iconographic, and it is then interpreted on that basis. Clearly, then, this process reflects the values, mental constructs and visual responses of the beholder rather than the producer of the rock art motif. The unscientific nature of this process of iconographic ‘identification’ is readily evident. To begin with, there is the neglect of the disconfirming elements of the motif, which typically account for the majority of the potential variables present in it. Refutability is the cornerstone of good science, so the disconfirming attributes are the most important. Rock art motifs are not naturalistic likenesses of objects; they are abstractions, and in most cases very schematised abstractions. The tendency to subconsciously experience some formal aspects of an image as naturalistic and others as ‘poorly drawn’, or for some other reason not relevant, indicates the subjectivity of the process. In assessing which aspects are naturalistic and which are not, the beholder already has to anticipate an ‘identification’. In this form of circular reasoning, “the image seems to be of object A, therefore aspects confirming this must be well depicted and thus diagnostic, while those that do not are not diagnostic”. The identification of diagnostic features is inherently biased, and autosuggestion plays a further role in this example of pareidolia, the underlying phenomenon we have already considered in Chapter 5. It needs to be fully appreciated that the neural processes implicated in the ‘identification’ of rock art motifs are identical to those engaged in locating ‘iconic’ elements in

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Figure 61. Baume Latrone, southern France; this zoomorph has been variously described as a horse, saiga antelope and mammoth by ‘Palaeolithic art experts’. The preceding finger flutings are about four times as old, so if it is indeed of the Upper Palaeolithic, the finger grooves must be Middle Palaeolithic (Bednarik 1986b).

random arrangements (such as rocks, cliff faces, clouds, tree bark, burnt toast, Rorschach blots etc.). Similarly, the visual system of a viewer of a rock art motif always applies subjective and subliminal discrimination between motifs of ‘identifiable’ objects, and those that do appear iconic but cannot be identified (for instance those called ‘fantastic creatures’ or ‘ambiguous’; Figure 61). These are all idiosyncratic and subconscious judgments over which we exercise very little sentient control. They are determined by the complex neural system involving the eye, the optic nerve and chiasm conveying the information to the thalamus (lateral geniculate nucleus), and the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe, from where it is disseminated through the cortical hierarchy of the visual cortex and visual association cortex. According to the two-stream hypothesis (Mishkin and Ungerleider 1982), the ventral stream, connecting to the medial temporal lobe, limbic system, and the dorsal stream are involved in recognising, identifying and categorising visual information. In pareidolia, the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus is being ‘overruled’ by the visual cortex in the occipital lobe. This is because in human vision, only about 10%

Generic Issues of the information used derives from the retina; the rest is provided from within the brain and is a reflection of that organ’s ontogenic history. The information streaming from the visual centre to the thalamus is about six times greater than that travelling in the opposite direction (Eagleman 2015), thus ‘swamping’ the information from the optic nerve in pareidolia. That we see the world through a lens of our past experiences is demonstrated by countless illusions and skilled illusionists: we tend to see what we expect to see. And if we have already decided that a rock art motif featuring what looks like legs and a body bears something vaguely resembling antlers, our brain tells us that it represents a deer. From that point onwards, disconfirming evidence is discounted, including the most fundamental objections. For instance if this cannot possibly be a deer because no such species ever existed in the continent in question (Figure 15), intricate justifications may be invented to dispel any doubt: perhaps the Aboriginal artist had been overseas, had seen deer and upon his return had depicted them (in this example the ‘deer’ were in fact a group of dancers engaged in a ceremony; Welch 2012). In other words, such pareidolic ‘identifications’ become so powerful they tend to defeat logical reasoning. The underlying rule, as so often in human existence, is that human beliefs are stronger than human rationality. In the Australian example just cited the archaeologists actually named the Kimberley site in question Deer Rock. In Chapter 5 we have seen that when those who believed in the artificiality of the humanoid ‘face’ in the Cydonia region of Mars saw the much better 1998 photographs, they defended their belief by invoking a cover-up conspiracy: beliefs trump rationality nearly always in humans. The effectiveness of this process of detecting meaningful patterns in the visual data and interpreting them is determined by state of interconnectedness of the subject’s various brain regions involved as well as other factors, such as the degree of integration between the left prefrontal cortical areas and memory and the level of dopamine presence. The level and volume of prefrontal cortex activity is widely variable among human brains and, depending on the amount of integration it facilitates, degrees of constellated psychic contents are more or less available for conscious analysis. Having evolved in a patterned world, the brain inevitably has the stamp of patterns built into its structure, and it is patterns it seeks. This can result in apophenia, a Type 1 error (false positive or alpha error). In one of its forms, visual pareidolia, iconographic patterns are detected in random phenomena. It is most strongly developed in individuals whose brains are suboptimally integrated and provide limited sophistication of their cause and effect reasoning. Examples of it have been provided in this book, for instance in the examples in Chapter 2, where several elements of genuine rock art were combined by pareidolic perception to perceive faunal depictions, such as a

