Palaeoart of the Ice Age [1 ed.] 9781527500716, 9781443895170

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Palaeoart of the Ice Age

Palaeoart of the Ice Age By

Robert G. Bednarik

Palaeoart of the Ice Age By Robert G. Bednarik This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Robert G. Bednarik All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9517-2 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9517-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Outlining the Issues Introduction............................................................................................ 1 The nature of palaeoart .......................................................................... 3 About this book ...................................................................................... 6 About Eve .............................................................................................. 9 Summing up ......................................................................................... 21 Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 37 Africa Earlier Stone Age (ESA) and Lower Palaeolithic ................................ 37 Early Middle Stone Age (EMSA) ........................................................ 42 Middle Stone Age (MSA) .................................................................... 46 Later Stone Age (LSA) ........................................................................ 52 Discussion ............................................................................................ 54 Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 73 The Americas Introduction .......................................................................................... 73 North America ..................................................................................... 76 South America ..................................................................................... 83 Discussion ............................................................................................ 87 Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 97 Asia Siberia .................................................................................................. 97 Eastern Asia ....................................................................................... 106 Southern Asia..................................................................................... 114 South-western Asia ............................................................................ 120 Discussion .......................................................................................... 125

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Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 141 Australia Introduction........................................................................................ 141 Misconceptions .................................................................................. 144 Pleistocene petroglyphs ..................................................................... 149 Pictograms and portable palaeoart ..................................................... 156 Discussion .......................................................................................... 158 Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 167 Europe Introduction........................................................................................ 167 Lower Palaeolithic palaeoart.............................................................. 169 Middle Palaeolithic palaeoart............................................................. 174 Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) palaeoart ........................................ 184 Later Upper Palaeolithic (LUP) paleoart ........................................... 193 Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 213 Palaeoart of the Ice Age Summarising the evidence ................................................................. 213 Towards a cultural sequence .............................................................. 221 A proposal .......................................................................................... 232 Let history be the judge...................................................................... 236

CHAPTER ONE OUTLINING THE ISSUES

Introduction Although palaeoart of the Pleistocene occurs in at least five continents (Bednarik 1992a, 2003a), most people tend to think of Europe first when the topic is mentioned. This is rather odd, considering that this form of evidence is significantly more common elsewhere, and very probably even older in Asia and Africa. For instance there are far less than 10,000 iconographic motifs in the much-studied corpus of European rock art of the Ice Age, and they are even outnumbered by the number of publications about them. By comparison, the much greater corpus of Pleistocene rock art in Australia has been almost completely ignored (Bednarik 1986, 2010), while almost no publications have considered the corresponding Asian body in a pan-continental perspective (Bednarik 1992b, 1994a). In any other academic endeavour that needs to review a global body of evidence to arrive at a balanced perspective such a severe imbalance would be decried as yielding only a hopelessly inadequate record. But in rock art studies this Eurocentric viewpoint is so widely evident that it seems universally acceptable. The arrant neglect of non-European early global rock art is in turn reflected in the comparatively limited knowledge available about it, and the lack of interest in this topic accounts for the often sporadic and extremely patchy record available; it contrasts sharply with the attention lavished on the over-exposed Franco-Cantabrian cave art. This has also led to distorted perceptions about the origins of symbolism, cognitive evolution and a variety of other related subjects. In the case of very early African palaeoart this relative lack of interest is particularly puzzling, because most Pleistocene archaeologists still believe that “modern humans” arose in sub-Saharan Africa and from there began to spread, replacing in their wake all other humans first in Africa, then in Asia, and finally in Europe. They also believe that this was possible because this new African species was cognitively as well as technologically superior to other humans contemporary with them, termed the Robusts. Therefore it was this “new species”, unable to interbreed with

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other humans, which gave rise to art, language and any other feature of advanced humanness. It stands to reason that it would then be obvious to search in Africa for the roots of the Upper Palaeolithic cave art these gracile Moderns are assumed to have introduced in south-western Europe around 40 ka (kilo-annum, i.e. thousand years) ago. And yet, in comparison to the enormous research efforts lavished on the French and Spanish cave art, since its authenticity was grudgingly accepted by the gatekeepers of the human past (Carteilhac 1902), the efforts to trace this art tradition back to its African source have remained decidedly modest. However, there is no evidence available currently that could reasonably be interpreted as an African antecedent of the magnificent Franco-Cantabrian cave art, which seems to suggest that it was a local development, and not introduced from elsewhere. Nevertheless, there is no doubt a great deal of Pleistocene rock art and mobiliary art in Africa, most of which has not been found or recognised so far. Even most examples that have been reported are being ignored, in favour of a very few instances that happened to have been published prominently. For instance any recent discussion of African palaeoart features one of the fifteen engraved haematite stones from Blombos Cave, yet the much more densely decorated plaque from Wonderwerk Cave, also in South Africa, receives no mention at all, despite being of almost identical age and so much more informative about the marking tradition in question. Also mentioned frequently are the painted plaques from Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia, yet they are invariably described as being of the Middle Stone Age (MSA) when in fact they are of the Later Stone Age (LSA) (Beaumont and Bednarik 2013). Thus the veracity and quality of the readily available information about the earliest palaeoart of the entire continent is so inadequate that no conclusions should be drawn from it. The present book is an attempt to remedy this adverse state by offering a more comprehensive review of current empirical and published knowledge on this subject, first from Africa, then also from the Americas, Asia and Australia, before focusing on Europe. This shows not only that the production and use of palaeoart in one form or another has a very long history; it also demonstrates how premature it would be to base farreaching deductions on what is essentially an extremely coarse and incomplete record. It shows poignantly that we might most profitably approach this subject by first acknowledging our rather severe lacunae of knowledge about it. There are thousands, indeed tens of thousands, of publications on the Pleistocene “art” of western Europe, but only a handful of academic papers about the vastly greater body of Pleistocene palaeoart about Africa,

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Asia, Australia or the Americas. Since it is this incredible imbalance that this book addresses, it needs to be given particular attention. The severely distorted record resulting from this significant imbalance has been a major contributor to the slanted model of early global “art” development that has been promoted for over a century, which in turn has discouraged serious attempts to examine the available data found outside of Europe. This distortion is reflected in the listing of dozens of European sites of “Ice Age rock art” on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, where not a single such site from any other continent is listed. Some of these listed European sites, such as those in the Côa valley of northern Portugal or Siega Verde in western Spain, are not even of the Pleistocene (Bednarik 1995a, 2009). It is therefore legitimate to search for the reasons for this state of profound disparity. It feeds the illusion that “art was invented in Europe”, subconsciously reinforcing the European fantasy of cultural primacy. This is just one major effect of this imbalance, another being the unrealistic dogma of hominin cognitive evolution held by orthodox archaeology. For instance the “African hoax” (the “African Eve” model which ultimately derives from fraudulent claims; Bednarik 2008a, 2011) derives much support from this misconception. To appreciate the magnitude of the consequences of the distortion it could be considered how credible the discipline of, for example, plate tectonics would be if 99% of its attention were focused on France and Spain alone—or indeed how any scientific field would be viewed if it held such a massive bias. That is precisely the way most current Pleistocene palaeoart studies need to be seen, and this book represents an effort to remedy a state that is detrimental not only to pre-Historic “art” studies, but more importantly to our understanding of human origins, of the beginnings of the human ability to store memory traces outside the brain, and ultimately the processes that led to the establishment of our constructs of reality. These matters are far more important to our understanding of us than the issue of “art origins”, and they simply cannot be comprehended by commencing from a severely misconstrued corpus of relevant evidence.

The nature of palaeoart In a small effort to remedy a situation that is clearly detrimental to the credibility of the discipline and to its usefulness, the currently available evidence of Pleistocene art-like practices in all continents except Antarctica is comprehensively reviewed in this volume. Traces of human behaviour of that period that are archaeologically defined as “art” are probably not art in the modern Western sense, which is why the term

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“palaeoart” is preferable in defining them collectively. 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), because interpretation is inseparable from the art work (Danto 1986: 45). The term “palaeoart” is not intended to imply that it is a form of art; it is no more art than a peanut is either a pea or a nut, being the seed of a legume of the family Leguminosae. Just as we have no problem with the use of the humble peanut’s name, the term palaeoart does not necessarily imply the concept of art; it merely refers to the art-like nature of palaeoart. Another misunderstanding of ethnocentric commentators concerns the symbolic function of palaeoart (i.e. involving referent and referrer). It is perfectly possible that palaeoart was indeed symbolic, or that some of it was, but this has not been demonstrated so far and is unlikely to be determined. A much more viable alternative would be to treat palaeoart as the surviving manifestations of exograms: externalised memory traces akin to engrams (Bednarik 1987, 2014a; 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. “Palaeoart” simply defines traces or objects that would in contemporary traditions be interpreted as manifestations of art, but whose real role is much more appropriately described as external storage of memory traces, i.e. as exograms. The concept of external engrams was first applied to nonfigurative cave art (Bednarik 1987). Engrams, or memory traces in the human brain, have long been predicted to exist (Semon 1904, 1921) but have never been detected (Lashley 1950; Thompson 1967, 1986, 1990; Thompson et al. 1976; Steinmetz and Thompson 1991; Steinmetz et al. 1987, 1992; Christian and Thompson 2005). An engram is a hypothesised memory trace, a persistent protoplasmic alteration of neural tissue that was thought to occur upon stimulation of the brain, and accounting for memory in all animal brains. It is now assumed that there is no single biological locus of memory, but rather that there are many. Penfield (1952, 1954) and others had managed to reactivate memory traces by stimulating the temporal lobes, but the reported episodes of recall occurred in less than 5% of subjects and could not be replicated by later neurosurgeons (e.g. Jensen 2005). However, Penfield’s work has led to the

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concept of storage of memory traces external to the brain, at least in humans, first formally proposed by Gregory (1970: 148). The notion of such a “surrogate cortex” was then developed by Goody (1977) and Carruthers (1990, 1998), but its essence had been understood significantly earlier, by Plato. In Phaedrus (274e–275a), Plato noted that the use of writing fosters forgetfulness, because people were “calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves but from external marks”. The effect of external storage, just like the storage of computer memory in an external drive, is that it can potentially increase available memory volume indefinitely, relieving the primary device of its restraints. The first tangible proposal identifying phenomena as engram-like, externalised, “permanent” forms to which the human intellect of the creator as well as his conspecifics could refer, is in Bednarik (1987). We sought to explain very early rock art as externalisations of cognitive reference frames expressed in sensuously perceptible materials (1987: 223), as projections of neural structures (1987: 226) and as sensuously perceptible projections of neural systems (1987: 225). This paper also emphasised the significant communication potential of such engram-like phenomena, proposing that other hominins would have possessed “resonating” cerebral systems capable of response. Our subsequent assessments of the cognitive development of hominins derived from these insights (Bednarik 1990, 1992). Donald’s (1991: 308–333; 2001: 305–315) coining of the neologism “exogram” to define the concept was a welcome development, even if he was apparently unaware of both the author’s and Semon’s earlier work. Human culture as it developed over millions of years would have been unthinkable without such external memory traces; today it is largely based on them (modern mobile telephones can be viewed as today’s ultimate exogrammatic device). But what is of particular relevance in the present context is that certain forms of exograms are readily identifiable on the archaeological record. They provide the most comprehensive indices in estimating the cognitive complexity of hominins. For instance items of personal decoration such as beads and pendants are exograms capable of conveying a large number of messages about their wearer or producer. It is clear that the faculty of self-awareness in a social animal would logically lead to strategies of consciously expressing individualism. Most such evidence is of a nature possessing very low taphonomic thresholds (Bednarik 1994b; but see McGrew and Marchant 1998 and McGrew 2004 for apparent “self-decoration” of a chimpanzee), but beads and pendants are notable exceptions (Bednarik 1997a, 2005, 2008b), providing glimpses of very early self-adornment. The several animal species indicating degrees of self-awareness (Gallup 1970, 1998; Gallup et al. 2002; Mitchell

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1993, 1997, 2002; Heyes 1998; De Veer and Van Den Bos 1999; Keenan et al. 2003) are much the same as those shown to possess von Economo neurons (Seeley et al. 2006; Butti et al. 2009; Hakeem et al. 2009). These neurons seem to occur in relatively large species with large brains and extensive social networks (Bednarik 2011), and it may be that constructs of individuality evolved in tandem with these networks. It is difficult to see how social complexity could have developed beyond that of social insects without some level of self-awareness. Since self-awareness can safely be assumed to have been present in all hominin species (because it exists in extant non-human primates), it helps account for the earliest known find implying recognition of iconic resemblance, the Makapansgat cobble (Bednarik 1998). Clearly, the pareidolic detection of human features presupposes apperceptive capability, in this instance more than 2.5 million years ago. The lack of subsequent, more direct indications of self-awareness for much of the remaining history of hominins is apparent, but in view of the generic coarse resolution of the available record as well as the relevant taphonomy (not to mention systemic archaeological neglect of such evidence) it is to be expected. Taphonomic logic (Bednarik 1994b) thus facilitates the theoretical reconstruction of the “missing” component of the archaeological record.

About this book The purpose of this volume is to provide the first relatively comprehensive catalogue of the various types of palaeoart that have been recorded from the Pleistocene. This geological epoch, also known as the Ice Age, began about 2.588 million years ago, although up to 2009 its commencement was traditionally placed 1.8 million years ago. The Pleistocene ended 11,700 years before the present; previously its end was set at 10,500 years BP (before the present, this being the year 1950 CE). In its earliest phase this period witnessed the appearance of the first human species, and then the rise of hominins to the top of the food chain and their emergence as the major niche-creator on the planet. During the final thirty or so millennia of the Pleistocene, humans domesticated themselves, unintentionally, as cultural choices in mate selection gained momentum (Bednarik 2008c, 2011). The last 11,700 years of the Earth’s history comprise the Holocene, marking the time during which the humanly caused extinction catastrophe on the planet accelerated and the human species changed the face of the Earth as well as the composition of its atmosphere. Clearly, then, in order to understand any fundamental characteristic of humans, or the trajectory of their evolution or development, it is essential

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to pay close attention to the Pleistocene period. The Holocene witnessed large-scale plant and animal domestication and expanding areas of cultivated land, but the biological and cognitive nature of human beings was essentially established by the time that epoch began. To understand the origins and development of such phenomena as language ability, technologies, colonisation (including maritime colonisation), art-like production, cognition and cultural systems it is essential to delve into the origins of these developments during the Ice Age. Any phenomenon relating to humans can only be properly interpreted by recourse to its aetiology. Therefore humanistic disciplines, like psychology or psychiatry, which have no understanding of aetiological origins because they only deal with symptoms—with present-day effects rather than with causes— are not hard sciences. Sciences, in the strict sense of that description, deal with causes of effects—in addition to being limited to testable and falsifiable propositions. This is the crux of the matter: if we are to comprehend the reasons for the human condition as it manifests itself today (Bednarik 2011)—in the way our cognition works, in the neuropathologies we suffer from, in the concepts of reality the human brain has created, in the strengths and shortcomings of our species—we need to have reliable information about certain aspects of hominin societies of the Pleistocene. More than anything else, we need dependable and scientifically based constructs of what happened in the human past, what has shaped the way we experience, the way our brain processes information. There is precious little available from the archaeological record that might help us in that quest, and the most important part of it by far are data referring to the cognitive state of our early ancestors: how did they perceive, how did they make sense of the sensory information they were capable of receiving? Clearly the only significant source of such information could come from the traces of exograms surviving on the archaeological record. But it is unfortunately true that mainstream archaeology, for the greater part, lacks an understanding of this intricate subject. Moreover, it trivialises exogrammatic data as entities comprehensible in a naive construct of reality, essentially as “art” or “symbols”, and it reports them in the cavalier fashion of an exceedingly simplistic epistemology. Instead of a cognitive archaeology it has served up myths (Bednarik 1992a, 2016), and facile fads of shamanism and the rise of that perceived crown of evolution, Homo sapiens sapiens. To make matters worse, archaeology has distorted the available record of palaeoart in several directions by its interpretations of it. For instance mainstream archaeology has an inadequate understanding of taphonomic logic, which is a form of logic translating raw archaeological data into propositions

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about the living system they refer to (Bednarik 1994b). It also selects from the available data those that tend to support preconceived dogmas, such as the “African Eve” model; or strenuously promoted fads such as the various claims relating to shamanism, religion and pseudo-psychology. Finally, because of the selectiveness in what has been reported effectively, many practitioners are even unaware of the bulk of the available relevant record, and form their opinions on the basis of narratives by spin doctors such as popular science writers (who according to evolutionary biologist Michael R. Rose are the “intellectual lumpenproletariat” of science; Rose 2016: 70) rather than comprehensive knowledge of what has really been reported. This is the point of departure for the present book: the palaeoart of the Pleistocene period is the principal source available to us, of information about the cultural, cognitive and intellectual development of hominins. The fragmented nature of the way this material has been presented, and more often than not the biased consideration of it have rendered it difficult to appreciate, comprehend and consider it in a balanced fashion. What is clearly needed is a single repository of all known material that is likely to have had exogrammatic relevance to hominins of the Pleistocene. One of the greatest impediments to such a balanced assessment is that when protagonists are confronted with material they were unaware of, they inevitably try to discount it to preserve their reputations as scholars. Testing of propositions is very important to science, but rejection due to ignorance—so common in discussions about palaeoart—does not help in furthering knowledge. Therefore what is needed is a single archive of all such material that warrants consideration. The present book seeks to provide such a summary of all archaeological finds of the Pleistocene that can reasonably be assumed to have served as exograms. An attempt is made to render it comprehensive, but if we have missed any credible items we apologise in advance. However, what does make this collection particularly useful is that we have personally examined most of the key finds, having travelled the world to see specimens, collections and find sites. We have microscopically analysed most of the objects we have seen, and we have not had to rely on the judgements of others about their credibility. This means that the examples listed in this book have been subjected to precisely the same standards of rigorous proof. Moreover, a good number of the finds recorded here have been first reported by this author. The underlying rationale of this volume is our belief that Pleistocene archaeology has fundamentally and systematically misconstrued the scientific role of palaeoart and its function in human evolution. It has regarded palaeoart as art, and forced it into the teleological straightjacket

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of its basically false concept of evolution. Evolution is totally dysteleological, and palaeoart does not “evolve”. Evolution does not yield “more advanced” humans any more than it produces more advanced other life forms. Subconsciously, archaeology subscribes to a religious concept of ascending development, when the human genome has in fact deteriorated rapidly for tens of millennia (Bednarik 2011, 2012, 3013, 2014b). In other words, our take on recent hominin development differs very significantly from that of all mainstream archaeologists. We believe that the cultural rise of humans had little to do with increasing intelligence or cognitive competence; rather, it is the outcome of growing competence in employing and exploiting exograms, which became the primary selecting factor in maximising cognitive fitness in the hominin species. Because of their misinterpretation of palaeoart, archaeologists have been baffled by some quite specific findings. For instance, that the iconographically most sophisticated rock art of the Upper Palaeolithic is also the earliest, when in accordance to their teleological thinking it should be the most recent, is impossible to reconcile with their thinking (Pettitt and Bahn 2003). Therefore it is essential that palaeoart be studied within an understanding of its exogrammatic role, and not by cherry-picking those specimens of it that seem to support one dogma or another. This volume is intended to present the baseline for such an approach.

About Eve Before presenting such a benchmark for future consideration of hominin palaeoart production it is requisite to clear up certain related misconceptions. To begin with, the palaeoart record currently available to us is a very different thing from the palaeoart production. In fact the two are separated by a veritable abyss, determined by inadequate records and, most importantly, by taphonomy. Concerning the first factor, it is self-evident that the current record is a transient state that will inevitably change in the future, when much more palaeoart has become available for consideration. The second factor is of equally fundamental effects: nearly all of the exogrammatic evidence of the Pleistocene (very probably more than 99.9%) has been lost due to deterioration processes that are all highly selective. So for instance rock art that could never survive in the open can be perfectly preserved in deep caves; or many types of portable palaeoart materials cannot survive in low pH sediments, others can survive very well in them; and most exogrammatic materials cannot survive at all for tens of millennia, except in fluke conditions. So the surviving evidence presents a grossly distorted picture, not remotely resembling the “living system” that

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created it. There is a tool available to compensate for this distortion, called taphonomic logic, but although it was developed more than a quarter of a century ago (in 1992; Bednarik 1994b), archaeologists have chosen not to avail themselves of it. When we add to this the effects of the second factor just mentioned—the fact that very little of what actually has survived has so far been found—the distortion increases manyfold. And when we then add to these cumulative impediments the fact that most of the known finds of Pleistocene exograms are being ignored by armchair archaeologists commenting on the cognition or palaeoart of hominins, we realise the enormity of the impairment to arriving at a credible understanding of how humans became human. But there are other, more pernicious distorting factors contributing to this perilous state: those attributable to false but dominant dogmas in mainstream archaeology. For example there is the replacement hypothesis, better known as the “African Eve” theory. It depends greatly on ignoring the palaeoart evidence of most of the Pleistocene, because it cannot admit any evidence of cultural complexity prior to the “arrival” of what it calls “anatomically modern humans” in Europe. Its advocates therefore strive to disallow all instances of palaeoart prior to the Upper Palaeolithic. So for instance any bead or bone flute that would be universally accepted if it came from an Upper Palaeolithic context will be rejected if it was Middle Palaeolithic, simply because such finds are “forbidden” by the dogma that states the earlier people were too primitive to have such things. Alternatively, their dating may be rejected, or the competence of their presenters questioned. It has even been contended that such finds contradicting the dogma may indicate “a running ahead of time” (Vishnyatsky 1994), a particularly malignant argument. But whatever pretext is used, the objective is not to learn or to falsify; it is to preserve the dogma. This raises the question, what is so precious about the dogma of the African Eve that it needs to be defended at the cost of disallowing a huge volume of evidence? When it is closely examined it simply dissolves in a puff of smoke. The model derives from the hoax of Professor Reiner Protsch “von Zieten” who proposed that modern humans evolved in subSaharan Africa (Protsch 1973, 1975), presenting subsequently a series of false datings of fossil specimens (e.g. Protsch and Glowatzki 1974; Protsch and Semmel 1978; Henke and Protsch 1978). In 2003 it was demonstrated that all his radiocarbon dates were invented (Terberger and Street 2003; Schulz 2004) and he was sacked from his university. However, in the meantime his idea had been elaborated into several derivative hypotheses, including the “Afro-European sapiens” model (Bräuer 1984); the “African Eve” complete replacement scenario (Cann et

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al. 1987; Stringer and Andrews 1988; Mellars and Stringer 1989; Vigilant et al. 1991; Tattersall 1995; Krings et al. 1997); the Pennisi (1999) model; the “wave theory” (Eswaran 2002); and the Templeton (2002) model; followed by the “assimilation theory” (Smith et al. 2005). Of these proposals, the Eve model was promoted most vigorously by the spin doctors, despite showing major methodological flaws right from the start. Cann et al. (1987) had botched their computer modelling and its haplotype trees were irrelevant. Its arbitrarily selected haplotype tree was one of 10267 alternative and equally credible trees. A re-analysis could produce 10,000 haplotype trees that are more parsimonious than the one chosen by Cann et al. (Maddison 1991). Their assumptions of exclusive maternal transference of mitochondria and constancy of mutation rates of mtDNA were both false (Rodriguez-Trelles et al. 2001, 2002). In fact there is no reason why the most parsimonious haplotype tree result should even be expected to be the correct tree (Hartl and Clark 1997: 372). The entire logic is without justification and as Gibbons (1998) observed, by using the modified putative genetic clock, Eve would have lived 6000 years ago, not 200,000 years ago as Cann et al. had contended. Not surprisingly, according to all these empty speculations, the hypothetical split between these “moderns” and other humans occurred anywhere between 17,000 to 889,000 years ago (Vigilant et al. 1991; Barinaga 1992; Ayala 1996; Brookfield 1997). All of them are contingent upon purported models of human demography and the timing or number of colonisation events, and yet nothing secure is known about these factors. The same applies to the contentions referring to Y-chromosomes (“African Adam”; Hammer 1995). The divergence times projected from the diversity found in nuclear DNA, mtDNA and DNA on the non-recombining part of the Ychromosome differ so much that a time regression of any type is extremely problematic. Contamination of mtDNA with paternal DNA has been demonstrated in extant species (Gyllensten et al. 1991; Awadalla et al. 1999; Morris and Lightowlers 2000; Williams 2002), in one recorded case amounting to 90% (Schwartz and Vissing 2002). The issues of base substitution (Lindhal and Nyberg 1972) and fragmentation of DNA (Golenberg et al. 1996) have long been known, and the point is demonstrated, for instance, by the erroneous results obtained from the DNA of insects embedded in amber (Gutierrez and Marin 1998). Other problems with interpreting or conducting analyses of palaeogenetic materials are alterations or distortions through the adsorption of DNA by a mineral matrix, its chemical rearrangement, microbial or lysosomal enzymes degradation, and lesions by free radicals and oxidation (Geigl 2002; Carlier et al. 2007).

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Certainly there was never unanimous support among geneticists for the African Eve hoax (e.g. Barinaga 1992; Hedges et al. 1992; Maddison et al. 1992; Templeton 1992, 1993, 1996, 2002, 2005; Brookfield 1997; Klyosov and Rozhanskii 2012a, 2012b; Klyosov et al. 2012; Klyosov and Tomezzoli 2013). The central claim of the Eve lobby, that “Neanderthals” (Robusts) and “Moderns” (Graciles) were different species has been under review at least since Gutierrez et al. (2002) demonstrated that the pair-wise genetic distance distributions of the two human groups overlap more than claimed, if the high substitution rate variation observed in the mitochondrial D-loop region (see Walberg and Clayton 1981; Zischler et al. 1995) and lack of an estimation of the parameters of the nucleotide substitution model are taken into account. The more reliable genetic studies of living humans have shown that both Europeans and Africans have retained significant alleles from multiple robust populations (Hardy et al. 2005; Garrigan et al. 2005; cf. Templeton 2005). After the Neanderthal genome yielded results that seemed to include an excess of Gracile single nucleotide polymorphisms (Green et al. 2006), more recent analyses confirmed that Robust genes persist in recent Europeans, Asians and Papuans (Green et al. 2010). Robusts are said to have interbred with the ancestors of Europeans and Asians, but not with those of Africans (Gibbons 2010; cf. Krings et al. 1997). The African alleles occur at a frequency averaging only 13% in non-Africans, whereas those of other regions match the Robusts in ten of twelve cases. “Neanderthal genetic difference to humans must therefore be interpreted within the context of human diversity” (Green et al. 2006: 334; but note the taxonomic travesty of limiting the term “humans” to Graciles, when in reality all members of the genus Homo are of course humans). Sankararaman et al. (2012) report that comparisons of DNA sequences between “Neanderthals” and presentday humans have shown that the former share more genetic variants with non-Africans than with Africans. Further evidence of interbreeding, from a 40-ka-old Homo sapiens sapiens fossil, implies a 10% contribution of “Neanderthal” genes, suggesting “interbreeding” occurred just four generation previous (Viegas 2015). Sankararaman et al. (2014) report finding “Neanderthal” haplotypes in the genomes of 1004 present-day humans. Prüfer et al. (2014) demonstrated several gene flow events among Neanderthals, Denisovans and early modern humans, possibly including gene flow into Denisovans from an unknown archaic group. Kuhlwilm et al. (2016) analysed the genomes of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan from the Altai Mountains in Siberia together with the sequences of chromosome 21 of two Neanderthals from Spain and Croatia. They believe that a population that diverged early from other Moderns in Africa contributed

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genetically to the ancestors of Neanderthals from the Altai Mountains roughly 100 ka ago. They did not detect such a genetic contribution in the Denisovan or the two European Neanderthals. Therefore they concluded that in addition to later interbreeding events, the ancestors of Neanderthals from the Altai Mountains and early modern humans met and interbred many thousands of years earlier than previously thought. Finally, Vernot et al. (2016) have reported the occurrence of “Neanderthal” and “Denisovan” DNA from present Melanesian genomes. What all this suggests is that gracile Europeans and Asians evolved largely from local robust populations, which had long been obvious from previously available evidence. For instance Alan Mann’s finding that tooth enamel cellular traits showed a close link between Neanderthaloids and present Europeans, which both differ from those of Africans (Weiss and Mann 1978), had been ignored by the Eve protagonists, as has much other empirical evidence (e.g. Roginsky et al. 1954; Yakimov 1980). CavalliSforza et al. (1988) considered that the phylogenetic tree separates Africans from non-Africans, a view reinforced by Klyosov et al. (2012). But whereas the first authors interpreted this as placing the origin of “modern humans” in Africa, Klyosov et al. showed that this separation continued for 160±12 ka since the split of the haplogroups A from haplogroups BT (Cruciani et al. 2002); therefore Africans and nonAfricans evolved essentially separate. Contrary to Chiaroni et al. (2009), haplogroup B is neither restricted to Africa, nor is it at 64 ka remotely as old as the haplogroups A are (some of these may be older than 160 ka). In short, Graciles, “Neanderthals” and “Denisovans” were all variations of one species, Homo sapiens, and there is genetic continuity among them for well over 100 ka, with minimal or no African inflow. The multiple species hypothesis simply has no genetic foundation, and humans appear to have been a single breeding population for the entire Late Pleistocene. Another flaw of the replacement model was that Cann et al. had also mis-estimated the diversity per nucleotide (single locus on a string of DNA), incorrectly using the method developed by Ewens (1983) and thereby falsely claiming greater genetic diversity of Africans, compared to Asians and Europeans. This oft-repeated claim (e.g. Hellenthal et al. 2008; Campbell and Tishkoff 2010) is false: the genetic diversity coefficients are very similar, 0.0046 for both Africans and Asians, and 0.0044 for Europeans. Even the premise of genetic diversity is false, for instance it is greater in African farming people than in African hunters-foragers (Watson et al. 1996), yet the latter are not assumed to be ancestral to the former (see e.g. Ward et al. 1991). Similarly, the contention that genetic diversity of extant humans decreases with increasing geographical distance

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from Africa (e.g. Atkinson 2011) is doubtful, and has no bearing on the questions of the origins of Graciles. Certainly such diversity diminishes markedly in regions first occupied in the Final Pleistocene or Holocene, which is only to be expected. Klyosov et al. 2012, who demonstrate genetically that recent human evolution in Eurasia must have occurred in situ, list no less than 24 papers asserting that “AMHs” (see Tobias 1996 for a cogent rejection of this concept; also Latour 1995) entered Europe between 27 and 112 ka ago. Most of these nominate 40 to 70 ka as the time of the “African invasion”. It would seem that these untenable propositions simply reflect archaeological estimates of a phenomenon that never actually occurred (Bednarik 2008a, 2008c, 2011, 2012, 2013). The original impetus of the African Eve notion derived not from genetics; this field was only recruited to prop it up after the failure of palaeoanthropology to support it. Initially the model derived its momentum from the false datings of numerous hominin remains, especially in Europe. Among them were the four Stetten specimens from Vogelherd, Germany, widely claimed to be about 32 ka old (e.g. Churchill and Smith 2000a, 2000b), when in fact their Neolithic provenience had long been noted (Gieseler 1974; Czarnetzki 1983: 231) and they are between 3980±35 and 4995±35 carbon-years old (Conard et al. 2004). The Hahnöfersand calvarium, the “northernmost Neanderthal specimen found” and dated to 36,300±600 BP or 35,000±2000 BP (Bräuer 1980) by Protsch, is actually a Mesolithic “Neanderthal”, at 7470±100 BP or 7500±55 BP (Terberger and Street 2003). The Paderborn-Sande skull fragment, purportedly 27,400±600 years old (Henke and Protsch 1978), is only 238±39 carbonyears old (Terberger and Street 2003). The Kelsterbach skull, dated to 31,200±1600 years BP (Protsch and Semmel 1978; Henke and Rothe 1994), is probably of the Metal Ages (Terberger and Street 2003) but has mysteriously disappeared from its safe. And the cranial fragment from Binshof, dated by Protsch to 21,300±20 BP, is in fact only 3090±45 years old. These German finds are not the only misdated fossils from the crucial period of the “Early Upper Palaeolithic” in Europe. The “modern” Robust specimen from Velika Peüina, Croatia, is now known to be only 5045±40 radiocarbon years old (Smith et al. 1999). Those from Roche-Courbon (Geay 1957) and Combe-Capelle (originally attributed to the Châtelperronian levels; Klaatsch and Hauser 1910) are now thought to be Holocene burials (Perpère 1971; Asmus 1964), as probably is the partial skeleton from Les Cottés (Perpère 1973). The “type fossils” of early “modern” Europeans, the “Aurignacian” Crô-Magnon specimens, are not

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at all of modern skeletal anatomy; especially cranium 3 is quite robust. Moreover, at about 27,760 carbon-years (Henry-Gambier 2002) they are of the Gravettian and not of the Aurignacian. A similar pattern pertains to the numerous relevant Czech specimens, most of which are intermediate between robust and gracile. This includes the Mladeþ sample, dated to between 26,330 and 31,500 BP (Wild et al. 2005); the very robust specimens from Pavlov and PĜedmostí (both between 26 and 27 ka); Podbaba (undated); and the slightly more gracile and more recent population from Dolní VČstonice. The same pattern of “intermediate” forms continues in the specimens from Cioclovina (Romania), Bacho Kiro levels 6/7 (Bulgaria) and Mießlingtal (Austria). The earliest liminal “post-Neanderthal” finds currently available in Europe are the Peútera cu Oase mandible from Romania (Trinkaus et al. 2003), apparently in the order of 35 ka old, and the partial skull subsequently found in another part of the same cave (Rougier et al. 2007). Both lack an archaeological context and are not “anatomically modern”. The six human bones from another Romanian cave, Peútera Muierii (~30 14 C ka BP), are also intermediate between robust and gracile types (Soficaru et al. 2006). In fact literally hundreds of Eurasian specimens of the last third of the Late Pleistocene are intermediate between robust Homo sapiens and H. sapiens sapiens, or imply that a simplistic division between “Moderns” and “Neanderthals” is false. They include the finds from Lagar Velho, Crete, Starosel’e, Rozhok, Akhshtyr’, Romankovo, Samara, Sungir’, Podkumok, Khvalynsk, Skhodnya, Denisova and the older Narmada specimen, as well as several Chinese remains such as those from the Jinniushan and Tianyuan Caves. The replacement advocates ignored this obvious obstacle to their model, of numerous intermediate or liminal forms contradicting their belief that robust and gracile populations were separate species. Moreover, they failed to appreciate that not a single fully gracile specimen in Eurasia can credibly be linked to any Early Upper Palaeolithic tool tradition, be it the Aurignacian, Châtelperronian, Uluzzian, Proto-Aurignacian, Olschewian, Bachokirian, Bohunician, Streletsian, Gorodtsovian, Brynzenian, Spitzinian, Telmanian, Szeletian, Eastern Szeletian, Kostenkian, Jankovichian, Altmühlian, Lincombian or Jerzmanovician (Bednarik 2008a, 2011). Therefore their proposition that these industries were introduced from sub-Saharan Africa is without basis, especially as there are no geographically intermediate Later Stone Age finds from right across northern Africa until more than 20,000 years after the Upper Palaeolithic had been established in Eurasia. Similarly, the African Eve advocates ignored that at least six Early Upper Palaeolithic sites have yielded human skeletal remains attributed to Neanderthals: the

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Châtelperronian layers of Saint Césaire (~36 ka) and Arcy-sur-Cure (~34 ka) in France, the Aurignacian of Trou de l’Abîme in Belgium, the Hungarian Jankovichian of Máriaremete Upper Cave (~38 ka; GáboriCsánk 1993), the Streletsian of Sungir’ in Russia (which yielded a Neanderthaloid tibia from a triple grave of “Moderns”; Bader 1978), and the Olschewian of Vindija in Croatia (Smith et al. 1999, 2005; Ahern et al. 2004). The Neanderthals at the latter site are the most recent such remains reported so far (28,020±360 and 29,080±400 carbon years BP). Like other late specimens they are much more gracile than most earlier finds—so much so that many consider them as transitional (e.g. Smith and Ranyard 1980; Wolpoff et al. 1981; Frayer et al. 1993; Wolpoff 1999; Smith et al. 2005). The replacement paradigm is not even supported by the palaeoanthropological finds from Africa, which generally mirror the gradual changes in Eurasia through time. It is often claimed that African Graciles date from up to 200 ka ago, yet no such specimens exist. The skulls from Omo Kibish offer some relatively modern features as well as substantially archaic ones; especially Omo 2 is very robust indeed (McDougall et al. 2005). Their dating, also, is not secure, and Omo 2 is a surface find. The much more complete and better dated Herto skull, BOUVP-16/1, is outside the range of all recent humans in several cranial measurements (White et al. 2003)—and is just as archaic as other specimens of the late Middle Pleistocene, in Africa or elsewhere. The lack of “anatomically modern” humans from sub-Saharan Africa prior to the supposed Exodus is glaring: the Border Cave specimens have no stratigraphic context; Dar es Soltan is undated; and the mandibles of Klasies River Mouth lack cranial and post-cranial remains. The Hofmeyr skull from South Africa, about 36 ka old, features intermediate morphology (Grine et al. 2007, 2010) comparable to that found in Europe at that time, e.g. in Romanian specimens. Similarly, extant Australians, with their average cranial capacity of 1264 cc (males 1347 cc, females 1181 cc, i.e. well within the range of Homo erectus), possess molars and other indices of robusticity matching those of Europeans several hundred millennia ago, yet they are Graciles. Their tool traditions were of Mode 3 types (Middle Palaeolithic) until mid-Holocene times, and remained so in Tasmania until European colonisation. Clearly, the guiding principle of the replacement advocates, that Mode 4 technologies were introduced together with “modern” anatomy is false, in Europe as well as elsewhere. The scarcity of African fossils of the African Eve “species” prompted the replacement advocates to turn to the Levant for help, which would be on the route the Exodus would have presumably taken, and the Mount

