Three tiny figurines carved out of mammoth ivory, unearthed in a cave in southwestern Germany, have demonstrated that Early Man was far from primitive in his artistic skills.

The artworks found at Hohle Fels cave in the Jura Mountains, Schwabia, have been carbon-dated to at least 30,000 years old, placing them in the era when anatomically modern man and the strange hominids known as Neanderthals lived alongside each other.

A team led by archaeologist Dr Nicholas Conard from Tübingen University report their research in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

None longer than five centimeters across, the carvings are of a half-human creature that appears to have the body of a man and possibly the face of a lion, a duck-like bird and an animal that resembles a horse.

The artworks join 17 other sculptures, including a fragment of a sophisticated musical pipe made from swan bone, that have been found at three nearby sites, Vogelherd, Geissenkloesterle and Hohlenstein-Stadel, all in the Ach and Lone Valleys southwest of Ulm.

These works "belong to one of the oldest traditions of figurative art known worldwide and point to the Upper Danube as an important centre of cultural innovation during the early Upper Palaeolithic period," says Conard, who made the find.

The carvings have been dated to the so-called Aurignacian period, through analysis of carbon isotopes in the stratum of soil in which they were deposited.

The collection of 20 carvings is "the oldest body of figurative art in the world," said British archaelogist Anthony Sinclair in an accompanying commentary.

The unknown hand which carved them displayed astonishing technical skills. This debunks the notion, set down in the 19th century, that cavedwellers began as primitive wall-daubers and then bit by bit acquired better artistic talents and a wider range of tools and materials.

"The study of early art has been plagued by our desire to [see] this essentially human skill in a progressive evolutionary context," says Sinclair.

"Yet for many outlets of artistic expression - cave paintings, textiles, ceramics and musical instruments - the evidence increasingly refuses to fit. Instead of a gradual evolution of skills, the first modern humans in Europe were in fact astonishingly precocious artists."

Arguably the most famous cave paintings in the world are the Lascaux caves in southwestern France, which are around 17,000 years old. However, in October 2001, spectacular charcoal walldrawings depicting horses, rhinoceros and a deer found in in the Ardeche region of France, were estimated to be between 29,700 and 32,400 years old. The dating of these Chauvet caves paintings shows that early European dwellers were just as skilled at art as the humans who followed 13,000 years later, the researchers said at the time.

The oldest known objects considered to be art are far older than the cave paintings or the newly discovered figurines, however, and they precede the rise of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens.

A tiny stone carving found in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights in 1981 is estimated at 233,000 years old. And pigments and paint-grinding equipment found in a cave in 2000 at Twin Rivers, near Lusaka, Zambia, are believed to be between 350,000 and 400,000 years old.

The source of the given news and copyrights belong to the ABC Online News

Back