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Myths about Rock Art mammoth or pterosaur. The tendency to seek patterns in random information is fundamental to the ability of a species in processing sensory input. High levels of dopamine affect the propensity to find meaning, patterns and significance, even when there is none, and this proclivity is related to a tendency of receptivity for the paranormal (Leonard and Brugger 1998). Alcock emphasises how evidence that should be rejected on a rational basis is instead accepted by default, and how rationality is changed to fit the perceived evidence (Alcock 1981; Alcock et al. 2005). He also notes how this is reinforced when believers listen to each other’s stories. In the scanning and disambiguation of rock art imagery by human vision, much the same neural structures as those causing pareidolia are involved. The neurophysiological limitations of rock art interpretation are somewhat different, but there are also parallels. The low connectivity between the hemispheres responsible for what neuroscientists call ‘magical thinking’ (a better term is Edward Burnett Tylor’s ‘associative thinking’) contributes to susceptibility to pareidolia. In rock art interpretation, it is the susceptibility to autosuggestion that facilitates the conviction that the modern beholder’s visual perception is capable of extracting emic meaning from pigment traces or petroglyph marks made in pre-History. This misconception seems to be attributable to the view that modern mentality and behaviour can be attributed to all humans since thirty or forty millennia ago. That error is so ingrained in orthodox archaeology that it seems almost impossible to correct, and yet it is self-evident that practically all rock art was created by non-literate people. They most certainly had no ‘modern minds’. Helvenston (2013) has explained in great detail that the brains of literates and of people with oral-aural traditions are very differently organised and connected. It is true that evolutionarily-derived, basic human perceptual abilities have not likely changed much in the past 50 ka or so; what has changed is how we think and what we think, as a result of the development of such technologies as writing (and the phenomenal rise of exograms generally) that deeply affect how we perceive. Since 90% of visual information derives from within the brain (i.e. reflects past experiences and how they were processed and stored), it follows logically that the way modern and ancient conspecifics experience ‘visual reality’ must be expected to differ quite dramatically. Even today, the way visual or other neural data are processed within the brain varies greatly among people of different cultures. How readily parts of a brain can be ‘rewired’ is illustrated by how rapidly the inferior posterior parietal lobule ‘rewires’ itself in the rubber hand illusion (Botvinick and Cohen 1998; Peled et al. 2003; Tsakiris and Haggard 2005; Costantini and Haggard 2007; Marjolein et al. 2009). The illustrated proprioceptive drift (Thakkar et al. 2011) can even lead to out-of-body experiences, linking body ‘disownership’, psychotic experiences and a weakened sense of the self. The rubber hand illusion

Generic Issues is a tangible demonstration of localised human neuroplasticity, and it is now well known that ontogenic conditioning modifies both the chemistry and the structure of the brain significantly (Maguire et al. 2000; Draganski et al. 2004; Smail 2007; Malafouris 2008; Eagleman 2015). Thus the way the brain of a producer of rock art processed visual information can safely be assumed to have differed very greatly from the way a modern literate Westerner perceives. Therefore the creative pattern detection that constitutes rock art interpretation is effectively a projection of newly created meaning onto marks on rock that, in reality, consist of pigment patches or anthropogenic surface depressions. This predisposition to ‘abnormal meaningfulness’ (Brugger 2001; Brugger and Mohr 2008) offers some comparisons with the Rorschach inkblot test. In both cases, the subject views graphic arrangements of marks, the meaning of which is not available but must be divined by examination. As implied by the Rorschach test, this process is subjective in that it is influenced by numerous factors, such as personality traits of the beholder and his/her life experiences. The comparison should, however, not be stretched too far because the marks rock art consists of are not random blots but have been made deliberately by human hand. Where the pareidolic reading of rock art fails is in the belief that one can communicate with the rock artist via the marks (Mithen 1998), particularly concerning intent: which visual clues are deliberate iconographic referents? The modern beholder’s perception searches the rock art motif for details resonating with his/her visual system, in the same way as pareidolia operates. When it detects such elements, it locks onto them as if it knew that these are the clues the rock artist wanted to convey. As every experienced rock art researcher knows, practically all motifs in the world are non-naturalistic. Most comprise far more elements that contradict a favoured interpretation, but the instant an opinion of the meaning is formed, all disconfirming aspects are subconsciously or subliminally suppressed. It is this tendency that most disallows such ‘identifications’ from scientific consideration, because in science the disconfirming evidence should be of particular weight. Therefore from the perspective of neuroscience, the notion that rock art connoisseurs can somehow conjure up the real (emic) meanings of rock art motifs from their brains’ past experiences is simply preposterous (Bednarik 2011a, 2012a, 2013a, 2013c). The modern human brain has no relevant past experiences and no such ability should be presumed to exist. So for instance the least qualified to identify zoomorphs are zoologists and palaeontologists, because they are intensively trained to recognise animals and their remains from a certain conditioned perspective but have no understanding of how rock artists perceived or depicted them. And yet as we have seen, in many cases their opinions have been cited in support of this or that ‘interpretation’.