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Carmel finds from Qafzeh Cave and Skhul Shelter were recruited as “Moderns” (Stringer et al. 1989; Grün and Stringer 1991; Stringer and Gamble 1993; McDermott et al. 1993). Yet all of these skulls present prominent tori and receding chins, even Qafzeh 9, claimed to be of the most modern appearance. The distinct prognathism of Skhul 9 matches that of “classic Neanderthals”, and the series of teeth from that cave has consistently larger dimensions than Neanderthaloid teeth. Supposedly much later “Neanderthal” burials in nearby Tabun Cave as well as the Qafzeh and Skhul material are all associated with the same Mousterian tools, and the datings of all Mount Carmel sites are far from soundly established, with their many discrepancies. The TL dates from Qafzeh, for instance, clash severely with the amino racemisation dates (ranging from 33 to 45 ka), and are in any case plagued by inversion: the lower layer 22 averages 87.7 ka, the middle layer 19 is 90.5 ka, while the uppermost layer 17 averages 95.5 ka (Mercier et al. 1993; cf. Bada and Masters Helfman 1976). Therefore the claims of 90-ka-old “modern” humans from Mount Carmel, a cornerstone in the Eve model, are unsound, and this population is best seen as transitional between robust and gracile forms, from a time when gracilisation had commenced elsewhere as well. Turning next to the Early Upper Palaeolithic tool traditions of Eurasia, claimed to indicate the arrival of Eve’s progeny there, we find that they all evolved locally. They first appear fairly simultaneously between 45 ka and 40 ka BP, even earlier, at widely dispersed locations from Spain to Siberia (e.g. Makarovo 4/6, Kara Bom, Denisova Cave, Ust’-Karakol, Tolbaga, Kamenka, Khotyk, Podzvon-kaya, Tolbor Dorolge; Bednarik 1994a). The earliest carbon date for Upper Palaeolithic stone tools was provided by Senftenberg, Austria, at >54 ka BP (Felgenhauer 1959). The Aurignacian of Spain commences at least 43 ka ago (Bischoff et al. 1994; Cabrera Valdés and Bischoff 1989). Early Upper Palaeolithic variants such as the Uluzzian (Palma di Cesnola 1976, 1989), the Uluzzo-Aurignacian, and the Proto-Aurignacian (43–33 ka BP) have been reported from southern Italy (Kuhn and Bietti 2000; Kuhn and Stiner 2001). The montane Aurignacoid tradition of central Europe, the Olschewian (42–35 ka BP), clearly developed from the region’s final Mousterian (Bayer 1929; Kyrle 1931; Bächler 1940; Zotz 1951; Brodar 1957; Malez 1959; Vértes 1959; Bednarik 1993). The Bachokirian of the Pontic region (>43 ka BP), the Bohunician of east-central Europe (44–38 ka BP; Svoboda 1990; 1993), and various traditions of the Russian Plains complete the picture to the east. Some of the latter industries, such as the Streletsian, Gorodtsovian and Brynzenian derived unambiguously from Mousteroid technologies, whereas the Spitzinian or Telmanian are free of Mode 3 bifaces

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(Anikovich 2005). The gradual development of Mode 3 industries into Mode 4 traditions can be observed at various sites along the Don River, in the Crimea and northern Caucasus, with no less than seven tool assemblages coexisting between 36 and 28 ka ago: Mousterian, Micoquian, Spitzinian, Streletsian, Gorodtsovian, Eastern Szeletian and Aurignacian (Krems-Dufour variant). A mosaic of early Mode 4 industries began before 40 ka BP on the Russian Plain and ended only 24–23 ka ago. In fact in the Crimea, the Middle Palaeolithic is thought to have ended only between 20–18 ka BP, which is about the same time the Middle Stone Age ended across northern Africa. In the Russian Plain, the first fully developed Upper Palaeolithic technocomplex, the Kostenkian, appears only about 24 ka ago. The Russian succession of traditions connecting Mode 3 and 4 technocomplexes is repeated in the Szeletian of eastern Europe (43–35 ka BP; Allsworth-Jones 1986), the Jankovician of Hungary; and the Altmühlian (~38 ka BP), Lincombian (~38 ka BP) and Jerzmanovician (38– 36 ka BP) further northwest. Similarly, the gradual development from the Middle Palaeolithic at 48 ka BP (with “Neanderthal” footprints of small children) to the Upper Palaeolithic is clearly documented in Theopetra Cave, Greece (Kyparissi-Apostolika 2000; Facorellis et al. 2001). Thus there is a complete absence of evidence in the presumed eastern or southeastern entry region of Europe, of an intrusive technology arriving from the Levant. Nor should it be expected, considering that in the Levant both Mode 3 and Mode 4 industries were used by robust as well as more gracile populations: the replacement advocates’ notion that their “Moderns” introduced Mode 4 in Europe is refuted by all archaeological evidence. The Mousteroid traditions of the Levant developed gradually into blade industries, e.g. at el-Wad, Emireh, Ksar Akil, Abu Halka and Bileni Caves, and that region’s Ahmarian is transitional. This can be observed elsewhere in southwestern Asia, for instance the Aurignacoid Baradostian tradition of Iran clearly develops in situ from Middle Palaeolithic antecedents. The late Mousterian of Europe is universally marked by regionalisation (Kozáowski 1990; Stiner 1994; Kuhn 1995; Riel-Salvatore and Clark 2001), miniaturisation and increasing use of blades, as well as by improved hafting technique. This includes the use of backed or blunted-back retouch on microliths set in birch resin in Germany, almost as early as the first use of microlithic implements in the Howieson’s Poort tradition of far southern Africa. Therefore the notion that a genetically and palaeoanthropologically unproven people with a Mode 4 tool set travelled from sub-Saharan Africa across northern Africa is completely unsupported, while there is unanimous proof that these

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traditions developed in situ in many Eurasian regions long before they reached either northern Africa or the Levant. Precisely the same applies to palaeoart. The replacement advocates relied considerably on the unassailability of their belief that the EUP traditions, especially the Aurignacian, were by “AMHs” (Graciles). As mentioned above, there are no unambiguous associations between “AMHs” and any of the many identified EUP tool traditions, including the Aurignacian. These “cultures”, as they are called, are in any case merely etic constructs, “observer-relative or institutional facts” (Searle 1995); as “archaeofacts” or “egofacts” (Consens 2003) they have no real, emic existence. They are entirely made up of invented (etic) tool types and based on the misunderstanding in Pleistocene archaeology that tools are diagnostic for identifying cultures. The authentic cultural variables of Pleistocene archaeology have never been employed in creating the period’s cultural nomenclature. Cultures are defined by cultural variables, but Pleistocene archaeology as it is conducted relegates the cultural information available (such as rock art and portable “art”) to marginal rather than central status, forcing it into the false technological framework it has created. One of the effects of this misunderstanding has a direct bearing on the “African Eve hypothesis”. Among the EUP traditions its advocates attribute to AMHs, the Châtelperronian was in 1979 discovered to be the work of Neanderthals. But the Châtelperronian of Arcy-sur-Cure in France had produced numerous portable palaeoart objects, including beads and pendants (Figure 1). So the Eve supporters argued that the primitive Neanderthals, incapable of symbolling, must have “scavenged” and used these artefacts (White 1993; Hublin et al. 1996). They failed to explain, however, why such primordial creatures would possibly scavenge symbolic objects and what they would do with them. This is one of numerous examples of the accommodative reasoning of the replacement advocates; others can be found in d’Errico (1995), d’Errico and Villa (1997) and Rigaud et al. (2009); or in the assertion that Early Pleistocene seafaring colonisers (Bednarik 1997b, 1999, 2003b) might have drifted on vegetation. After it was first observed that there is no evidence linking early Aurignacian finds to the purported Moderns (Bednarik 1995b), it was proposed that no such link exists to any EUP industry (Bednarik 2007, 2008a). The contention that the Aurignacian rock art (e.g. in Chauvet Cave, l’Aldène, Baume Latrone, Zarzamora Cave, El Castillo) and portable palaeoart (e.g. in Hohlenstein), arguably the most complex and sophisticated of the entire Upper Palaeolithic, is the work either of “Neanderthals” or of their direct descendants (Bednarik 2007, 2008a,

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2011; Sadier et al. 2012) has demolished the last vestiges of support for the “African Eve hypothesis”. It now stands thoroughly refuted. The record shows unambiguously that the Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia developed in situ, that the hominins in question evolved in situ, and that introgression can account fully for the genetic observations. “Modern” or gracile humans derive from archaic H. sapiens in four continents; the two forms of the same species interbred no more than grandchildren breed with their grandparents.

Figure 1. Some of the jewellery from the Châtelperronian of Grotte du Renne, Arcy-sur-Cure, Yonne, France, made by “Neanderthals”.

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Summing up The collapse of the replacement or African Eve hypothesis, still strongly resisted by its most ardent supporters (Mellars 2005; Stringer 2014), comes as no surprise. It was originally based on an academic scam, developed by scholars with inadequate understanding of the investigative tools they used and promoted by academic interests capable of silencing dissent through “peer review”. The history of this model provides a classic study of the hegemonic operation of the disciplines of palaeoanthropology and Pleistocene archaeology, controlled by their “high priests” (Thompson 2014) or “mob capos” (Kohl and Fawcett 2000). It is not just a matter of these disciplines having been misled by their high-ranking operatives; what is more startling is that most of the information contradicting their paradigm has long been available. The potential argument, that the genetic counter-evidence has become available only most recently, does not stand up, because the sum total of all other relevant data has to a large extent been obtainable for decades. The simple truth of the matter is that the African Eve advocates were inadequately aware of it, and on that basis have prevented its effective publication in many cases. This will become evident throughout this book. Some of the most important indications of the replacement model’s falseness are the Early Pleistocene maritime colonisation evidence (Bednarik 1997b, 1999, 2003b, 2015) and the early appearance of palaeoart, which is being presenting in this volume. This material shows starkly that the ancients could not have been as primitive as African Eve’s apostles have always maintained. But importantly, the evidence presented on these pages is unambiguous on one issue: this has been known for a long time. It simply had never before been summarised effectively.

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CHAPTER TWO AFRICA

The first continent we will consider in reviewing its Pleistocene palaeoart is Africa, simply because it has alphabetic precedence. For this continent we will list the evidence in roughly chronological order, commencing with the earliest, and ending with the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene, a little over 10,000 years ago. Scientifically, the Pleistocene (aka Ice Age) is divided into three phases, the Early, Middle and Late Pleistocene. Archaeologists split the period into three broad technological eras, which in Eurasia are called Lower, Middle and Upper Palaeolithic. This division is also applied in northern Africa, but in sub-Saharan Africa, the alternative terms Earlier, Middle and Later Stone Age (ESA, MSA and LSA) are preferred, which typologically coincide roughly with the Eurasian divisions. The latter derive from the 19th century, and today a more appropriate taxonomy of the technocomplexes would be a sequence of four stages, called Mode 1 to Mode 4. Mode 1 comprises archaic stone tools such as those of the Odowan, free of the distinctive bifaces (“handaxes”), whereas Mode 2 industries are primarily characterised by handaxes and cleavers. Together the two account for the Lower Palaeolithic. Mode 3 lithics correspond roughly with the Middle Palaeolithic/MSA, and Mode 4 artefacts with the Upper Palaeolithic/LSA. Since a cultural sequence, i.e. one based on cultural variables such as those found in palaeoart, has never been established for the Pleistocene, we will follow the archaeological usage, but not without noting that in the 21st century it may need to be revised.

1. Earlier Stone Age (ESA) and Lower Palaeolithic The oldest manuport so far reported is the jasperite/jaspilite cobble from the australopithecine-bearing deposits (Partridge 1979) of the dolomite cave of Makapansgat, northern South Africa (Eitzman 1958; Bednarik 1998). In archaeology, a manuport is a natural object that was picked up by an early human, was carried for some time, and eventually left behind in an occupation site. A grey breccia in Makapansgat, the Member 3 layer,

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is approximately 3 Ma (million years) old (McFadden 1980: Fig. 2; Cooke 2005), and is overlain by Member 4, between 2.4 and 2.9 Ma old. Member 4 yielded two stone artefacts (Maguire 1980) of Oldowan typology and the jaspilite cobble, which had been carried from at least 11 km away. Ostensibly it attracted this attention because of its conspicuous face-like markings and red colour (Figure 2). Although a completely natural object whose geological history has been determined (Bednarik 1998, 1999), its presence implies that the primate that handled it detected its pareidolic properties, which presupposes apperceptive capability. Certainly selfawareness (Gallup 1970, 1998; Mitchell 1993, 1997, 2002; De Veer and Van Den Bos 1999; Keenan et al. 2003) and developed theory of mind (Premack and Woodruff 1978; Baron-Cohen 1991; Happé et al. 1996; Heyes 1998; Jacques and Zelazo 2005) must have been available to this creature, whether it was an australopithecine or an as yet unknown member of early Homo (Bednarik 2013). A “conscious” awareness of one’s appearance or that of one’s conspecifics is all that is required to detect meaning in what is merely a chance product of nature. From the time it was deposited in the cave, no human ancestors are securely known to have existed outside of Africa, and as the stone was apparently imbued with meaning, i.e. a proto-exogram, it implies that exograms might originate in Africa. Nevertheless, this find remains very isolated, as no similar discoveries have been reported until well into the Pleistocene. In Africa, palaeoart seems to begin with beads, proto-sculptures and extensive evidence of pigment use of the Acheulian (a term defining the Mode 2 stone tool industries of three continents). The absence of any pigment finds in the 9 m deep Canteen Koppie, central South Africa, despite the presence of many tens of thousands of stone tools of the site’s early and middle Acheulian (Beaumont 2004a; McNabb and Beaumont 2011), may well indicate that during the period covered by these sediments, from ~1.9 – 1.25 Ma (Helgren 1978; Gibbon et al. 2009; Beaumont 2011), pigments were not used. Among the earliest examples of pigment are those from Mashwening 1 and Kathu Pan 1, both in central South Africa. At the first site, specularite rubble with a few flakes and a refined cleaver (Beaumont 1990a) has been related to the ~0.8-Ma-old occupation at the nearby Kathu Townlands site (Beaumont 1990a, 1999a, 2004a). At Kathu Pan 1 half a dozen haematite manuports were found with a rich Acheulan assemblage (Beaumont 1990a, 2004b) and faunal elements thought to be in the order of 0.8–1.3 Ma years old (cf. McBrearty and Brooks 2000). Of similar age, according to the associated fauna, might be a haematite fragment and a 60 mm spheroid with red staining over much of its surface (Clark et al. 1947;

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McBrearty and Brooks 2000) from Kabwe at Broken Hill, Zambia, although Clark and colleagues have suggested a lower age. More secure is the dating of the pigment fragments, mostly of haematite, from the Acheulian of Major Units 6 and 7 of Excavation 1 in Wonderwerk Cave, central South Africa, which on the basis of palaeomagnetic data extend back to ~1.1 Ma ago (Beaumont 1990b, 1999b, 2004c, 2011). Finally, the microscopic traces of red pigment detected on the Tan-Tan proto-figurine (see below) represent the world’s earliest available evidence of applied pigment (Bednarik 2001, 2003a).

Figure 2. The Makapansgat cobble, South Africa, carried to a cave and deposited 2.4 to 2.9 million years ago.

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In contrast to the comprehensive early appearance of pigment use, mostly from the continent’s south, Acheulian beads are so far limited to those of one site in Africa’s north. The ostrich eggshell beads from the Late Acheulian of El Greifa, Libyan Sahara, are about 200 ka old according to Th/U dating and other evidence (Ziegert 1995, 2007; Bednarik 1997). Initially only three fragmentary beads were recovered, but in 1995 the site yielded forty more specimens, found with well-preserved other organic materials, such as plant remains and snail shells, on the shore of the extensive Fezzan Lake that covered much of the region in the Pleistocene.

Figure 3. The Tan-Tan proto-figurine, Morocco, a natural object that was modified to emphasise its human form during the middle Acheulian.

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The Tan-Tan proto-sculpture (Figure 3) from a fluvial terrace deposit on the north bank of the River Draa in southern Morocco is from a rich assemblage of Middle Acheulian lithics, which in this region are in the order of between 300 and 500 ka old (Bednarik 2001, 2003b). The quartzite object is of natural form but has been modified. Five of symmetrically located eight grooves that emphasise its human form were made by careful impact, and traces of haematite suggest that it was once coated in red colour. It is one of only two known proto-sculptures of the time, the second being the probably slightly younger Late Acheulian specimen from Berekhat Ram, Israel (Goren-Inbar 1986; Goren-Inbar and Peltz 1995). That period has also yielded a manuport from Morocco, the Triassic Orthoceras sp. cast from Erfoud site A-84-2 in the Sahara near the eastern border of the country (Bednarik 2002a). This fossil cast resembles a human penis closely and was found in the remains of a stonewalled dwelling or windbreak, together with Late Acheulian tools (Figure 4). Although such fossils are very common in northern Morocco, they do not occur naturally in the find’s region and the manuports must have been carried for a great distance. Acheulian dwelling remains are found elsewhere in the Sahara (see below) and also known from India and Europe.

Figure 4. Fossil cast from Erfoud in eastern Morocco, a Late Acheulian manuport.

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2. Early Middle Stone Age (EMSA) Following on from the ESA or Acheulian pigment finds listed above, mostly from the continent’s south, such evidence becomes even more numerous from the subsequent period, which is characterised by prepared cores, convergent points and usually smaller bifaces. At Kathu Pan 1 a Middle Fauresmith (EMSA) assemblage yielded a number of sometimes smoothed haematite and scraped specularite manuports, brought from at least 20 km (Beaumont 1990a, 2004b; Porat et al. 2010). The stratified sediment dates from about 540 ka ago, by U-series and electron spin resonance (ESR) analyses. Pniel 6, also in central South Africa and with a Middle Fauresmith industry, has produced half a dozen haematite fragments, some of which are slightly smoothed. The age of this horizon was determined through faunal remains and is believed to be in the order of 500 ka (Beaumont 1990c, 1999a, 2004d). A 4 cm long haematite fragment with one striated face comes from a layer thought to be of similar age, at the site Nooitgedacht 2, on the Vaal River in central South Africa. This item is also from the Middle Fauresmith (Butzer et al. 1973; Beaumont 1990d, 1999b), as are the pigment manuports from three more sites in central South Africa: Biesiesput 1, Canteen Koppie and Wonderwerk Cave. At the first of these, largely unmodified low-grade haematite fragments were excavated from ~500-ka-old occupation sediments in 1983 (Beaumont 1990e; Beaumont and Richardt 2004). Canteen Koppie provided an isolated cluster of three jaspilite blades and three unmodified specularite lumps, all of which were carried for at least 100 km (Beaumont 1990f, 2004a; Beaumont and McNabb 2000; McNabb and Beaumont 2011). This is thought to have been a cache, deposited also about 500 ka ago. The magnificent repository of Wonderwerk Cave, already listed above, has yielded over a dozen haematite and specularite pieces, some of which are smoothed or grooved. They are from EMSA occupation layers dated by U-series analysis to between 280 and >350 ka ago (Beaumont 1990b, 2004c, 2011; Beaumont and Vogel 2006). Again, these manuports travelled at least 50 km. The bedded tuff layer of the Kapthurin Formation in western Kenya, between 284 and 509 ka old according to argon dating, has provided 70 red ochre pieces, over 5 kg in weight, from site GnJh-15. This material occurred together with an industry of points, blades and small handaxes of the EMSA (Cornelissen et al. 1990; McBrearty and Brooks 2000; McBrearty 2001: 92). More than 400 pigment pieces, mainly specularite and haematite manuports but including limonite, ochrous sandstone and

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manganese dioxide, come from Twin Rivers Kopje in central Zambia (Clark and Brown 2001; Barham 2000, 2002). About 3% of them show signs of modification by grinding or rubbing, and they are between 270 and 170 ka old. Another two-dozen pigment manuports, including specularite, haematite and limonite, were excavated in the EMSA of Zombepata Cave, northern Zimbabwe (Cooke 1971). Although undated, this material is believed to be in the order of 200 ka old. Bambata Cave and Pomongwe Cave, in south-western Zimbabwe, have also provided relevant evidence, in both cases probably older than 200 ka (Klein 1978; Walker 1987): a 4 cm long haematite fragment with two smoothed sides, one deeply scored from Bambata (Armstrong 1931; Jones 1940); and eight pigment pieces from Pomongwe. Pigment pieces were also present in several levels of Bushman Rock Shelter, north-eastern South Africa, undated but thought to be of the EMSA (Watts 1998). The Lower Sangoan deposit of the Sai Island site in Sudan, ~200 ka old, has produced several red and yellow ochre lumps, found with a portable slab bearing cupules (van Peer et al. 2003). Finally Clark (1974) has reported unspecified pigment from the Acheulian site of Kalambo Falls, Zambia, which is in the order of 200 ka old. Besides the remains identified as pigment, the EMSA of sub-Saharan Africa has also provided several other forms of manuports. These may be stones of pareidolic qualities or crystals. They are exemplified by the clusters of small water-worn pebbles and quartz crystals in the ~276 to 500-ka-old Fauresmith levels of Wonderwerk Cave, materials that have been collected a considerable distance from the site. Another feature attributed to the Fauresmith industries are the oldest currently known rock art sites of Africa, at Potholes Hoek and Nchwaneng in the southern Kalahari, South Africa (Beaumont and Bednarik 2012a, 2013). The Phase 1 petroglyphs at both sites, located on fully metamorphosed quartzite, are much more weathered than the adjacent Phase 2 petroglyphs, which are considerably older than the ~50 ka lower limit of the microerosion dating technique. While the Phase 2 motifs at Potholes Hoek include circles, those of Phase 1 are limited to cupules. At both Nchwaneng and Potholes Hoek, this earliest cupule phase has been attributed to the only climatic oscillation enabling human occupation in the southern Kalahari prior to the OIS 5e oscillation of 130–115 ka ago, the incursion of 410–400 ka ago (Beaumont and Bednarik 2015). This is confirmed by the adjacent Middle Fauresmith tool scatters, making this some of the earliest known rock art in Africa (Figure 5). However, it is relevant that the earliest rock art in the world, at two sites in central India, also features 99.5% cupules, but is securely attributed to Mode 1 industries (pre-Acheulian). Other early

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cupules credibly dated in Africa are those of Sai Island, Sudan, which are of the Lower Sangoan, ~200 ka old. Seven small cupules and one large grinding hollow or cupule occur on a 60 cm long, fractured Nubian Sandstone slab that was found together with red and yellow ochre lumps as noted above (Van Peer et al. 2003).

Figure 5. Cupules of the Middle Fauresmith at Nchwaneng, southern Kalahari, South Africa, 410–400 ka old. The artificially grooved and pecked phonolite cobble from Floor FLK North 1 in Bed 1, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, is significantly older (Leakey 1971: 269), but the percussion depressions on both of its sides may well be utilitarian. Cupule-like features have been produced by chimpanzees and other primates, resulting from such activities as cracking nuts (McGrew 1992: 205, 1993), and Joulian (1995: Fig. 5) presents a percuteur made by chimps that resembles Leakey’s specimen. Bearded capuchin monkeys (Cebus libidinosus) at Boa Vista, Brazil, have produced hollows and groups of mortar-like, quite deep percussion pits on horizontal rock surfaces through their skilled use of rock mauls in cracking palm nuts. These panels can closely resemble groups of mortars or large cupules

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(Bednarik 2011a: 66), therefore the secure identification of cupules requires considerable relevant experience. An important series of southern African palaeoart finds of the EMSA are the incised lines and notches on stone objects reported from several sites. The tabular lower grindstone with incised lines on it from Twin Rivers Kopje, central Zambia, has been dated by U-series analysis of sedimentary speleothems to greater than 400 ka (Clark and Brown 2001; Barham 2000, 2002). There is, however a possibility that this early find served utilitarian ends, which might be less likely for another lower grindstone, from Blind River Mouth, south-eastern South Africa (Laidler 1933; 1934). It bears a series of natural sedimentation lines that has been crossed at right angles by humanly incised or chipped lines, perhaps in reacting to the natural pattern. The age of the accompanying late EMSA assemblage has been estimated at between 270 and 540 ka (cf. Beaumont and Vogel 2006; Porat et al. 2010). The earliest unequivocal engraved plaque from Africa comes again from Wonderwerk Cave (Figure 6), where

Figure 6. Stone plaque bearing seven engraved lines from Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa, c. 300,000 years old.

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it was excavated in Major Unit 3, U-series-dated to >276 (probably c. 300) ka (Beaumont and Vogel 2006). The stone plaque bears seven sub-parallel lines, which have been shown to have been made deliberately with stone tools (Bednarik and Beaumont 2012). Several very weathered engraved dolomite fragments from Bushman Rock Shelter, north-eastern South Africa, appear to be of similar age (Watts 1998; Beaumont and Vogel 2006). The best-preserved specimen bears numerous sub-parallel lines of V-shaped profiles. Once again the African record resembles that of Eurasia, because these objects are very similar to engraved bone and ivory plaques of closely comparable ages excavated in Europe (Bednarik 1992a, 2003a).

3. Middle Stone Age (MSA) Characterised by prepared cores, convergent points and an absence of bifaces, the MSA is ubiquitous across Africa and has provided a considerable amount of palaeoart evidence. Again, pigment manuports are listed first, and roughly in order of decreasing age. Over a dozen red ochre fragments, some abraded, occur in the lower deposits of Border Cave (Beaumont 1978; Watts 2002). The dates from these horizons range from 230 to 175 ka (Avery 1992; Beaumont et al. 1992; Grün and Beaumont 2001; Herries 2011), and some of this material seems to originate from a large quarry at Lion Peak, about 120 km away. Ochre was excavated in the Charama levels in Bambata Cave, Zimbabwe, which are about 125 ka old (Klein 1978). Evidence suggestive of an ochre-processing workshop, comprising abalone shells, grindstones and hammerstones has been excavated in Blombos Cave, southern South Africa, and is 101±4 ka old (Henshilwood et al. 2011). At Pinnacle Point, southern South Africa, 380 manuport ochre fragments have so far been excavated (Marean et al. 2007, 2010; Jacobs 2010) from a level OSL-dated to ~100 ka (Watts 2010). Two small granite plaques bearing well-defined patches of ochre pigment come from Pomongwe Cave, Zimbabwe (Walker 1987). Stratum 2 in Excavation 5 of Wonderwerk Cave has yielded a haematite fragment with an abraded facet on which a series of curved lines was incised. A U-series date of 73 ka ago was secured from an immediately underlying stalagmite (Vogel 2001). From Hollow Rock Shelter, southern South Africa, come two haematite fragments, one with a series of notches on a concave ground edge, and the other thin and roughly rectangular with notches around much of the periphery (Evans 1994), and thought to be around 77 ka old. Over 1200 metric tonnes of pigment have been extracted from the haematite quarry Lion Cavern in western Swaziland (Dart 1969). Among the thousands of MSA lithics on its floor were numerous mining tools, and

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the minimum age of the mining activity is about 46 ka, but on the basis of tool typology it could be up to twice as old (Dart and Beaumont 1967, 1968, 1971; Beaumont and Boshier 1972; Beaumont 1973). Other evidence of pigment use of the period comes from Nswatugi, Zimbabwe, in the form of three stone slabs with ochre, >40 ka old (Walker 1987). Singer and Wymer (1982) have reported several ochre pieces with facets and striations at various MSA levels of Klasies River Mouth, southern South Africa. Ochre crayons and other pigments occurred on several levels of the MSA deposit in Apollo 11 Cave, Namibia (Wendt 1974). Undated ochre crayons with facets come from the MSA level of Kisese II, Tanzania (Inskeep 1962), and more wear facets were observed on haematite from Porc Epic, Ethiopia (Clark 1988). The MSA of southern Africa has also provided cupules from a few sites. At Potholes Hoek, as mentioned above, the Phase 2 petroglyphs, featuring cupules and circles, are attributed to that technological period (Beaumont and Bednarik 2012b). Microerosion analysis suggests that they are >50 old, when calibrated via values for the climatically comparable Spear Hill site in Western Australia (Bednarik 2002b; 2002c). Similarly, at the Nchwaneng site (Rogers 1908; Fock and Fock 1984), where some 640 cupules occur among iconic and non-iconic percussion petroglyphs, a small number of the cupules are being attributed to the MSA (Beaumont and Bednarik 2012b). Klipbak 1, like Potholes Hoek, is located in the Korannaberg hills on the southern fringes of the Kalahari. At this hilltop site, about 570 cupules, 40 outline circles, 30 rubbing areas, and five meandering lines also belong to the Phase 2 petroglyphs of the region. It is over 50 ka old and most probably of the period of climatic amelioration about 130–115 ka ago (Beaumont and Bednarik 2012b; Beaumont 2017). There are more than 300 cupules and grooves on the south wall of Rhino Cave, northwestern Botswana, some of which have been linked to a rich MSA layer below via an excavated rock fragment bearing a petroglyph (Coulson et. al. 2011). The occupation deposit is undated, but it has been suggested to be of similar age as the nearby Gi site (Helgren and Brooks 1983; Brooks et al. 1990), whose assemblage is between 65 and 85 ka old. Another site in northwestern Botswana, Corner Cave, also features cupules linked to an MSA occupation predating 50 ka (Walker 2008, 2010; cf. Brook et al. 2008). Incised lines of portable objects, already reported from the EMSA, occur in greater numbers in more recent MSA assemblages of southern Africa. The series begins with two of the approximately 100-ka-old ochre fragments from Pinnacle Point, mentioned above (Watts 2010). One ground specimen bears an engraved chevron, the second features three notches on an edge. Several decorated items have been recovered in the

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Klasies River Mouth Caves: a bone shaft piece with four parallel incised lines on one face, two rib fragments with notches along edges (Singer and Wymer 1982), a fractured ochre pebble with a series of sub-parallel incised lines, another piece with a single deep groove (d’Errico et al. 2012a), and a sandstone slab with one surface largely covered by an engraved lattice pattern (Watts 1998). The MSA levels containing these palaeoart objects are approximately dated by U-series analysis to between 101 and 77 ka ago (Vogel 2001). Two haematite fragments from Hollow Rock Shelter, from an MSA industry estimated to be between 80 and 71 ka old (Evans 1994; Jacobs et al. 2008), are also of interest. One features a series of small notches on a concave ground surface; the other is thin and roughly rectangular, bearing notches around much of its periphery. Border Cave has yielded a 3.8 cm long rib fragment with 13 notches on an edge, 69 to 55 ka old (Miller et al. 1999; Grün and Beaumont 2001; Bird et al. 2003); a bone fragment with incised lines from Stratum 5BS, possibly 170 ka old; and a bone fragment with parallel incisions from Stratum 4BS.LR, 118 to 82 ka (Grün and Beaumont 2001). Major Unit 2 of Excavation 5 in Wonderwerk Cave produced an engraved haematite plaque with complex engraved arrangements covering six of its seven surface facets (Bednarik and Beaumont 2012). These consist of numerous sets of “convergent lines motifs”, one of the world’s most typical features of Mode 3 palaeoart traditions (Figure 7). The sediment layer it was excavated in has been dated to ~70 ka BP by U-series analysis.

Figure 7. Stone plaque almost completely covered by engravings, Wonderwerk Cave, c. 70,000 years old.

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Several engraved items come from various MSA layers in Apollo 11 Cave. Two ostrich eggshell fragments bearing incised lines and traces of red ochre on their outer surfaces are from Layer F (Wendt 1974, 1976; Vogelsang 1998), which is dated by 14C to before 48 ka (Wendt 1976) and by amino acid racemisation (AAR) to before 63–69 ka ago (Miller et al. 1999). Three bone (two rib) fragments that show up to 26 notches along edges are from Layer G (Wendt 1974, 1976; Vogelsang 1998; Miller et al. 1999; Watts 1998; Vogelsang et al. 2010), dated by 14C to before 50.5 ka (Wendt 1976) and by AAR to before 83 ka ago (Miller et al. 1999). Also from an MSA context in Namibia is a small cobble from Palmenhorst/Rössing, bearing a cross-hatched engraved design closely resembling the famous Blombos Cave specimen SAMAA 8938 (Wendt 1975: 180). Two conjoining ochre fragments with cross-hatched incised lines from Klein Kliphuis Shelter, south-western South Africa (van Rijssen 1992; Mackay and Welz 2008), are 55–66 ka old (Mackay 2006; 2010). Diepkloof Cave in south-western South Africa has furnished a total of about 270 engraved ostrich eggshell fragments (Poggenpoel 2000; Parkington et al. 2005; Rigaud et al. 2006), dated by TL (thermoluminescence) and OSL (optically stimulated luminescence) to 55–65 ka BP (Feathers 2002; Tribolo et al. 2005; Jacobs et al. 2008). The patterns found on them, hatched band motif and sub-parallel lines, are also among the dominant graphic forms of the world’s Mode 3 traditions. More engraved finds of the MSA include a ~60–65-ka-old trihedral fragment of red ochre with 18 notches along its three edges from Howieson’s Poort Shelter, southern South Africa (Stapleton and Hewitt 1928); and a series of portable engravings excavated in Blombos Cave. These are a 2.8 cm long bone fragment with sub-parallel incised lines on it (Henshilwood and Sealy 1997; Henshilwood et al. 2002), 72–77 ka old (Jacobs et al. 2006); and a total of 15 engraved ochre fragments, bearing parallel lines, cross-hatched designs, right-angled juxtapositions and convergent lines motifs. Three engraved pieces have been reported from Sibudu Cave in eastern South Africa: a 3.5 cm long stone flake with five notches along an edge and six curved incised lines on the dorsal surface, from a layer dated by OSL to 33–35 ka and by 14C to ~42 ka ago (Wadley 2005; Wadley and Jacobs 2004); a long bone fragment with five notches, dated by OSL to ~48 ka ago (Cain 2004; Wadley 2005; Jacobs and Roberts 2008); a small bone fragment with a single notch, and an only 2.2 cm long rib fragment with ten notches, both >57 ka old (Wadley and Jacobs 2004; Cain 2004, 2006). Two more engraved MSA stones from eastern South Africa are the 8.5 cm long lydianite/hornfels flake with reticulate patterns from Muden (Malan 1956) (Figure 8), and the similarly

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engraved 7.0 cm long hornfels flake from Mkomanzi River (Beater 1967). This long list of hundreds of incised or notched objects of the southern African MSA is completed by a small sandstone slab with evenly spaced incised lines around much of its periphery, from the open site Caimbunji, north-eastern Angola (Clark 1963), which is undated but assumed to predate 44 ka.

Figure 8. Lydianite/hornfels MSA flake with engraved trellis patterns on both sides, from Muden, KwaZulu-Natal (after Malan 1956). Before discussing the final class of palaeoart objects, beads and pendants, one unusual object is to be considered. An anthropomorphous dolomite piece from Mumbwa Caves, Zambia, is the only proto-figurine so far proposed for the MSA (Barham 2000). Deposited during the OIS 5e interval, i.e. ~120 ka ago, no modification evidence has been reported, and the probably naturally shaped stone was found in the debris associated with windbreak foundations. Whereas the earliest ostrich eggshell beads are from Libya, those of the MSA are exclusively from the continent’s south. On the other hand, the few roughly contemporary perforated objects known from northern Africa are of other materials. These are all of the early Late Pleistocene and comprise Nassarius gibbosulus shells from the Aterian at Oued Djebanna, Algeria (McBrearty and Brooks 2000); perforated shells of the same species from Grotte des Pigeons, Rhafas, Ifri n’Ammar and Contrebandiers in Morocco (d’Errico et al. 2009); a bone pendant from Grotte Zouhra, Morocco

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(McBrearty and Brooks 2000); and four deliberately-drilled quartzite flakes from Debenath, Nigeria, early Late Pleistocene (McBrearty and Brooks 2000). Another discovery from northern Africa is not of perforated objects, but a cairn of spherical stones found in the Mousterian of El Guettar, Tunisia (Gruet 1955, 1959). The earliest known ostrich eggshell beads in southern Africa are a few specimens from Stratum 3 of Kathu Pan, found with MSA lithics (Beaumont 1990a). The OSL date of ~290 ka for this deposit (Porat et al. 2010) remains provisional; however, if correct it would render these older than the Acheulian specimens from Libya. The broken 3 cm ostrich eggshell disc with central perforation from Cave of Hearths, north-eastern South Africa, is dated more realistically, at ~70 ka ago (Mason 1962, 1988; Miller et al. 1992; Jacobs et al. 2008). Similar beads were excavated from three different levels in Bushman Rock Shelter (Plug 1982), the middle one of which is 14C dated to >57 ka BP (Vogel 1969; Plug 1981). One single ostrich eggshell bead comes from a MSA horizon in Boomplaas Cave, southern South Africa (Deacon 1984, 1995), which has been dated to 42–44 ka ago by 14C, AAR and U-series analyses (Fairhall et al 1976; Miller et al. 1999; Vogel 2001). Two more ostrich eggshell beads as well as several fragments of them were found in an undated MSA deposit in Loiyangalani River valley, in the Serengeti National Park, Tanzania. Beads made from shells have been reported from three sub-Saharan MSA deposits. Blombos Cave has yielded 41 perforated Nassarius kraussianus seashells from a layer dated by OSL and TL to between 72 and 77 ka ago (Henshilwood et al. 2001, 2004, 2009; d’Errico et al. 2005; Jacobs et al. 2006). Two Conus seashell pendants come from Border Cave, one from an infant’s burial (Beaumont et al. 1978, 1992); AAR, 14C and ESR readings of >69 ka, >62 ka and ~74 ka, respectively refer to their age (Miller et al. 1992, 1999; Grün and Beaumont 2001; Bird et al. 2003; Grün et al. 2003). Klasies River Mouth Cave 1 yielded a perforated Patella oculus specimen (Voigt 1982; Watts 1998), dated by 14C and OSL to between 22 and 58 ka BP (Deacon 1995; Jacobs et al. 2008). Finally, there are also a few presumed stone pendants recorded in sub-Saharan Africa, although not of quartzite, like the above-mentioned Debenath specimens, but of much softer schist. These three stone pendants from Zombepata Cave, northern Zimbabwe, are at the minimum dated to 44 ka BP by 14C via their deposit (Cooke 1971; d’Errico et al. 2005).

