Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Dating Rock Art

I love it when science is explained with a well thought out and cleanly drawn illustration.

A commentary in Nature News and Views by David G. Pearce and Adelphine Bonneau presents this diagram on dating rock art.


Two recent studies on dating cave paintings from Spain are discussed.

Who were the artists?

The oldest minimum age for the paintings is 66 ka (thousand  years) leading to speculation that they might have been drawn by Neanderthals. The earliest presence of modern humans in Spain is from  40 ka. This would imply independent evolution of symbolic behavior in Neanderthals.  However, the same painting throws up a range of minimum dates from ~ 60 ka to ~ 3 ka making an exclusive link  to Neanderthals problematic.

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