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The myths are here to stay Almost a quarter of a century has passed since I published a paper entitled ‘Palaeoart and archaeological myths’ in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (Bednarik 1992d, cf. 1992e). This was perhaps the first time the mythology that had been created for about a century around art-like productions by preliterate peoples was examined in any consequential fashion. On that occasion I showed that a great deal of archaeological information and discussion about palaeoart was unreliable or baseless. Perhaps it is time to ask: has the practice of unfettered archaeological interpretation of rock art shown signs of abatement since then? Not at all! Many of the examples cited in this book have been presented in recent years and inadequate epistemology remains the hallmark of the discipline (Bednarik 2013b). Archaeology seems to be inert to criticism, and often continues to prefer myths to scientific veracity. This is especially apparent in the areas of rock art and portable palaeoart. Rock art images continue to be confidently interpreted by pareidolic impression, and if that interpretation is as an extinct species it is postulated as proof of antiquity. If that claim of age is scientifically unsustainable, the pareidolic ‘identification’ is defended by special pleading: perhaps palaeontology is in error, perhaps the mooted extinction dates are false — scientific evidence must be refused in order to preserve the pareidolic perception, which is upheld with a fervour bordering on religious fanaticism. In eschewing falsifiability the discipline of archaeology truly has a long way to travel before it can become a science. But the most worrying factor in the present review is the realisation that this book has only addressed cases that were refutable outside of archaeological contentions or ostensibly lacked credibility to begin with. The perturbing question then arises: how many claims and interpretations published about palaeoart have not been given such attention, because they seem basically reasonable or plausible? Reasonableness, obviously, does not make them true; it merely renders them inconspicuous. Bearing in mind that there are myriad false or precipitate claims about rock art, is it not judicious to suspect that the number of apparently reasonable but ultimately false claims might be much greater than that of dubious ones? And if this were the case, where would it leave the credibility of the discipline? This disturbing realisation shows that a demand for greater authenticity in the creation of hypotheses about palaeoart is not only justified; it is unavoidable if the discipline is to be wrested from the control of the spin doctors — be they archaeologists or not.

Generic Issues At the beginning of the introduction in this book I hinted at the usefulness of conducting an ethnographic study of the creators of the myths about rock art, who describe themselves as rock art researchers. This, I said, would provide a vastly more fertile area of research than a consideration of the myths supposedly depicted in rock art. People such as archaeologists, anthropologists and ethnographers have made a career of investigating other people, their cultures and their purported behaviour. They have shown comparatively less enthusiasm for investigating themselves and their own prejudices, preconceptions or biases. Indeed, their academic publications say very little about authors’ cognitive, perceptual, religious, political, ontological, intellectual and most especially academic conditioning. Yet these are all of great importance in appreciating the epistemological origins of academic understandings or beliefs. Seen in a neuroscientific or neuropsychological perspective, intensive academic training has, after all, similarities with the aetiology of obsessive compulsive disorders (as, conversely, does my obsession with investigating myths in rock art interpretation). The number of possible systematic biases available to a researcher is not to be ignored: confirmation bias, déformation professionnelle, selective perception, wishful thinking, wishful thinking bias, psychological reactance, neglect of probability, Von Restorff effect, outcome bias, framing effect, bandwagon effect, expectation bias, congruence bias, attentional bias, clustering illusion (apophenia), conjunction fallacy, Hawthorne effect, observer-expectancy effect, primacy and recency effects, and most especially, selection bias. Consider, for instance, just one of these, apophenia: all of archaeological interpretation is an application of apophenia — a search for patterning in the way evidence is thought to present itself. It is therefore not extravagant to enquire here into the epistemologies applied in our probing into the peoples of the past. After all, in “molesting the past” (Campbell 2006) we do not hesitate to judge the motives, ideologies, responses to environments, intentions and so forth, of the peoples we investigate. Even in dealing with contemporary indigenous groups, we examine their ontologies, ignoring that this may be injurious to their beliefs or that our attention may be unwelcome. Our ‘explanations’ amount to usurpation of their histories by the dominant academic hegemony. Of course we assure ourselves that we do this for the sake of improving knowledge and understanding, but we tend to overlook that in one way or another, most researchers are beholden to the state, a state that only exists because alternative political systems have been obliterated by it. Around the world there have been many political confrontations between archaeologists and traditional peoples, including in Europe (e.g. with the Saami), over a variety of issues, but especially over the curatorial aspirations of archaeologists. Archaeologists may find it surprising that an argument can be made that their reason for often opposing indigenous aspirations is because indigenes are actual

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Myths about Rock Art competitors of archaeologists. But that is the case: many indigenes are the true experts on their pasts (possessing emic knowledge of it), and they compete with archaeologists for possession of material culture as well as control over the narrative of their past. Ethnographic examination of the scholars researching human communities other than their own is resisted by practitioners of these disciplines, on the grounds that they represent science and objectivity. But this is simply not true: these humanities are not sciences, and there is nothing ‘objective’ about interpreting evidence patterns in accordance with one’s own academic conditioning, not to mention personal biases of many kinds. All of this seems self-evident, but when these practitioners find themselves faced with challenges to their credibility as archaeologists, anthropologists (especially physical anthropologists) or ethnographers, they tend to react less than constructively. Since their models are couched in non-falsifiable terms (although many can be and have been falsified by sciences) they can resort to stonewalling critiques to preserve their positions in many scenarios. As an example, consider the replacement or ‘African Eve’ hypothesis of the origins of ‘modern humans’ (see Ch. 5). Although essentially falsified and discredited as being based on a hoax (Bednarik 2013h), its supporters continue to repel any assault on the authority of its dogma. It continues to hold sway over the discipline, despite being patently false: contemporary humans evolved as a single population in four continents, and while there was a great deal of movements of genes (introgression) among Pleistocene peoples of the world, there was rather little mass migration and large-scale genocide. This pattern of human evolution has been understood for well over half a century (Weidenreich 1946) but since then the discipline has been preoccupied with a wild-goose chase orchestrated by humanistic spin doctors. Despite the ‘Denisovans’, the ‘Red Deer people’ and the ‘Hobbit’ controversy (see Bednarik 2013b), just three kinds of recently reported fossil remains that contradict the simplistic Eve model, most practitioners in Pleistocene archaeology and palaeoanthropology seem incapable of thinking outside of it. They continue to be obsessed by wanting to prove that modern people (called ‘humans’ by them, as if other hominins were not human) evolved in one small place from where they conquered the world by eradicating all other hominins. To consider this to be a science is no different from calling religion a science, therefore the practitioners of these and other humanistic disciplines possess no mandate as sciences. This extends even to subjects such as psychology, psychiatry and many areas of medicine: disciplines that deal only with symptoms but have no understanding of aetiologies are not sciences. This may sound a trifle harsh, but what objective merits could there be in creating taxonomies on the basis of symptoms? These disciplines remain far too primitive to have earned the right to call themselves sciences.