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4. Later Stone Age (LSA) Evidence of the use of pigments is so common during the period of LSA technologies that examples of it are not listed here. However, the continuation of the production of cupules, incised lines and notches on portable objects, and the production of beads and pendants is of interest, because it illustrates the continuity between the MSA and LSA traditions. Similarly, the creation of cupules at the Nchwaneng site, begun in the EMSA and enduring in the MSA was resumed in the LSA, to which most of the 640 cupules at that site are attributed (Beaumont and Bednarik 2012b). Cupules of the LSA have also been reported from Chifubwa Stream Shelter, north-western Zambia, where they occur with long and short vertical grooves and inverted Us, the latter often with a central vertical line (Clark 1958). The covering sediments provided minimum dating via 14C to 13–25 ka BP (Miller 1971; Sampson 1974). Incised lines and notches have been reported from four sub-Saharan sites. Border Cave has yielded several such specimens: a bone point bearing a red pigment-filled incised spiral (d’Errico et al. 2012b), a small partial bored stone with eight incised lines, and a baboon fibula with 29 notches are all about 42–43 ka old (by 14C and ESR); whereas fragments of a wooden stick from the same site covered by short incised lines were directly 14C dated to ~24 ka ago (d’Errico et al. 2012b). At White Paintings Shelter, north-western Botswana, two small bone point fragments from the lowest LSA level were covered by incised marks, and are about 35–37 ka old (Robbins et al. 2000a, 2012). A ~24-ka-old small broken bored stone (6 cm across) with incised lines radiating out from both sides of the perforation comes from Matupi Cave, north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (van Noten 1977). One of the bone harpoons from Ishango, far eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, has notches along one edge (~20 ka old), and a bone handle with a hafted stone flake from the layer below it (~22 ka) is covered by sets of short incised lines (Clark 1970). Reports of beads and pendants increase markedly after about 20 ka, and therefore only those apparently predating that time are considered here. Mumba Shelter in central Tanzania produced numerous ostrich eggshell beads from various LSA horizons, beginning with the six lowest specimens, one of which gave an AAR age of ~52 ka (McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Diez-Martín et al. 2009). Further up, with 14C, AAR and OSL dates to ~34–37 ka ago (McBrearty and Brooks 2000; Gliganic et al. 2012), numerous such beads were recorded. The seventeen complete or fragmentary ostrich eggshell beads found in the LSA deposits of Border

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Cave are, according to numerous 14C and ESR determinations, 42–44 ka old (Beaumont et al. 1992; Grün and Beaumont 2001), and one of them was directly dated to ~42 ka (d’Errico et al. 2012b). The same two layers also yielded three perforated Nassarius krausianus seashells. The ostrich eggshell bead-making evidence in the form of 25 finished or partly made beads in Enkapune Ya Muto Shelter, central Kenya, is 14C dated to between ~41 and 44 ka ago (Ambrose 1998). A few finished beads and some preforms from White Paintings Shelter occurred in a deposit dated to 30–37 ka, but when two of them were directly dated, one yielded an age of 35 ka, the other 42 ka BP (Robbins et al. 2000b). At Kisese II Shelter, central Tanzania, ostrich eggshell beads occurred at all LSA levels subsequent to 35 ka ago (Beaumont and Vogel 1972). Kathu Pan 5 also produced such beads from throughout its LSA occupation evidence (Beaumont 1990a). At Heuningneskrans Shelter, north-eastern South Africa, four beads are ~43 ka old; another one derives from the ~23-ka-old stratum (Beaumont 1981; Miller et al. 1992). And Sehonghong Shelter in eastern Lesotho relinquished two ostrich eggshell beads from the lowest LSA level, 14C dated to ~21–24 ka ago (Carter and Vogel 1974; Mitchell 1995, 1996). Iconic palaeoart of the Final Pleistocene, or painted rock art of that period generally, so common especially in southwestern Europe, is lacking almost entirely in Africa. Clearly the elaborate Franco-Cantabrian cave art has no antecedents in Africa. The seven (actually six, as two join together) painted stone plaques from Apollo 11 Cave (Wendt 1974; 1976; Vogelsang 1998; Rifkin et al. 2015) were traditionally attributed to the MSA, but as this industry extends up to 44 ka BP at the site (Miller et al. 1992, 1999), the roughly 30-ka-old plaques are of the LSA (Beaumont and Bednarik 2012a). A stone slab excavated in Pomongwe Cave bears a painted shape that could depict the dorsal line and rump of an animal (Walker 1987; Watts 1998), but the dating is problematic (Beaumont and Vogel 1972; Mitchell 1997) and the specimen could be from 20 to 40 ka old. However, 16 exfoliated spalls from a wall bearing iconographic paintings in Cave of Bees, south-western Zimbabwe, were excavated in sediments dating from 12.5 to 15 ka ago, which thus provide minimum ages for the rock art above (Walker 1980, 1987). The only other figurative rock art in Africa so far shown to be of the Pleistocene are some bovid petroglyphs at the Qurta site in Egypt (Huyge 2009; Huyge et al. 2011). These were minimum dated by OSL to between 10±1 ka and 16±2 ka BP and have been suggested to be in the order of 15 ka old. At the Nchwaneng and Klipbak sites in the southern Kalahari, figurative petroglyphs occur in Phase 3, but they all appear to be of the Holocene. Those dated at the first

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site by microerosion range from E1900–E6060 years in age, while one quadruped image at Klipbak 1 is about E1600 years old (Beaumont and Bednarik 2012b). Aniconic paintings of the Pleistocene have only been recorded at one site, Apollo 11 Cave, where 14 ostrich eggshell fragments show well-defined lines of ochre application (Watts 1998). They are attributed to the early LSA tradition, which at this site places them between 30 and 44 ka BP (Vogelsang et al. 2010).

5. Discussion This wealth of Pleistocene palaeoart so far found in Africa permits some initial pronouncements about the course of these developments. The most obvious observation is perhaps that there is far more evidence in the south, although some very early finds have come from the north. This apparent imbalance is probably attributable to the intensity and priorities of regional research more than to any other factor. However, taphonomic factors are very powerful in determining the composition of any surviving archaeological record, so they certainly need to be considered as well. They are proportionally greater the older the material is. Taphonomic logic (Bednarik 1994a) would suggest that most exograms of hominins were of a nature that would either leave no archaeologically detectable traces, or whose taphonomic threshold occurred during the Holocene. In either case most of the finds listed here are attributable to fluke preservation conditions. If one adds to this important factor the tendency of many if not most archaeologists to reject what they call the use of symbols prior to the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens, the above list looks rather impressive. It shows that despite the taphonomic effects, adverse research bias and archaeological preconceptions, a sizeable sample of such material has been presented, and more will come to light in the future. The nature and temporal distribution of this large corpus is precisely as taphonomic logic would predict it to be. The further one proceeds into the past, the sparser the record becomes. Similarly, the older evidence shows a distinctive bias in favour of the most deterioration-resistant classes of finds. The earliest evidence is exclusively of minerals, especially jaspilite, quartzite, haematite, specularite and quartz crystal. Materials such as bone, ostrich eggshell or shell are in no instance older than a few hundred millennia, even though they would have been much easier to work. Wooden artefacts or rock paintings are only a few tens of millennia at the most, and remain very rare from the Pleistocene. This distinctive pattern is not a cultural variable; it illustrates the characteristic effects of taphonomy. This means that the truncation of any of the material classes of evidence is

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a taphonomic phenomenon, and therefore such classes as wooden palaeoart objects or pigment markings should be assumed to have been produced in earlier periods as well, even if not a single specimen is found. Anything else would be illogical. These considerations also show that to interpret the available record as representative of the cultures in question, which archaeology tends to do, must lead to misinterpretation. The record is never a representative sample, and if it is to form the basis of any interpretation it must first be seen as having been distorted by various factors. This is perhaps the main reason for the misinterpretation of hominin cognition, and for the difficulties many archaeologists have with the notion that Lower Palaeolithic societies were capable of exogram production, language and maritime colonisation, among other things (Bednarik 1987, 2007, 2011a, 2011b, 2014, 2015). Another reason relates to the archaeological belief that the available record is representative for the respective populations at the times in question. This is another logical fallacy, because more than half of the world’s population of these times must be assumed to have lived along coasts, in deltas and along the lower reaches of major rivers. Rather than following the inland herds, these people were able to live in much greater densities, had much greater reliability of food resources, and would have been far more sedentary. However, because the many massive fluctuations in sea level during the entire Pleistocene obliterated every single trace of these near-coastal populations, absolutely nothing is known of their cultures, technology, physiology or genetics. In other words, Pleistocene archaeology can only provide one part of the story, and even this is done inadequately. There would be solutions to overcome these issues. For instance, to determine the differences between coastal and hinterland populations, one could examine very early occupation evidence from the shore of a lake that existed then, but disappeared because of a subsequent fall in aquifer level. Such former lakes did exist, especially in the Sahara, and such evidence is in fact available, but it is being ignored by mainstream archaeology because it is unacceptable. Budrinna, one such site, was located on the vast Fezzan Lake of the Pleistocene in Libya (Figure 9). Ziegert (2007, 2010) reports that the Acheulian population on this former lake had established a village of stone huts 400 ka ago and that they buried their dead. He excavated an entire cemetery as well as a latrine, and suggested that the settlement was permanent or semi-permanent. Yet orthodox archaeology claims sedentary settlements only begin with the Neolithic, hundreds of millennia later. Because Ziegert’s findings contradict the mainsteam dogma he was denied funds to continue his

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important work and he found it hard to get his results published. And yet his evidence is not unique; Lower Palaeolithic dwelling remains have also been reported from Morocco, elsewhere in Libya (El Greifa), Ethiopia (Melka Konture), Kenya (Olduvai), France (Nice), Germany (Bilzingsleben) and India (Bhimbetka, Daraki-Chattan).

Figure 9. Remains of some of the earliest known stone structures, Acheulian, Budrinna, Libya, c. 400,000 years old. Indeed, the palaeoart evidence from Africa is also quite consistent with that of Eurasia, at least in its broad characteristics. As in Africa, cupules form the earliest known rock art in both Asia (Bednarik et al. 2005) and Europe (Peyrony 1934). As in Africa, there is ample Acheulian evidence of pigment use in Europe (Bednarik 1992b, 2003a), and there are a few instances in Asia (Bednarik 1992b, 1994b). The earliest engraved plaques of Africa and Europe are of almost identical ages, being around 300 or 400 ka old. Painted rock art appears only towards the end of the Pleistocene in all three continents, and except in caves remains very rare still — another taphonomic effect. In both Africa and Asia, anthropomorphous protofigurines appear during the Acheulian. All three continents feature very early manuports, such as quartz crystals. Although some of these consistencies can be attributed to taphonomic processes, they also reflect

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cultural factors. The similarities in the forms of exograms during the Early and Middle Pleistocene, and even during the first two thirds of the Late Pleistocene, are astonishing, and they will be considered in the concluding chapter of this book. Therefore what a comparison of palaeoart development in the various parts of the Old World shows is that innovations or stylistic memes must have travelled widely in the Pleistocene, and that most populations of humans were in contact with other groups. The notion of the replacement advocates, the believers in “African Eve”, that human groups travelled through largely unpopulated expanses of land and settled wherever it suited them is fundamentally naive. By the end of the Middle Pleistocene, the entire Old World, including numerous islands, were so densely occupied by hominins that these had even been forced into the Arctic region (Norrman 1997; Schulz 2002; Schulz et al. 2002; cf. Pavlov et al. 2001), living in temperatures below -40º. To assume, without evidence, that there were any unoccupied areas other than in deserts and high altitudes, is ingenuous. Therefore the model of wandering tribes in empty landscapes that eventually ran into the “Neanderthals” in Europe, implicit in the replacement hypothesis based on the African hoax (Protsch 1975; Bräuer 1984; Cann et al. 1987; Stringer and Andrews 1988), is simply unrealistic, and contradicted by all the empirical evidence (Terberger and Street 2003; Schulz 2004; Bednarik 2007, 2008a, 2008b, 2011a, 2011b).

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Mitchell, R. W. 1997. Kinesthetic-visual matching and the self-concept as explanations of mirror-self-recognition. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 27: 18–39. Mitchell, R. W. 2002. Subjectivity and self-recognition in animals. In M. R. Leary and J. P. Tangney (eds), Handbook of self and identity, pp. 567–595. Guilford Press, New York. Norrman, R. 1997. Wolf Cave - Varggrottan - Susiluola; a pre-Ice Age archaeological find in Lappfjärd, Finland. Studia Archaeologica Ostrobothniensia 1993–1997. Vasa (in Swedish). Parkington, J. E., C. Poggenpoel, J.-P. Rigaud and P.-J. Texier 2005. From tool to symbol: the stratigraphic and behavioural context of intentionally marked ostrich eggshell from Diepkloof, Western Cape. In F. d’Errico and L. Backwell (eds), From tools to symbols: from early hominids to modern humans, pp. 475–492. Witwatersrand University Press, Johannesburg. Partridge, T. C. 1979. Reappraisal of lithostratigraphy of Makapansgat Limeworks hominid site. Nature 279: 484–488. Pavlov, P., J. I. Svendsen and S. Indrelid 2001. Human presence in the European Arctic nearly 40,000 years ago. Nature 413: 64–67. Peyrony, D. 1934. La Ferrassie. Moustérien, Périgordien, Aurignacien. Préhistoire 3: 1–92. Plug, I. 1981. Bushman Rock Shelter. In E. A. Voigt (ed.), Guide to archaeological sites in the Northern and Eastern Transvaal, pp. 110– 131. Transvaal Museum, Pretoria. Plug, I. 1982. Bone tools and shell, bone and ostrich eggshell beads from Bushman Rock Shelter (BRS), Eastern Transvaal. South African Archaeological Bulletin 37: 57–62. Poggenpoel, C. 2000. The excavations of the Middle Stone Age deposits at Diepkloof Rock Shelter. Southern African Association of Archaeologists Biennial Conference (University of the Witwatersrand) Abstracts: 51. Porat, N., M. Chazan, R. Grün, M. Aubert, V. Eisenmann and L. K. Horwitz 2010. New radiometric ages for the Fauresmith industry from Kathu Pan, southern Africa: implications for the Earlier to Middle Stone Age transition. Journal of Archaeological Science 37: 269–283. Premack, D. G. and G. Woodruff 1978. Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 1: 515–526. Protsch, R. 1975. The absolute dating of Upper Pleistocene sub-Saharan fossil hominids and their place in human evolution. Journal of Human Evolution 4: 297–322.

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CHAPTER THREE THE AMERICAS

1. Introduction The number of realistic theories about the provenance of the initial colonisers of the Americas is very limited indeed, and there is only one serious candidate—that which refers to Asian origins. The two alternatives offered in the literature, such as Solutrean sailors from western Europe navigating the Atlantic or Australian Aborigines crossing the Pacific are not reasonable propositions: there is no credible evidence for either possibility. It is widely thought that Asian settlers first crossed Beringia to reach Alaska, perhaps by following the coasts in boats. There is no consensus agreement concerning the timing of this first human settlement of the New World, but with evidence of art-like and possibly symbolic productions extending back some hundreds of thousands of years now, in Eurasia and Africa (Bednarik 1994a, 2003a; Beaumont and Bednarik 2013), it is reasonable to attribute to the very first Americans the ability of producing forms of art-like objects or markings. At whatever time these people arrived in the far northwest of North America, they would probably have possessed the technological, cognitive and cultural faculties that are a precondition for rock art and portable “art” production. Their technology may well have included seaworthy watercraft, which was used to cross the open ocean between the Pleistocene regions of Sunda and Sahul (Greater Australia) at least 60,000 years ago, and to cross Wallace’s Barrier (probably between Bali and Lombok) at least 800,000 to one million years ago (Bednarik 1999). It is therefore more than possible that the first rock art of America has its origins in eastern Asia. Nevertheless, eastern Asian rock art of the Late Pleistocene has not captured the attention of American rock art specialists. The most likely foreign rock art to attract their interest remains, for some reason, that of southwestern Europe, and even when drawing intercontinental comparisons, some American scholars have referred to the Franco-Cantabrian traditions. Asian Pleistocene art had never even been studied on a pan-continental basis until recently (Bednarik 1994a), but a

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comprehensive review of the empirical evidence will be attempted in the next chapter. A second, perhaps even more severe limitation to the study of North American Pleistocene occupation is that the timing of the first colonisation of the Americas remains one of the major archaeological controversies of our time (Dillehay and Collins 1988; Bednarik 1989; Jelinek 1992). Many North American archaeologists reject the pre-14,000 BP occupation evidence from South America. Niède Guidon (1984), Fabio Parenti (1993) and others have argued persuasively that human occupation in northeastern Brazil extends back about 40–50,000 years. The sandstone shelter Pedra Furada in Piauí has yielded a series of fifty-four radiocarbon dates from occupation horizons with many stone implements. The dates are stratigraphically consistent and if the hypothesis that the Americas were occupied via an Alaskan bridgehead were correct, the South American Pleistocene archaeological finds from Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Argentina and Chile would suggest that humans must have reached North America somewhat earlier (Bednarik 1989). The circumstances of this colonisation remain entirely unknown and archaeology has consistently failed to produce any acceptable evidence of such early human presence in North America. The type of evidence offered includes that from such sites as Calico in California, which in reality contains not a single stone implement below the uppermost few centimetres of its massive sediments (but hundreds of thousands of “naturefacts”); China Lake, also in California, which lacks a stratigraphic context for its two flake tools; and Old Crow in Yukon, with its inadequately dated bone artefact. Meadowcroft Rockshelter at perhaps up to 19,000 years still falls short of the South American evidence. The Valsequillo site complex near Puebla, Mexico, remains thoroughly controversial, as do other contenders. The most recent North American claim for early hominin presence concerns the Cerutti Mastodon site in southern California, dated by U-series to about 130,000 years ago (Holen et al. 2017). There are no clear stone implements, only a selection of fractured mastodon bones and some damaged cobbles. The dating method applied has been problematic before. However, before rejecting this claim it needs to be remembered that great quantities of Modes 2 and 3 “Palaeoindian lithics” precede fluted bifacial projectile points at sites in Bolivia and especially southern Peru (Bednarik 1989: 109); and that human occupation evidence of similar magnitude of age has once been claimed for southern Brazil (albeit roundly rejected). It has long been suggested that the initial occupation of North America was restricted largely to coastal corridors, with only low population densities further inland (Bednarik 1989). Rapid expansion along the

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western coast by an essentially coastal people could have led to a speedy colonisation of South America. Due to the significantly lower sea-level during the Late Pleistocene all coastal evidence of the time is now submerged, which may help explain the patchy state of the evidence. Globally there is a complete lack of direct Pleistocene evidence about coastal navigation, and very little about exploitation of marine environments, coastal settlement patterns and marine ecologies of the entire Ice Age. This massive hiatus has resulted in a completely distorted picture of Pleistocene societies, with a heavy emphasis on inland ecologies and economies. The oldest direct evidence for the use of watercraft we have is mostly from the early Mesolithic of Europe, 8000 to 9500 years old (Bednarik 1999, 2003b, 2015), although logboats of almost 8000 years have also been found at Kuahuqiao in China (Tang et al. 2016) and Dufuna in Nigeria (Breunig 1996). Beyond this time, the present coasts of the world were all at higher elevations, continuously for perhaps 60,000 years, and it is not likely that boats, rafts, oars or paddles were frequently taken to such elevations, let alone survived. To avoid viewing early American palaeoart in isolation it needs to be considered what is currently known about Asian Pleistocene “art”. Although such palaeoart is found in several regions of Asia, the existing record is extremely fragmentary, disconnected spatially as well as chronologically, and no doubt distorted taphonomically in a most severe form (Bednarik 1994b). It includes tantalising glimpses of extremely early examples, but these are so frustratingly isolated that it is easy to challenge them. Nevertheless, they do include one of the oldest known figurative sculptures in the world, an animal head from Tolbaga in Siberia; one of the earliest known objects suggestive of hominin iconic perception, from Berekhat Ram in Israel; and the presumed oldest known rock art in the world. Some of the eleven petroglyphs found in Auditorium Cave, India, were concealed under undisturbed Middle Palaeolithic occupation deposits, as well as the upper part of the substantial Acheulian strata. They are undated, but the Indian Acheulian is of ages similar to that of Europe and Africa and ended around 200,000 to 170,000 years ago, i.e. before the Americas are assumed to have been settled. All attempts to date the Indian Acheulian radiometrically showed it to be 290,000 years or greater, and it seems to commence about 1.4 to 1.51 million years ago (Misra and Rajaguru 1994; Badam and Rajaguru 1994; Pappu et al. 2011). The 540 cupules of another central Indian quartzite cave, Daraki-Chattan, have been safely attributed to the site’s Mode 1 (Oldowan-like) tool industry, underlying Acheulian strata (Kumar 1996; Bednarik et al. 2005). Rock art of extremely great antiquity in other parts of the world also

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consists of cupules (Beaumont and Bednarik 2013). Early last century, a large limestone slab was found placed over a Neanderthal child’s burial in La Ferrassie, France (Peyrony 1934). On its underside, facing the corpse, eighteen cupules were found, sixteen of them arranged in pairs. Both North America and Australia seem to have been colonised from Asia, and in both cases, cupule traditions are among the earliest found in rock art. Cupules at the Sandy Creek I site in Queensland are undated, but were partly covered by sediment containing occupation evidence reaching to 32–40,000 BP. Even in eastern Asia, the region where both major colonisations of the Pacific Rim (the Americas as well as Australia) seem to have originated, provides supporting evidence. The earliest petroglyphs so far detected in China also consist of deeply carved cupules (Tang and Mei 2008; Tang 2012).

2. North America In North America it has long been proposed that the “pit-and-groove” petroglyphs or “pitted boulder” genres are the oldest “style” (Heizer and Baumhoff 1962; Grant 1967; Baumhoff 1980; Parkman 1992), and that some cupule traditions date back to “pre-Hokan” times, i.e. that they are of the final Pleistocene (Parkman 1992). They are not, however, soundly dated. Cupules occur in much of North America, but they are especially common in the west of the United States. They occur also in Mexico (Mercer 1895: 28; Valentine 1965; Clewlow et al. 1967; Gay 1973; Mountjoy 1974, 1987; Grove 1981, 1987; Grieder 1982; Strecker 1983), Costa Rica (Kennedy 1973), and a cup-and-groove boulder has been reported from Panama (Rau 1882: 60; Stone 1972), but none of them are suggested to be of the Pleistocene. There is no shortage of claims for such age from the United States, of both rock art and portable palaeoart. Most notably there are numerous propositions that extinct Pleistocene species have been depicted. Particularly popular are designations as proboscideans, which 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 no proposals of their depiction could so far be credibly substantiated. Some, 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).

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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 been refuted by Malotki and Wallace (2011), as has been another from Hieroglyphic Canyon, Arizona, and one more from near 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. Elephantine petroglyphs at Rainbow Rocks, Pennsylvania (Bednarik 2013a) and two other sites we are aware of are regarded as essentially modern. The status of two elephantine petroglyphs at Track Rocks near Barnesville, Ohio, has remained uncertain until recently. Early descriptions of the site (e.g. Ward 1872; Read and Whittlesey 1877; cf. Swauger 1974) make no mention of them, but they are all significantly incomplete. A recent scientific investigation confirmed that the “mastodons” date from between 1910 and 1980, based on granular exfoliation calibrated by numerous engraved dates (Bednarik 2013a). Two further arrangements high up on a cliff at Upper Sand Island near Bluff, Utah, have been attributed to the Columbian mammoth (Malotki and Wallace 2011). Intensive microscopic examination (Bednarik 2013a) and geological study (Gillam and Wakeley 2013) show that a Pleistocene antiquity of the petroglyph panel is geologically not feasible, and that the groups of markings concerned are fortuitous arrangements of several unrelated elements of different ages (Figure 10). The petroglyphs are less than 4000 years old, which falls significantly short of the presumed end-Pleistocene extinction date of the species (Faith and Surovell 2009). 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. Purdy et al. (2001) have presented empirical evidence in favour of the marking’s authenticity, but several aspects remain to be clarified further (Figure 11). Presently the case for the image’s authenticity rests mostly on the continuity of mineralisation across the indentations (Purdy et al. 2001: 2911), other indicators being essentially inconclusive (Bednarik 2013a).

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This long list of purported elephantine rock art motifs from the United States can be supplemented by a series of spurious claims for other Pleistocene faunal depictions in American rock art. Among them are Whitley’s (1996) assertion that the extinct Western horse has been depicted at Legend Rock, Wyoming; and his contention 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 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 (Bednarik 2011).

Figure 10. Petroglyph arrangement of unrelated elements on cliff at Upper Sand Island, Bluff, Utah, thought to depict a mammoth, but less than 4000 years old.

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Figure 11. Engraving on a fossil bone fragment from Vero Beach, Florida, bearing a proboscidean engraving. Even more bizarre are the various proposed depictions of dinosaurs or pterosaurs in the rock art of North America. The perhaps earliest claim of this nature concerns a pair of paintings first described by Marquette (1855) who saw them in 1673. It is the first published record of rock art north of Mexico (Bednarik 2007: 8). Armstrong (1887) regarded the images as depicting pterosaurs, as did Gibbons and Hovind (1999), among others. The 1924 Doheny expedition into Havasupai Canyon, northern Arizona, reported an image of Diplodocus (Hubbard 1927), seen as Edmontosaurus by Taylor (1987). Since then Beierle (1980) has described a second motif from the same panel as an unspecified dinosaur. Senter (2012) has examined both petroglyphs and considers the first to be of a bird, the second of a bighorn sheep. One of the most spectacular misidentifications 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 pictograms, two anthropomorphs and three zoomorphs, have been combined as one hypothetical motif. This has been confirmed by Senter (2012). 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

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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. It occurs together with several other motifs, the meaning of which is known (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, a mythical creature of the region. Tracks of dinosaurs have apparently been depicted in North American rock art: a pictogram in Utah close to sets of fossil dinosaur footprints seems to depict them, and petroglyphs of such tracks have been found in Arizona and Wyoming (Mayor and Sarjeant 2001). However, there is only one instance known of rock artists actually having depicted dinosaurs. In Mokhali Cave, Lesotho, a red painting of a saurian track appears together with three images of the ornithopod that caused them (Ellenberger et al. 2005). The reconstruction of the live animal by a San/Bushman ethnoscientist, applying his magnificent tracking skills, represents a splendid scientific deduction that greatly surpasses the endeavour of celebrated palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen to reconstruct the same animal. It follows from this review of the empirical evidence that there is currently almost no credible evidence of Pleistocene (or Mesozoic) palaeoart in North America. Even plausible datings from the early Holocene are surprisingly rare. Despite many endeavours to find early material, all claims of this nature appear to be unsubstantiated. For instance, Dorn and Whitley (1984) obtained a series of cation-ratio minimum “dates” from Coso Range (California) petroglyphs ranging up to about 11,500 years BP, but numerous writers have rejected the method’s reliability (Bednarik 1988a; Bierman and Gillespie 1991; Bierman et al. 1991; Watchman 1989, 1992; Beck et al. 1998) and Dorn himself has effectively withdrawn all his results (Dorn 1996a, 1996b, 1997). Nevertheless, final Pleistocene petroglyphs do exist in North America (Parkman 1992; Bednarik 1995a), but that has been demonstrated in very few instances. At present the most credible claims include those of Steinbring (2013, 2016), concerning the Hensler Petroglyph Site in Dodge County, Wisconsin. Its excavation yielded peck marks below sediment that is up to 10,000 years old, containing bifacial projectile points (of Hardin Barbed and Page-Ladson types; Figure 12). There are even several petroglyphs at the site that seem to depict such stone points, one superimposed over another in one case (Steinbring 2013: Fig. 7).

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Figure 12. Peck marks at Hensler Petroglyph Site, Dodge County, Wisconsin, shown to be at least 10,000 years old (after Steinbring 2013).

Figure 13. Final Pleistocene petroglyphs on tufa deposit at Winnemucca Lake, western Nevada, entirely aniconic (photograph by L. Benson).

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One of the most recent claims of Pleistocene rock art in the Americas concerns a spectacular petroglyph site at Winnemucca Lake, Nevada, comprising cupules and complex reticulate and repetitive patterns occurring on tufa formations of the Final Pleistocene (Benson et al. 2013). Based on the radiocarbon age of the tufa of 14.8 ± 0.2 ka and that of a superimposed carbonate crust of about 10 ka, and on information about lake level fluctuations, this entirely non-figurative rock art tradition is assumed to date from one of two possible intervals: either from 14.8–13.2 ka or from 11.3–10.5 ka BP. The occurrence nearby of artefacts in the latter interval renders this the most likely interpretation. Therefore, the Winnemucca Lake petroglyphs appear to be the earliest dated rock art in North America (Figure 13). There are several purported Pleistocene portable art objects from North America, but some have been exposed as fakes (Bednarik 2013a). The only exceptions (apart from beads from the Jones-Miller site in Colorado) seem to be a mineralised sacrum from Tequixquiac, Mexico, which has been modified to look like an animal head (Bahn 1991: Pl. 18a); possibly the Vero Beach specimen mentioned above; and the limestone plaques from the Clovis layer of the Gault site, Texas. Other examples are less well authenticated, but a bone with an engraving of a rhinoceros from Jacob’s Cave, Missouri, has been suggested to be of the final Pleistocene (Messmacher 1981: 84; Bahn 1991: 92); Bahn fails to question why there could be an American Pleistocene depiction of a rhinoceros, an animal that did not exist in the New World. This illustrates how sceptical one needs to be in reviewing claims of Pleistocene palaeoart from North America, and especially from the United States—the only world region apart from western and central Europe that has yielded fakes of Ice Age “art”. The numerous limestone and chert plaques from the Clovis layer of the Gault site, Texas, with their “geometric” (aniconic) engravings (Collins 2002; Collins et al. 1991, 1992; Robertson 1999) are generally accepted as authentic. So far, at least 134 specimens have come to light at this site, but the provenience of many is not secure (D. C. Wernecke, pers. comm.). Nevertheless, eighteen good examples are clearly from the Clovis deposits, and they represent some of the most important palaeoart the Americas have yielded so far (Figure 14).

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Figure 14. Engraved plaques of the Clovis layer of Gault site, Texas, of the final Pleistocene.

3. South America With the exception of the common occurrence of fakes or hoaxes in North America (absent in South America), similarly severe limitations apply to the current knowledge about the palaeoart of the south. In the Americas we know of no Pleistocene tradition of cave art, hence we would expect the earliest surviving rock art to consist of deeply pounded, rather simple but very prominent designs on weathering-resistant rock. The above shows that what can be regarded as the earliest surviving rock art in North America consists precisely of these types of markings: cupules and deep linear incisions on pavements, cliffs and large boulders, and geometric designs of a very specific range. Significantly, this is in agreement with the Old World continents and especially Australia (Bednarik 2010). To a major extent this is a taphonomically determined outcome (Bednarik 1994b) although to some degree it also reflects a widespread uniformity in the cultural conventions that contributed to the surviving record.

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Figure 15. Oldest petroglyph tradition of Inca Huasi, Mizque valley, central Bolivia, probably early Holocene or very final Pleistocene.

Figure 16. Engraved grooves on bedrock of Cueva Epullán Grande, Neuquén Province, Argentina, probably more than 9970±100 years old (after Crivelli M. and Fernández 1996).

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For instance, the oldest rock art this author has seen in Bolivia, at such sites as Inca Huasi, Mizque valley (Figure 15), and Bola Chanka, Santivañez petroglyph complex near Cochabamba, includes non-figurative linear groove arrangements and especially cupules (Bednarik 2000; Querejazu et al. 2015), as do more recent sites such as Toro Muerto (Bednarik 1988b). These corpora remain undated, however, and their antiquity is only estimated by their relative weathering state and other factors. A site with similar petroglyphs, also in the eastern foothills of the Andes, but 2500 km to the south, in Argentina, is Cueva Epullán Grande, which includes Final Pleistocene bedrock grooves resembling very early petroglyphs in Australia (Figure 16). These are probably more than 10,000 years old. There are also cupules and non-figurative linear petroglyphs on the walls of the site (Crivelli M. and Fernández 1996). A similar finding has been reported from the Lapa do Boquete site, Peruaçu valley in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where a boulder bearing cupules and incised lines was excavated in sediment dating from between 9350 and 7810 years BP (Prous 1999: 32). Even earlier appears to be a schematic pounded anthropomorph on the bedrock of a limestone cave in the Lagoa Santa region, Brazil (Neves et al. 2012: 3). It was concealed under 4 m of sediment, the lowest layer of which provided both OSL and 14 C dates ranging from 11,760 to 9960 cal. years BP. This petroglyph is therefore very probably of the Pleistocene. A panel of tridactyl petroglyphs covered by a black sediment deposit yielding dates from 7840 to 7600 cal. BP has been excavated at Toca dos Oitenta, Serra da Capivara National Park, Piauí (Pessis 2002: 42). The possible relationship between petroglyphs in southern Roraima, Brazilian Amazonia, and occupation evidence dating from 9485 to 9410 cal. BP still needs to be established (Valle 2017: 16). Other early petroglyphs in Brazil, such as those at Caiçaras or Riacho Santana, Piauí, are deeply pounded, fully patinated simple designs that could survive the longest (Bednarik 1989), but are unlikely to date from beyond the Holocene. The major cupule concentration on granite tors at Papagaio III at Santana do Matos, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil, seemed likely to be older but — together with motifs at several other sites in the region — has recently been dated to the late Holocene (Santos, Bednarik et al., work in progress). Similarly, the deeply hammered and heavily weathered dense cupules on the granite boulders at Lungumari Puntilla, southern Peru, may also be of considerable age (Parkman 1994), but they remain undated. The region of their occurrence features extensive Pleistocene terrace systems and the various lithic industries found on them (for instance those we studied on the Río Majes and Río Siguas) feature

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massive evidence of very early traditions of cobble tools and handaxes, no different from those found in Eurasia and Africa. Oddly, these have not attracted any interest from the local archaeologists, who seem to be preoccupied with the rich ceramic traditions of the region. As in North America, cupules occur in many parts of this continent, but they have not been soundly dated to beyond the last millennia so far (Querejazu et al. 2015). Occurrences include those in Guyana, Surinam, Chile and Argentina, besides Peru, Bolivia and Brazil.

Figure 17. Pictograms of Perna I rockshelter, São Raimundo Nonato, Piauí, Brazil, at least 9500 years old. An exceptional site of early South American rock art is Toca do Baixao do Perna I, Serra da Capivara National Park, where numerous red paintings have been excavated in unusually dry sediments that are up to 9500 years (Guidon and Delibrias 1986; Bednarik 1989: 105) or 10,530 years BP (Pessis 1999: 43) old. They occur immediately above a thick layer of charcoal (Bednarik 2013b). A fragment of a pigment ball bearing signs of having been worn as an ornament was found at the site, providing an AMS radiocarbon date of 15,250±335 years BP (Chaffee et al. 1993).

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Although that age cannot be extrapolated to the rock art, it seems that pictograms at the site date from the Final Pleistocene, and are therefore among the oldest surviving rock art of the Americas (Figure 17). Roosevelt’s (1999) attempt to attribute pictograms in Pedra Pintada Cave at Monte Alegre to the Pleistocene/Holocene transition via their chemical composition provides no credible dating. Similarly, claims concerning exfoliated fragments from Boqueirão da Pedra Furada, Serra da Capivara, supposedly bearing applied pigment, at 17 ka (Guidon and Delibrias 1986) or 26.3 ka respectively (Lage 1999: 50) have inadequate support (e.g. Bednarik 1989).

4. Discussion One valid line of reasoning would note that the presumed parent traditions of Pleistocene arts in Asia, both on rock surfaces and on portable objects, exhibit an almost complete absence of graphic, i.e. two-dimensional figurative art from that entire continent. Generally, Pleistocene graphic arts in Asia consist of geometric patterns (Bednarik 1994a), just as in the very early Australian rock art (Bednarik 2010). If, as is almost universally assumed, the Americas were colonised from the far north, essentially via Beringia, it stands to reason that their earliest palaeoart traditions would derive from those of eastern Asia. That does indeed seem to be the case, with the Gault plaques representing an American version of the sometimes very complex engraved plaques of Upper Palaeolithic Asia, especially evident in Siberia and European Russia. Seen in its metamorphological context (Bednarik 1995), the beginnings of graphic art production in the Americas are part of a universal pattern. Taphonomic logic (Bednarik 1994b) renders certain consistencies likely, in terms of the types of “art” we are most likely to find in the Pleistocene. They may be interpreted as confirming general, perhaps global trends, and it would be only too easy to jump to the apparently self-evident conclusion that this pattern marks a developmental trend in very early world rock art. We find the epistemologically more elegant explanation more persuasive: the conformity of American evidence with that elsewhere marks primarily a taphonomic trend, as is almost certainly the case in the Old World continents. The most convincing hypothesis is that a general trend in early palaeoarts has been significantly emphasised by the selective processes of taphonomy. Hence it is easy to define the rock art that is most likely to emerge as the oldest to have survived in the Americas, and taphonomic logic could to some extent guide our search for it.

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In the absence of any rock art in deep caves in the Americas that might be over 2000 years old (cave art of less than 2000 years age occurs in three regions of the Americas: the Caribbean, Yucatan and Kentucky), the earliest surviving rock art of the Americas is most likely one of petroglyphs. The Perna 1 pictogram corpus is exceptional due to its unusual sedimentary context, because pictograms rarely survive below sediment. They are the only documented case in the world of pictograms having been minimum-dated via concealing sediment. In most cases the earliest surviving rock art will consist of the types most resistant to deterioration. The cup-and-groove tradition is particularly conspicuous along western coastal regions of both Americas, and it is also there that early examples seem to occur. They are sometimes found on particularly weathering-resistant rock types, even on granite and in ultra-arid environments, and their state of weathering or patination can be suggestive of great antiquity. If any Pleistocene rock art is to be found in the Americas, this form of petroglyph is the principal contender—which is entirely consistent with the evidence in the remaining continents. In Canada, which with Alaska is the region most likely first occupied by human colonisers, this author is not aware of any rock art which one would expect to be of the Pleistocene. One is tempted to consider the western coast as the most likely area to contain the earliest rock art of the northern regions. However, most west-coast rock art seems related to the present shoreline, and is thus most likely of the Holocene. Minor tectonic and even eustatic sea level changes still occurred in the Holocene, and they can account for the location of some petroglyphs found at or even below water level. This includes those on the “Shaman Rock” in Kulleet Bay, Vancouver Island, and the massive granite boulder in Case Inlet at Victor, Washington State. The latter is of particular interest here because its base has not been excavated, being below sea level. At North American sites that offer a well-spaced chronological sequence of several discrete petroglyph traditions, the earliest component tends to display a similar motif repertoire as the early traditions of Asia, Australia and South America. A good example is Parowan Gap in Utah, where several rock art traditions can easily be discerned by patination and carbonate encrustation, degree of kinetic as well as exfoliation damage, style and content, weathering, microerosion, spatial distribution and method of production (Bednarik 1995). The oldest phase consists of deeply carved concentric circles, radial figures, single and multiple wave lines or zigzags, sets of cupules, barred elongate ovals, multiple arcs, sets of parallel lines, and a variety of maze designs. The same range, perhaps more elaborate, occurs at the Winnemucca Lake site, which has been

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credibly attributed to the end of the Pleistocene. Much of this range of motifs could have been taken straight from Australia’s earliest petroglyph phases, the “archaic linear petroglyph traditions” of the Late Pleistocene (Bednarik 2010). In short, the forms of early American palaeoart match those of other continents rather closely.

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Faith, J. T. and T. A. Surovell 2009. Synchronous extinction of North America’s Pleistocene mammals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A. 106: 20 641–20 645. Gay, C. 1973. Olmec hieroglyphic writing. Archaeology 26(4): 278–288. Gibbons, W. J. and K. Hovind 1999. Claws, jaws, and dinosaurs. CSE Publications, Pensacola, FL. Gillam, M. L. and L. D. Wakeley 2013. Are Utah’s Sand Island “mammoths” Late Pleistocene? A geologic view. Paper presented to IFRAO-ARARA International Rock Art Conference, May 26–31, Albuquerque, NM. Gould, L. M. 1935. The Moab mastodon pictograph. Scientific Monthly 41: 378–379. Grant, C. 1967. Rock art of the American Indian. Promontory Press, New York, NY. Grieder, T. 1982. Origins of pre-Columbian art. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. Griffin, J. B., D. J. Meltzer, B. D. Smith, W. C. Sturtevant 1988. A mammoth fraud in science. American Antiquity 53: 578–582. Grove, D. C. 1981. Olmec monuments: mutilations as a clue to meaning. In E. P. Benson (ed.), The Olmec and their neighbors, pp. 49–68. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. Grove, D. C. 1987. Miscellaneous bedrock and boulder carvings. In D. C. Grove (ed.), Ancient Chalcatzingo, pp. 159–170. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. Guidon, N. 1984. Les premières occupations humaines de l’aire archéologique de Sao Raimundo Nonato - Piauí - Brésil. L’Anthropologie 88: 263–271. Guidon, N. and G. Delibrias 1986. Carbon-14 dates point to man in the Americas 32,000 years ago. Nature 321: 769–771. Heizer, R. F. and M. A. Baumhoff 1962. Prehistoric rock art of Nevada and eastern California. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA. Holen, S. R., T. A. Deméré, D. C. Fisher, R. Fullagar, J. B. Paces, G. T. Jefferson, J. M. Beeton, R. A. Cerutti, A. N. Rountrey, L. Vescera and K A. Holen 2017. A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA. Nature 544: 479–483; doi:10.1038/nature22065. Hubbard, S. 1927. Discoveries relating to prehistoric man by the Doheny scientific expedition in the Hava Supai Canyon, northern Arizona, with supplement. Oakland Museum, Oakland, CA. Isaacs, D. 2010. Dragons or dinosaurs? Creation or evolution? BridgeLogos, Alachua, FL. Jelinek, A. J. 1992. Perspectives from the Old World on the habitation of the New. American Antiquity 57: 345–347.

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Kaldenberg, R. L. 2005. Possible proboscidean petroglyph found at China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station. Current Research in the Pleistocene 22: 51–53. Kennedy, W. J. 1973. A comparison of certain Costa Rica petroglyph designs with those of adjacent areas. In Proceedings, Fourth International Congress for the Study of the Precolumbian Cultures of the Lesser Antilles. Archaeological and Historical Society, Castries, Saint Lucia. Kraft, J. C. and R. A. Thomas 1976. Early man at Holly Oak, Delawere. Science 192: 756–761. Kumar, G. 1996. Daraki-Chattan: a Palaeolithic cupule site in India. Rock Art Research 13(1): 38–46. Lage, M. C. M 1999. Dating of the prehistoric paintings in the Serra da Capivara National Park, Piauí, Brazil. In M. Strecker and P. Bahn (eds), Dating and the earliest known rock art, pp. 49–53. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Layton, T. N. 1976. Stalking elephants in Nevada. Western States Folklore Society 35(4): 250–257. Lyons, E. and L. Butt 2008. The dinosaur delusion. Apologetics Press, Montgomery, AL. Malotki, E. and H. D. Wallace 2011. Columbian mammoth petroglyphs from the San Juan River near Bluff, Utah, United States. Rock Art Research 28(2): 143–152. Malotki, E. and D. E. Weaver 2002. Stone chisel and yucca brush: Colorado Plateau rock art. Kiva Publishing, Walnut, CA. Marquette, J. 1855. Recit des voyages det des ecouvertes R. Père Jacques Marquette de la Compagnie de Jesus, en l’année 1673 et aux Suivantes; la continuation de ses voyages par le R.P. Claude Alloüez, le journal autographe du P. Marquette en 1674 & 1675. Weed, Parsons & Cie, Albany, NY. Mayor, A. and W. A. S. Sarjeant 2001. The folklore of footprints in stone: from classical antiquity to the present. Ichnos 8(2): 143–163. Mercer, H. C. 1895. The hill-caves of Yucatan. Lippincott, Philadelphia, PA. Messmacher, M. 1981. El arte paleolítico en México. In Arte paleolítico, pp. 82–110. Comisión 11, 10th UISPP Congress, Mexico City. Meurger, M. and C. Gagnon 1988. Lake monster traditions. A crosscultural analysis. Fortean Times, London, UK. Misra, S. and S. N. Rajaguru 1994. Comment on S. K. Acharyya and P. K. Basu, “Toba ash on the Indian subcontinent and its implications for the

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correlation of Late Pleistocene alluvium”. Quaternary Research 41: 396–397. Mountjoy, J. 1974. Some hypotheses regarding the petroglyphs of west Mexico. Mesoamerican Studies 9, University Museum, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale, IL. Mountjoy, J. 1987. Antiquity, interpretation, and stylistic evolution of petroglyphs in west Mexico. American Antiquity 52(1): 161–174. Nelson, V. 2011. Dire dragons. Untold Secrets of Planet Earth Publishing Company, Red Deer, Canada. Neves, W. A., A. G. M. Araújo, D. V. Bernardo, R. Kipnis and J. K. Feathers 2012. Rock art at the Pleistocene/Holocene boundary in eastern South America. PLoS ONE 7(2): e32228. Pappu, S., Y. Gunnell, K. Akhilesh, R. Braucher, M. Taieb, F. Demory and N. Thouveny 2011. Early Pleistocene presence of Acheulian hominins in south India. Science 331(6024): 1596–1599. Parenti, F. 1993. Le gisement préhistorique du pléistocène supérieur de Pedra Furada (Piauí, Brésil). Considérations chronostratigraphiques et implications paléoanthropologiques. Documents Laboratoire Géologique Lyon 125: 303–313. Parkman, E. B. 1992. Toward a Proto-Hokan ideology. In S. Goldsmith, S. Garvie, D. Selin and J. Smith (eds), Ancient images, ancient thought: the archaeology of ideology, pp. 365–370. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Chacmool Conference, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada. Parkman, E. B. 1994. Lungumari Puntilla: a cupule petroglyph occurrence on the south coast of Peru. American Indian Rock Art 20: 35–44. Pessis, A.-M. 1999. The chronology and evolution of the prehistoric rock paintings in the Serra da Capivara National Park, Piauí, Brazil. In M. Strecker and P. Bahn (eds), Dating and the earliest known rock art, pp. 41–48. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Pessis, A.-M. 2002. Do estudo das gravuras rupestres pré-históricas no Nordeste do Brasil. Revista Clio Arqueológica 15: 29–44. Peyrony, D. 1934. La Ferrassie. Moustérien, Périgordien, Aurignacien. Préhistoire 3: 1–92. Prous, A. 1999. Dating rock art in Brazil. In M. Strecker and P. Bahn (eds), Dating and the earliest known rock art, pp. 29–34. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Purdy, B. A., K. S. Jones, J. J. Mecholsky, G. Bourne, R. C. Hurlbert Jr, B. J. MacFadden, K. L. Church, M. W. Warren, T. F. Jorstad, D. J. Stanford, M. J. Wachowiak and R. J. Speakman 2011. Earliest art in the Americas: incised image of a proboscidean on a mineralized extinct

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animal bone from Vero Beach, Florida. Journal of Archaeological Science 38(11): 2908–2913. Querejazu L., R., D. Comacho and R. G. Bednarik 2015. The Kalatrancani petroglyph complex, central Bolivia. Rock Art Research 32(2): 219– 230. Rau, C. 1882. Observations on cup-shaped and other lapidarian sculptures in the Old World and in America. Contributions to North American Ethnology 5: 1–112. Read, M. C. and C. Whittlesey 1877. Antiquities of Ohio. Nevins and Myers, Columbus, OH. Robertson, T. 1999. Symbolic and notational expressions of central Texas Paleo-Indian culture: engraved artifacts of the Gault Site. McNair Research Journal 3: 123136. Roosevelt, A. C. 1999. Dating the rock art at Monte Alegre, Brazil. In M. Strecker and P. Bahn (eds), Dating and the earliest known rock art, pp. 3540. Oxbow Books, Oxford. Senter, P. 2012. More “dinosaur” and “pterosaur” rock art that isn’t. Palaeontologia Electronica 15(2): 22A, 14 p. Senter, P. and S. J. Cole 2011. “Dinosaur” petroglyphs at Kachina Bridge site, Natural Bridges National Monument, southeastern Utah: not dinosaurs after all. Palaeontologia Electronica 14(1): 2A, 5 p. Stone, D. 1972. Pre-Columbian man finds Central America. Peabody Museum Press, Cambridge, MA. Steinbring, J. 2013. A brief note on archaeological superposition at the Hensler Petroglyph Site (47DO461), Dodge County, Wisconsin, U.S.A. Rock Art Research 30(1): 118–120. Steinbring, J. 2016. A newly discovered projectile point image at the Hensler Petroglyph Site. Rock Art Research 33(1): 98–99. Strecker, M. 1983. Skeletonization in rock art of eastern Mexico. Bolletino del Centro Camuno di Studi Preistorici 20: 129–131. Swauger, J. L. 1974. The Barnesville Track Rocks Petroglyph Site, 33BL2. Pennsylvania Archaeologist 44(4): 29–41. Swift, D. L. 1997. Messages on stone. Ancient rock art challenges evolutionary theory. Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal 18(2): 20– 23. Tang H. 2012. New discovery of rock art and megalithic sites in the Central Plain of China. Rock Art Research 29(2): 157–170. Tang H., Jin A. and R. G. Bednarik 2016. The earliest logboats of China. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. Tang H. and Mei Y. 2008. A discussion on the date of prehistoric petroglyphs from the Jiangjunya site. Southeast Culture 202(2): 11–23.

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Taylor, J. 1999. Fossil facts and fantasies. Mt. Blanco Publishing Group, Crosbyton, TX. Taylor, P. S. 1987. The great dinosaur mystery and the Bible. Chariot Victor Publishing, Colorado Springs, CO. Thompson, B. 1993. Where have all the mammoths gone? Patina 2: 1–23. Tuohy, D. R. 1969. A “wounded elephant” and three other petroglpyhs in northern Washoe County, Nevada. Nevada Archaeological Survey Reporter 3(1): 9–12. Valentine, J. M. 1965. The discovery and possible significance of Xkukican, ancient Mayan site. Alabama Museum of Natural History, Report 1, Tuscaloosa, AL. Valle, R. B. M. 2017. Relatório técnico final. Projeto Pedra do Sol: contextualização arqueológica e datação relativa de gravuras rupestres na Amazônia Brasileira – Roraima. Ufopa, CNPQ, Iphan. Santarém, Pará, 62 pp. Ward, J. W. 1872. Sculptured rocks, Belmont County, Ohio. Journal of the Anthropological Institute New York 1: 57–66. Warner, J. S. and J. E. Warner 1995. Some unique horizontal sunrise and sunset markers in Black Dragon Canyon. Utah Rock Art 4: 92–101. Watchman, A. 1989. Comment on Nobbs and Dorn. Rock Art Research 6: 65–66. Watchman, A. 1992. Investigating the cation-ratio calibration curve: evidence from South Australia. Rock Art Research 9: 106–110. Whitley, D. S. 1996. Recent advances in petroglyph dating and their implications for the pre-Clovis occupation of North America. Proceedings of the Society of California Archaeology 9: 92–103. Whitley, D. S. 1999. A possible Pleistocene camelid petroglyph from the Mojave Desert, California. San Bernardino County Museum Association 46(3): 107–108. Whitley, D. S. 2009. Cave paintings and the human spirit: the origin of creativity and belief. Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY.

CHAPTER FOUR ASIA

The largest continent’s Pleistocene palaeoart will not be considered in chronological order, like that of Africa, because in most Asian regions there is considerably less dating available of the evidence. In this case we will therefore consider all relevant Pleistocene materials geographically, beginning in the continent’s north, in Siberia, followed by the remaining regions, essentially travelling around the continent clockwise: eastern Asia, southern Asia and south-western Asia.

1. Siberia Besides Israel, Siberia is the only region of Asia whose Pleistocene art has traditionally attracted a reasonable degree of attention, however limited. In central Siberia, in the Irkutsk region, Palaeolithic research commenced in 1871, i.e. within a few years after it had begun in Europe, and it has recorded portable palaeoart at over twenty sites so far. Where this material can be plausibly attributed to the Pleistocene, it seems to belong mostly to the second half of the Upper Palaeolithic. The best-known site is Mal’ta, excavated both before and after World War II (Gerasimov 1958) and then again in more recent years (Medvedev et al. 1996; Kuzmin et al. 2010; Lipnina 2012). Located on a left tributary of the Angara, the Belaya River, the site’s Palaeolithic layers are often described as being between 24 ka and 19 ka old, but the ages of the occupation deposits actually range from 43–41 ka to 12 ka BP (Medvedev et al. 1996; Boriskovski 1984: 358 reports a radiocarbon date of 14,750±120 years BP). Portable Pleistocene palaeoart finds have also been reported from the Irkutsk hospital site (Irkutskii gospital’), and from several further sites on the Angara river (Buret’, Krasnyi Yar, Ust’-Kova and Verkholenskaya Gora). They also occur at sites on the upper Yenisey river, of which the Angara is the major tributary (Afontova Gora II, Afontova Gora III, Maininskaya, Dvouglazka Cave, Tachtik, Kokorevo, Novosselovo and Atchinskaya); at two sites on the upper Ob river (Ust’-Kanskaya and Denisova Cave, the latter site having recently received much attention for

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its considerably earlier hominin; Krause et al. 2010); at two sites on the Upper Lena (Shishkino and Tal’ma); at two more south of Lake Baykal (Oshurkovo and Tolbaga); and at one site on the Irtysh River (ChernoOzer’e). There is also a single site on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, at the mouth of the Indigirka river (Berelekh, apparently the northernmost known Palaeolithic site in the world). Here the evidence from these sites is briefly summarised. Recently further anthropomorphous figurines have been reported from Listvenka, Krasnyi Yar, Shestakovo and Maiyna (Lbova and Volkov 2017). The perhaps best-known corpus of Pleistocene art from all of Asia consists of the 33 anthropomorphous sculptures from Mal’ta and Buret’, traditionally described as female figurines (Figures 18 and 19). By 2017, Mal’ta alone yielded over 30 anthropomorphs, 25 zoomorphic figurines, numerous pendants, various other objects with ornamentation, ivory and stone bracelets, perforated disks, beads, an ivory plaque bearing a “mammoth” engraving and nail-like pins (Lbova and Volkov 2017). In all, the Mal’ta collection comprises a total of over 850 bone and ivory artefacts at present. The predilection for the anthropomorphs expresses the Eurocentric preoccupation with the “Venus” figurines of western, central and eastern Europe, and commentators often consider them as part of a perceived Upper Palaeolithic tradition extending from the Pyrenees to Siberia. However, there are two problems with this popular notion. First, although the female figurines of Europe have given rise to numerous mutually exclusive explanations, they are rather more diverse than implied in much of the commentary (cf. Gvozdover 1989; Bednarik 1989, 1990a, 1996a; Duhard 1990; Gimbutas 1991; Dobres 1992; Russell 2006). Second, there is also considerable diversity among the Palaeolithic anthropomorphs from Siberia, in several respects, and as a group they are sufficiently different from the supposedly female figurines of France, central Europe and European Russia/Ukraine to prompt separate consideration (Bednarik 1990a). For instance, none of the Siberian specimens indicates abdominal enlargement and few offer clear enough evidence of gender to collectively define them as female. Breasts are often lacking, and a vulvar cleft is suggested only on one, Mal’ta No. 5. About 40% of them show some facial details, which are frequently lacking on the so-called “Venus” figurines of Europe, and many appear to be fully clothed in Siberia (Figure 20). Of the European examples, only one is perforated, while many of the generally smaller Siberian specimens still bear perforations on the lower end, or the same is broken off. Indeed, a large part of the Palaeolithic art of Siberia is perforated. For instance, this applies to 76.6% of the largest assemblage, that of Mal’ta—not counting those items that bear no

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perforation now, but may have been perforated in the past, or that have been attached to a string by other means, such as the distinctive notched beads from Buret’ and Mal’ta. Most Siberian anthropomorphous sculptures of the Pleistocene are made from mammoth ivory, the two exceptions being Buret’ No. 5, which is from pale-green steatite, and a clay figurine from Maininskaya. Most of the Siberian specimens have no “stylistic” counterparts in Europe, and they are also distinctly different from many of those in European Russia. Only the highly stylised Krasnyi Yar sculpture deserves a comparison with European finds, in that it seems to resemble the Magdalenian figurines and engravings of central and eastern Europe, which have been collectively defined as stylised female figures, including those from Ölknitz, Petersfels, Mauern, Nebra, Trasimeno, Gönnersdorf, Wandersleben, Mezin and Pekarna (see Bednarik 1990a for references and discussion).

Figure 18. Eight of the ivory objects from Mal’ta, near Irkutsk, Siberia, probably roughly 20,000 years old. The same applies to the other forms of portable art from the Siberian sites. The distinctive “flying bird” pendants (13 from Mal’ta, one from Buret’) have no counterparts at all in Pleistocene Europe, nor have the other three bird pendants, the five nail-like pins, and several further, apparently decorative items, particularly from Mal’ta (Figure 18). “Ornamental” objects, likely to have served as body adornment, clearly

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Figure 19. Numbers 3 (left) and 4 of the ivory figurines from Buret’, central Siberia, each seen from front and back; scale in cms. dominate the Siberian assemblages, making up >80%. There are numerous rods, spindles and possible hairpins, and other objects of jewellery such as headbands, bracelets, breast-ornaments, necklaces and pendants. Even most of the human figurines were probably pendants, interestingly designed to hang upside down, and evidence of them having been suspended by a string has been observed (Bednarik 1990a: 134–5). They differ significantly from those of European Russia and central/western Europe, most of which were too large to use as pendants, with one limestone specimen from Kostenki weighing several kilograms (Bednarik 1990a: Fig. 1f). In fact only one European specimen was meant to be suspended, as indicated by the location of its perforation. It is from Sireuil in France. The Buret’ site is located on the right bank of the Angara, near its tributary Belaya, and its occupation is at 14.8 ka ago apparently more recent than Mal’ta’s main use.

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Figure 20. Three small figurines from central Siberia: (a) Mal’ta No. 13; (b) Mal’ta No. 27 (both are of ivory); (c) Buret’ No. 5 (of steatite). Afontova Gora II (the occupation is perhaps 20.9 ka old), Krasnyi Yar, Buret’ and Mal’ta have yielded perforated disc beads, while perforated animal teeth occur at Verkholenskaya Gora and are especially numerous at Afontova Gora II. Decorative patterns of various types occur on many artefacts, including evenly spaced notches on edges. Incised engravings are comparatively rare, and when they do occur they are usually restricted to geometric arrangements, such as that on the large, centrally perforated Mal’ta ivory plaque (Figure 21), on the Oshurkovo pendant (Figure 22), an incised bone from the same site, two of the circular discs from Afontova Gora II, another circular disc from Afontova Gora III (engraved on both faces with radial patterns and circles; Figure 23), and four intricately decorated objects from Irkutskii gospital’. A distinctive feature are notches along edges, which are less common at the European Russian sites of the Upper Palaeolithic. The only unambiguous two-dimensional figurative art

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known from Pleistocene Asia are two Siberian depictions of “mammoths”. One of these is on a perforated ivory plaque from Mal’ta (Figure 24), the other on a juvenile mammoth tusk from Berelekh, the northernmost site (Figure 25). Although there is human occupation evidence of the final Pleistocene at the latter site, it should be noted that the mammoth survived to at least 4000 years BP in the wider region (at Wrangel Island, on the same latitude but 1100 km to the east; Vartanyan et al. 1993). Therefore mere depiction of the mammoth is not necessarily proof for Pleistocene age, nor is the use of mammoth ivory. However, the mammoth-like sculpture from Ust’-Kova, at the confluence of the Kova river and the Angara, is 23.9 ka old. It was found with bone beads, pendants of animal teeth and a geometric design (Vasilevski and Drozdov 1983). Mammoth ivory can also be found in various undoubted Holocene contexts of Siberia, at least until the Bronze Age, having presumably been salvaged from frozen carcasses or fossil remains (Bednarik 1993a). Three-dimensional iconography, however, occurs widely in Siberian mobiliary palaeoart of the final Pleistocene. One of the most significant finds is the sculpted animal head from Tolbaga. It is carved on a natural projection of a second vertebra of a woolly rhinoceros (Coelodonta antiquitatis). Microscopic examination of tool marks has shown how the head, thought to resemble that of a bear, has been carved with stone implements. Though produced with an economy of effort, the sculpture is sophisticated and of strikingly naturalistic appearance (Figure 26). Tolbaga is located on the right bank of the Khilok river and was excavated by Okladnikov in the 1970s. Two dates were secured from the site’s bones: 34,860±2100 BP and 27,210±300 BP. Abramova (1990) argues that the older of the two dates is the more likely to refer to the carved vertebra. That would make it one of the oldest known iconic sculptures in the world.

Figure 21. The centrally perforated ivory plaque from Mal’ta, engraved on both sides.

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Figure 22. The notched pendant from Oshurkovo, near Ulan-Ude, southern-central Siberia, engraved on both sides.

Figure 23. Both sides and section of engraved ivory disc from Afontova Gora III, western-central Siberia.

Figure 24. Presumed mammoth engraving on a perforated ivory plaque from Mal’ta, central Siberia.

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Figure 25. Presumed mammoth engraving on a mammoth tusk from Berelekh, Indigirka river in far-northern Siberia.

Figure 26. Presumed head of a bear carved on a woolly rhinoceros vertebra from Tolbaga, south of Lake Baikal, Siberia, probably about 35,000 years old.

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Turning next to rock art, a few rock paintings at the major petroglyph and pictogram site Shishkino and one motif at Tal’ma have often been described as being of the Upper Palaeolithic. Shishkino extends over almost 1 km along cliffs on the right bank of the Lena river downstream of Kaþug and features about 2730 recognisable motifs. Tal’ma is a small petroglyph site on a left tributary of the Lena, further north, and has been proposed to include the presumed figure of a rhinoceros. However, neither the published recording of this figure (Okladnikov 1977: Figs 56, 57) nor the quite different actual “pigment” traces on the rock at the Tal’ma main site resemble such an animal (Figure 27). Similarly, the supposedly equid and bovid animal paintings at Shishkino (Okladnikov 1959; Okladnikov and Saporoshskaya 1959) are almost certainly much younger than the end of the Upper Palaeolithic (Bednarik and Devlet 1992), and there is no indication that they depict species endemic to the Pleistocene (Figure 28). Both sites are fully exposed to the elements and their paintings should not be expected to be more than a few centuries old. Moreover, the fine sandstone weathers rapidly and most if not all petroglyphs in the region are clearly of Historic antiquity. The petroglyphs at both sites are exclusively of the Holocene and many were engraved with metal tools.

Figure 27. The petroglyph panel of the Tal’ma site, central Siberia, bearing also a presumed pictogram of a woolly rhinoceros. However, the hard to reach pigment patch does not resemble that animal and may even be natural discoloration.

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Figure 28. Zoomorphic pictograms at the large petroglyph site Shishkino on the Lena river, claimed to be of the Pleistocene. They are very recent, however. Even the Pleistocene age of the paintings in Kapova and Ignatiev Caves, on the European side of the Ural watershed and first questioned by Bednarik (1993a), is doubtful, not only because the basis of purported faunal depiction has been queried in Siberia, but also because Steelman et al. (2002) have provided three Holocene radiocarbon dates from Ignatievskaya. A supposed mammoth pictogram of charcoal pigment yielded a result of 7370±50 years BP, and two other charcoal motifs at 7920±60 BP and 6030±110 BP respectively support this dating. Several explanations are possible: the first image may not be of a mammoth, the dates may be erroneous, the depiction may have been inspired by a frozen carcass, or the mammoth survived in the Urals well into the Holocene.

2. Eastern Asia By far the oldest known palaeoart from eastern Asia is a recently discovered engraving among the material Eugene Dubois excavated at Trinil, Java, in the 1890s (Dubois 1894). During a recent reassessment an arrangement of engraved grooves was discovered on a freshwater mussel

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shell of Pseudodon vondembuschianus trinilensis Dubois 1908 from the site’s Hauptknochenschicht (Joordens et al. 2014). One third of a collection of at least 166 of these shells bears one or two artificial perforations at the location of the anterior adductor muscle, interpreted as having been made to assist in opening the live shells for consumption. Sediment retained in them has facilitated age estimation of the assemblage: 40 Ar/39Ar and luminescence dating suggest that it is roughly between 540 and 430 ka old. The engraved specimen bears various arrangements of linear grooves, including a zigzag pattern, on its outer surface (Figure 29). The patterns have been suggested to have been created with a shark tooth. At present this engraving is one of the earliest in the world.

Figure 29. Part of the engraved patterns on a Pseudodon freshwater mussel shell from Trinil in Java, Indonesia, approximately 500,000 years old. Some of the earliest possibly non-utilitarian evidence from eastern Asia has been provided by Zhoukoudian Site 1, south-west of Beijing, which has yielded about twenty clear quartz crystals, including a prism with all crystal facets intact (Pei 1931: 120). Lower Palaeolithic quartz crystals have also been reported from sites in South Africa, India, Israel

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and Austria (Bednarik 1992a, 1992b). Zhoukoudian Site 1 is part of a complex of twenty-six sites, and has also yielded the largest sample of Homo erectus remains (most of which disappeared in the Second World War) and very early but long controversial evidence of fire use. In view of the much earlier, clear-cut proof of controlled fire use in Wonderwerk Cave, South Africa (Beaumont 2011; Bednarik 2011: Figs 6.1, 6.2), there is no longer any need to question the Zhoukoudian evidence. Moreover, the limestone wall contiguous with the major hearth shows distinctive thermal cracking. Stone spheres have also been frequently found in the deposits containing the Homo erectus finds, but while they tend to be grapefruit sized elsewhere, for instance at Lantian (also in China), they appear to be somewhat smaller at Zhoukoudian Site 1, of around 6–8 cm diameter. Another Chinese find of quite early palaeoart comes from Xinglongdong Cave in the Three Gorges region (Gao et al. 2004). It refers to one of two excavated stegodon (Stegodon orientalis) tusks, which are from different animals but have apparently been deposited together. One has numerous markings near its tip, some of which appear to be deliberate because they are branching and were made with stone tools; others seem to be taphonomic. A human tooth and stone tools have been recovered from the same layer, dated to 120–150 ka by uranium-series analysis. Numerous Palaeolithic engravings on bone have been reported, especially from the Shiyu site, Shanxi Province. This large occupation site dates from the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic interface, comprising two major occupation horizons which seem typologically identical, and which date from about 32 and 28 ka BP respectively. One of about 600 marked bone objects from both horizons has been published as depicting an engraved hunting scene (You 1984), but none of the many specimens this author has examined has actually been engraved by human hand. The entire assemblage bears taphonomic (and thus natural) markings (Figure 30), which are basically of four types: tooth marks, clastic gouge marks, mycorrhizal root marks and abrasion marks. However, one item from the upper level at Shiyu is relevant here. It is one half of a broken stone disc that has been drilled through the centre (Figure 31) and was presumably used as an item of body adornment (Bednarik and You 1991). Very similar objects have been found at Siberian, Russian and Japanese sites of the Upper Palaeolithic.

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Figure 30. Taphonomic (natural) marks on a horse humerus fragment from the Shiyu site, central China, that have been interpreted as depicting two hunting scenes, c. 28,000 years old.

Figure 31. Three views of a drilled and fractured stone pendant from the Shiyu site. Shuidonggou Locality 1 in Lingwu County, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, was the first Palaeolithic occupation site to be discovered in China, in 1920. Although its final Pleistocene stratigraphy has yielded a series of contradictory OSL dates from the site’s Lower Culture unit, ranging from about 15.8 to 35.7 ka (Liu et al. 2009), U-Th dating of horse teeth points to an age of 34 to 38 ka (Chen et al. 1984). The only radiocarbon date from the horizon, from charcoal, is 36,200±140 years BP (Fei et al. 2012). Like the Shiyu site, the Shuidonggou lithic industry is transitional between Middle and Upper Palaeolithic typologies. Recently an engraved siliceous limestone fragment was discovered among remains excavated in 1980, bearing a set of eight distinct linear markings. The grooves on the 68 mm long stone (Figure 32) were studied microscopically and are judged to have been made with stone implements (Fei et al. 2012).

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As elsewhere in the region’s Palaeolithic occupation deposits, ostrich eggshell was also found in the site’s Lower Culture unit, including one bead made from this material. Disc beads made from ostrich eggshell occur also in the nearby Gobi desert as surface finds and are attributed to the final Palaeolithic industry exemplified at Shubarak-usu. One of the sites of the Zhoukoudian complex is the Upper Cave, a natural bridge containing two Upper Palaeolithic occupation deposits, dating roughly to 13 ka and 18 ka BP respectively. These have yielded numerous haematite lumps and over 120 perforated objects (Bednarik and You 1991). They include beads made of deer and fox teeth, shells, fish vertebrae, perforated pebbles and five polished tubular sections of bird bones on which parallel lines are engraved. Ochre has also been found around interred human skeletal remains in the Upper Cave, but wear facets or striations have not been noted on the pigment pebbles.

Figure 32. Two views of engraved stone and close-up of the markings, from Shuidonggou Locality 1, central China, probably about 36,000 years old. The only item of more intricate Pleistocene palaeoart so far found in China is an engraved antler fragment from Longgu Cave, Hebei Province (Bednarik and You 1991; Bednarik 1992c). It is extremely well made, bearing three distinctive geometric patterns that were infilled with red pigment. The object is 13,065±270 years old, according to a small sample from the actual specimen. Made from a 134 mm long fragment of Cervus elaphus canadiensis antler, the object has been carefully fashioned with stone tools to create the three separate designs (Figure 33). Particularly

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noteworthy is the occurrence of an elaborate guilloche pattern, which is most unusual but does occur in the exclusively geometric art of the Jarawas of the Andaman Islands (Bednarik and Sreenathan 2012). The complete stylistic isolation of this sophisticated object provides some inkling of how limited the understanding of Pleistocene palaeoart remains in Asia.

Figure 33. Three carefully engraved complex patterns and their rolled-off recording on a 13,000-year-old deer’s antler fragment from Longgu Cave, eastern China.

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Several claims to have identified extinct fauna in Chinese rock art (e.g. You 1984; Gai 1986: 415–424; Liu 1991; Chen 1991: 126; Li 1992), which would date the art to the Pleistocene — in one case even to the Tertiary — have been refuted (Wang 1984; Bednarik and Li 1991; Bednarik 1993a; Tang 1993). Nevertheless, as in India it seems likely that Pleistocene petroglyph traditions will be identified eventually. That possibility is reinforced by the microerosion dating of a cupule at the Jiangjunya site, Jiangsu Province, to approximately 11 ka BP (Tang and Mei 2008; Tang 2012). Cupules appear also in numerous Holocene contexts in China, for instance on dolmen, but there is a universal trend, in all continents, for the oldest petroglyphs being primarily cupules (Bednarik 2008). However, considerably more research is required before the presence of Pleistocene rock art in China can be clarified. For instance the pictograms of zoomorphs and supposed skiers in the rockshelter Dunde Bulake 1 in northern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are among the rock art in the Altay area that has been attributed to the Upper Palaeolithic (Figure 34). They are in reality of the late Holocene (Bednarik 2015a, 2015b; Taçon et al. 2016). Similarly, the claimed depiction of a rhinoceros at the Tayuan Rock Art Site, Xinlin District in Heilongjiang (far northeastern China) has been dated to less than 2000 years BP (Bednarik, work in progress). Numerous other Holocene rock art sites in the general regions of east-central Asia have been mistakenly attributed to the Pleistocene (e.g. Molodin and Cheremisin 1993, 1994; Novgorodova 1983; both refuted by Kubarev 1997; cf. Jasiewicz and Rozwadowski 2001), a malaise that exists right across Eurasia. For instance the claims concerning Khoid Tsenkher Cave in the Mongolian Altai, western Mongolia, seem without justification. Novgorodova (n.d.) based her view that animal paintings in that cave must be of the Upper Palaeolithic on that of A. P. Okladnikov, who has placed several north-Asian rock art sites in the Pleistocene without credible evidence (e.g. Okladnikov 1957, 1977). Of interest here is a recent report from Myanmar, of cupule panels in a limestone cave covered by stalagmites and other speleothems (Aung 2013). Although there is no indication of a Pleistocene antiquity, it is relevant that in India vertical panels of cupules can be of extremely great ages (see below). A claim for Pleistocene petroglyphs based on the perceived identification of depicted fauna, similar to those raised in China, has also been made in South Korea (Sohn Pow-Key 1981). The same author had previously reported portable art from the Korean Middle Palaeolithic (Sohn Pow-Key 1974) but both these reports have not been independently checked.