Generic Issues Nevertheless, when their practitioners are challenged, they react in the same way a religion does when it is confronted. In the case of the archaeologists and others who interpret rock art, a form of cultural remains belonging to others, they will continue to reject requests to discontinue their practices of inventing mythologies about it. It is their way of claiming authority and control. Macintosh, an anatomist, has shown us (see Ch. 1) that cultural aliens are incapable of interpreting rock art correctly. Yet this is all the ‘interpreters’ do, and they are not particularly eager to relinquish control over these subjects. Therefore the myths they create are here to stay, and will continue to be invented and perpetuated. Conclusion If at this stage the reader has formed the impression that a vast body of claims made about rock art belongs into the realm of fantasy or mythology, the correct conclusion has been reached. By far the most common content of the myriad publications about rock art addresses the meaning of motifs and purported scenes, and yet it is in nearly all cases impossible to know what they depict or mean. Moreover, such propositions are typically not testable. Another common theme in rock art books and articles concerns the perceived styles, and what they mean, especially in terms of antiquity of the rock art. Again, the constructs of styles are archaeofacts (or ‘egofacts’; Consens 2006); they probably have no real, emic existence in the majority of cases. This is supported by the observation that where they were tested rigorously, they failed, and yet they tend to be vigorously defended by their promoters. This leads to a third common theme in rock art publications: the invention of chronological schemes on the basis of the previous two kinds of myths, those of interpretation and stylistic constructs. If we excise these three types of fabrications from the literature about rock art, most of its premises collapse, most of it becomes unsupportable. We have examined one example in some detail (Chapter 3), the stylistic rock art sequence of Saudi Arabia established by Emmanuel Anati, who has never even been to that country. This is a representative illustration of the kind of meaningless blather the discipline not only tolerates, but actually adopts in its models and text books. This begs the question: by what academic mechanisms do such myths about rock art secure wide acceptance, and why do sober proposals tend to attract so much less approval than flamboyant interpretations? For instance, unsubstantiated proposals that rock art is the work of shamans abound in the literature, and most of them originate not from that archaeologically most despised group, the archaeological amateurs or ‘folk archaeologists’, but from professionals. Indeed, there does appear to be a certain degree of separation of the rock art myths that are mainly contributed by, respectively, vocational archaeologists and avocational commentators. The latter dominate in such areas as ascribing rock art to extra-

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Figure 62. Equine petroglyphs on the walls of Castro at Yecla de Yeltes, western Spain, which are among hundreds that cannot be of the Palaeolithic because they were made on historical stone walls.

terrestrials, to writing systems of visitors from other continents, or in interpreting rock art as depicting dinosaurs or pterosaurs. The professional archaeologists, however, have contributed the lion-share of misinterpretations of non-anthropic rock markings, or of shamanic attributions, for instance. Indeed, the attribution of rock art production to neuropathologies or the obsession of wanting rock art to be of the Pleistocene are practically endemic to the academic boffins. For example the Palaeolithic obsession of seeing all horse-like petroglyphs of Iberia as being of the Ice Age (Figure 62) are completely limited to Pleistocene archaeologists who pretend to be specialists on Palaeolithic rock art. This observation, easily quantifiable, should be of greatest concern. It appears that the tangible difference between the kinds of errors made by avocational people on one side, and the professional archaeologists on the other, is that those of the amateurs pose no challenge to the credibility of the discipline: to effectively refute them involves no great difficulties. The myths created by the professionals are vastly more pernicious. Not only are they much harder to dislodge, they are also much more effectively disseminated. They are widely taught at universities around the world and they feature prominently in academic textbooks. They form the dogma of the discipline, an interlocking web of falsities presented in largely unfalsifiable formats, resting on the authority of the ‘high-priests’ of archaeology

Generic Issues (Thompson 2014) and on the refereeing systems used by most establishment journals, which favour intellectual and academic inbreeding. These myths are as difficult to extricate as are cancerous cells in a body. But their most alarming aspect is not even their malignancy; it is the deeply troubling realisation that what distinguishes the kinds of errors made by the two groups is that those pronouncement coming from professional archaeologists are invariably the more plausible of the two categories. Whereas the myths usually generated by amateurs tend to suffer from an abject lack of credibility (how difficult is it to falsify the proposition that dinosaurs were depicted in rock art?), those proffered by the professionals tend to be far more plausible or reasonable. And therein lies the problem: ‘reasonableness’ of an ‘interpretation’ is an insidious variable. A ‘reasonable’ interpretation may be just as false as an unreasonable one, but we tend to accept it without giving contradictory elements the attention they deserve — especially if it comes from an ‘expert’. Which leads us to a derivative problem: whereas an amateur loses nothing by admitting that he or she was mistaken, this is quite different for a professional. The academic system, at least as it has evolved in the Westernised world, does not encourage an academic to admit to a mistake; on the contrary, the concept of ‘defence’ is strongly ingrained in this intellectual tradition, encouraging tenacity and even intransigence. There are no academic rewards for admitting that one’s hypothesis has been falsified — but there are significant disadvantages. This adds another layer on the inherent structure of such myths and it illustrates the full profundity of the issue. One question arises from all this: is the discipline of mainstream archaeology capable of addressing such issues? When one reads such webpages as http:// www.badarchaeology.com/, run by a hard-core public archaeologist, one has to despair. His extensive pages titled Bad archaeology mention not one single ‘bad archaeologist’, but a litany of non-archaeologists who had made false or dodgy claims. The implication is that ‘real archaeologists’, as the moderator of these pages calls paid archaeologists, produce no ‘bad archaeology’, which is simply a falsity. There are miscreants and people with severe personality disorders or poor knowledge in literally all endeavours, and archaeology is no exception. Many have falsified evidence, others have destroyed prime cultural heritage, or provided corporate entities with the means of doing so, accepting generous rewards for helping in circumventing protective legislation. Pathological archaeology is practised widely, and many archaeologists have opposed indigenous control of indigenous heritage. Of course it is also true that there are very many archaeologists of great integrity, and they do admit that archaeology needs to bring its house into order. To name just one example that comes to mind, there is Robert M. Chapple, a commercial archaeologist from Northern Ireland, who

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Myths about Rock Art analyses commercial archaeology. One of his key arguments is that archaeology fails the test of usefulness if it does not increase knowledge about the human past, and that “archaeological excavation without publication is, in real terms, no different than simply bulldozing the site without any record”. He comments on the “shockingly-low level” of analysis and threshold of general competence among his colleagues: The owners and management of the archaeological consultancies are as much to blame as anyone in this situation. They are supposedly professional archaeologists, devoted and dedicated to our archaeological heritage. Yet, these are the very people that have presided over the denigration of this cultural resource. ... What am I proposing? Nothing less than the wholesale disbanding of the licensing of commercial companies in Northern Ireland to carry out archaeological excavations. ... I would go further, to argue that the interests of commercial archaeology — as it is curently [sic] configured — are diametrically opposed to the furthering of genuine knowledge of our past (Chapple 2013). Chapple thus identifies some key issues in ‘bad archaeology’, by first asking what the purpose of archaeology is. Nobody could fault his answer: to further our knowledge of the human past. Commercial archaeologists operate virtually outside the discipline: they are answerable only to their masters, such as large resource companies; they not only fail to report their findings to the discipline, they typically sign contracts containing non-disclosure clauses, and their reports are owned by their clients. Therefore, as Chapple points out, these reports are privately owned, and the commercial archaeologists contribute simply nothing to our knowledge of the human past. Most archaeological work involves destruction of archaeological evidence, and this is particularly blatant when archaeological consultants are engaged in the destruction of rock art sites. Robert M. Chapple is certainly not the only professional in the discipline who argues that there are severe credibility issues with this field. Another example is the Campaign for Sensible Archaeology by Stuart Rathbone (https://www.academia. edu/2061900/Sensible_Archaeology), which addresses the “unpleasantly obtuse and dense” language of archaeology; the “disregard of factual evidence in favour of opinions and speculation” (i.e. the creation of mythologies); and “deliberately stretching the boundaries of what is considered suitable for archaeological study”. Certainly the creation of archaeological mythologies about rock art is very prominent, and it needs to be appreciated that the mythologies by professional archaeologists are far more insidious than those of avocational researchers. This point needed to be clarified and that is why this book had to be written.

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Index

A abnormal meaningfulness 88, 159 Aborigines 3, 4, 5, 82, 101, 113, 115, 143, 145, 146, 170 African Eve 124, 162, 174 Agawa Rock 15, 16 Ain Jamal 60 Altamira 7, 43, 177, 179, 185, 193, 212 amateur 165 anatomy 2, 8, 55 anthropological 6, 57, 138, 170, 203 anthropomorph 30, 31, 59, 88, 109 apophenia 20, 88, 111, 118, 119, 157, 161 Arabia 55, 56, 58, 60, 84, 89, 90, 163, 167, 168, 175, 192, 212 archaeoastronomer 116, 117 archaeological forgeries 153 archaeologist 3, 10, 11, 20, 25, 28, 41, 68, 72, 77, 90, 101, 102, 108, 116, 117, 124, 139, 165, 208 Arizona 14, 17, 31, 32, 33, 177, 190, 210 Arnhem Land 24, 25, 26, 27, 88, 101, 187, 195, 199, 212 Asperger’s syndrome 134, 136, 142, 176, 204 associative thinking 158 Aurignacian 45, 64, 90, 91, 93, 122, 123, 124, 135 aurochs 37, 48, 125 Australopithecus 40 Austria 46, 49, 93, 126, 127, 171, 192 autistic spectrum disorder 134, 136, 202 autosuggestion 11, 28, 140, 152, 155, 158