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Figure 34. Some of the pictograms in Dunde Bulake 1, Xinjiang Region, China, claimed to be Pleistocene, but less than 3000 years old. Although Japan is claimed to have been occupied by humans at least since the Penultimate Glaciation, Pleistocene art evidence remains extremely scarce in that country. The few available art objects are of stone. They consist of a perforated stone disc from the Debari site in Mie Prefecture (Bednarik 1994a), reminiscent of that from Shiyu, China; a polished triangular stone object from the Deguchi Kanezuka site in Chiba Prefecture (Okamura 1992); and the engraved pebbles from layer IX in the Kamikuroiwa rockshelter, Ehime Prefecture, which is of the Incipient Jomon period and has been dated to over 12,000 years BP (Aikens and Higuchi 1982). These kokeshi (a term referring to wooden Japanese dolls lacking arms and legs) are of natural pebbles with engravings that seem to represent breasts and skirts (Figure 35). The Jomon tradition produced the earliest decorated ceramic vessels in the world and is Mesolithic rather than Palaeolithic, but its early phase is of the Pleistocene.

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Figure 35. Engraved pebbles of the Incipient Jomon of Kamikuroiwa rockshelter, Japan, of the final Pleistocene.

3. Southern Asia As in China, the relevant finds begin with quartz crystals and haematite of the Lower Palaeolithic, here notably the Acheulian. Six small quartz crystals have been recovered at Singi Talav, Didwana region of the Thar Desert in Rajasthan, from the base of the Lower Acheulian deposit (Gaillard et al. 1983; d’Errico et al. 1989). Chronostratigrapically the horizon is thought to be in the order of 800 ka old (Gaillard 2006). The crystals measure from 7 to 25 mm in length, too small to have been used as tools, and they are almost entirely unmodified (Figure 36). Re-fitting them was impossible, and they differ so much in mineralogical purity that they are not assumed to have come from the same geode. Thus they have been brought to the site independently and were apparently collected for their visual qualities, as at several other Acheulian sites. Haematite pebbles occur frequently in Acheulian deposits of India (Paddayya 1982), and there is one small specimen from Hunsgi which bears a wear facet with distinctive but fully patinated striation marks, suggesting that it has been used as a crayon to colour or mark a rock surface (Bednarik 1990b). Again, such finds are frequent in the Lower Palaeolithic in other parts of the world, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.

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Figure 36. Small quartz crystals from Singi Talav, Rajasthan, India, which are manuports of the Lower Acheulian. Two petroglyphs excavated in Auditorium Cave, Bhimbetka Site III F24, Madhya Pradesh in the 1970s (Wakankar 1973, 1975) were discovered in 1990 (Bednarik 1992a, 1993b). Reconstruction of the stratigraphy showed that they had been covered by a substantial and well-consolidated, calcite-cemented Middle Palaeolithic deposit that virtually excluded the possibility of post-depositional disturbance, and by the uppermost part of the upper of two Acheulian layers. They consist of a large circular cupule and a meandering line running parallel to part of its periphery (Figure 37). Their stratigraphical position within the deposit suggests that they were made either in the Acheulian period (Bednarik 1993b, 1994b), or in the preceding occupation of the site by hominins using Mode 1-type cobble tools. A few metres from these buried petroglyphs occurs a large standing quartzite slab whose vertical face presents another nine cupules (Figure 38). The co-occurrence at the site of the two buried petroglyphs and the nine cupules above ground suggests that the latter were created at the same time, for the reasons stated in Bednarik (1996b): they are the only cupules found in the region. Moreover, a great antiquity of the above-ground petroglyphs was confirmed by microerosion analysis. The cave is formed by heavily-metamorphosed quartzite, a rock of such hardness that it was extensively quarried by Acheulian hominins at several Bhimbetka sites. This, together with their sheltered location inside a cave, is thought to have facilitated the survival of the Auditorium Cave petroglyphs since the Lower Palaeolithic.

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Figure 37. Two petroglyphs covered by Acheulian occupation deposit, Auditorium Cave, Bhimbetka rock art complex, central India. The proposition that the Auditorium petroglyphs are of Lower Palaeolithic age was most audacious at the time, but within a few years found itself well supported by a new discovery. In 1996, another central Indian occurrence of very early petroglyphs was reported, the quartzite cave Daraki-Chattan (Kumar 1996). Because apparently Middle Palaeolithic and Acheulian lithics occur on the surface of the cave’s floor deposit, it was suggested that the over 500 cupules on its two walls might also be of great age (Figure 39). The presence of extensive exfoliation scars at the cave’s entrance prompted excavations there, leading to the recovery of numerous exfoliated wall fragments found within the Lower Palaeolithic occupation deposit (Bednarik et al. 2005). These rock slabs bear a total of 28 further cupules, identical to those on the walls above. Also, two engraved grooves were found on a boulder excavated in the Lower Palaeolithic deposit, and one cupule was encountered in situ in the excavation. Stone tools exhibiting Lower Palaeolithic characteristics occurred both above and together with these slabs, in deposits that are considered undisturbed. Most importantly, hammerstones used in the production of the cupules were recovered well below the Acheulian occupation layer, from the basal deposit containing saprolithised Mode 1 chopping tools that was completely free of bifaces. There can be no reasonable doubt that the cupules, or at least some of them, were made by

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Figure 38. Four of the nine cupules occurring above ground in Auditorium Cave, but also thought to be of the Lower Palaeolithic. people of a Lower Palaeolithic tool typology dominated by choppers resembling those of the African Oldowan and several Indian sites, and predating the Acheulian. The Auditorium Cave Acheulian also overlies a Mode 1 occupation deposit, separated from it by a sterile laterisation layer, and as a result of the discovery of Daraki-Chattan’s stratigraphy it is now thought that the former cave’s petroglyphs are also related with the Mode 1 occupation.

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Figure 39. Some of the over 500 cupules in Daraki-Chattan, at least some of which have been demonstrated to be of a chopping tool industry found below Acheulian deposits; central India. Thus the confirmed Lower Palaeolithic petroglyphs of India consist currently of three linear motifs and about 550 cupules in two quartzite caves. These phenomena form the earliest known rock art of all continents, as so far no other such petroglyphs have been demonstrated to be of the same great antiquity, based on stone tool typology (Bednarik 2008). Proper dating is still to be secured, however. The earliest cupules of Africa are currently considered to be more recent (c. 400 ka; Beaumont and Bednarik 2015), while the earliest of Europe date from the Mousterian (Peyrony 1934). The Acheulian of India has provided further possibly relevant evidence, including two circular, discoid stone objects that seem to be non-utilitarian, one from Bhimbetka III F-24, the other from Maihar (Bednarik 1992a). The Upper Palaeolithic, too, has provided important remains in India, but it should be emphasised that at this stage, no rock art can safely be attributed to that period in India. The only known complex portable palaeoart from the Indian Upper Palaeolithic is an ostrich eggshell

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fragment from Patne that bears a geometric engraved design (Figure 40). It has been radiocarbon-dated to about 25 ka BP and the eggshell was fresh rather than fossil at the time it was engraved. The Upper Palaeolithic bone object from Lohanda Nala, described as a “mother goddess” or female figurine, is bracketed by radiocarbon dates to between 20 and 25 ka (Misra 1977). However, it has been shown that it is not a figurine, but a wellmade bone harpoon that has suffered extensive damage in its very coarse sediment matrix (Bednarik 1992a, 1993b). Of relevance are also Upper Palaeolithic shell beads from Patne and several perforated discs made from ostrich eggshell (from Bhimbetka and Patne), similar to such Upper Palaeolithic and later beads in other parts of the world (northern China, Mongolia, southern Siberia, Sahara and southern Africa). The fragment of a circular disc of ostrich eggshell with smoothed margin from Nagda has been suggested to be of the earliest Upper Palaeolithic. This object is >31 ka old and may thus be Middle Palaeolithic, because that period persisted to about 30 ka BP in India (Kumar et al. 1988). Finally, the occurrence of animal teeth with grooves to facilitate their attachment to a string has been reported from an Upper Palaeolithic horizon in one of the Kurnool Caves, Billa Surgam III (Bednarik 1993b).

Figure 40. Engraved ostrich eggshell fragment from Patne, western India, c. 25,000 years old. Numerous other claims for Upper Palaeolithic art in India have no credible support. For instance, the grooved patterns on forty-five further ostrich eggshell fragments from a series of six central Indian sites have

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been shown to be the result of a specific taphonomic process that affects also other mineralised calcareous substances of animal origin, and which has been described in detail (Bednarik 1992d, 1993c). Rock paintings once attributed to the Upper Palaeolithic are now generally considered to be Mesolithic. It is interesting to note that, despite the enormous wealth of apparently Mesolithic rock art in India, there are almost no portable art objects from that period. This tends to corroborate the model involving a massive taphonomic bias. We have been able to locate only six Mesolithic mobiliary art finds in India: the engraved chalcedony core from Chandravati (Sonawane 1991), an engraved human tooth, and four engraved bone fragments. A similarly distorted record also seems to apply to petroglyphs, especially in comparison to the considerable effort in India to record the much more spectacular rock paintings (Bednarik et al. 1991). In Afghanistan, two pre-Neolithic stone objects have been excavated at Aq Kupruk, but their dating appears uncertain. Marshack (1972), who has examined and reported them, suggests that they may be about 10 ka old, but there is no certainty of this. One object is an elongate pebble, c. 75 mm long, which bears an anthropomorphous face; the other is a rectangular small stone tablet, 70 mm long, clearly scored where it has been broken, bearing four series of regularly spaced notches on some of its edges. While the head-like sculpture seems to be without stylistic parallels, the type of decoration on the tablet can sometimes be found on late Palaeolithic objects, e.g. in Siberia and Russia. Another interesting find from Afghanistan is considerably older, consisting of a fossil shark tooth at Darra-i-kur, which has been reported to have been modified, belonging to a Levallois Mousterian (Dupree 1972: 79). It provides further evidence that hominins took an interest in fossils they found (Bednarik 1992b).

4. South-western Asia The known record of Pleistocene art and art-like objects from the Levant seems to mirror this general Asian situation: despite some extremely early clues of non-utilitarian behaviour or exogram production, there is a frustrating paucity of intermediate evidence, and the general impression one gains from the evidence is that it is extremely fragmentary, patchy and taphonomically distorted. There are several indications of very early technological and perhaps cognitive sophistication, including the fragment of a polished plank made from willow wood, between 240 and 730 ka old, the oldest known artefact of its kind (Belitzky et al. 1991). It comes from the Acheulian deposit of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, as do two bead-like crinoid fossils with natural central perforations, one of them clearly worn

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from having been on a string (Figure 41), and a number of very small, angular quartz crystals (Goren-Inbar et al. 1991). A scoria pebble with the natural shape of a female torso, head and arms has been found in the Late Acheulian layer of Berekhat Ram (Goren-Inbar 1986), which was sealed between two lava flows dated to 233 and 470 ka respectively (Feraud et al. 1983; Goren-Inbar 1985). Its shape has been emphasised by several deep grooves which the excavator judges to be artificial (Figure 42). The anthropic origin of the object’s many markings has been confirmed by two independent examinations (Marshack 1997; d’Errico and Nowell 2000). This is one of only two currently known proto-figurines of the Middle Pleistocene, the other being the Tan-Tan specimen from Morocco, of a similar or somewhat greater age (Figure 3).

Figure 41. Two crinoid fossil casts from the Acheulian of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov, Israel, used as beads, as indicated by the extensive wear on one specimen (after Goren-Inbar et al. 1991). However, the status of the one dozen limestone cobbles with cup marks from layer L2 in the Oldowan site of Hummal (Aïn al Fil), El Kowm oasis, central Syria, remains questionable (Le Tensorer et al. 2011). This is for the same reason as the pecked phonolite cobble from Floor FLK North 1 in Bed 1, Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, also of the Oldowan, is probably a percuteur, a utilitarian object resulting from the cracking of nuts such as those made by chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys (see page 44). The markings on the small cobbles from El Kowm, about 1.8 million years old, provide not adequate evidence of palaeoart production.

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Figure 42. Scoria pebble from the Late Acheulian deposit of Berekhat Ram, Israel, modified by several anthropogenic grooves and abraded areas. The use of ochre or haematite can be traced back only to the Mousterian in the Levant. For instance, such pigments are present throughout the Mousterian deposits of Qafzeh (Hovers et al. 2003) and Skhul Caves (d’Errico et al. 2010), Israel, and they include two pieces with burial 8 at the first site (Vandermeersch 1981). At Nahr Ibrahim, Lebanon, the remains of a fallow deer, apparently buried with ochre, have been reported from a Mousterian context (Solecki 1975). The incised bones recovered from Kebara Cave, Israel, are also of the Mousterian (Davis 1974), and Goren-Inbar (1990) has reported a chert artefact from the Mousterian of Quneitra, Israel, in which natural bedding markings have been deepened, apparently artificially. More indubitable is a Middle Palaeolithic Levallois-type core bearing numerous subparallel incisions on

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one face, from Qafzeh Cave (Hovers et al. 1997). The Mousterian artefact is 62 mm long, featuring over twenty grooves, and it is approximately 100 ka old (Figure 43). A range of other Middle Palaeolithic evidence from the Levant has been described as indicative of some symbolic function (e.g. Leroi-Gourhan 1975, 1989; Bar-Yosef 1989; Belfer-Cohen and Hovers 1992).

Figure 43. Mousterian Levallois core with a series of engraved lines on its cortical face, c. 100,000 years old, Qafzeh Cave, Israel (after Hovers et al. 1997). Some linear rock engravings in caves of Mount Carmel have been suggested to be possibly of Palaeolithic age (Ronen and Barton 1981), but the several portable decorated objects from the Upper Palaeolithic provide more reliable evidence, particularly in terms of their approximate age. Several items of interest come from the Aurignacian levels of Hayonim Cave, Israel, including a fragment of a bone object with five or six deeply carved parallel grooves across its width; some perforated animal teeth that

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may have served as pendants or beads; and a limestone slab which bears arrangements of engraved lines on both sides (Belfer-Cohen and BarYosef 1981), in which Bahn (1991) perceives a possible animal figure. More convincing is the limestone cobble from Urkan e-Rub, which is somewhat younger at c. 19–14 ka BP, and is attributed to the Epipalaeolithic (Hovers 1990). It is also engraved on both sides, bearing complex geometric compositions of arcuate and parallel lines which resemble the marking strategies of other early non-iconic art traditions (Figure 44).

Figure 44. Epipalaeolithic limestone cobble bearing extensive geometric engraved marks on both sides, from Urkan e-Rub, Israel. It is only with the Natufian, the Levantine final Pleistocene tradition (c. 12.8–10.3 ka BP), that decorated objects appear in large enough numbers to discern a distinctive “tradition”. The el-Wad Cave at Mt Carmel features prominently, with “art” finds first reported back in the 1920s, including figurines, beads, pendants and decorated sickle hafts. A bone sickle haft was carved in the shape of an animal head (Garrod and Bate 1937), there was a human head carved from calcite, and a few “phallic” objects made of flint nodules (Garrod and Bate 1937: Pls 12, 13). Other Natufian sites have yielded pestles of “phallic” shape (Belfer-Cohen 1991; Edwards 1991), including Kebara Cave (Turville-Petre 1932: 276), where in addition to several “phallic” objects an engraved limestone slab was also recovered. A calcite sculpture, apparently of a couple, has been claimed to come from the Early Natufian of Ain Sakhri Cave (Neuville

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1951), while a zoomorphic limestone figurine is from the Early Natufian of Wadi Hammeh 27 (Edwards 1991). Finally, a long bone decorated on both ends was recovered at Nahal Oren (Noy 1991: Fig. 5-1). One end of it has been shaped to resemble an animal head; the other bears a human face in profile. More recent excavations in the el-Wad Cave have provided several new Pleistocene palaeoart finds (Figure 45). This series includes five more objects made of chert nodules and a chert tool that seems to have been shaped into a zoomorphic form (Weinstein-Evron and Belfer-Cohen 1993). They all bear evidence of rubbing, pitting and incising, and some appear to be again phallic objects. These finds bear no more signs of modification than the Acheulian pebble from Berekhat Ram, but while their authenticity is readily accepted by archaeologists, that of the much older find has been controversial for some time.

Figure 45. Three of the Natufian modified chert nodules from el-Wad Cave, Israel (after Weinstein-Evron and Belfer Cohen 1993).

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5. Discussion This illuminates a fundamental issue in the epistemology of assessing preUpper Palaeolithic evidence suggestive of the use of symbolism. Palaeoart evidence of the Pleistocene is accepted primarily on the basis of age and on how well a find fits into the consensus model (see e.g. Rigaud 2006– 2007; Rigaud et al. 2009). This suggests that archaeologists believe that they already know what the cognitive capacities of Palaeolithic people were before they consider all the relevant and available evidence, and that they already know the full range of Pleistocene “symbolic” production. It is a near-universal aspect of the discipline (cf. Bednarik 1992b) that clashes with scientific perspectives of the cognitive evolution of hominins. The many incommensurabilities between the biosciences and archaeology render it inevitable that the minimalist explanations favoured by archaeology contradict the scientific perspective. They are illustrated by the archaeological perception of evolution as a teleological process, when in fact the sciences see it as a completely dysteleological development. According to Pleistocene archaeology of recent decades, hominins prior to 40 ka ago lacked symboling abilities and therefore probably had no language. This anachronism is neuroscientifically irrational and highly unlikely, given that all hominins and hominids are assumed to have possessed self-awareness, consciousness and theory of mind (Bednarik 2011). Homology suggests, for instance, that expressions of selfawareness such as body adornment (beads etc.) should be expected to have been used for one or two million years, yet most archaeologists reject all such finds up to the Upper Palaeolithic in Eurasia, and up to 80 ka ago in southern Africa (here in support of the “African Eve” model). This would imply that the millions of years of continuous encephalisation had limited cognitive effects on humans, which in view of its massive evolutionary cost, in obstetric demands (O’Connell et al. 1999) and its burden to society and to the breeding cycle (Joffe 1997; Falk 2009) is absurd (Bednarik 2011). Archaeology’s “big bang of consciousness” (Klein and Edgar 2002) is supposed to have occurred at the very same time as the significant reduction of brain volume commenced (Bednarik 2014). This “creative explosion” (Pfeiffer 1983; Mithen 1998) is perceived at the beginning of a hypothetical period called the Upper Palaeolithic, triggering a veritable quantum jump in cognitive and intellectual abilities. The myth attributing the advent of human modernity to the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic and the arrival of supposedly anatomically modern humans is contradicted by virtually millions of surviving exograms preceding these events, either chronologically or technologically. For instance all of Australia’s

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Pleistocene petroglyphs relate to Middle rather than Upper Palaeolithic technologies, and the world’s palaeoart exceeding 40 ka in age (Bednarik 1992b, 2003; Beaumont and Bednarik 2013) refutes both the “explosion” and the replacement hypothesis it is tied to. As indicated above there are numerous claims, from most parts of Asia, of rock art being of the Pleistocene, based inevitably on the reasoning that the fauna thought to be depicted is of the Pleistocene. Such contentions are commonly expressed not only in Siberia, as noted, but also in Mongolia, China, South Korea, several of the central Asian republics, occasionally in India, Pakistan, Iran and Azerbaijan. For instance it has been claimed that certain rock art in Arabia dates from the final Pleistocene (by a researcher who has never been there; Anati 1968), but studies of the extensive rock art of Saudi Arabia have provided no support so far. Direct dating places all examined Saudi petroglyphs in the Holocene, and the practice of applying the conditioned alien perception of the modern beholder to the perceived iconographies of the rock artists is a seriously flawed epistemology. Typically authors select from a complex image a few aspects that support their preferred interpretation, claiming them to be diagnostic while ignoring those that overwhelmingly contradict it, or demonstrate that the image as a whole is not naturalistic. Pareidolia is fundamental to the perception of palaeoart by the modern beholder and the process of autosuggestion involved in such “identifications” (Bednarik 2013). Such controversial iconographic pronouncements are not acceptable dating evidence. Direct or scientific age estimations of rock art are so far limited to three Asian countries, China (Qin et al. 1987; Woo 1991; Tang and Gao 2004; Tang and Mei 2008; Tang 2012; Taçon et al. 2012), Saudi Arabia (Bednarik and Khan 2002, 2005, 2009) and India (Bednarik and Kumar 2002; Bednarik et al. 2005; Taçon et al. 2013). All of them are limited to the Holocene, but one date from China, as mentioned, is about 11 ka. However, the presence of two Lower Palaeolithic cupule sites in India confirms that such exograms were produced in Asia since the Early Pleistocene, which begs the question where the other Ice Age rock art is to be found. There is no shortage of such petroglyphs from Australia, therefore it should have survived out of caves at least in the semi-arid to arid regions of Asia. The picture emerging from these considerations is that the known (and probably authentic) pan-Asian Pleistocene rock art and portable palaeoart suggests that the published examples, though quite numerous from some regions, overall represent a severely distorted sample. Not only has the surviving corpus no doubt experienced significant taphonomic reduction through differential preservation; the bias against finding such remains,

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recognising them and having them reported “effectively” are at least as significant. It is well illustrated by two of the above fortuitous key finds of specimens when long-excavated remains were recently reviewed: the Trinil and Shuidonggou specimens. The known sample reviewed here should therefore not be considered without an appreciation of the factors that have contributed to the distortion of this “archaeological record”. For instance, there is evidence from several Asian countries that local researchers, in trying to locate Pleistocene art, have been guided by western European models of what such material should be. It was perceived that western European Palaeolithic art is generally “naturalistic” (because of the distorted way it had been reported), and predominantly of large animals and of female humans. Specific “stylistic” elements of the Franco-Cantabrian iconic art that had been subjectively identified by western European researchers have guided Asian researchers in their quest to find Pleistocene art. By the same token, art that did not fit the European mould was ignored, or regarded as somehow “inferior”. These severe research biases have distorted the record at least as much as aspects of preservation. Another major factor has been the significant disparity in research intensity across the continent. It is obvious that the only two concentrations of Pleistocene palaeoart known in Asia are from the two geographical regions that have seen the most sustained research efforts: the Levant and the region near Irkutsk. This can hardly be a coincidence when it is considered that, in various parts of Asia, almost no Pleistocene research has ever been conducted. In countries such as China and India, early palaeoart clearly does exist, but the number of confirmed instances is incredibly minute, yet it includes the oldest currently known rock art in the world. These isolated, tantalising clues confirm that what we know of Asian Pleistocene art is extremely tenuous, isolated and no doubt unrepresentative. It is therefore inappropriate to attempt any form of synthesis on the basis of the available remnant sample, which provides certainly no adequate data for any distributional or compositional interpretation of the available evidence. Despite these significant reservations, which mirror those applying to Africa, some very tentative deductions will be attempted here, which seem possible especially if the sparse evidence is placed into a global context of archaic “art” systems (Bednarik 1994c). The most pervasive characteristic of the very limited Pleistocene palaeoart from Asia is the almost complete absence of two-dimensional (graphic) figurative depiction. This is not at all surprising, because the same situation pertains to eastern Europe and Africa: nearly all of the

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world’s known Pleistocene figurative graphic depictions are from western Europe, whereas the graphic Ice Age art of the rest of the world is almost entirely non-figurative, as far as we can tell (Bednarik 1993d). Even in western Europe, an estimated more than three-quarters of the graphic art is non-figurative, but there the figurative component has been overemphasised in most reports. Three-dimensional figurative art may have a much longer history, however. The animated Tolbaga animal head has its counterparts in the similarly sophisticated sculpted art of central Europe (southern Germany and Austria, between 40 and 30 ka old). The Berekhat Ram find may remain isolated, with only a single parallel from Africa, but there are a number of indications that the iconicity of natural shapes was recognised quite early, and that sculpture began by emphasising the iconic features of natural forms. These practices continued right to the end of the Pleistocene, as shown by the Natufian of the Levant. The extremely early petroglyphs of Bhimbetka have their counterparts in the cupules of one French Mousterian site and in several South African locations. Another notable consistency is suggested by the earliest forms of apparent nonutilitarian behaviour, especially the use of haematite and quartz crystals. Certainly the type of evidence found is the result of taphonomic biases, but these are also universal, and such finds occur in the Acheulian of Africa and Europe as well (Bednarik 1992b, 1994c, 2003). Similarly, in China, Japan and Russia, the earliest known art-like evidence includes artificially perforated flat pebbles, probably used as pendants, i.e. a taphonomically highly resistant class of object. Perhaps these observations do indicate some underlying patterns, even if they do not suffice to form a Eurasian synthesis of Pleistocene palaeoart development. Such patterns seem to indicate much more uniformity than more regional comparisons, or a superficial comparison between Asian and European Pleistocene evidence, might suggest. The impression one gains from the present review is that the general progression of “art” development across the Old World was relatively homogenous. In such a broadly based model it is also essential to consider the roles of the Americas and Australia (Bednarik 2010), because it is almost universally assumed that all three continents were initially settled from Asia. It is now almost certain that they were first peopled by hominins who possessed the capability of symbolic expression. There is a particularly well-preserved corpus of Pleistocene rock art in Australia, many times the size of that of Europe, which has also attracted almost no attention. Asia, therefore, not only occupies the geographically central position in hominin expansion, but perhaps also an important position in

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Pleistocene “art” development. The arrant neglect of Asian palaeoart until now has had a serious effect on all models of this development. Without exception, they can be safely regarded as irrelevant to a universal paradigm, as they are based on inadequate data for such a purpose. (A similar distortion is becoming evident in hominin genetics and evolution, where specific regions of Asia are probably of great importance but have until recently been neglected.) The effects of this distortion can be easily appreciated by considering the following parallel: most European Pleistocene archaeologists see bone harpoons as an invention of the people they call Magdalenians. This notion came into existence because there are very few much older specimens, but they do nevertheless exist, showing that this artefact has a long history: in Africa there are the examples from Katanda, Zaire (Brooks et al. 1995); the bone harpoon from Lohanda Nala, India (Bednarik 1995) has been mentioned; and there is the probably much older one from Solo River, Java (Narr 1966: 123). Ignoring these finds in the context of a study of early harpoons is like ignoring the massive evidence of extra-European Pleistocene palaeoart. It can only yield a hopelessly skewed view of the cultural development of hominins, and this chapter has tried to make a small contribution to correcting this state.

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CHAPTER FIVE AUSTRALIA

1. Introduction Pleistocene rock art is abundant in Australia, but has so far received only limited attention. Instead there has been a trend, begun over a century ago, to search for presumed depictions of extinct megafauna and the tracks of such species. All these notions have been discredited, however, and the current evidence suggests that figurative depiction was introduced only during the Holocene, never reaching Tasmania. Nevertheless, some Australian rock art has been attributed to the Pleistocene by direct dating methods, and its nature implies that a significant portion of the surviving corpus of rock art may also be of such age. In particular much of Australian cave art is of the Ice Age, or appears to be so, and any heavily weathered or patinated petroglyphs on particularly hard rocks in arid zones are good candidates for Pleistocene antiquity. On the other hand there is very limited evidence of mobiliary palaeoart of such age in Australia. It has for a long time been suspected that rock art of Pleistocene antiquity occurs in Australia, but for much of the 20th century, “conclusive proof” remained elusive. Herbert Basedow (1881–1933), a South Australian geologist and medical practitioner, who had also studied ethnology under Klaatsch prior to his return from Germany in 1910, presented the first cohesive arguments for this proposition. In commenting on the petroglyphs of the Yunta Springs (Olary district) and Red Gorge (Flinders Ranges) sites in South Australia, he noted that many are found in places where it would now be almost impossible to work, suggesting that major exfoliation of rock mass must have occurred since the designs were made (Basedow 1914). He also observed the presence of “many tumbled blocks of rocks ... bearing part of a design, the other portion of which remained in situ on the cliff above”. As a geologist he realised that the dark, rust-coloured patina he observed on many petroglyphs had to be of some considerable age. Being familiar with the fossil megafauna found at

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Lake Collabonna, he further speculated that a track petroglyph could represent the extinct Diprotodon (Figure 46).

Figure 46. Petroglyph proposed to depict Diprotodon track, and Basedow’s recording of it. The image is far too recent to be of that long extinct creature. Much later, archaeologists rightly rejected the last proposition, and argued that he had made the right deduction only “for the wrong reason”. In this they overlooked that Basedow, as a commensurate polymath, lacked their narrow vision and considered the totality of the evidence he perceived in a holistic framework. Most particularly, rock exfoliation or tectonic unloading effects are ongoing processes in geomorphology; they provide a relative chronological framework for a site. Ancient rock art can often be quite realistically slotted into such chronologies, and rough age estimates may well be more reliable than sophisticated dating attempts if they are based on a good grasp of the time-spans involved in geomorphological adjustments and the precipitation of accretionary mineral veneers. Anthropologist, archaeologist and entomologist Norman Tindale (1900–1993) later also visited Yunta Springs and speculated that images of large bird tracks at Pimba, a site near Woomera, could be indicative of megafauna. He considered a series of such tracks, each about 45 cm long, to be of Genyornis (Tindale 1951). Similarly, Edwards (1965: 229) proposed that large macropod tracks on Tiverton Station, also in South

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Australia, could represent those of Procoptodon. Most Australian megafauna had disappeared by around 20 ka ago, yet similar claims of depictions of extinct species have been made by several others since Basedow’s initial suggestion. Mountford (1929; Mountford and Edwards 1962, 1963) thought that a complex maze at the Panaramitee North site near Yunta depicts the head markings of a saltwater crocodile. That species has never existed in southern Australia, however, and Berndt (1987) subsequently secured an indigenous interpretation of the complex petroglyph, which in fact depicts a magic object (Figure 47). Mountford and Edwards (1962) also reported marine turtle and saltwater fish images from Panaramitee North and Yunta Springs, proposing that they must relate to a time when the sea was much closer to the area. They would have been referring to the retreating Eromanga Sea of the Late Cretaceous period (peaking about 115 million years ago) or the Early Eocene transgression (51 million years ago), as the three Early and Middle Miocene eustatic events of high mean sea levels (Haq et al. 1987; Miller et al. 1998) were not of adequate magnitude to be considered. The Mountford and Edwards proposition is therefore absurd, as humans have only been in Australia for up to 60 ka. More recently there have been suggestions of the depiction of extinct megafauna in Cape York Peninsula (Trezise 1993) and Arnhem Land (Murray and Chaloupka 1984). Further claims concerning Thylacoleo and Genyornis followed, but none of them stand up to any critical review (Bednarik 2013). While it is not possible to conclusively exclude the possibility that Pleistocene Australians depicted extinct fauna, the likelihood of this is remote, primarily because we lack any convincing evidence that figurative depiction was used at the time most megafauna still existed. As will be contended below, no iconographic (figurative) Australian rock art can be securely attributed to the Pleistocene, whereas there is a great wealth of non-iconic petroglyphs of that period. Moreover, it is fundamentally inappropriate to use Western perception to determine iconic meaning of Aboriginal imagery, and Macintosh (1952, 1977) has demonstrated, in the only “blind test” ever conducted on this topic, that such pareidolia-induced identifications are the result essentially of autosuggestion. The only extinct Australian animal species whose identification in rock art can reasonably be accepted, at least in a number of clear enough cases, is the Thylacine. Its imagery has been reported from the Pilbara and Arnhem Land. However, before these matters can be considered, several misapprehensions about the antiquity of Australian rock art need to be examined.

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Figure 47. (a) Petroglyph from Panaramitee North, supposed to depict a crocodile head, but in fact depicting a yarida magical object; with (b) Mountford’s recording of it.

2. Misconceptions Determining or estimating the antiquity of rock art is of fundamental importance to archaeology, because without any notion of its age, rock art cannot be linked to archaeology and is simply not an archaeological resource. Mere co-occurrence with archaeological evidence is irrelevant to this issue, so the only testable common variable to link rock art with archaeology is time. Unfortunately, age estimation of both petroglyphs and pictograms remains difficult and generally experimental, and overinterpretation or misinterpretation of scientific dating pronouncements is rife among archaeologists (Bednarik 1996, 2002a; Watchman 1999). This applies in all parts of the world where rock art occurs, and is frequently evident in Australia. In some cases, previous statements have been misunderstood or even completely inverted; in others the information was misquoted. For instance Maynard (1979: 93) has this to say about rock weathering and repatination:

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Trendall’s view [relating to dolerite from Depuch Island], that it takes one million years, seems a little extreme in these circumstances (1964: 88). In a similar situation in the Negev Desert, Iron Age engravings which are approximately 2,500 years old have not repatinated to match the surrounding rock (Edwards 1971: 361).

This brief comment is crucial to several geomorphological aspects, yet it contains so many errors that untangling them demands detailed explanation. To begin with, Maynard confuses or conflates two issues here: that of weathering front formation and that of patination rate. Trendall’s findings refer to his view of the depth of the weathering zone or “weathering rind”, which is the substrate that has been altered by weathering processes, such as hydration. His estimate was not only correct in terms of order of magnitude, it was even confirmed independently by the more precise work of ýernohouz and Solþ (1966), whose determinations match those of Trendall (see Bednarik 1979). Therefore his view is not “a little extreme”; Maynard has not understood it. Next she quotes Edwards’ citation of a statement originally by Anati, concerning the time taken by the patination of a petroglyph. Unfortunately, Edwards misunderstood Anati’s key statement, which was: In this region we know of no engraved surface from Style IV-B (Iron Age) to Style VII (recent) with a patination identical to that of the original rock surface. This seems to mean that in this area it took a minimum of 2,500 years to reach an “0” shade, the natural color of the patina on the surface of the rock (Anati 1963: 189).

Edwards misrendered this carefully crafted, precise wording by stating that no engravings have re-weathered to match the natural dark rock surface. As some of them are associated with the Iron Age, Anati believes it takes a minimum of 2500 years for a thin, initial surface patination to form in the region (Edwards 1971: 361).

These misunderstandings are in addition to a previous failed attempt by an archaeologist of interpreting Trendall’s very clear data (Crawford 1964: 50; see Bednarik 1979: 22 for correction), and they have led to further misguided views and discussions, such as a debate concerning the effects of groove depth (or, more precisely, distance between groove bottom and weathering front) on patination rates (see Bednarik 2007: 223). The level of understanding Australian archaeologists have applied to many scientific issues concerning rock art has limited their ability to

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interpret rock art. Several have incorrectly claimed that Dragovich (1984a, 1984b, 1986) has dated rock art at Eight Mile Creek, near Sturts Meadows, western New South Wales (e.g. Lourandos 1997: 121). Dragovich clearly states that her samples were from rock that was not engraved (Dragovich 1984a: 53). Another example is provided by Loy et al.’s (1990) AMS carbon isotope results from what they claimed was blood haemoglobin at two sites, Judd’s Cavern in Tasmania and Laurie Creek in Northern Territory. However, the principal analyst of that team, Earle Nelson, reported having second thoughts about these results and reviewed the Laurie Creek evidence. He found that the reported pigment layer was in fact naturally precipitated iron oxide, and that its organic content comprised no proteinaceous matter, i.e. no blood residue (Nelson 1993). Although Loy (1994) continued to claim that mammalian IgG was present at the sampling site, his view has been refuted by Gillespie’s (1997) subsequent research (see also Tuross and Barnes 1996). Loy’s insistence that there was organic matter present is a meaningless factor, because practically all rock substrates contain natural organic compounds (Bednarik 1979). This questions also the credibility of Loy et al.’s (1990) dating of a pictogram in Judd’s Cavern to the final Pleistocene: unless it derives from a specific and identified organic component in the paint residue, it needs to be regarded as a random figure. The same issue of the ubiquity of organics in rock surface deposits also led to the many mistaken rock art datings by Dorn, in Australia and elsewhere (Dorn 1983, 1986, 1990, 1992, 1994; Dorn et al. 1992; Dorn and Whitley 1984; Nobbs and Dorn 1988). Dorn sought to estimate petroglyph ages by analysing rock varnishes covering the rock art. He reasoned that weathering should remove the more soluble cations in the varnish more readily than the less soluble. In comparing the cations Ca and K with the supposedly more erosion-resistant Ti, Dorn tried to demonstrate that their ratio was a consistent function of time. To do this he had to calibrate the assumed change, for which he used the bulk carbon isotope ratios of similar varnish close to the sampling site. Although Bednarik (1979) had already demonstrated that the carbon system of ferromanganous mineral accretions was open to continued exchange of carbon, and that carbon seems to occur in all rock substrates, Dorn claimed for many years to obtain consistently credible age estimations from numerous sites. His sampling of petroglyphs in the Olary district of South Australia yielded spectacular results at several sites, ranging up to about 45 ka (Dorn et al. 1992). However, an attempt to duplicate his results, using the same analytical methods on the same sites and motifs, produced entirely different results (Watchman 1992a). This eventually led to the

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retraction by Dorn of all his results after a “change of perception” (Dorn 1996a, 1996b, 1997; see also Beck et al. 1998). Morwood attempted to provide a maximum age for the petroglyphs on a boulder he excavated in Ken’s Cave, Queensland, but his illustration of the stratigraphy (Morwood 1981: Fig. 7) shows that he misinterpreted the section. ANU-2118 is not as he assumes a maximum age for the deposition of the boulder, it offers in fact a minimum date for that event. Clarke (1978) attributed rock varnish covering many petroglyphs of the Dampier Archipelago to the Last Glacial Maximum, speculating that some might be over 17 ka old. His view was echoed by Lorblanchet (1992), who constructed an elaborate chronology extending more than 18 ka. It was based on a single, questionable carbon isotope analysis of a surface seashell, which has no demonstrable relevance to the rock art. Both Clarke’s and Lorblanchet’s views are probably false, as there is no clear evidence of a Pleistocene component in the Dampier rock art. Most of it almost certainly relates to the present sea level and there is no occupation evidence older than 7 ka BP known in the archipelago (Bednarik 2007). Based on their patination, most Dampier petroglyphs are under 4 ka old (Bednarik 2002b, 2009: Fig. 9). Nevertheless, recently Mulvaney (2010) has revived the notion of Pleistocene rock art at Dampier, but again without presenting scientific data to support it. For instance, the presumed depiction of Thylacines provides no support; the species survived in Western Australia until at least until 3 ka ago. Several other sensational claims concerning the age of Australian rock art have had to be rejected, such as those concerning the Jinmium petroglyph site in Northern Territory, in respect of both occupation and rock art (Fullagar et al. 1996). The early occupation proposal, of 176 ka, was three times the accepted range of the duration of human presence in Australia, and the petroglyphs were proposed to be 58 to 75 ka old (Figure 48). They are in fact of the Holocene, as is the entire sediment of the site (Roberts et al. 1998; cf. Rothwell 1996; Gibbons 1997). Another example of misconceptions concerns the Gwion pictogram tradition of the Kimberley (formerly called “Bradshaw” tradition). Watchman et al. (1997) produced preliminary data for radiocarbon contents of five paintings that suggested a mid- to late-Holocene age range of these spectacular rock painting traditions (range c. 1400–4000 years BP). Roberts et al. (1997) applied a very different approach, extracting samples of quartz grains from the mud that had been used by mud-daubing wasps to superimpose a nest over a pictogram. An age of 23.8±2.4 ka BP was proposed for the base of one wasp nest, but as Aubert (2012) shows, only its much younger surface layer conceals the paint residues. Its palaeodose

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is only 7% of that of the nest’s earliest layer, suggesting that the age of the pictogram is within the range Watchman et al. (1997) proposed. The reasons for this discrepancy are examined in Bednarik (2014a).

Figure 48. The cupules of Jinmium, Northern Territory, claimed to be older than the accepted first human presence in Australia, but in fact of the late Holocene. Also from the Kimberley is the report of an exfoliated rock fragment from Tangalma (the correct name of Carpenter’s Gap Rockshelter 1), which is said to be covered with ochre and comes from spit 47, thought to be about 40 ka old (O’Connor 1995). That would make it one of the earliest known applications of ochre on rock, but the anthropogenic origin of the mineral coating has not been demonstrated (Bednarik 2000). One of the most common misconceptions in Australian rock art research is the pareidolic perception of extinct Pleistocene species and genera. Practically all the better-known possibilities have been exhausted in a series of proposals, which all have three things in common: they are implausible; no credible supportive evidence is ever presented; and the rock art in question postdates the demise of the species supposedly depicted (see Bednarik 2013 for a review). Portable palaeoart of the Pleistocene does occur in Australia, but remains relatively neglected, which in part seems to be attributable to its

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often highly sacred roles. There has been a research focus on the postulated “engraved” limestone plaques from Devil’s Lair (Dortch 1976, 1984), described as such in numerous publications. Eventually the entire series of six stone slabs was microscopically examined and it was shown to bear taphonomic markings of several types: animal scratches, micropitting, exfoliation, kinetic incisions by quartz grains caused by trampling, and fine markings caused by toothbrushes when the specimens were cleaned (Bednarik 1998). A similar object has been reported from Koonalda Cave (Gallus 1971: 115), which has also been identified as bearing typical animal claw marks (Bednarik 1991). The error of identifying animal scratches as anthropogenic incisions has occurred numerous times in Australian archaeology, and an early historical example has only come to light recently. Archaeological method is not able to determine the age of rock art, but in some cases has provided minimum datings. The first such result from Australia came from Ngaut Ngaut (Devon Downs on the lower Murray River), where Hale and Tindale (1930: 208–211) distinguished three types of petroglyphs. They attributed the earliest, “type A”, to a technocomplex they called the “Mudukian”, which was later dated to around 3000 BP (Roberts et al. 2014). However, their type A markings consist of densely arranged, randomly orientated shallow grooves, which on close examination are not humanly made, but are claw markings of climbing possums.

3. Pleistocene petroglyphs A first valid minimum dating of Australian rock art was secured by Mulvaney (1975: 185) when he dated the sediment containing petroglyph fragments at Ingaladdi in Queensland via radiocarbon to 4920±100 BP (ANU-58) and 6800±270 BP (ANU-60) respectively. Although the fragments were described as weathered, exfoliated sandstone clasts tend to weather below ground, but it is unlikely that the petroglyphs had been executed on rock already eroding at the time. Therefore these mid- to early Holocene dates could reasonably infer final Pleistocene ages of the rock art. However, the first credible evidence for a Pleistocene age of Australian rock art was yielded by Koonalda Cave in South Australia (Gallus 1968, 1971, 1986). There is no direct dating available from the extensive finger flutings in this large cave, but its occupation, mainly for the purpose of chalcedony and chert mining, appears to be limited to the period from about 31 ka to 15 ka. Subsidence of the entrance sinkhole’s floor has rendered human access so difficult that there may have been no human presence in the cave during the Holocene. The one date from

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Koonalda that can be related directly to the finger flutings (there are also a few engravings in the cave) is V-92, around 20 ka BP, which must postdate the cave art by a very considerable margin: it was collected from the surface of the rock fall, but the flutings extend several meters below it.

Figure 49. Finger flutings in Koonalda Cave, Nullarbor Plain, probably between 15,000 and 31,000 years old. Finger flutings are made with fingers drawn over a soft white speleothem (reprecipitated carbonate), called moonmilk, which may subsequently harden and thus remain preserved (Figure 49). These markings range from simple sets to very complex arrangements forming patterned compositions measuring many square meters. Since the work in Koonalda Cave their Pleistocene age has been demonstrated in several other Australian caves. The first “direct dating” of rock art was attempted in 1980 in a site near Mount Gambier in South Australia, Malangine Cave (Bednarik 1984, 1995, 1999). The extensive decoration in this limestone cave comprises three widely separated cave art traditions, the earliest being finger flutings. Superimposed over them are deeply carved petroglyphs of a specific range of geometric motifs. In the entrance-near part of the cave, these became concealed by a laminar sheet of calcite speleothem of around 15 mm thickness. The site’s third tradition, of shallow incisions, was placed on the surface of this ceiling deposit, thus postdating the cessation of the precipitate’s build-up. A radiocarbon date

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Figure 50. Schematic depiction of the dating evidence from Malangine Cave, South Australia (after Bednarik 1984).

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extracted from the deposit of 5550±55 years BP (Hv-10241) was contradicted by a uranium-series date of 28,000±2000 years BP, taken from the same accretion. While carbon rejuvenation is to be expected in such speleothems, the implied magnitude came as a surprise and the issue of the true age remains unresolved. Be that as it may, the deeply executed petroglyphs are almost certainly of the Pleistocene, and the much earlier finger flutings are so undoubtedly (Figure 50). The cave art sites of Australia (Bednarik 1990), currently numbering fifty, provide more evidence of the Pleistocene antiquity of much of their palaeoart. The early Holocene occupation deposit in Orchestra Shell Cave (Hallam 1971) rests on a subsided floor that postdates the finger flutings in that cave, which are therefore most probably Pleistocene. Similarly, in Koongine Cave, next to Malangine, Frankel (1986) has shown that the massive ceiling collapse in the cave is of the Pleistocene, and Bednarik (1989) has demonstrated that the extensive surviving cave art precedes that rock fall. The cave art in New Guinea II Cave in Victoria appears to relate to the site’s Final Pleistocene occupation, although here the evidence is not as clear-cut (Ossa et al. 1995). Of particularly great age are the complex finger flutings in Yaranda Cave, which precede claw markings attributed to Thylacoleo (Bednarik 2010). That genus is thought to have become extinct about 46 ka ago (Roberts et al. 2001; Rule et al. 2012), and if this is correct the rock art is among the oldest known in the world, possibly dating from the earliest phase of human presence in Australia. It needs to be cautioned, however, that not all Australian cave art is of the Pleistocene; for instance the finger flutings in Prung-kart Cave are of the late Holocene (Bednarik 1999), and the most recent of the three traditions in Malangine Cave also appears to be Holocene. The attribution of Malangine Cave petroglyphs to the Pleistocene coincided roughly with Rosenfeld’s (1981) minimum dating of some of the similar rock art in Early Man Shelter in Cape York Peninsula. Her work resulted in one of the twenty-three known archaeological minimum datings in the world when she excavated this sandstone shelter and determined that some of the rock art must predate 13 ka to 15 ka. This result has been queried by Cole and Watchman (2005) but the established cave art sequence in the south of the continent tends to support it in general terms. Another factor of relevance is the extreme similarity between the deep petroglyphs in the Mount Gambier caves, called the Karake tradition after Karake Cave, and the petroglyphs at many Tasmanian sites, especially Preminghana (formerly called Mt Cameron West). The age of the curvilinear maze designs at that site remains unknown, although it is thought to have been covered by sediment about

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1500 years ago, but if this very distinctive tradition was introduced from the mainland, this must have been in the Pleistocene: Tasmania was sundered from the mainland perhaps 12 ka ago by the rising sea level. It is certainly striking that Tasmanian rock art generally resembles mainland rock art that is thought to be of the Pleistocene, which is reinforced by the observation that all Tasmanian stone tools, like those of Pleistocene mainland Australia, are of Mode 3 technology (called Middle Palaeolithic in Eurasia and northern Africa). Therefore the hypothesis that Tasmanian culture reflected the refugium of the island derives considerable support from its rock art, while at the same time providing insights into the probable nature of Pleistocene palaeoart on the Australian mainland. The quintessential characteristics of the curvilinear, cupule and CLM (convergent lines motif) tradition is fairly readily identifiable. This principle is of considerable help in spotting mainland petroglyphs that could potentially be of the Pleistocene or early Holocene, and predate the introduction of the small tools traditions and the dingo in midHolocene times. Care is required, however, because the conservatism of Aboriginal culture has facilitated the preservation of formal and stylistic elements over immense time spans, and their reuse and adaptation is evident throughout the Holocene, right up to the present. The following example shows this most aptly. Microerosion analysis, which is one of the most reliable methods of estimating the antiquity of petroglyphs directly (rather than indirectly), remained long unavailable in Australia because of the endemic dearth of monuments, structures, inscriptions and glacial striae of historically known ages that are required for calibration. But in 2000 a large series of engraved dates at a rock art site in the eastern Pilbara, a semiarid region of north-western Australia, was analysed and a calibration curve obtained. This enabled age estimation of the hundreds of thousands of petroglyphs in the region, and seven petroglyphs were selected randomly at three nearby sites. One of them was chosen by a senior Traditional Custodian, Monty Hale, who stated that he knew it was “very old” and what the arrangement actually means (Figure 51). Consisting of a curvilinear maze it was found to be E19,376+7219/-3419 years old (Bednarik 2002b). Therefore either the meaning of the petroglyph (which cannot be disclosed here as it is sacred-secret) was transmitted for around 20 ka, or the ancient motif has been re-interpreted by more recent societies. Be that as it may, the formal tradition has been maintained for all of this time, and similar petroglyphs were still made in the 20th century (Mountford 1976). A second motif, a small circle within a few metres of this motif, is even older: E26,753+11,545/-3349 years BP,

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and other nearby petroglyphs were considered older again, although they were not analysed.

Figure 51. Traditional Custodian Monty Hale with curvilinear maze in the eastern Pilbara of north-western Australia that is about 20,000 years old. Since these results were published, Cole and Watchman (2005) have reported Pleistocene radiocarbon dates from oxalate accretions in two sites in Cape York Peninsula, Possum B and Sandy Creek Shelter 1. These provide minimum ages of up to about 25 ka for cupules and curvilinear maze petroglyphs, broadly confirming determinations elsewhere in Australia for these Pleistocene petroglyphs. Finally, microerosion analysis of a circle petroglyph at Sacred Canyon in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia yielded an age of roughly 6400 years BP (Figure 52). This places the adjacent, very complex curvilinear mazes, which are several times as old, soundly in the Pleistocene (Bednarik 2010).

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Figure 52. The lower and uppermost petroglyphs are of the Pleistocene; those on the shaded exfoliation surface in the middle are of the early Holocene. Sacred Canyon, Flinders Ranges, South Australia.

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4. Pictograms and portable palaeoart Haematite fragments bearing striations and ground facets occasioned by human modification occur in abundance practically from the time Australia is believed to have been first colonised (Jones 1985; Roberts et al. 1990, 1993; Thorne et al. 1999). Whether the red powder was used to paint bodies, artefacts or rocks, the resultant exograms (Bednarik 2014b) are forms of palaeoart, most of which can be safely assumed to exist no longer. Indeed, there is very limited sound evidence anywhere that rock paintings of the Pleistocene survived out of caves. Nevertheless, Watchman has shown that paint residues have endured within silica and oxalate accretions, even in mineral skins lacking any surface indication of pigment (Watchman 1992b). Stratified oxalate deposits containing within them pigment yielded carbon dates of up to about 24,600 years BP from Sandy Creek in Cape York Peninsula (Watchman 1993). Another site in northern Queensland, Walkunder Arch Cave, provided a sequence of ten carbon dates from a series of laminae measuring only 2.11 mm thickness, but containing three strata of paint residue (Watchman and Hatte 1996; Watchman 2000). The dates placed two of the three painting events firmly in the Pleistocene, and the third at the Pleistocene-Holocene interface. While the nature of these pictogram motifs is unknown, the evidence shows that paintings were produced in Australia for tens of millennia. The first application of radiocarbon analysis of Australian rock paintings targeted charcoal pigments at Gnatalia Creek and Waterfall Cave in New South Wales (McDonald et al. 1990). It resulted in controversial results at the first site, where a large lattice design was sampled repeatedly, and two samples yielded significantly different results although they were collected only about 10 cm apart and from the same motif. One result was 6085±60 years BP (AA-5850), the other 29,795±420 years BP (AA-5851). Both are at odds with the view that the region’s rock art is mostly under 2000 to 3000 years old, and obviously they are at considerable odds with each other. Even less credible are the claims concerning purported pictograms at Laurie Creek and Tangalma, or the painting in Judd’s Cavern, as described above. Portable palaeoart objects from Australia have remained relatively neglected, and as noted above, the “engraved plaques” from Devils Lair and Koonalda Cave have been found to bear only taphonomic markings. However, Devils Lair has also provided palaeoart objects, in the form of three bone beads, a perforated marl pendant with microscopic wear from the supporting string, and a perforated sliver of a bird bone (Dortch 1984;

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Figure 53. Two views of a cylcon from western New South Wales. Bednarik 1997). Mandu Mandu Creek Rockshelter on the Northwest Cape in Western Australia has yielded twenty-two perforated Conus shells, thought to have been used as beads, from a sediment believed to be approximately 32 ka old (Morse 1993).

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Of interest are also the cylcons of the central eastern region of Australia, particularly the Darling River basin (Ethridge 1916; Black 1942). These “cylindrical-conical” stones can be up to a metre long, although most are considerably smaller (Figure 53). Around one half of them are decorated with geometric linear motifs and there is little reliable ethnographic information about them. Several dissimilar uses have been proposed and it is widely believed that they derive from Pleistocene traditions (McCarthy 1967: 63–64) and had magico-religious functions, but later acquired different roles in society. Preferably made from argillaceous sandstone, but also found on basalt, slate phyllites and quartzite, they were also made from fired clay, just as the tjuringa (also tjurunga, churinga, atywerrenge) may be made of stone or wood. The latter’s function is better understood: those of stone are believed to have been made by the original ancestors themselves; both types can externalise totemic ancestors, among other entities, and are extremely sacred. They are therefore not discussed or depicted here. In contrast to cylcons, tjuringa are relatively recent phenomena.

5. Discussion It is evident from the dating of the eastern Pilbara petroglyphs mentioned above that two of seven randomly chosen petroglyphs in one location date from the Pleistocene, and it has been estimated that in the order of 10% of all surviving Australian petroglyphs may be of that period (Bednarik 2010). This is on the basis of the weathering resistance of the support rock, its patination, degree of weathering, and the formal characteristics of the motif. Pleistocene petroglyphs in Australia appear to be exclusively nonfigurative and of a quite specific motif range, dominated by a great number of variations of circles and circular patterns or mazes, CLMs with from two to five “toes”, and the ubiquitous cupules, supplemented by parallel grooves and similar archaic forms. Where such motifs are found on granite, quartzite or similarly hard rocks, are heavily weathered or patinated, and occur in arid environments, they are prime candidates for Pleistocene antiquity. Where they are found in deep caves such age is highly likely. Bearing in mind that there are estimated to be more than 10 million petroglyphs in Australia, a few fundamental predictions can be made: 1. The number of Pleistocene rock art motifs of Australia massively exceeds that of Europe (40-ka-old Spitzinian occupation: three polar fox canines, three perforated gastropod shells, four belemnite fragments and three stone objects; all probably the work of Robusts. Another class of exogram of the European Mousterian comprises several circular objects, such as a shaped circular limestone disc from La Quina, France (Henri-Martin 1947). A particularly complex example is the partially translucent fossil nummulite excavated in Tata, Hungary (Vertés 1964). It is decorated by two lines forming a symmetrical cross. Marshack

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has shown that the cross visible on both sides of the fossil consists of one natural fracture and engraved lines on each face at right angle to the fracture. From the same deposit comes the finely polished and bevelled, elongate plaque made from a lamella of a mammoth molar mentioned above (Vertés 1964; Marshack 1976) (Figure 59). Of considerable interest is the circular sandstone pebble with central groove and two cupules from the Mousterian of Axlor, Spain (Barandiarín 1980). It brings to mind the much earlier cupules in Africa and Asia, and those at La Ferrassie (see below).

Figure 59. Both views of a polished and bevelled lamella of a mammoth molar, formerly coated in ochre, from the Mousterian deposit of Tata, Hungary. The Middle Palaeolithic of Europe has also produced numerous portable engraved objects. Three bone fragments found with Micoquian stone tools in the Kiesgrube Oldisleben 1, Artern County, Thuringia, Germany, are of particular interest. On one scapula fragment appears an arrangement resembling a human stick figure. If that is what it indeed depicts it would represent the oldest known figurative depiction in the world (Figure 60). Another bears two sets of sub-parallel incisions totalling 21 grooves, suggestive of the same marking strategy as evident

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on one of the Bilzingsleben artefacts found only 10 km away, but significantly older (Bednarik 2006a). The third bears eight parallel lines, made very deliberately by repeated tool applications. Also of the Micoquian are three engraved items found in Prolom 2 Cave, Crimean peninsula, featuring sets of convergent lines (Stepanchuk 1993; Bednarik 1995a). One is a modified first phalanx of Saiga tatarica bearing seven lines, another a triangularly shaped bone splinter bearing two lines, while the third is a horse canine decorated with four deep grooves.

Figure 60. Apparently iconographic engraving on bone, from Oldisleben 1, near Halle, Germany, from a Micoquian context of the last Interglacial. Further specimens from German sites have not been attributed to a particular tool industry, but are likely to be Middle Palaeolithic. The bone

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artefact with a series of cuts from Taubach near Weimar is of the Eem Interglacial (Moog 1939; Müller-Beck 1981; Kuckenburg 1997). A fragment of a mammoth tusk with a set of well over 20 short, obliquely cut notches from Wyhlen near Lörrach is Rissian (Moog 1939) but has disappeared at the end of World War 2, and may even be from a Lower Palaeolithic context. Several French engraved or notched specimens are of the Mousterian. They include eight apparently intentionally notched bone fragments from the Mousterian of Abri Suard, Le Chaise-de-Vouthon, Charente (Duport 1960; Debénath and Duport 1971; Crémades 1996) and other objects from Petit Puymoyen and Montgaudier listed by Débenath and Duport (1971). Then there is the bovid right mandible with nine regularly spaced engraved lines, crossed by another six lines of different length, from the upper of two Mousterian occupation layers in Peyrere 1 Cave, also called Noisetier Cave, near Arreau, Aure valley, HautesPyrenées (d’Errico and Allard 1997). A bovid shoulder blade with long parallel lines has been recovered from the Mousterian of La Quina (Martin 1907–1910; Marshack 1991). One of the Neanderthal graves in the Mousterian of La Ferrassie has yielded a small bone with several sets of parallel engraved lines (Capitan and Peyrony 1921; Marshack 1976); and Abri Blanchard has provided three engraved bone fragments of the final Mousterian. Similar finds elsewhere include five engraved bone pieces and a bone retoucher with numerous incised lines from the Mousterian of Tagliente shelter, Italy (Leonardi 1988). A utilised bone fragment with a series of five barb-like, incised marks from Cueva Morín, Spain is also of the Mousterian (Freeman and Gonzalez Echegaray 1983). The same deposit yielded a rib fragment with paired line markings, and it should be noted that the quality of “paired-ness” is found in many very early markings. The engraved bone objects from level 18c in El Castillo, Spain (transitional Mousterian/earliest Aurignacian, c. 40 ka), comprise the fragment of a bone chisel with three series of incised lines, a fragment of a deer metapodial with three deeply incised grooves, and a flat bone fragment with painted lines resembling a horse head. There are also two decorated bone fragments from level 18b of that site (Cabrera Valdés et al. 2006). Huyge has shown that the serrations on a fragment of a mammoth bone, Mousterian, Schulen, Belgium (Huyge 1990), were made with stone tools, and that the transverse incision at the top may have facilitated snapping the bone along a predetermined line. Prominent polish on the created projections is interpreted as suggesting that the artefact was a musical instrument, a notched rasp. The Mousterian of Bacho Kiro in Bulgaria, a cave that has also yielded earlier exogrammatic finds, has

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produced an engraved object, a pointed bone piece bearing deeply cut zigzag patterns (Figure 61). However, the various patterns Frolov (1981) has described on a mammoth shoulder blade of the Mousterian of Molodova, Russia, are probably natural, taphonomic features, perhaps drying cracks and other alteration phenomena. Similarly, we consider the several grooved bear teeth Gautier (1986) has recovered from the Mousterian of Sclayn, Belgium, to be marks caused by silica-rich plant diet, such as grasses, which the dentation was not adequately suited for. The extensive markings on a Micoquian horse tooth excavated at Neumark-North near Halle, Germany, are considered to be heat fractures by this author.

Figure 61. Bone fragment bearing engraved zigzag patterns, from the Middle Palaeolithic of the vast cave Bacho Kiro near Dryanovo in central Bulgaria. Materials other than bones and teeth have also been engraved by hominins of Middle Palaeolithic tool traditions. Particularly extensive are the incisions on a small schist plaque, about 50–60 ka old, from Temnata Cave near Karlukovo, Bulgaria (Crémades et al. 1995). It bears some 43 parallel markings, which have been subjected to internal analysis (Figure 62). They are certainly anthropogenic, whereas this is not assured for the markings on a limestone pebble from Grotta dell’Alto, Italy (Leonardi 1988). Leonardi has also described three flint flakes with possibly engraved lines and a limestone cobble with intentional engravings from the Mousterian of Tagliente Shelter, Italy; and another flint flake with possible engravings from Solinas Shelter (Leonardi 1988). Further incised pebbles with markings have been reported from the Mousterian of Hungary (Vértes 1965). A quartzite pebble recovered from Mousterian level 21 in El Castillo, Spain, bears five very small cupules (Cabrera Valdés et al. 2006). Four are arranged in an evenly spaced row, the fifth is nearby and in the centre of the row, evidently an intentional composition. Also relevant here is a Mousterian antler fragment from Grotte Vaufrey,

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Dordogne (Vincent 1988), bearing eight transverse, tool-cut notches of different sizes.

Figure 62. Incisions on schist plaque from the Middle Palaeolithic of Temnata Cave, Bulgaria. The best-known and almost unique instance of Middle Palaeolithic rock art from Europe is the large limestone slab over burial No. 6 of the “Neanderthal” cemetery in La Ferrassie, France (Peyrony 1934). It bears 18 cupules, mostly arranged in pairs, and was placed with these on the block’s underside above the interment of a robust child (Figure 63). Limestone clasts with traces of brown paint residues were also excavated in the Mousterian deposits of the cave (Kuckenburg 1997). One limestone block bearing brown, bluish and black paint traces was recovered from the Mousterian of its type site, Le Moustier. Peyrony thought he recognised in them a motif consisting of patches and irregular bands (cf. Kuckenburg 1997: 306). Although perhaps not qualifying as palaeoart, the more appropriate definition of exograms certainly demands the inclusion here of deliberate depositions of cave bear remains, typically skulls and long bones. Such depositions have been reported from caves in many parts of Europe and the practice relates to both the late part of the Middle Palaeolithic and the EUP (Early Upper Palaeolithic), straddling in effect the artificial divide between the two eras. Among these sites are the Drachenloch (Bächler 1940), Reyersdorfer Cave (Zotz 1939), and especially Veternica Cave (Malez 1956, 1958, 1965). Evidence offered in support for ceremonies involving cave bears includes the striking positioning of ten bear skulls in the Caverne des Furtins, France (Leroi-Gourhan 1947), and similar finds in the Hungarian caves Homoródalm ser, Istállóskö (Vértes 1951, 1955)

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Figure 63. The sepulchral slab placed over “Neanderthal” child’s grave in the Mousterian cemetery of La Ferrassie, Dordogne, France. and Kölyuk Caves (Vértes 1959: 160–162); in the Salzofen Cave, Austria (Ehrenberg 1951, 1953a, 1953b, 1954, 1956, 1957, 1958, 1959; Trimmel 1950; Schmid 1957), and in Mornova Cave, Slovenia (Brodar 1957: 154– 155; Zotz 1944: 29). These early reports were challenged by Cramer (1941), Koby (1953) and Jéquier (1975). Koby even rejected that the cave bear was hunted, apparently unaware of the extensive evidence to the contrary

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(Bednarik 1993a, 2010). However, recent discoveries have confirmed that crania, mandibles and femora or other long-bones of cave bears were deposited intentionally. The best-known instance is the skull perched on the edge of the upper surface of a conspicuous, table-like boulder centrally located in the Salle du Crâne, Chauvet Cave, France (Clottes 2001: Figs 202, 203). This “altar”, a few metres from the magnificent horse panel, is surrounded by 52 further skulls of this species on the floor. In all, there are 190 skulls of Ursus spelaeus on the cave’s floor, most of them occurring in conspicuous concentrations relatively free of other skeletal remains. In the vast Salle des Bauges, closer to the entrance, very few bear remains can be seen, but in two cases, about 10 m apart, occur the combination of a cave bear skull with a cave bear humerus. In both instances, the skulls are placed upright, facing the entrance, and the humeri have been inserted into the ground perfectly vertically in front of them, at least half submerged in the sediment and precisely aligned with the longitudinal axis of the skull. There are no other bones in the vicinity. Other recent discoveries are the four skulls arranged in a radial/cross formation on the floor of Piatra Altarului (Altar Cave) or Rece Cave, Bihor Mountains, one of a system of six caves in the Bihor Mountains in north-western Romania (Lascu et al. 1996; Lascu 1999; Bednarik 2007: Fig. 5; Cârciumaru et al. 2015). Two skulls surrounded by ochre stones were excavated next to a hearth from the Mousterian of Cioarei Cave, also in Romania, radiocarbon-dated to c. 40 ka, but U/Th analysis of the calcite crust coating the bones yielded 75–80 ka. Also relevant is a large cave bear skull in a “box” formed by stone slabs, clearly man-made, found by Ion Emodi in Igrita Cave, Transylvania. Perforated cave bear mandibles, some with multiple holes, have been reported from several sites, including Veternica and Potoþka Caves (Brodar 1938: 153), Drachenloch (Bächler 1940), Mokriška Cave and some sites in Silesia (Zotz 1939: 27). Bear cults were practised across the circumpolar region well into Historical times (Hallowell 1926) and continue in parts of Siberia today. The Khanty still conduct ceremonies with the skulls and long-bones of bears and preserve these (pers. comm. Andrew Wiget). In view of the extensive evidence from the final Mousterian and the early EUP, it needs to be considered that the deposition and alterations of cave bear bones probably had cultural significance and exogrammatic meanings. Similarly, evidence of utilisation of diurnal raptor parts in what seems to be symbolic behaviour has recently been reported from the Middle Palaeolithic of France and Italy (Morin and Laroulandie 2012). Finally, a form of evidence other than palaeoart that is of relevance here has recently been reported from the floor of the French cave

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Bruniquel. It comprises deliberate geometric constructions of broken-off stalagmites that have been safely dated to 176.5±2.1 ka BP (Jaubert et al. 2016). These deliberate and exogrammatic arrangements were found 336 m from the entrance of the cave, demonstrating not only the confidence of early Neanderthals in exploring difficult cave environments, but also their preoccupation with conducting non-utilitarian activities in them. It is therefore not surprising that they also engaged in producing palaeoart there.

4. Early Upper Palaeolithic (EUP) palaeoart The EUP (roughly between 45 ka and 30 ka ago) comprises a series of technocomplexes such as the Aurignacian, Châtelperronian, Uluzzian, ProtoAurignacian, Olschewian, Dufour Aurignacian, Bachokirian, Bohunician, Streletsian, Gorodtsovian, Bryynzenian, Spitzinian, Telmanian, Szeletian, Eastern Szeletian, Kostenkian, Jankovichian, Altmühlian, Lincombian and Jerzmanovician. The discovery in 1979 that the Châtelperronian (previously called the Périgordian) is a “Neanderthal” tradition has since then presented a conundrum to those who see the EUP as peopled by Graciles (or “Moderns”). Since the late 1980s, the replacement advocates alleviated their discomfort by suggesting that the Châtelperronian “Neanderthals” must have scavenged the numerous palaeoart objects found in their occupation deposits (see Figure 1) from invading Graciles, which shows to what lengths the adherents of a dogma will go when its doctrine is challenged: what would primitive brutes do with purely “symbolic” artefacts? In 1995, we pointed out that there is no evidence that the Early Aurignacian is the work of “anatomically modern humans” (AMHs) (Bednarik 1995a: 627); by 2007 we proposed that the Aurignacian cave art of Chauvet Cave was created by Neanderthaloids (Bednarik 2007); and a few years later we suggested that all EUP traditions, not only the Aurignacian, probably belonged to them (Bednarik 2011). It would be judicious to consider that the palaeoarts of all these technocomplexes might be attributable to more or less robust hominins, who were subjected to gradual gracilisation leading to the forms many define as AMHs. Consequently, it is useful to separate the cultures of the Upper Palaeolithic into two horizons: the EUP, dominated by Robusts including Neanderthals, and the LUP (Late Upper Palaeolithic), characterised by humans that became gradually more gracile. Interestingly, there is no fundamental difference in the forms of palaeoart of the two periods, and most certainly there is no obvious trend towards greater sophistication. On the contrary, some key indicators imply

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the opposite. For instance, the Russian Streletsian with its distinctively Middle Palaeolithic roots has yielded (from just three graves) about 700 times as many beads as the characteristically Upper Palaeolithic Spitzinian of the same region. Similarly the Aurignacian sculptures of southwestern Germany seem more sophisticated conceptually than the LUP figurines; and the rock art of Chauvet Cave is so magnificent that some commentators still find it impossible to accept its Aurignacian age and prefer to attribute it to the LUP. Clearly, the teleological view of human artistic development, which has dominated all of 20th-century archaeological thought, is not easily displaced. Nevertheless, it is true that the frequency of surviving palaeoart manifestations does increase with time. That does not, however, mean that the incidence of palaeoart production increased correspondingly: most forms of exograms are greatly affected by taphonomy. Therefore, it is impossible to effectively quantify these phenomena through time without judicious application of taphonomic logic (Bednarik 1994). Among the portable objects from the EUP, some show continuities from the preceding late Mousterian, including the fossil crinoid segment from the Châtelperronian of Arcy-sur-Cure, France (Leroi-Gourhan 1971); or the dense concentrations of powdered red ochre from two circular dwelling remains in Grotte du Renne (Leroi-Gourhan 1961), of the same period and country. The cave El Castillo in Spain has yielded a bone with “graphite” lines suggestive of an animal head, and another with the probable lower rear quarters of an animal drawn with sharpened manganese, both from the very early Aurignacian (Cabrera Valdes and Bernaldo de Quirós 2004). Most recently, there have been unconfirmed reports of “Neanderthal” petroglyphs in Zarzamora Cave (Segovia, Spain) and those found in Gorham’s Cave, Gibraltar. At the latter site, a design of eight deeply engraved lines on the lime-dolostone bedrock floor predates sediment layer IV, dated to c. 39 cal. ka BP. It is therefore attributed to one of the “Neanderthals” who occupied the cave (Rodríguez-Vidal et al. 2014). That the many palaeoart objects from the Châtelperronian of Grotte du Renne at Arcy-sur-Cure, south of Paris, were used by “Neanderthals” seems generally accepted now, although some archaeologists still have difficulties admitting that they also made them (Figure 1). They include not only perforated jewellery items, but also grooved pendants (LeroiGourhan and Leroi-Gourhan 1964), which as Marshack (1991) points out are not typical for the Aurignacian. That site also yielded no less than 18 kg of black and red pigment fragments, many of them with use wear, from its Châtelperronian levels (Salomon 2009). In addition there is a growing body of evidence of rock art that is likely

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to be of the EUP, dating roughly from between 40 and 30 ka ago and probably produced by Neanderthaloid people. This primarily Spanish corpus includes some rock art in the Cave of Nerja in Málaga, with dates of up to 35,320±360 BP (Romero et al. 2012), from where Sanchidrián has reported apparent torch soot next to ichthyform paintings that date from between 43,500 and 42,300 BP (Collado Giraldo 2015). At Tito Bustillo in Asturias, pictograms have been attributed to the Aurignacian (Balbín Behrmann et al. 2003) and may be as early as 37,700 BP (Pike et al. 2012: 1412). A red triangular motif in the cave of Altamira, Cantabria, has been suggested to be in excess of 36,160±610 years old (Pike et al. 2012: 1410). Another Cantabrian cave, El Castillo, which has yielded some of the earliest Aurignacian evidence in western Europe, has produced minimum dates of up to 41,400±570 BP from its rock art (Pike et al. 2012). This proposal would place the sampled red “disc” motifs before the earliest Aurignacian occupation evidence at the site (Hedges et al. 1994). Although the use of uranium-thorium dates from very thin carbonate speleothem needs to be reviewed (Clottes 2012; Bednarik 2012), the growing number of proposals of rock art in southwestern Europe having been created by robust Homo sapiens is entirely reasonable, considering the much earlier rock art production reported in other continents. Several more Spanish pictogram sites have been suggested to include motifs of the EUP that may be attributable to Neanderthaloids, including Pondra Cave in Cantabria (González Sainz and San Miguel 2001: 116– 118) and five more sites in Asturias. These are the cave of La Peña (Fortea Pérez 2007), Abrigo de la Viña (Fortea Pérez 1999), El Conde Cave (Fernández Rey et al. 2005), yellow bovid figures and charcoal dots in Peña de Candama, and possibly the cave of El Sidrón (Fortea Pérez 2007). Finally, Maltravieso Cave in Cáceres, Extremadura, contains on panel 3 in its “hall of paintings” some painted motifs that appear to be more than 37,000 years old (Collado Giraldo 2015: 200). The Aurignacian technocomplex has produced not only a large number of beads and pendants and extensive evidence of pigment use, but also significant quantities of portable “art” and rock art. Mobiliary palaeoart attributed to the Aurignacian tool industries includes the several ivory figurines from Geißenklösterle and Vogelherd, and the therianthropes found in Hohlenstein-Stadel (Figure 64) and Hohle Fels (Conard et al. 2003). These caves are located in the Swabian Alb of south-western Germany and until the mid-1990s their iconographic sophistication was considered incompatible with the rock art then known of the same period, 30–35 ka ago. They are matched by the female human sculpture of green serpentine from Galgenberg, north of Krems, Lower Austria, dated to c.