B Bacon’s Hole 47 Balparana 20 Bara Bahau 65 213

Bat Creek inscription 106, 187 Bernardos 43 Beswick Cave 2, 195 biblical archaeology 119, 120, 168, 182 bipolar disorder 134, 139, 140, 179, 180, 199, 202, 203, 206, 208 Birch Creek 31 Black Dragon Canyon 15, 16, 86, 211 blind test 1, 8, 54 Blue Tier 72, 143, 175, 185 body disownership 139 Bos primigenius 37 Brazil 52, 53, 74, 108, 201 Breuil 44, 47, 48, 50, 53, 177, 179, 192, 193 bull-leaping 132, 133 Bycí Skála 45, 208

C California 14, 33, 169, 170, 181, 183, 186, 189, 193, 194, 201, 202, 207, 212 Canada 15, 72, 74, 108, 114, 167 Carbonero Mayor 43 cassowary 102 Castro 38, 150, 164 cation-ratio dating 62, 182, 199 cave bear 45, 46, 64, 65, 88, 172 Cedar-by-the-Sea 114 Chalcolithic 44 Chauvet 43, 90, 91, 142, 173, 201, 206 China 31, 34, 37, 50, 51, 52, 102, 104, 127, 174, 175, 186, 191, 194, 201, 208 Church Hole 46, 47, 172, 203 Côa 41, 42, 43, 44, 52, 62, 91, 126, 148, 149, 150, 167, 168, 170, 172, 183, 202, 211 colluvium 42 colonialist perception 122 conditioning 1, 8, 111, 155, 159, 161, 162

214

Myths about Rock Art contact art 37, 55 cosmogenic radiation 62, 172 Cosquer 43, 90, 180 Craneman Hill 32 creationist 13 creativity 108, 137, 138, 139, 177, 178, 180, 191, 197, 199, 206, 212 crocodile 21, 22 cryoturbation 73 Cuciulat 45 cupule 72, 79, 80, 99, 143, 145, 170, 173, 203 cyclothymia 140

D Dampier 4, 145, 146, 147, 148, 173 Deer Rock 28, 29, 157 déformation professionnelle 10, 161 Delaware 31 determinism 9 Devil’s Lair 52, 74, 75, 172, 183 devolution 141 Dighton Rock 107, 108, 181 dinosaur 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 31, 42, 169, 175, 195, 206, 207, 208 Diprotodon 20, 21, 26 disambiguation 86, 111, 158 disorder 10, 134, 136, 138, 139, 140, 178, 179, 180, 185, 192, 199, 202, 203, 206, 208 Domingo García 43 dopamine 157, 158, 199 Doring 3, 4, 182 dragon 15, 16, 86, 211 Drysdale River 27 Dunde Bulake 50, 51 dysteleological 141

E elephant 29, 30, 31, 210 Elkin 4, 184 Elvina Track Site 79, 80 emic 3, 8, 10, 94, 158, 159, 162, 163 Epigraphic Society 103, 104, 109, 176, 178, 179, 198, 199 epilepsy 134, 142

epistemology 1, 7, 8, 11, 18, 93, 142, 160 erosion retreat 62 Escoural Cave 44 ethnocentric 8, 123 ethnographic 1, 3, 5, 6, 11, 28, 57, 82, 86, 103, 119, 122, 123, 130, 161, 162, 193 ethnography 61, 130, 192, 207 etic 10, 11, 20, 55, 61, 94 Eucolo Creek 23 Eurocentric 8, 38, 94, 123, 151 evolution ii, 137, 141, 162, 168, 170, 173, 182, 184, 187, 189, 190, 197, 200, 201, 205 excavation 42, 53, 54, 61, 99, 166 exograms 94, 123, 129, 158, 174

F fake 91, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 126, 127, 152, 153, 154, 155 falsifiability 9, 142, 150, 160 figurative 7, 28, 33, 44, 89, 90, 92, 109, 124, 155 figurine 30, 50, 92, 93, 94, 153, 154, 155, 171, 172 finger flutings 71, 74, 88, 156 Flag Point 17, 19, 194 Florida 32, 33, 203 fluvial erosion 39, 173 footprint 18, 21, 186 Fornols-Haut 43 France 38, 43, 45, 48, 65, 88, 112, 122, 125, 126, 132, 154, 156, 181, 195 Franco-Cantabrian 7, 33, 90, 129, 135

G Geißenklösterle 45, 188 genetic drift 141, 173 Genyornis 20, 23, 24, 25, 101, 102, 187, 197 Georgia 107 Germany 45, 46, 64, 68, 91, 112, 126, 127, 190, 202, 211 giraffe 34 glacial striae 52, 73, 74 Glen Canyon 31, 32, 210 Gondershausen 45, 175

Index Gough’s Cave 47, 199 gracilisation 141 grey matter 8, 183 Gwion 3, 4, 7, 182

H Har Karkom 120, 121, 168 Havasupai Canyon 14, 15, 31 Helvenston 7, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 140, 141, 142, 158, 175, 178, 189 Hieroglyphic Canyon 31 high priesthood 126, 151, 209 Hohler Fels 45, 46, 64 Holly Oak 31, 192 Holocene 10, 30, 31, 41, 44, 45, 48, 49, 52, 60, 61, 75, 89, 91, 92, 100, 115, 121, 124, 125, 127, 129, 191, 208 Hopi 17 humanities 6, 9, 162, 173 hypothesis 9, 107, 117, 124, 130, 135, 136, 137, 138, 141, 142, 156, 162, 165, 174, 184, 195, 196 hysteria 114, 134, 142

I Iberia 37, 43, 149, 164 iconographic i, 7, 8, 21, 25, 53, 54, 57, 58, 88, 136, 155, 157, 159 Ignatiev 45 Ig Nobel Prize 113 India 35, 37, 50, 92, 123, 132, 172, 179 Inner Mongolia 34, 114, 115 interpreter 1, 4, 10, 15, 20, 34, 86 introvertive anhedonia 139 Iran 55 Iron Age 39, 40, 44, 45, 125

J Jabal Qara 55, 58, 60 Japan 103, 104, 113, 200 Jinmium 61, 62, 99, 100, 186, 204

K Kachina Bridge 16, 207 Kalahari Desert 122, 170

kangaroo 2, 35, 88 Kapova 45 Kastlgänghöhle 45 Keller and Miller 137, 139, 141 Kensington rune stone 105 Kienbachklamm 46 Kimberley 3, 4, 7, 17, 26, 27, 28, 29, 34, 57, 157, 167, 182, 200 Kleines Schulerloch 45 Kontrewers 18, 186 Kostenki 154, 187 Kuhn 9, 193 Ku-ring-gai Chase 80, 117, 177

L La Ferrassie 38, 122, 202 l’Aldène 142 Lamderod 2 L’Anse aux Meadows 105 Lascaux 43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 125, 169, 177 lateral geniculate nucleus 156 Laurie Creek 77 Legend Rock 33 Lesotho 17, 18 Levantine rock art 44 Libyan 72, 108 Lohanda Nala 50, 92 Los Lunas 105, 106, 198 Lower Palaeolithic 38, 93, 112, 137, 172 Lynch’s Crater 26

M Macintosh 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 54, 163, 195 magical thinking 7, 135, 158, 212 Maine 105, 199 mainstream 89, 104, 105, 112, 121, 128, 129, 165 mammoth 28, 30, 31, 32, 33, 47, 70, 88, 156, 158, 171, 187, 196, 199, 201 Mars 110, 111, 112, 157, 210 Mary Tarn 69, 70 Massachusetts 107 mastodon 28, 30, 31, 32, 88, 187 Mazouco 44, 191 Mendelian 141 mental code 2

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Myths about Rock Art Mesolithic 44, 48, 50, 202 metaphysical 5, 6 Metcalf stone 107 microcephaly 141 microerosion 104, 144, 208 Middle Palaeolithic 38, 44, 129, 156 Minateda 50 Minnesota 105 Minoan 107, 132, 133 Miocene 33, 72 Mladeč Cave 45, 173 modern behaviour 134, 136 Mokhali Cave 17, 18 Mongolia 34, 37, 52, 74, 114, 115 Mount Bego 78 Mountford 2, 3, 21, 22, 23, 24, 82, 84, 89, 116, 198 Murujuga National Park 147 myth 2, 16, 26, 48, 90, 91, 93, 122, 126, 128, 133, 145, 148, 151, 152 mythology 14, 86, 95, 104, 121, 122, 125, 129, 142, 148, 160, 163, 200, 208

N Native American 177 naturalistic 8, 18, 23, 25, 29, 49, 50, 51, 52, 55, 60, 92, 124, 125, 136, 155, 159 natural selection 136, 141, 142 Neanderthal 44 Neolithic 37, 42, 44, 45, 49, 92, 149 neotenisation 124, 141 neuropathologies 134, 137, 141, 142, 164 neuroplasticity 159 neuropsychology 10, 193 neuroscientific 8, 161 neuroscientist 55 neurosis 134, 142 neurotransmitter 138 Nevada 31, 176, 193, 202, 210 New Mexico 29, 32, 35, 106, 176, 186, 194, 210 Newport Tower 108 Noiheener Group 143, 145 Northern Territory 2, 3, 24, 54, 61, 65, 68, 77, 99, 101, 167, 186, 195, 211 Nyawarra 3, 182

O Ocreza 43, 150 oestrus 142 Ohio 28, 30, 105, 176, 203 Okamura 113, 200 Old Vero Site 32 Oracle bones 109 Orchestra Shell Cave 65, 71 ornithopod 17, 18, 19, 184 Ortigosa 43 OSL 54, 60, 62, 100 Owen 17, 180

P palaeoanthropology 141, 162 Palaeolithic art experts 121, 150, 156 palaeontologist 1, 17, 33 Palorchestes 26 Panaramitee 21, 22, 23, 89, 90, 176, 185, 198 paranormal 158, 177, 178, 193 pareidolia 13, 20, 28, 32, 86, 110, 111, 113, 114, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 175 pareidolic 20, 25, 28, 36, 39, 59, 102, 103, 111, 112, 113, 119, 155, 157, 159, 160 Parietal Markings Project 65 patternicity 88 Pedra Furada 52 peer review 97, 100 Penascosa 149 Pennsylvania 29, 208, 212 Perigordian 44, 47, 48 Perna 52, 53 Peyrony 38, 47, 122, 179, 202 Phoenician 71, 72, 103, 107, 108 Piasa bird 13, 208 pictogram 17, 19, 25, 77, 86 pictograph 41, 187, 194 Piedras Blancas 43, 196 Pilbara 4, 5 Piltdown 40, 122, 211 pink cockatoo 3 Point no Point 69 Poland 18