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Figure 64. Ivory therianthrope, combining lion and human elements, 29.6 cm long and about 40 ka old, of the Aurignacian deposit in HohlensteinStadel, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

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31,800 years BP (Bednarik 1989). Bone flutes of the period come from Abri Blanchard in France and Istállóskö in Hungary. Decorated bone and ivory objects are numerous from the Aurignacian, such as those from KĤlna Cave in Moravia and from numerous sites in western Europe, and many of the figurative sculptures are also decorated with geometric markings. The rock art attributed to the Aurignacian until the discovery and prompt dating of the massive corpus in Chauvet Cave, France, consisted of simple grooves and cupules, petroglyph shapes usually regarded as vulvae, and a very few crudely made zoomorphs, suggesting that the rock art had not yet reached the refinement of three-dimensional depiction evident from the sculptures. Examples of this tradition are the limestone clast No. 16 from La Ferrassie, Middle Aurignacian (Bednarik 2008c: Fig. 30); another decorated block from the same site (Figure 65); and a smaller block featuring engravings interpreted as part of a zoomorph and ovals, also from La Ferrassie. Then there is an engraved block from Abri Cellier, also in the Dordogne (Figure 66), together with the presumed horse head and vulva found on yet another, 48 cm long limestone block, and a clast bearing a large cupule and three “vulvae”, all from Cellier rockshelter. A much larger rock bearing a nearly complete quadruped often described as a possible ibex figure, from Abri Belcayre; a smaller clast with a single “vulva” from Abri Poisson; and several decorated blocks from Abri Blanchard, including at least five bearing “vulvae”, are also attributed to the Aurignacian. In addition, Leroi-Gourhan (1971: Pl. 54) defined the two anthropomorphs deeply engraved into a block from Terme-Pialat, Dordogne, as possibly being of late Aurignacian, but apparently without evidence. Recently, some Aurignacian pictograms (paintings) on rock fragments, possibly exfoliated from cave walls, were also recovered. From Abri Castanet comes a ceiling block bearing red and black pigment markings that is associated with a 37-ka-old deposit. In Fumane Cave, in the Lessini Mountains of the Veneto region, Italy, two Aurignacian painted rock plaques have been excavated lately. The most recently dated new site of presumed Aurignacian cave art concerns a charcoal zoomorph in Coliboaia cave in the Natural Park of Mount Apuseni, Bihor, Romania (Clottes et al. 2011). Another bovid image, drawn with fingers on a soft cave wall in Cueva de la Clotilde in Cantabria, northern Spain, and some other figures in that site have been attributed to the Aurignacian, but only on the basis of style.

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Figure 65. Engraved limestone block, 56 cm long, from the Aurignacian of La Ferrassie, Dordogne, France.

Figure 66. Engraved limestone block, 60 cm long, from the Aurignacian of Abri Cellier, Dordogne, France.

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However, the proposition of great antiquity in respect of the cave art in Baume Latrone, Gard, southern France, is supported by empirical evidence. The cave’s decorated chamber contains both petroglyphs (as finger flutings and engravings) and pictograms (finger paintings in red clay) (Bednarik 1986). One of the zoomorphic petroglyphs is of a duckbilled quadruped that has been “identified” as a horse by Leroi-Gourhan (1971: 330); and first as a saiga antelope, later as an ibex by Drouot (1953: 26; cf. 1968: 147, 1976: 158). It is superimposed over finger flutings (Figure 67) that, on the basis of speleo-weathering are roughly four times as old (Bednarik 1986: 34). Drouot regards the image as being of the early Solutrean, but again this is only a stylistic and therefore misleading attribution. There are approximately ten clay pictograms of what are said to be mammoths, which Clottes (2008: 60) attributes to the Aurignacian (Figure 68). Some of the contours of these zoomorphs were first sketched by shallow incisions that show that at the time the formerly soft panel surface was fully hardened and desiccated. Adjacent traces of finger flutings are from the time the speleothem was still soft, and while the difference in timing is not quantifiable, this adds to the appreciation that the chamber’s rock art, 240 m from the cave entrance, spans a great period of time. If the clay figures were of the Aurignacian, the early finger flutings would necessarily be of the Middle Palaeolithic. If the zoomorph in Figure 68 is of the Upper Palaeolithic, the preceding finger fluting should also be Middle Palaeolithic. In a sense, the question is moot because both the Aurignacian and the Mousterian are technocomplexes of robust hominins, such as “Neanderthals” or “post-Neanderthals” (Bednarik 2007). Recently, some charcoal in the cave has been dated to around 32,740 years BP, but this cannot be linked to any of the palaeoart production phases (Azéma et al. 2012). In addition to the many cited examples of archaic-looking rock art of the Aurignacian, the corpus of the best-dated Franco-Cantabrian cave art in Chauvet is arguably also the most sophisticated rock art of the entire Upper Palaeolithic. This confirms the identical pattern observed in the mobiliary palaeoart of the period: artistic sophistication, in terms of naturalism, movement, production methods and even the apparent depiction of “moving pictures”, of the EUP is not repeated in the more regimented genres of the subsequent LUP. Those who question or reject the attribution of Chauvet to the Aurignacian (Zuechner 1996; Pettitt and Bahn 2003; Pettitt et al. 2009) also need to consider that the small rock art corpus of l’Aldène, at Cesseras (Hérault, France) can only be of the Aurignacian (or earlier) because the decorated passage became closed around 30,300 years ago (Ambert et al. 2005; Ambert and Guendon 2005).

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Oddly enough Pettitt, who rejects the well-established Chauvet chronology, has recently supported (Pike et al. 2012) much less credible new claims for the Aurignacian age of several rock art motifs in Spanish caves, using a dating method that may not be reliable (cf. Clottes 2012; Bednarik 2012). With his co-authors he has repeated the proposition (Bednarik 2007; cf. Sadier et al. 2012) that Aurignacian palaeoart was made by robust humans, presenting it as a new idea.

Figure 67. Engraving of a quadruped superimposed over much older finger flutings that were probably made in the Middle Palaeolithic; more recent markings are also visible. Baume Latrone, north of Nîmes, southern France. The Streletsian is an EUP tool-making tradition of Russia, resembling the Szeletian and marked by bifaces deriving from a local Mousterian (Bader 1978). At one of its most impressive sites, Sungir, three human burials contained 13,113 tiny ivory beads and over 250 perforated fox teeth. Thus, a typically intermediate industry linking the Middle Palaeolithic with the Upper yielded at just one site hundreds of times as many beads as the roughly contemporary Spitzinian in the same region which is regarded as fully Upper Palaeolithic (Bednarik 1995a: 627). Moreover, it contained in just three graves, occupying a few square meters, more beads than the number recovered from the entire rest of the Upper Palaeolithic of the

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world. Like the extraordinarily complex cave art of Chauvet and other sites and the elaborate figurines of Swabia, this shows that the simplistic teleological understanding of the cultural Palaeolithic development is fundamentally mistaken. Moreover, these factors also show persuasively that the exogrammatic culture of the still robust people of the EUP, who included “Neanderthals”, Neanderthaloids or “post-Neanderthals”, was more complex and more artistically sophisticated than that of the following LUP traditions (Gravettian, Solutrean and Magdalenian) as well as the later Azilian and “Mesolithic”.

Figure 68. Finger paintings of zoomorphs made with clay on the ceiling of Baume Latrone; the photograph was taken in 1981, before the traces of vandalism were removed. As mentioned above, numerous other tool traditions have been identified as EUP, and so far only limited palaeoart has been reported from them. However, attribution is usually not as secure as one might hope; for instance, the cave art in Coliboaia Cave may well be of one of these many EUP industries rather than the Aurignacian. Finally, the evidence of deliberate deposition of cave bear skulls and long-bones from the final Middle Palaeolithic, described above, extends clearly into the EUP. It is particularly evident from the Olschewian, a montane Aurignacoid tradition

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of central Europe specialising in the harvesting of cave bears in their interstadial hibernation haunts (Bednarik 1993a).

5. Later Upper Palaeolithic (LUP) palaeoart Bouvier (1993) lists 291 sites of Palaeolithic rock art in Europe, the majority of which feature LUP palaeoart. This does not necessarily imply that the production of rock art increased, because taphonomic logic (Bednarik 1994) would certainly predict such “proliferation”. Bahn and Vertut (1997) expand on Bouvier’s inventory but Bahn’s pronouncements of what is Palaeolithic cave art are questionable: in many cases he offers no proof, and in a number of them he is clearly wrong. It appears that he follows the traditional practice of determining Palaeolithicity so well defined by Freeman (1994), which resembles the theocracy of certain religious faiths: instances are validated in the same way religious shrines are. While it is undoubted that the number of Pleistocene rock art sites known in Europe is in the hundreds, it is equally true that in the vast majority of cases the sites themselves offer no credible proof of such age, other than stylistic arguments. Not only is this not adequate in the “poststylistic era” of rock art studies (Lorblanchet and Bahn 1993), it has led to some of the most monumental blunders in rock art research. The obsessive search for Palaeolithicity in European rock art is not shared in other continents, despite the clear indication that Pleistocene rock art is much more common there, at least in Australia. It coincides with the almost complete absence in all other continents (with some notable exceptions in North America) of fakes of Pleistocene palaeoart, whereas in Europe there are thousands of examples of fake palaeoart (Bahn and Vertut 1997: Ch. 6). A detailed discussion and analysis of this constellation of fakes, mistaken attributions to the Pleistocene and over-promotion of Europe as the “cradle of art” is much needed. Be that as it may, even a brief review of Bahn’s list of Pleistocene rock art sites in Europe reveals many errors. For instance, he lists the finds from Geißenklösterle (Hahn 1988a, 1988b, 1988c, 1989) and Hohle Fels (Hahn 1991, 1994; both claims refuted in Bednarik 2002), Mladeþ Cave (Oliva 1989; refuted in Bednarik 2006), and Bycí Skála (refuted in Svoboda et al. 2005). There has never been a credible claim from Cuciulat Cave (Bahn and Vertut 1997: 43), and those from Kapova and Ignatiev Caves in the Urals have also been proposed without scientific support. First questioned by Bednarik (1993b), they may no longer be justifiable now that Steelman et al. (2002) have provided three Holocene radiocarbon dates from three Ignatievskaya charcoal pictograms. In fact, there are now no credible

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claims of Pleistocene rock art from central Europe and almost none from eastern Europe, and those of mid-southern Europe need to be reviewed. However, the most serious and consequential errors occurred in the Iberian Peninsula. None of the numerous sites Bahn accepts from Portugal has provided credible evidence of Pleistocene antiquity, nor have many of those he lists from Spain. This applies in particular to all of the open-air petroglyph sites occurring on schist, i.e., those he describes in his Chapter 9 (“Art in the open air”). For instance, the petroglyphs of the western Spanish site Siega Verde, which “every single European Ice Age art specialist” has identified as Palaeolithic (Bahn and Vertut 1997: 132), are certainly of the same age range as the numerous dated inscriptions at the same site. Fluvial erosion indices have shown conclusively that the majority of the images are of the 20th century, centring on about 1925, but some of the “typically Palaeolithic” zoomorphs are actually of the 1950s (Bednarik 2009). Much the same applies to a large series of sites in the nearby lower Côa valley of northern Portugal, where again most of the panels bearing recent petroglyphs only formed in the second half of the Holocene (Figure 69). Although all river terraces there are less than 2000 years old, archaeologists claimed to have excavated Palaeolithic occupation floors in them, without providing any reasonable evidence such as radiocarbon dates from hearths or credible stone tools. The obsession of wanting to prove Pleistocene ages has led to many similar pronouncements concerning engravings in open schist sites across Iberia, all of which are based on a singular argument: that the horse, Spanish bull and goat images are stylistically Palaeolithic. In this, the proponents ignore that people of recent millennia have often used similar styles. The archaeologists also ignored the villagers near Siega Verde, who told them the petroglyphs were made by shepherds recently (Hansen 1997), assuring them that the Palaeolithic claim would bring much tourism to the region. For that, they even managed to convince UNESCO to place the site on the World Heritage List. This is perhaps the finest expression of what the European Palaeolithic obsession can lead to. Bahn, who seems to be both in favour of and opposed to stylistic dating, has also been instrumental in projecting a proposition for Palaeolithic cave art in England (Bahn et al. 2003; Ripoll et al. 2004, 2005). It was marred by inconsistencies and errors of description from the start, culminating in the contention that the Church Hole at Creswell Crags features “the most richly carved and engraved ceiling in the whole of cave art”, bearing well over a hundred images (Ripoll et al. 2004). Bednarik’s (2005b) response that most images seemed to be natural features led to the abandonment of over 90% of these “images” in this “Sistine Chapel” of

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British “Palaeolithic cave art” (Bahn and Pettitt 2007). In the meantime, the ill-fated British proposal of Pleistocene rock art prompted a rather weak assertion for one “mammoth” motif in nearby Gough’s Cave (Mullan et al. 2006) and it was followed by an even weaker report of a “reindeer” image in an unnamed cave in the Welsh Gower Peninsula (Nash et al. 2011).

Figure 69. Selection of petroglyphs from the lower Côa valley, northern Portugal, which are of similar age as the bull and horse images on the same rocks that archaeologists falsely attribute to the Upper Palaeolithic. 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 in reality no rock art in this famous cave has been credibly dated. Although substantially younger charcoal occurred in abundance in the cave, and often together with ochre, it was assumed without good reason that all the “art” relates to the earliest charcoal found. Not only is this quite unlikely in a logical sense, Bahn (1994, 1995) has convincingly argued that the Lascaux corpus comprises considerable cultural diversity. The haphazardly excavated charcoal has provided many Holocene dates, beginning at about 7500 years BP, and the cave was open during much of

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the Holocene and visited and probably painted in by humans. It is likely that the most recent visitors created the most recent art, and the recent huge bovid figures cannot be of the age usually assigned to them. Aurochs has not been found in southwestern France between the Gravettian and the very final Magdalenian (Delpech 1992: 131, cited in Bahn 1994). 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 rock art phases of that site. In these circumstances it seems necessary to review all assertions of Pleistocene rock art in Europe, except those of a rather small number of motifs backed by credible dating evidence. If a significant portion of the supposedly Palaeolithic rock art is of uncertain status or of clearly more recent age, it is not adequate to report some vague pigment traces in a cave in, say, Cantabria, and to pronounce them Upper Palaeolithic simply because authentic Pleistocene cave art occurs elsewhere in the region. Examples of this practice are from the sites Askondo (Garate and RiosGaraizar 2011), Praileaitz 1 cave (García-Diez et al. 2012), Lumentxa cave (Garate and Rios-Garaizar 2012) and Morgotako Koba (Garate et al. 2015). Similarly, the contentions of archaeologists to know what the palaeoart styles of particular tool traditions look like need to be treated with scepticism. The direct datings of many motifs at several sites have long demonstrated that the traditional stylistic chronology is false (Bednarik 1995b). Therefore, the mainstream information about early rock art in Europe, although substantially more voluminous than that of all other continents added together, is actually less reliable than the latter. Since the subject has already been addressed in many thousands of publications there is little point in pursuing it further here, especially until a rigorous re-assessment of all such claims has been presented. The situation is significantly better in respect of European mobiliary palaeoart, essentially because much of it derives from documented stratigraphical contexts and can therefore be attributed to specific artefact traditions with a reasonable degree of confidence. That does not mean, however, that the quality of other information about this corpus is much better, especially when it concerns meaning. The most frequently discussed portable objects of pre-History are perhaps the so-called “Venus” figurines of the Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic. They have been subjected to unparalleled attention of interpretational fervour, characterised by several common features. Their interpretations are ideologically motivated, they are taphonomically naive, they are presented by inadequately informed commentators who often had not studied any of the evidence or sites first hand, and their epistemology is

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often inadequate. The underlying idea of all of these hypotheses is that there is a corpus of some 100–140 (or more) female figurines, whose distribution from the Pyrenees to Lake Baikal indicates a usually Gravettian tradition concerned with fertility, or with a mother goddess cult, or with Palaeolithic pornography or whatever other imagined cultural determinant. None of these reviews attempts to define the sample spatially, formally, taphonomically or temporally, by stating a rationale for including or excluding specimens. All of them omit numerous known examples that would fall well within the stated or implied parameters of such studies. 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, some are male, very few might be depicted pregnant, and fewer still could reasonably be classified as steatopygous. Most of these specimens are either undated, or they are not from a Gravettian context. Indeed, these anthropomorphous figurines originate from all periods of the Upper Palaeolithic, and some of them may be as yet undetected fakes (e.g., from Brassempouy; Bahn 1993). To analyse an arbitrarily selected, chronologically and formally undefined, incomplete sample such 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). It has been defined entirely on the basis of ideological, cultural and academic conditioning of how to detect the visual clues provided by the artists of an alien culture, and by arbitrary (and invalid) variables of spatial and chronological distribution. Consequently the sample will include specimens that are 20,000 years and 6000 km apart, but it will exclude those from the very same site and only a few millennia younger. It will exclude other forms of female depiction of the same periods, and will perceive differences in iconography as culturally conditioned, when in fact they are more likely the outcome of technological factors (Bednarik 1990). 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

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and so forth, consists largely of androcentric, gynocentric, heterocentric, feminist-inspired and Eurocentric polemic. Its only relevance to fertility is that this literature would be a highly fertile area for 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, which are rare and receive rather less attention (e.g. Rosenfeld 1977; Gvozdover 1995; Russell 2006). 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 (see also discussion on Siberiam material in Chapter 4) (Figure 70).

Figure 70. A few of the so-called “Venus” figurines of Europe: a–d = Avdeevo (Russia) No’s 1, 7, 8 and 6; e = Willendorf (Austria); f = Hohle Fels (Germany). All are between 25 ka and 35 ka old.

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While three-dimensional iconographic art of the Upper Palaeolithic is widely found in Eurasia, the distribution of two-dimensional iconic palaeoart differs significantly. East of France and Italy, and across all of Eurasia, Pleistocene graphic art is almost exclusively aniconic, be it portable or on rock. There are only a few exceptions (Bednarik 1995c). No explanation is available for this glaring distributional discrepancy. The graphic Pleistocene art of most of Eurasia consists of “geometric” designs that are often of great complexity, especially at Russian sites. Most of this palaeoart is found on plaques of stone, bone, and ivory. The thousands of engraved Upper Palaeolithic plaques of western Europe, by contrast, feature a rich array of iconic markings, at such sites as Rochedane, Mas d’Azil, La Marche, Gönnersdorf and Parpalló. Deliberately placed objects as they have been reported from EUP and even late Middle Palaeolithic contexts also occur in the LUP period, for instance as bones deliberately stuck into wall cracks in decorated caves. Beads and pendants occur widely, though more have been found in the EUP period as noted—at just one site. Pigment use is widespread and includes processes of modifying substances to achieve better colours (e.g. by heating). The palaeoart of this phase includes clay sculptures and floor drawings in caves, fired clay objects, and artistically decorated utilitarian objects become commonplace in the LUP traditions, especially in the Magdalenian. A massive corpus of publications, exceeding the number of actual objects or motifs, exists on the palaeoart especially of the LUP period, and of the Upper Palaeolithic generally. No attempt is made here to list or discuss these tens of thousands of finds, be they portable or rock art, and the interested reader is referred to this huge corpus of received knowledge. It is not intended to add to it with the present volume, the very purpose of which is to address the truly significant shortcomings of this record. These refer primarily to the neglect of pre-Upper Palaeolithic evidence and to the almost complete disregard for the extra-European Pleistocene evidence.

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CHAPTER SEVEN PALAEOART OF THE ICE AGE

Summarising the evidence The review offered in the preceding chapter of this volume differs very significantly from all previous appraisals of Europe’s magnificent Pleistocene palaeoart in a number of aspects. First, it does not focus on the Upper Palaeolithic, but allots earlier periods a semblance of “equal space”. It also represents an attempt to view the corpus from a global perspective. This derives from the realisation that the known European body of relevant evidence is actually smaller than that of Australia, and that all other continents have at this stage been most inadequately explored in the field of Pleistocene palaeoart. Indeed, in this endeavour Europe is indisputably the (very small) tail that wags the (very large) dog. This imbalance is so pronounced that it can fairly be defined as more marked than in any other academic endeavour. The entire field is so biased in favour of evidence from Europe that the knowledge required for a reasonably balanced overview has simply been unavailable to the mainstream. This book is the first attempt to present a balanced account. For instance, the discipline seems entirely unaware that the amount of “Middle Palaeolithic” palaeoart from Australia alone greatly exceeds the known “Upper Palaeolithic” palaeoart of the entire world. Or, to restate this differently: there is more surviving Mode 3 palaeoart in the world than there is Mode 4 palaeoart. However, an even greater misconception of orthodox archaeological understanding of palaeoart is that its advent is attributed to the mythological Africans thought to have colonised Europe towards the end of the Late Pleistocene, while the resident “Neanderthals” were too primitive to create palaeoart. Not only have these “ape-like Neanderthals” or their direct descendants created the masterworks of Chauvet (Figure 71), among others; the African Exodus is in any case a myth based on a hoax (Bednarik 2008a, 2013a).

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Figure 71. The author in Chauvet cave, the most magnificent cave art site in the world (photograph by Jean Clottes). At this point it is justified to pause for a moment and ask: what would humanity say today if it discovered that the fundamental beliefs of some other discipline were as seriously flawed as those in the field of “prehistoric art”? Pleistocene archaeology has operated as a mainstream topic for over one and a half centuries. Many sciences are much younger than that, such as ethology, plate tectonics or genetics, to name just a few. Could any of these much more recently developed disciplines of science operate as successfully as they do if they had remained as embryonic and as Eurocentric as Pleistocene archaeology and palaeoanthropology? So, what is it that has retarded the development of these two fields for the past 150 years? Bearing in mind that most of the empirical evidence presented in this volume has not been engaged in general syntheses on palaeoart, the answer is simply that most practitioners in the field have been and remain inadequately informed, deriving their knowledge largely from a very limited number of mainstream journals that present the orthodox model and permit no deviation from this dogma. Thompson (2014) has recently described this system as “unstable orthodoxies” presided over by a “high

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priesthood”, defining these disciplines as resembling “poorly managed but well-advertised corporations”, run for the benefit of their upper echelons. He explains their practices of publishing and refereeing, academic employment and research funding as a form of economic niche construction and other capitalistic trends that are detrimental to the academic endeavour. Since the origins myths created by these disciplines (Bednarik 2013b) are their only tangible products, it is highly relevant that the data they are based on are largely false or incomplete, as shown in the present volume that focuses on that part of the relevant evidence that tends to be ignored or swept under African Eve’s red carpet. This helps explain the continuous series of historical deficiencies defining these fields, and this still applies today. It is of particular concern that the origins myths produced by the academic gatekeepers of the human past are so often incompatible with expectations or findings of the sciences, which have come up against numerous issues that are inexplicable within the frameworks provided by these myths. These issues include empirical phenomena such as the rapid reduction of human brain volume in the last 40 ka, which both palaeoanthropology and Pleistocene archaeology have simply ignored (Bednarik 2014a). Then there is the proliferation of neuropathologies and about 8000 other genetic impairments in much the same period, and why they were not selected against (Keller and Miller 2006), which scientists had been profoundly unable to explain because the archaeological information they relied on was severely compromised by dogma (Bednarik 2011). Other developments completely ignored by the gatekeepers of human history include the unexplained rise of the alleles underwriting exclusive homosexuality; the abandonment of oestrus in humans; and especially the rapid acceleration of neoteny since the “Neanderthals”. These and numerous other phenomena cannot be explained with the teleologically based replacement model of both Pleistocene archaeology and palaeoanthropology. Therefore disciplines such as the bio- and neurosciences have been hampered by the falsities the gatekeepers of the human past have disseminated during times when the sciences were far more advanced than these anthropocentric humanities. All of the contradictions, inconsistencies and paradoxes (such as the Keller and Miller paradox) inherent in the conventional dogma about this human past have been resolved (Bednarik 2008a, 2011, 2012, 2013a), but frustratingly the dogma will be defended against these new insights until the high priesthood succumbs to old age (Planck 1950: 33–34).

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The Eurocentric notion that this palaeoart is an “art” and is “symbolic” has been a major stumbling block for the discipline: there is no proof for either assumption. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that palaeoart is made up of the surviving examples of exograms from these early times, and this is how the phenomenon has been approached here (see Chapter 1, “The nature of palaeoart”). The principal findings of this volume, in the context of the Pleistocene palaeoart of the non-European continents, is that its traditions begin many hundreds of millennia ago; that they originate neither in Europe nor in Africa; and that their beginnings are in no way related to some imaginary Exodus of some imaginary Eve’s descendants from Africa. Superficially, the substitution of exograms for “art” and “symbols” may not seem much of a departure from the traditional view, but in fact it is as different from it as cause-and-effect thinking differs from associative thinking (“magical thinking”). From the perspective of the cognitive and neurosciences, the difference could not be greater. However, it will take a long time before the anachronistic epistemology of exploring the human past will embrace science in more than just a cargocult fashion. As noted in Chapter 1, “palaeoart” is the collective term describing all art-like manifestations of the distant past (Bednarik et al. 2010), and is best defined as the corpus of surviving evidence of ancient exograms. To treat it as art is not warranted, because interpretation is inseparable from the art work (Danto 1986: 45), and we cannot know the interpretation or the meaning of any palaeoart. It would be preposterous to contend that modern (Westernised) humans could fathom the ideas culture applied to palaeoart tens of millennia ago (Dutton 1993). Helvenston (2013) has demonstrated that the human brain has changed dramatically since the time palaeoart was created, especially through the introduction of writing. In the distant past, human experience was materially, socially and ideationally very different from today’s (Thompson 2016). And when we use the loaded term “culture” we need to remember that cultures are merely epidemics of mental representations, as cognitive scientist Dan Sperber put it. All that is meant by the word “culture” is that some information states in one person’s brain “somehow” cause, by unknown mechanisms, the “reconstruction” of similar information states in the brain of another person. “Culture” as such, so central to the project of anthropology, is simply a meaningless cliché, as indeed most concepts in the humanities are. Another would be the term “learning”, so central to the academic project, and yet no humanist understands what it means in a scientific sense.

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Moreover, archaeology has developed an all-pervasive perception that palaeoart was symbolic (i.e. involving referent and referrer). Perhaps it was, or some of it was, but before proclaiming this it would need to be demonstrated by scientific testing—which it has not been. Exograms (externally stored memory traces) are quite different from symbols. Exograms can be personal (not shared with conspecifics) or they can be shared (culturally determined), whereas it is the defining attribute of symbols to be shared. The difference between exograms and symbols can be illustrated by the symbol systems and communication devices primatologists use to communicate with non-human primates. These are always humanly created, whereas externally stored memory presupposes the creation of exograms. In contrast to symbols (referrers), exograms do not necessarily have referents. Therefore, even the most fundamental assumptions archaeology makes about palaeoart are either false or contentious. This is before the mis-pronouncements, mis-datings, misattributions, misidentifications and the overwhelming lack of a credible narrative are considered. As a more viable alternative, here palaeoart is treated as surviving traces of exograms: externalised memory traces akin to engrams (Bednarik 1987, 2014), which places a very different epistemological framework on the evidence. One of the more immediate effects is that the question, is anything art, becomes as irrelevant as it should always have been, having no scientific merits. Whereas engrams probably do not exist (Lashley 1950), exograms can be permanent, unconstrained and reformatable entities; they can be of any medium, have virtually unlimited capacity and size, and can be subjected to unlimited iterative refinement (Bednarik 2011: 157). The concept of external engrams was first applied to non-figurative Australian cave art (Bednarik 1987), before the neologism “exogram” had even been invented to name them (Donald 2001). Indeed, rock art and other palaeoart constitutes almost the only archaeological evidence available of exograms in the distant past, and therefore they provide the indices in effectively estimating the cognitive state of the hominins that used them (Bednarik 2012, 2013a). Broadly speaking, the earliest surviving exograms comprise petroglyphs, rock paintings, engraved or notched portable objects, beads and pendants, proto-figurines, probably most instances of pigment use, and manuports. The latter category refers to natural objects that are not modified by human hand, but were collected and carried because of some inherent properties attracting the attention or curiosity of hominins. They include crystals, fossil casts and unusual or brightly coloured stones, all found in sediments where they cannot occur naturally.

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These several classes of evidence have been considered separately from each continent (except Antarctica) in the various chapters of this volume. There is no discernible trend in these types of exograms spreading out from one specific centre: some occur first in Asia (e.g. petroglyphs), others might first appear in Europe (beads), some are first found in northern Africa (e.g. proto-figurines), while others again can be detected first in sub-Saharan Africa (pigment use). Figure 72 implies that, on the basis of current evidence as presented in this volume, there is no such radial meta-geographical patterning of the evidence. Naturally, this explanation is susceptible to future changes as new evidence may become available, with some of its details being quite tentative at the present time. However, it does not seem that the overall pattern of the evidence will radically change through new information. Therefore different strands of human behaviour expressed in the production of exograms appear to have emerged in many places and perhaps gradually coalesced into what can be described as cohesive, definable traditions. This could have occurred in much the same way as the genetic direction of hominin evolution involved a mostly connected single population in three continents, largely coevolving through the process of introgressive hybridisation (Anderson 1949; Bednarik 2008a, 2011). Contrary to the views of African Eve advocates, it is most unlikely that there were great expanses of Eurasian territory in the Late Pleistocene that were free of humans, into which the massed Africans poured to eradicate the widely dispersed Neanderthal bands. We know that by the beginning of that period, i.e. 135 ka ago, humans had occupied regions within the Arctic Circle, enduring temperatures below minus 40°C (Schulz 2002; Schulz et al. 2002; Pavlov et al. 2001). It is therefore reasonable to postulate that all regions, other than the most arid or high altitudes, would have been occupied to their full carrying capacity. Consequently the notions of genocidal Africans swarming into unpopulated realms are archaeological fantasies. Similarly, technological developments in the Pleistocene might be attributable to the travel of “memes” through mostly contiguous populations.

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Figure 72. A comparison of hominin evolution and technology in the three main regions of the Old World, showing the relative durations of the use of the major palaeoart forms in the Pleistocene. Although there are differences in the durations of most of the indices, none of the regions can be regarded as a source area for the general use of exograms. It is the archaeological use of technological variables to define cultures that has determined the sequence of the so-called Palaeolithic period. All of the divisions attributed to this arbitrarily defined era of human history have been established on the basis of perceived technological characteristics, most especially of stone implements. There are fundamental epistemological issues with this taxonomy. First of all, the

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tool classifications applied to the mass of the lithics are etic—“observerrelative or institutional facts” in Searle’s (1995) parlance. There is no proof or falsifiability of these groupings; they need to be accepted on trust and may lack emic justification. Second, in the design of this taxonomy, there is an implicit teleological assumption that characterises all of preHistory research, subliminally affecting judgment: that development is always in the direction of greater sophistication (teleology). Third, there is ample evidence that contradicts the orderly “evolution” of technology, and the application of the term “evolution” is itself at significant odds with the biological dictum that evolution is entirely dysteleological. We noted in Chapter 1 that the same applies to the false notion of evolution in palaeoart. But the most important objection to the use of perceived (rather than real) technological markers in defining cultures is that no culture is typified by the tools used by its partakers. This practice of delineating culture by technological indices derives from the 19th century, from a time before the reality of Pleistocene rock art had been accepted by archaeology. Clearly, tools or their relative combinations do not distinguish cultures; cultural indicators do. Most of these cannot be expected to survive on the archaeological record, such as song, language, mime, dance and many art-like products. Thus palaeoart is the only category we can expect to find that might be suitable to establish cultural entities in the Pleistocene. But therein resides the problem: palaeoart has never been used in the quest of defining cultures of the Ice Age. Instead it has been forced into the non-cultural, technological framework based on tools or their relative combinations in assemblages. This practice was continued after the existence of Pleistocene rock art was grudgingly accepted by archaeologists at the turn of the century (Cartailhac 1902) and it still continues today. Throughout this time, palaeoart was relegated to the role of “art”, without ever demonstrating that it had the same roles as art has in some of today’s totally different societies. This has been a considerable disadvantage in the study of hominin history, a field already saddled with many other limitations. All of its postulates are essentially unfalsifiable constructs of specialists, and although most practitioners accept that the cultural designations are unrealistic, these remain in use in implausible contexts. To illustrate with an example: there is a perceived culture called the Aurignacian, and those who supposedly practised it are called Aurignacians, as if such an identifiable group actually existed. Most archaeologists still believe that these Aurignacians were modern humans, in contrast to the Robusts of the preceding “Mousterians”. But the concept of an “Aurignacian” derives

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from the relative combinations within assemblages of certain etically invented tool types, and is very unlikely to define a real culture or group of cultures. To make matters worse, the people using this Aurignacian technology were not even “modern humans” (whatever this HumptyDumpty term is intended to refer to), they were robust Homo sapiens (Neanderthaloid humans). Yet the rock art that is attributed to them by the majority, such as that of Chauvet Cave in France, is claimed by some to be much more recent, of another invented culture, the Magdalenian (Zuechner 1996; Pettitt and Bahn 2003; see Valladas and Clottes 2003). In other words, the specialists are very much at odds over what constitutes “Aurignacian” rock art, be it in terms of style, content or any other variable. This misalignment between genuinely cultural information and the established “cultural taxonomy” is evident throughout the discipline, leading to countless conflicts and incongruities.

Towards a cultural sequence What adds to the difficulties is that a significant portion of palaeoart remains essentially undated. This applies to rock art much more than to portable palaeoart, because the latter was frequently recovered from dateable sedimentary contexts, which applies in only a handful of instances to rock art (twenty-three cases worldwide in the past 140 years). Nevertheless, there are adequate examples of at least roughly dated palaeoart to construct a preliminary chronology for much of the world. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, many of the examples cited can be broadly attributed to specific phases of hominin history. The question arises to what extent there might be regularities in this global record that could possibly point to cultural consistencies. Until now this has not been considered in an informed way, simply because no comprehensive worldwide record had been assembled. Moreover, the definition of palaeoart as some form of art has not been helpful in its study, and it is only when we completely reorientate the subject by collectively considering palaeoart as exograms that it can be perceived in radically different ways. With this volume, such a global record has now been attempted, and that offers a prelude to such an ambitious endeavour. Could it also present the potential of creating a culturally based, broader taxonomy of the Pleistocene cultural framework? Because there has not been a comprehensive review of worldwide Pleistocene palaeoart before the present volume, it has understandably been difficult to distil any credible information from the record that might help in defining cultural entities in the Pleistocene. Based on the contents

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of this book, this could be attempted now, with the database currently available. Just in case there are discernible consistencies or patterns in the way the data presents itself, it would be worth examining the evidence more closely. This is now attempted. The first peremptory observation refers to Figure 72 above: we have noted that the currently available record implies no pattern suggesting that palaeoart production arose in one part of the world and then spread from there. Rather, it seems to reflect the stochastic nature of a distributional pattern determined by a combination of taphonomy and very uneven intensities of research conducted so far. In particular the first of these two factors is strongly evident. All forms of palaeoart material finds attributed to the Lower Palaeolithic are of classes and locality types that are of the kinds that are most resistant to deterioration: silica minerals and quartzite, haematite and other iron minerals in sheltered locations; with very rare shell, bone and ivory finds appearing in the late part of this period, and ostrich eggshell only at the end of it and in just one site of exceptional preservation conditions. This coincides with the observation that the same period has provided a good selection of wooden artefacts from a total of just eight localities: Schöningen (Thieme 1995, 1996a, 1996b, 1997, 1998, 1999a, 1999b), Bilzingsleben (Mania and Toepfer 1973; Mania and Weber 1986; Mania and Mania 1998), Lehringen (Jacob-Friesen 1956; Roebroeks 2008), Bad Cannstadt (Wagner 1990), Gesher Benot Ya’aqov (Belitzky et al. 1991), Clacton-on-Sea (Warren 1922; Allington-Jones 2015), Torralba (Biberson 1964; Howell 1966) and Florisbad (Clark 1955). Numerically, nearly all wooden fragments and artefacts (as well as resin or bark finds) of the Lower Palaeolithic are from just two countries, Germany and Israel. There is no reason to assume that these regions offered some peculiar preservation conditions not possible elsewhere. It is much more likely that there was either better targeted research in these places, or researchers were more efficacious in detecting and salvaging such perishable materials than archaeologists elsewhere. In other words, the record is systematically biased, and much the same can be expected for surviving exogrammatic data. This is especially apparent when the effects of research biases, such as those imposed by the replacement hypothesis, are also contemplated: if researchers are inclined to reject levels of apparent technological sophistication because it would negate an ingrained belief, archaeology becomes a belief system. Nevertheless, the information summarised in this volume presents a surprisingly consistent pattern in the available palaeoart record. Beginning with the Mode 1 tool traditions, we encounter very few classes of evidence: pigment use, manuports, cupules and a very few linear grooves.

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These categories continue through the usually subsequent Mode 2 or Acheulian traditions, during which some graphic elements were added to the portfolio. Added were sets of subparallel or deliberately juxtaposed lines in the form of incised grooves appearing first on stone and shell, later on bone and ivory. Also in this phase, the first proto-sculptures appear, in the form of manuports bearing anthropogenic modifications. But it is with the Mode 3 technologies that distinctively standardised conventions become fully evident. These technocomplexes are defined as Middle Palaeolithic in Eurasia, as Middle Stone Age (MSA) in much of Africa and as core and scraper traditions in Australia. They are widely attributed to robust Homo sapiens types, which included the “Neanderthals”. Possibly around 60 ka ago they were introduced into Australia, by Middle Palaeolithic seafaring colonisers who managed to bring an adequate breeding population into the continent (Bednarik 1997, 2003, 2015a). Perhaps because of Australia’s geographical isolation, these Mode 3 complexes were retained there for much longer than in the Old World continents, surviving as such into the Holocene. In Tasmania, which had become sundered from the mainland about 12 ka ago (Jones 1977), essentially Mode 3 technology continued right up to British contact just two centuries ago. Again, this is very likely the result of isolation of a rather small population that may have even shed some of its skills in the course of the Holocene (Jones 1978). Therefore the Tasmanian rock art can be assumed to comprise only elements derived from Mode 3 conventions, and is represented by cupules, curvilinear mazes and circle patterns, a few simple linear designs and very rarely convergent lines motifs (CLMs), plus hand stencils. This resembles very closely the Pleistocene content of cave art on the southern coast of the Australian mainland. The range of motifs, while following the same basic patterns, is considerably greater in the rich Mode 3 palaeoart traditions in the Australian cave and open sites (Figure 73). It is characterised by prolific variations on the circle and circular maze themes, including divided circles and circles with internal vertical barring; parallel lines and herringbone patterns (e.g. in Koonalda Cave), arcuate forms, wave lines or zigzags, and variants of CLMs that at the end of the Pleistocene seem to grade into the ubiquitous “bird track” motifs (Bednarik 2010).