Index Portugal 37, 41, 43, 44, 45, 62, 91, 107, 124, 126, 148, 149, 183, 193, 195, 202, 211 pothole 81, 186, 207 precocious realism 136 pre-Historic 1, 28, 45, 68, 74, 84, 116, 127 professional 6, 7, 10, 42, 108, 126, 128, 164, 165, 166 proprioceptive drift 139, 158 prosopagnosia 111 Protomnodon 26 Protsch 124 pterosaur 15, 16, 26, 86, 158, 206 Puebloan 31

Q quantum theory 9

R radiocarbon 31, 42, 45, 62, 77, 78, 92, 98, 99, 100, 171, 183, 204, 208 Rainbow Rocks 29 Rainbow Serpent 2 reality 7, 9, 10, 11, 47, 51, 59, 62, 80, 88, 98, 103, 111, 123, 124, 129, 135, 141, 158, 159, 176, 206 reasonableness 36, 160, 165 refutability 155 refutation 9, 60, 73, 107, 144, 172 religion 139, 162, 163, 193, 203 Remarkable Cave 67 repeatability 9 retina 87, 157 Rhode Island 108 Robertson Cave 65 Rochester Creek 77, 171 rock artist 1, 8, 11, 13, 20, 87, 133, 159 Roman 37, 38, 39, 121, 150 Rorschach inkblot 20, 159 Rouffignac Cave 88, 210 rubber hand illusion 139, 158, 180, 196, 208, 209 Russia 45, 67, 96, 126, 127, 154, 208

S sacred knowledge 5, 6

Sahara 7, 49, 55, 176, 191, 204 Sandia Cave 106, 176 Saudi Arabia 55, 56, 58, 60, 89, 163, 192, 212 Sautuola 7 schizotypy 134, 139, 177 Searle 10, 61, 206 self-domestication 142 shamanism 109, 119, 129, 130, 131, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 184, 185, 190, 192, 194, 199, 201, 202, 211 Shishkino 50, 51 Siberia 33, 50, 51, 95, 127, 175 Siega Verde 38, 39, 40, 41, 50, 52, 126, 150, 169, 173 solifluction 73 solution scallops 80, 81 South Africa 40, 170, 207, 208 South Australia 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 53, 65, 72, 75, 89, 98, 99, 170, 188, 198, 199, 207, 210, 211 Spain 7, 37, 40, 43, 44, 45, 50, 125, 126, 132, 164, 173 Spirit Pond rune-stones 105 Sthenurus 26, 88 Stonehenge 62, 212 Stubwieswipfel 46 superior parietal lobule 139 Surprise Tank 33 Sutherland Creek 68, 176

T Tal’ma 50, 76 Tandandjal Cave 2, 195 Tan-Tan 112 taphonomic 29, 48, 52, 64, 69, 74, 75, 94, 108 Tasmania 27, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 143, 144, 175, 185, 203 Tasmanian tiger 27 Tertiary 20, 34, 50, 102 testability 9, 10, 142 testable 2, 9, 54, 97, 132, 135, 163 test of usefulness 166 thalamus 156, 157 Thamudic 55, 56, 60

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Myths about Rock Art theory of mind 136, 170, 174, 178, 185, 189, 191, 197, 201 thermoluminescence 42, 54, 61, 99, 186 Thylacinus 26, 27 Thylacoleo 26, 27, 65, 167 Toca do Sítio do Meio 74 Track Rocks 28, 30, 208 trampling 54, 73, 74 trance 130, 131, 134, 190, 193 Tukalili 2, 3 turtle 21, 23, 24 twisted perspective 22, 25

U Underwater Panther 14, 16 UNESCO 38, 39, 40, 122, 150 United States 13, 20, 28, 33, 52, 98, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112, 127, 154, 178, 196, 202 Upper Sand Island 30, 32, 70, 88 Utah 15, 16, 17, 19, 26, 30, 31, 32, 33, 70, 77, 86, 88, 186, 194, 196, 207, 211 Uzbekistan 52

V Vale da Casa 44, 170 Venus 92, 93, 95, 112, 152, 153, 154, 182 Verein Anisa 127 Vermelhosa 39, 167 Vero Beach 32, 33, 203 Viking 105, 112, 176, 191, 203, 204 visual cortex 156 Voronoi 79, 118, 210

W wenhua Shiyu 50 Western Australia 3, 4, 5, 19, 26, 34, 52, 65, 75, 146, 167, 171, 172, 180, 183, 188 Wilkindinna 20 wombat 21 World Heritage 38, 41, 43, 114, 122, 126, 150, 151 Written Stones 71, 108, 183 Wunan 3, 4, 182 wusum 60 Wye Valley 47, 205 Wyoming 17, 33

X xenolith 69 Xinjiang 50, 51, 174 x-ray treatment 24

Y Yaburara 145 Yatib 55, 56 Yellow Rock Canyon 31, 179 Yunta Springs 20, 21, 24

Z Zaglossus 16, 26 Zaraut-Kamar 52 zoomorph 24, 27, 31, 32, 34, 37, 43, 47, 52, 55, 150, 156