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Figure 73. Example of the rich aniconic rock art of Pleistocene Australia, of a Mode 3 technocomplex. A wall of Paroong Cave, South Australia, is completely covered to 4 m height by deeply engraved petroglyphs. These traditions constitute the final development of the Mode 3 palaeoart forms, introduced with the initial colonisation of the continent but deriving from an earlier corpus of astonishing uniformity that extends back hundreds of millennia in the Old World continents. Its roots are perhaps to be found in the cupule conventions evident at Daraki-Chattan and Auditorium Cave in Asia; and Nchwaneng, Potholes Hoek and Sai Island in Africa, which are hundreds of millennia old. It commences as a Mode 3 culture with the circle and cupule tradition at Klipbak 1 in the Kalahari, dated to OIS 5e (130–115 ka BP) (Beaumont and Bednarik 2015), i.e. well before the assumed first hominin arrivals in Australia. Even in Europe, where Mode 3 palaeoart has rarely been detected in Mousterian and Micoquian traditions, a number of finds have been reported, such as the sepulchral limestone block from La Ferrassie in France, nearly all of whose cupules occur in pairs. “Paired-ness” is evident in other European palaeoart of the period, such as portable items from Abri Lartet and Cueva Morín (Bednarik 1995a), seemingly implying some unknown binary function. The Temnata Cave schist plaque with its extensive sets of engraved lines is a fine expression of late Mode 3 marking strategy, but it can look back at a long history of juxtaposed or deliberately arranged linear incisions.

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This history of incised markings begins, as far as the available record is concerned, with the engraved freshwater mussel shell from Trinil, Java, on which Homo erectus created various linear grooves about half a million years ago. Among them is a zigzag pattern, still found on a bone fragment from Bacho Kiro, Bulgaria, in the late Mode 3 period, and in a variety of other Middle Palaeolithic examples. The best-known of the fifteen engraved ochre pieces from Blombos Cave in South Africa, in the order of 75 ka old, are SAMAA 8938 and SAMAA 8937. Both bear distinctive crosshatching, which is perhaps a variation on the zigzag motif. Anderson (2012) has drawn attention to the frequency of crosshatching in Middle Stone Age engravings, although she seems to combine two different types. In the more common type, such as the ostrich eggshell fragments from Diepkloof Cave, the Mkomanzi River and Muden flakes or the Klein Kliphuis ochre piece, the grid patterns are of rectangular arrangements. The combined natural and artificial markings reported from Blind River Mouth may be a much earlier precedent of this pattern. The Blombos Cave and Palmenhorst/Rössing lozenge-style arrangements (of diagonals crossing, and in two cases surrounds indicated) show high graphic consistency, echoing the nascent concept embodied on the Trinil shell, so very distant both chronologically and geographically. Viewing collectively the approximately 300 Middle Stone Age specimens that bear engraved grid patterns, it is clear enough that they are manifestations of a single palaeoart tradition which found expression in a variety of materials that in rare circumstances managed to survive. There can be no doubt that this graphic continuum expresses traditions that are in some cultural respects related. Just as distinctive is the distribution and development of the CLMs, the convergent lines motifs. Collectively they are defined as coherent groups of subparallel to fan-like arrangements of two or more straight lines, which may or may not be connected at the focal end, i.e. where they converge (Bednarik et al. 2010). CLMs first appear on the record at Bilzingsleben and Stránská skála in Lower Palaeolithic contexts, perhaps in the order of 400 ka ago. They are found sparsely in Middle Palaeolithic specimens from Europe (Figure 74), and they become important components in the Australian Mode 3 (“Middle Palaeolithic”) ensemble. In the latter region they seem to “evolve” into the tripartite motifs often regarded as depicting bird tracks, vulvae or arrows, which renders it impossible to distinguish between aniconic and iconic variations. In the Pleistocene cave art of Australia (Bednarik 1990a) the CLMs are found with from two to five “toes” (Figure 75).

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Figure 74. Convergent lines motifs from Lower (a-c) and Middle (d-f) Palaeolithic contexts in Europe.

Figure 75. Several convergent lines motifs on a heavily modified wall of Karlie-ngoinpool Cave, South Australia, that features also extensive finger fluting and other rock art.

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Other types of essentially Middle Palaeolithic graphics are the sets of parallel engraved lines and the notched edges of portable objects. Such markings are found from the Late Acheulian (e.g. at Sainte Anne I, Temnata Cave) and Fauresmith (the engraved plaque from Wonderwerk Cave, c. 300 ka) and through the subsequent Mode 3 contexts of Africa (e.g. notches on various bone and ochre or haematite objects), Europe (Oldisleben, Whylen and several French sites) and Australia, where parallel lines are very common in Pleistocene corpora. However, it is with the curvilinear and circular patterns that Mode 3 palaeoart reaches its greatest sophistication. Multiple arcs first appear at Bilzingsleben in Germany, and they are commonly found in Australian Pleistocene rock art. Also occurring in the latter are the wave lines and zigzags, following their long history in the Old World continents. But the finest expressions of Mode 3 traditions, from Australia, are not found elsewhere: the exceedingly complex curvilinear mazes and circle variations that mark the tradition’s graphic culmination, and can be seen as its final signature motifs. Circles may be divided or filled by vertical bars or lozenge grid, and eventually concentric circles or circles with central cupules appear (Figure 76).

Figure 76. Detail of a typical Pleistocene curvilinear maze, Karliengoinpool Cave, South Australia.

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It is only during the second half of the Late Pleistocene, beginning about 40 ka ago, that with the advent of the Franco-Cantabrian palaeoart western Europe diverges from the rest of the Old World. There is almost no known graphic (two-dimensional) palaeoart of figurative properties from the Pleistocene of both Africa and Asia (only three or four sites: Mal’ta, Berelekh, Apollo 11 and possibly Qurta), and none at all from Australia, yet the aniconic traditions especially of the Mode 2 and 3 industries are distinctively consistent, from southern Africa to eastern Asia and Australia. A balanced and comprehensive appraisal of all Pleistocene graphic production simply had not been attempted before; therefore these traditions were so far not recognised. We now have such an appraisal, and it implies a universal Mode 3 palaeoart tradition in four continents, even some traces of it in the Americas. This demonstrates the importance of not becoming so immersed in the minutiae of a subject that one loses sight of the overall purpose of the research. In this case we have failed to see the obvious: the great formal and stylistic consistency of Mode 3 palaeoart, even after allowing for the inevitable taphonomic distortions, implies that these far-flung traditions are very probably all somehow related. They are related culturally: similar behaviour and similar cultural “memes” have evoked similar graphic expressions worldwide, sustaining palaeoart production over hundreds of millennia. This provides the search for the “cultures” of the Pleistocene with a new impetus. We have above reflected that the practice of delineating cultures by technological indices is likely to provide false cultural models of the past. Cultural taxonomies and sequences need to be extracted from cultural indices, of which only palaeoart has survived from the Pleistocene. Throughout the history of archaeology, no sustained effort has been made to extract a cultural sequence from cultural elements. Instead there are inconsistent divisions supposedly created along technological lines. For instance we have the concept of a Neolithic, intended to refer to the advents of pottery, ground stone artefacts, and plant and animal domestication. Yet none of these criteria are valid, except perhaps in certain parts of Europe. In the Middle East (Arabia and Palestine) we have a pottery-free Neolithic, while decorated pottery marks the Pleistocene Early Jomon of Japan. Australia and New Guinea have yielded even earlier ground stone tools, many times as old as the European Neolithic. Together with the considerable complexities of the questions of cultivation and domestication, the traditional criteria of the Neolithic become problematic in defining an era. The concept of a Mesolithic period may be even more nebulous. Obermaier rejected it on the basis that “the final phase of the Capsian, the

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Tardenoisian, the Azilian and the northern Maglemose industries are the posthumous descendants of the Palaeolithic” (Obermaier 1924: 322), and like Stjerna (1910) regarded it as a transitional phase. Traditionally characterised by such features as the introduction of microliths and the Spanish Levantine shelter painting tradition, we now believe the latter is much younger, while microliths were common in many much earlier traditions, including in Middle Palaeolithic and Middle Stone Age technocomplexes. The “Mesolithic” is marked by the introduction of coastal settlement patterns and marine-based economies, contrasting sharply with the inland hunting societies of the Upper Palaeolithic. Indeed, some commentators went so far as crediting the Mesolithic period with inventing arithmetic, to help in “counting shells and fish”. Yet the appearance of coastal economies in deposits of the early Holocene is merely a taphonomic phenomenon. Sea levels oscillated throughout the Pleistocene, therefore any traces of coastal occupations of the period are either below the sea today, or they have fallen victim to coastal erosion. There is absolutely no coastal evidence available from the entire Pleistocene, and since the low-altitude occupations have all been lost to sea level rises, we have only studied the former inland societies of nomadic bands of hunters. They may have accounted for less than half the human populations of the Pleistocene, while the coastal people only became archaeologically visible after the end of the last glacial, as they retreated from the rising sea. Bearing in mind that maritime colonisation occurred around a million years ago (Bednarik 1997, 2003, 2015a), it becomes obvious that the level of technological competence reflected in such feats has not been evident in the nomadic bands of that long period. Or in other words, the constructs we have invented for this period must be distortions based on a taphonomic bias. As we proceed back through the Pleistocene the plateau-forming effects of taphonomy and misinterpretations increase as a function of age. Taphonomic effects are not limited to those of sea level fluctuations; they are universal and they apply to all categories of archaeological material evidence (Bednarik 1994). The evidence of the earliest periods of hominin history is almost invariably so greatly affected by taphonomic distortions that practically all its quantitative parameters are statistically irrelevant. For instance the global distribution of hominin remains is largely unconnected to demography or to marking the spatial movement of genetic traits and their physical manifestations. All skeletal remains from these times are the result of fluke preservation conditions; therefore these geographical distributions indicate primarily the locations where hominin populations lived in geological and climatic conditions favouring the

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occasional preservation of skeletal remains. They are also the locations where we have managed to track down the relevant fossil beds, and they are in the regions where our research efforts have been focused. Therefore we have no hominin remains from territories that were not favourable for preservation or that have not attracted much attention. It is self-evident that the prime regions of hominin finds share quite specific geological conditions: well-stratified, undisturbed high-pH sediments, often containing significant volcanic ash components. Zones lacking such deposits also lack hominin remains. During more than one and a half centuries of Pleistocene research it has become necessary, for practical reasons, to define main phases of human history. The obvious problem with traditional notions of these eras of hominin evolution is that they were determined before nearly all of the information we have today was gathered. With the means available then, the researchers concerned have done their best to design a workable system. But it is also clear that many of the assumptions on which chronological pigeonholes were established, essentially during the 19th century, are no longer valid or relevant. A call for a revised system is not an expression of disrespect for the pioneers of the discipline, but a realistic response to their reasonable expectation that we would build on their foundation, that we would refine a developing discipline to meet new challenges. To preserve a system intended as a tentative taxonomy is not an expression of respect; it facilitates academic stagnation, which the founding fathers of the discipline—academic revolutionaries of their time—surely would not have advocated. John Lubbock created the names Palaeolithic and Neolithic as the first two of four “great epochs”, the subsequent ones being the Bronze Age and the Iron Age (Lubbock 1865: 3). In this he expanded the previously named sequence of Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages, generally attributed to Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1836, but first publicised by him in 1819; cf. Rowley-Conwy 2006, 2007). However, this was preceded by the same divisions proposed in the previous century, first by Antoine de Jussieu and then by Nicholas Mahudel (Hamy 1906: 246, 249–251). The concept of a time when people used stone tools was already recognised in the 16th century by Michele Mercati when he realised that the types of stones called “ceraunia” (“thunderstones”, believed to have fallen from the sky) were in fact knapped stone tools, and he quite correctly reasoned that the people who made and used them lacked the use of metals to fashion tools from (Goodrum 2008: 496). Thus, by the late 1860s the basic divisions of what European scholars decreed constitutes “prehistory” were in place very much as they are

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applied today. However, it is also clear that this taxonomy faces numerous challenges. For instance there is no agreement as to where the Iron Age ends, with opinions ranging from the introduction of writing to the view that we are still existing in this era today. These problems commenced with the apparent gap between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic, which Hodder M. Westropp sought to fill with a period he called Mesolithic (Westropp 1866: 288, 1872). He also replaced Lubbock’s “Neolithic” of the previous year with “Caenolithic”. This concept of a Mesolithic was strenuously opposed by John Evans (1872), even after Edouard Piette (1895) announced that he had discovered the elusive Mesolithic at Mas-d’Azil in France. Knut Stjerna (1910) introduced the terms “Protoneolithic” and “Epipalaeolithic” to account for the Mesolithic, defining it as a transitional feature. If as proposed here the “Mesolithic” is simply the effect of seeing, for the very first time, the coastal Upper Palaeolithic—as seems highly likely—the “Mesolithic era” is indeed an incongruity. Much the same can be said for all transitions between perceived periods in human pre-History (Camps and Chauhan 2009 dedicated a large volume to this issue). For instance the Palaeolithic era was divided into three successive phases, yet there is no clear demarcation between the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic, nor is there one between the Middle and the Upper Palaeolithic. In the first case it is unclear where to place “transitional” industries such as the Fauresmith of southern Africa or the Micoquian of Europe; while the second transition has caused endless bewilderment to archaeologists of recent decades who were so mesmerised by the African Eve hoax they could not see through its fake data (Bednarik 2008a, 2009a, 2011, 2013a). The simplistic notion that the introduction of a genetically new population in Europe coincided with the appearance of a radically different technology and palaeoart has been gradually eroded since the Châtelperronian had to be “yielded” to the “Neanderthals”. This now applies to all Early Upper Palaeolithic technocomplexes, even the Aurignacian. The most complex palaeoart of Ice Age Europe now has to be attributed to these “primitive brutes”, the Neanderthals (Bednarik 2008a), which renders the teleological myths of Pleistocene archaeology redundant and the replacement model as a whole inconsequential. Other misgivings concerning the “epochalism” of archaeology (Childe et al. 2004: 173; Connah 2010: 62–63) apply to more recent times. For instance the “Copper Age” or “Chalcolithic” invented by Evans (1881) was sometimes separated from the Bronze Age by him, sometimes included in it. But the perhaps most potent objections concern the entirely Eurocentric basis of this ideology. At present, one can find in a single country such as India people living in the Nuclear Age as well as people

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who exist with a Palaeolithic or Neolithic technology, and people of every possible intermediate level of technology. For instance, are the Jarawas of Andaman Island, who have a stone tool subsistence system but use iron nails salvaged from shipwrecks (Bednarik and Sreenathan 2012), of the Stone Age or the Iron Age? The same applies to the hunters and gatherers of the Kimberley region in Australia who cold-hammered lost horseshoes into the feared shovel-nosed spear points. Nothing is ever as clear-cut as archaeologists imagine. There is no Bronze Age in sub-Saharan Africa, no “Mesolithic” in most of the world, the “Middle Palaeolithic” also looks increasingly nebulous (Xing Gao and Norton 2002), and “Neolithic” has turned out to be a Humpty-Dumpty word (sensu Lewis Carroll): it means just what one chooses it to mean. Clearly, the adoption of this Europebased nomenclature in the other continents, aided by colonialism, has only served to cloud the issues. If we add to all these concerns the realisation that the “cultures” of this teleological “epochalism” need to be expected to be false constructs, because they are based on technologies rather than culture (i.e. on invented tool types and their relative combinations within assemblages), it becomes evident that the classification tentatively proposed one and a half centuries ago is in some need of review. Since its main flaw is its reliance on an etic taxonomy of technological indices, the development of a culturally based nomenclature would offer the most promising option. With the broad canvas of the palaeoart evidence so far discovered we now have a first basis for such a review. This can be supplemented with the implications derived from careful assessment of this record by the cognitive and neurosciences (Bednarik 1987, 1990b, 1995a, 2011, 2012, 2014b) and various other relevant sources. An understanding of the cognitive dimensions of culture is essential in this task, and has been difficult to secure from the empirical information provided by archaeology, inevitably tainted by ideology and dogma. Initially one should step back and appreciate the “greater picture”. The following details could guide such a re-assessment.

A proposal We are familiar with the end result of hominin evolution, and we quite reasonably assume that it began several million years ago with a creature, as yet undiscovered, that resembled an ape. We know that this period was marked by many evolutionary changes, among which the relentless encephalisation is perhaps the most obvious. This increase in brain volume came at great cost to humanity: it caused the human foetus to be expelled

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at an increasingly early stage in pregnancy, imposing on society a great burden in caring for these prematurely born young (Joffe 1997; O’Connell et al. 1999; Falk 2009; Bednarik 2011). Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the cognition and intelligence of hominins increased, at least very roughly, in step with the growth in brain size, and that this enlargement was sufficiently advantageous to be selected for. Encephalisation had to be of massive benefit to the species, or natural selection would have never favoured it. On that basis the orthodox model, seeing very little change in cognitive sophistication until a sudden burst in the final Pleistocene (Pfeiffer 1983; Mithen 1998; Klein and Edgar 2002), has no biological justification and is an absurdity. Therefore the first prerequisite for a realistic paradigm is that hominids must have used their brain intensively during the Pleistocene and the preceding Pliocene. We know that they possessed awareness and a Theory of Mind (ToM) throughout this time, because even extant apes have them. Based on primatology, the ToM of the still unknown earliest hominid ancestor, 5 to 8 million years ago, should be expected to have been similar to that of a modern child of about 40 months (Bednarik 2015b). Homo erectus of, say, one million years ago has been credited with the cognitive development of a modern juvenile of about 8 to 12 years of age, based on rational expectations of cognitive and neuroscience (Bednarik 2012). This would reasonably account for his ability of crossing the open sea, suggesting that a substantially modern ToM was in place by the second half of the Early Pleistocene. It is less readily transparent at what time metarepresentation (Leslie 1994; Baron-Cohen 1995; Perner and Garnham 2001), recursive thinking and episodic memory or future planning appeared. They are lacking in the great apes (Suddendorf 1999; Call and Tomasello 1999; Suddendorf and Busby 2003). However, if we consider that nautical colonisation a million years ago demonstrates the latter conclusively, it seems to demand recursion and possibly also the ability of explicitly representing representations as representations. Within this reasonable framework, demanded by the sciences but contradicting archaeological beliefs, the ability to navigate the sea clearly stands out as one of the key evidences. Another is the conscious sentience of pareidolia, demonstrated by the Makapansgat cobble between 2.4 and 2.9 Ma (million years) ago, presupposing apperceptive capability. By comparison, the earliest suggestion of self-awareness, in the form of beads and pendants, derives from Middle Pleistocene contexts, i.e. it is significantly later than would be expected, but taphonomy no doubt accounts for this quite effectively. Accordingly the following timeline is

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perhaps the most realistic, taking into account all relevant information currently accessible. The use of exograms began at least 3 Ma ago, at a time when ToM, consciousness and self-awareness should have developed about half-way between that of a chimpanzee and a present-day human. Forward planning, metarepresentation and recursion should have been acquired as the skilled use of exograms became selected for, somewhere between 3 Ma and 1 Ma ago. While one would expect that self-awareness emerged during the same time, empirical evidence for it only begins later, but then in good numbers. The use of graphic exograms can be traced back 0.5 Ma ago (Trinil engravings), having very probably occurred earlier on perishable materials. Therefore, from the perspective of securing a reasonable timeframe to form a null-hypothesis, the use of manuports as exograms was followed by their modification at least 400 ka ago (Tan-Tan proto-figurine), while the creation of graphic exograms began somewhat earlier. The advent of distinctive graphic traditions, apparently about 0.5 Ma ago, marks the first definable palaeoart tradition. It continues practically to the end of the Mode 3 technocomplexes and is marked by a quite distinctive repertoire of motif types. These are found across four continents and culminate in the complex rock art of final Pleistocene Australia. We propose that these many traditions, extending over several hundred millennia and a huge territory, be known as Exogram Stage 2, ending 200 years ago in Tasmania, in the early Holocene in mainland Australia, and c. 40 ka ago in Europe. This period is preceded by Exogram Stage 1, the period from 3 Ma to 0.5 Ma, during which the use of exograms evolved but from which no characteristic patterning in such use can be demonstrated currently. Following this convention, Exogram Stage 3 continues the use of previous practices, but adds to them—and sometimes seems dominated by—the use of graphic (two-dimensional) iconography, i.e. the depiction of objects. Stage 3 begins at different times (e.g. 40 ka in Europe, 30 ka in southern Africa, early Holocene in Australia) and there is strong evidence that it is introduced by juveniles initially (Bednarik 2008b; cf. Bednarik and Sreenathan 2012). No sharp division between Stages 2 and 3 is evident, because various palaeoart traditions of Eurasia are greatly dominated by aniconic motifs but also comprise rare iconic imagery. Indeed, if the Micoquian engraving on the Oldisleben scapula fragment should depict a stickman (which we regard as likely but unproven; Figure 60), it would be by far the earliest known iconic graphic exogram. All Exogram Stage 3 traditions are in fact numerically dominated by aniconic motifs, contrary to popular beliefs. Even the Franco-Cantabrian cave art with its prominent complement of zoomorphs comprises considerably

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more non-iconic material, including the so-called signs. These differ from the Stage 2 motif range and seem more standardised, to the point of resembling a formalised semiotic system. Indeed, the change from Stage 2 motifs to these “signs” is one of the most promising topics for analytical attention. Similarly, the complex engravings on Russian/Siberian plaques are so conventionalised that some authors tend to see them as maps or mnemonic devices. Irrespective of the meanings of such symbol systems, they and not the animal images are the most complex component of these palaeoart traditions, but the iconic component has been greatly overemphasised. There is no distinctive innovation in the use of exograms with the end of the Pleistocene, as Stage 3 continues into the Holocene where it already exists. The next great change occurs with the introduction of writing systems, a new class of exograms, indicating the advent of the Exogram Stage 4. Writing constitutes a form of exogram use harnessing both aniconic and iconic elements, formalising them into distinctive conventions and heralding the proliferation of exograms that marks historical “civilisations”. Through them, competence in exogram use becomes a dominant selection factor, and the spiralling acceleration of cultural change it entails marks the second half of the Holocene decisively. This basic division of the early palaeoart into just three main phases may not seem much help in determining a cultural taxonomy of the Pleistocene, but it does have a considerable advantage over the traditional system: it does reflect distinctive cultural traits rather than technologies. And it demonstrates clearly that principal cultural divides do not coincide with any of the perceived somatic types of humans, usually defined as species. Robust Homo sapiens of Eurasia, such as the so-called Neanderthals, clearly created both Stage 2 and Stage 3 exograms. Elsewhere, gracile Homo sapiens sapiens produced Stage 2 rock art, for instance in Australia, including Tasmania, and in Africa. Similarly, Stage 1 palaeoart can be the work of Homo erectus, or it can be of early robust Homo sapiens types. In short, cultural divisions are unrelated to the typologies of palaeoanthropologists, just as they differ from the technological nomenclatures based on tools, mostly stone tools. Thus breaking out of the straitjacket of traditional archaeological thinking is certainly a useful improvement, irrespective of whether these technological or palaeoanthropological classes are true reflections of Pleistocene reality. The tripartite division of Pleistocene palaeoart exograms certainly reflect real cultural categories, and in that sense they are relevant. Of course the system implicit in this proposal needs to be greatly refined, in that the components of each Stage, the regional and chronologically distinctive traditions, need to be characterised. This is not

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attempted here because the resolution of the presently available record is thought to be inadequate for a credible identification of such details. Firstly, the accuracy of available chronological determinations needs to be improved considerably. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the comprehensiveness of the record is entirely inadequate, especially in Africa and Asia. In fact all it shows is that relevant material exists in these continents from the entire period under review, but in tantalisingly fragmentary and scattered modes. Until that record is as comprehensive as that already available from Europe, it would be entirely premature to think about refining the taxonomy. This factor, the inadequate coverage of some continents, is of particular relevance, because it is closely related to the very purpose of this book. The reason for the extreme neglect of extra-European Pleistocene palaeoart and its cavalier treatment in virtually all discussions of the subject is the Eurocentric outlook of the discipline, and its African Eve-centric endeavour to suppress the pre-Upper Palaeolithic evidence from around the world. Not only does it squarely contradict the greatest archaeological hoax of the 20th century (ahead of the Piltdown hoax and any other), it also negates the fond delusion that culture was “invented” in the caves of France and Spain. One of the reasons this book had to be written is to review this delusion in the cold hard light of reality.

Let history be the judge Let us be quite explicit: almost every generic belief about “Palaeolithic art” has now been either refuted or challenged. Most of the surviving corpus is not of animal figures, but is aniconic. The Franco-Cantabrian cave art is not the earliest palaeoart in the world; it was preceded by hundreds of millennia of art-like production, including even some from Europe, but mostly from other continents. The belief that there is no “art” from Middle Palaeolithic (Mode 3) tool traditions is shattered by the simple fact that there is far more surviving palaeoart from Mode 3 industries, especially in Australia, than there is surviving palaeoart from Mode 4 (Upper Palaeolithic) traditions. The naive belief that “Neanderthals” were incapable of producing palaeoart (even that they “scavenged” it from Graciles’ occupation sites!) is particularly disconcerting, now that we regard the most sophisticated palaeoart of the entire Upper Palaeolithic as the work of Neanderthaloids (Bednarik 2007b; Sadier et al. 2012). Then there are the interpretations of the magnificent Franco-Cantabrian cave art as works of “great art”, as evidence of grand rituals, as the elucidations of the religious significance of these “sanctuaries”, these “Sistine Chapels” of

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the ancients—the many explanations emphasising the profundity of this “art”. Yet the empirical evidence is that a major part of it, perhaps most of it, was not even produced by adults; it is the work of children and teenagers (Bednarik 2008b). Literally all Franco-Cantabrian palaeoart that permits the estimation of the age of the producer by forensic methods is the work of youngsters, without a single exception. Moreover, nearly all impressions of human body parts found in these caves, such as tracks, hand or finger prints on soft surfaces, are by teenagers and children, some as young as three years. In these circumstances it is premature to think of elaborate rituals; much of the iconic imagery may simply reflect the preoccupations of male adolescents. The strongest connection between the French and Spanish cave art and religion is perhaps not to be found in the meaning of the “art”, but in the way it is treated today. This has been well expressed by Freeman (1994), when he carefully examined the process of validation of Palaeolithic rock art and noted the parallels with the way religious shrines are authenticated by ecclestial authority in such religions as the Roman Catholic faith: 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).

The validation of Eurasian rock art as Palaeolithic is controlled by those who have apparently been anointed by the “high priesthood” of the “Palaeolithic lobby” (Thompson 2014) to act as arbiters, much in the same way a church would validate its saints, holy relics or sacred sites. Such “authentication” of rock art sites is generally conducted without the use of scientific or forensic data, such as scientific dating evidence, but on the basis of some mysterious, undefined ability of the cognitive systems of the experts of “Palaeolithic style”. That transcendental ability is to “know”, through some mystical power, whether or not a rock art motif is “Palaeolithic”. The styles of the Palaeolithic derive from a vague, never clearly defined concept that confers the status of a “Palaeolithic art expert”. There are fairly self-evident problems with this notion. For instance the literature abounds with polemic among these experts, showing wide disagreement about this “Palaeolithicity” of style (e.g. Zuechner 1996; Pettitt and Bahn 2003; versus Valladas and Clottes 2003). There are

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also many cases in which the stylistic “determinations” have been accepted to have failed (see Bednarik 1995b for examples). We have also thousands of rock art motifs of claimed Palaeolithic style, all across Eurasia, which just cannot be of the Pleistocene, for a variety of reasons. It is simply a fact that relatively naturalistic images of animals (apparently the hallmark of this “Palaeolithic style”) were produced in many periods of the Holocene, including in Classical times, in the Middle Ages and in very recent centuries. Bearing in mind that thousands of non-Palaeolithic motifs have contributed to these extrasensory constructs of Palaeolithic styles (e.g. Bednarik 2009b; 2016), there are some rather imperative issues to be addressed. The “Palaeolithic style” includes many thousands of petroglyphs from open as well as cave sites, and numerous portable objects that are simply not Palaeolithic. Therefore the very definition of this “style” can only be a flawed construct. It cannot possibly be valid, unless one deleted from it all the imagery that is in fact of the Holocene. Yet when the findings of these experts are contradicted by scientific evidence, as has occurred on numerous occasions, the scientists can find themselves severely attacked and defamed. This is not surprising: the self-appointed experts derive their status from the very ability that is under review, and naturally they are inclined to defend that status. A very useful study would investigate how these constructs of “Palaeolithic style” were established and how they are justified, how they came to be adopted, and how they stand up to critical testing. But as Max Planck said in his Scientific autobiography, in response to his fruitless discussions with Wilhelm Ostwald: “A new 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” (Planck 1950: 33–34). The shortcomings of the self-delusional notion that Palaeolithic style experts can, by simple eye-balling of a rock art motif, divine its placement in one of the technological pigeonholes of the Upper Palaeolithic are not likely to be conceded any time soon. What renders this state particularly absurd is that some of its most ardent protagonists both reject and uphold the notion of stylistic determination. Lorblanchet created the term “poststylistic era” (1990), applied by Lorblanchet and Bahn (1993) in the title of their book, and Bahn (1993) quite rightly criticised the stylistic dating of rock art. But at the same time he embraced it fervently for the improbable proposition that a series of thousands of petroglyphs at schist sites fully exposed to the rain are of Palaeolithic age—a geologically unrealistic claim. The only justification for his belief, shared by thousands of archaeologists, is that the images are of “Palaeolithic style”. And of

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course there is the commitment to preserving the authority of the “stylistic daters”. A discipline of internally unfalsifiable propositions that relies on the perceived authority of its “high priests” obviously resembles a religion more than a science. If that authority is predicated on a purported ability of knowing the age of a rock art motif from its perceived style, and if this ability seems to lack an objective justification, its defence in the face of contradictory empirical evidence is irrational. Such a state of affairs helps greatly in explaining why so many aspects of Pleistocene palaeoart have been completely misunderstood: why it has been attributed to shamans and to mental illness (Humphrey 1998; Whitley 2009; Spikins 2009; for response see Bednarik 2013c), why robust Homo sapiens were excluded from possibly having contributed to its production, why it was assumed to be the work of adults, why it was explained away as art and symbols, and why the Franco-Cantabrian corpus was assumed to mark the origins of culture and the arrival of African Eve’s progeny. If the study of Ice Age “art” has been conducted in an arena of untestable propositions postulated by “high priests” who, Freeman suggests, are no better at self-analysis than the “average citizen”, it should not come as a surprise that the information about this invaluable scientific resource is severely tainted. Nationalism, neo-colonialism, cultural jingoism and academic intransigence determine what is disseminated to the public—and what is submitted to UNESCO’s World Heritage List. The simple fact that the extra-European evidence remains largely ignored, so as to preserve the self-delusion of Europeans that their ancestors have bestowed culture on humanity, illustrates the problem. It has also necessitated the writing of this book. However, its author is rather pessimistic about its effectiveness in changing perceptions. Certainly the academic hegemony will have something to say about what it will only see as an attack of its authority. In the second half of the 19th century that same hegemony persistently rejected Marcelino de Sautuola’s idea that Pleistocene man painted in his Altamira Cave. It took three further amateurs, Léopold Chiron, Francois Daleau and Emile Rivière to correct them. Earlier it had rejected Boucher de Perthes’ contention that early man and Pleistocene fauna coexisted, until it was confirmed several decades later by non-archaeologists Hugh Falconer and Joseph Prestwich. Amateur Johann Carl Fuhlrott’s discovery of fossil man in the Neander valley was rejected from 1859 to 1901. Similarly, the discovery of Homo erectus by yet another amateur was followed by its rejection for several decades. It took from 1912 to 1953 and the work of still another non-archaeologist, Kenneth Oakley, to clarify the quite obvious Piltdown hoax. The 1924 find of Australopithecus by

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anatomist Raymond Arthur Dart was merely ignored until the middle of the century. There is an uncanny consistency in these observations concerning the major discoveries of the discipline: in each case it took about 30 to 40 years to correct archaeological blunders, and the corrections were always made by non-archaeologists. This provides considerable support for Planck’s postulate that the opponents of a new idea had to fall off their perches before acceptance was possible. If this is true, academia is in a sorry state. And it does seem to be true, at least in Pleistocene archaeology, if we consider more recent examples. The idea that Homo erectus must have been a seafarer stems from the finds of non-archaeologist Theodor Verhoeven in Flores, Indonesia, in the 1960s. It is still rejected today by many archaeological authorities, who until 1995 were completely unaware of the evidence because it had not been published in English (Bednarik 1995c). Then we have the replacement hypothesis (African Eve): first proposed by charlatan archaeology professor Reiner Protsch in 1973, but formally introduced in 1987, it was opposed by this author since then. Still today its advocates reject the ideas that palaeoart extends back hundreds of millennia, and that hominins actually used their brains long before the “mythical Moderns” (Bednarik 2008a) are said to have marched on Europe to eradicate the people who had created the Chauvet Cave imagery. While it is universally acknowledged that progress in the sciences accelerates exponentially through the decades and centuries, the same cannot be said about correcting the mistakes of Pleistocene archaeology: the intervals between the first statement of an important new find, idea or evidence, and the time of its acceptance seem to have remained the same in the 19th and 20th centuries, and now into the 21st. It therefore appears that Planck did get it right: it has nothing to do with the merits of the find, idea or evidence; it is all about the defence of authority. In short, academia is an unscientific social system, just as Thomas Henry Huxley had foreseen in the 19th century, when he lamented that authorities, disciples and schools of thought “are the curse of science, and do more to interfere with the work of the scientific spirit than all its enemies” (Bibby 1959: 18). We could also consider what one of the most illustrious archaeologists, Lewis R. Binford, had to say about his own colleagues: Humanists [in archaeology] are committed to the defense of their chosen identity. Their methods are vacuous and their attempts at learning pathetic. When challenged, their only recourse is to ad hominem argument. Those who do not share their privileged knowledge are to be understood as defective persons, persons blinded to the truth, or persons who deny the truth in order to pursue dubious social goals (Binford 2000–2001).

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It remains to invite humanists in archaeology to enlighten the present author whether he is a defective person, blinded to the truth, or denies the truth in order to pursue some dubious goals. Alternatively they are invited to reconsider the credibility of Pleistocene archaeology and palaeoanthropology. The first discipline has invented cultures and sociopolitical groups that probably never existed; the second has invented many dozens of human species, most of which are unlikely to be real species, i.e. most were probably inter-fertile. Both disciplines produce narratives that suffer a chronic lack of falsifiability and, predictably, have produced more scientific blunders than any other academic pursuit. Especially the juggernaut of Pleistocene archaeology is notoriously accident prone, and this book bears witness to a major defect: the replacement hypothesis has already been refuted and replaced by the domestication hypothesis (Bednarik 2008a, 2008c, 2011, 2012, 2013a, 2014a, 2015b), yet we need to expect that it will probably take to 2040 to correct that particular mistake. That mistake was entirely unnecessary because most of the empirical evidence refuting the notion was available in 1987, when Eve became dogma. That delay in abandoning a refuted model so as to allow its proponents to expire in the belief that they “held the line” disadvantages the discipline greatly and it is in nobody’s interest; it does not even benefit those whose work is challenged by the more advanced hypothesis. One of the many forms of evidence that contradicts the replacement story and reinforces the auto-domestication account is the pre-Upper Palaeolithic palaeoart of the world, which has been summarised in this book. Its author can only hope that the African Eve supporters consider this evidence fairly, and when they reach the stage of accepting that there are some significant shortcomings in their hypothesis, that they go on and examine the support the domestication hypothesis derives from many other disciplines. In the final analysis, all scholars can be assumed to strive to produce work that will stand the test of time, and that not one relishes the thought that his or her life work will be scorned after their death. Therefore Planck’s dictum that opponents of a new idea need to die before it can be accepted, while apparently true, negates all that good scholarship stands for. History will judge the issue, and history tends to be a harsh judge of those who retarded progress because they felt obliged to defend authority. In applying these principles to the subject of Pleistocene palaeoart it should be obvious that, despite all suppression attempts by Eve’s advocates, thousands of pieces of evidence have been assembled thus far. How many such specimens will we have in five centuries from now? How will history judge the ideas of Eve’s apostles then?

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