dim passageways, a cool breath, footsteps echo, bats scurry away. Suddenly, in the flickering glow of the lamp, two piebald horses, directly in front of me, full of life and plastic. I almost think I can hear her snort. That was my impression when I visited the Pech Merle cave in southern France with ancient scholars in September. The animal pictures were probably painted on the rock by ice age people, some around 29,000 years ago. Such representations, in caves like Altamira, Lascaux or Chauvet, are among the most valuable cultural heritage of mankind today.
More on this in SPIEGEL
Issue 51/2019
Yes, he can
Why Donald Trump just gets away with it allDigital edition Printed edition Apps | SUBSCRIPTION
Whoever engages in cave pictures tumbles into the depths of time, right into the dizzyingly strange world of our ancestors.
But everything is relative. Now I find out: The French cave paintings could be a new-fashioned bells and whistles - at least compared to the really old cave paintings in Indonesia, of which a team around the Australian archaeologist David Brumm reported on Thursday in the science journal "Nature".
In a cave on Sulawesi, the researchers discovered figurative hunting scenes and mixed animals and humans, painted them on the walls with reddish color. The uranium-thorium dating showed a record-breaking age of up to 44,000 years. That would be a few millennia older than comparable finds in Europe. And it shakes the previously widespread view that Europe is the most important haven of high cave culture and that other regions of the world have only a late, weak reflection of it to offer. Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that. Prehistoric art history must be rewritten, expanded by at least one chapter that takes place in Asia, a fascinating prequel. But what exactly is it about?
The picture is said to be "the oldest evidence of the conveyance of a story in Stone Age art", the "Nature" authors write, in short: it is the oldest story in the world. These sentences themselves tell a lot about the worldview of their authors. Cave paintings are always about us, the viewer and their time. They hold up a mirror to us.
Indonesia's National Research Center for Archeology / Griffith University / REUTERS
Cave painting in the Sulawesi cave
Exploring cave art is a relatively young science. In the pioneering phase of cave art history writing about 150 years ago, many researchers suspected fraud when looking at the Stone Age paintings - such beautiful forms could not possibly have come from semi-wild primitive primates! It only dawned on the scholar: Even cavemen had taste and talent. The breakthrough came in 1902 when the French historian Émile Cartailhac, one of the sharpest-mouthed crap makers of the cave paintings, backed off in his article "Mea Culpa a Skeptic".
But the Zoff really started. Did the Paleo-Picassos paint just for fun, as an end in themselves? This theory fit elegantly into the worldview of Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Cave magicians might conjure up ghosts with shamanic visions, as some anthropologists believed? Did the prehistoric documents simply depict their everyday lives? Or did they tell fictional stories as the "Nature" authors suspect? Good question, next question. There will never be a clear answer, at least not until someone finally builds a time travel machine.
Who knows, maybe someday a researcher will introduce the following theory: Cave walls once worked like social media unplugged, with influencers, memes and hypes. Maybe worried paleo grandpas moaned around the campfire even against the new media? According to the motto: "In the past we didn't need ocher paint to talk. This constant irrigation with wall paintings is the reason for the lack of concentration of the youth. And man, put the damned pen away at the mammoth meal!"
I myself do not find this scenario implausible, as compared.
And what is your theory?
warmly
Yours Hilmar Schmundt
Twitter: @hilmarschmundt
Feedback & suggestions?
Abstract
My reading recommendations this week
- A rabbit from the 3D printer contains the clone instructions for itself, writes my colleague Julia Merlot, now researchers have cloned the model.
- A dating app is to couple the right partners, plans George Church, the bad boy of biology. Here are some background information in the "Technology Review" of the "Digid8" project.
- Call the orca grandma: orca whales have a much higher chance of survival if a grandmother teases them, researchers report in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences".
- The eruption of the stratovolcano on New Zealand's White Island has claimed many lives. "National Geographic" reports on how monitoring works.
Elementary Particles - the weekly science newsletter. Elementary particles are free of charge and end up in your mailbox every Saturday at around 10 a.m. Subscribe to the newsletter here:
quiz
Tuberculosis is considered the biggest killer among infectious diseases. How many people die from it each year? 150,000? 1.5 million? 15 million?
What is "Plundervolt" please? An electrically charged pastry made of pastry? A computer attack? A unit of measure for excess energy?
In the specialist journal "PLOS One", linguists report that times like "quarter twelve" are slowly dying out. But what does "quarter twelve" mean anyway? 11.15 a.m. 12.15 p.m. A quarter out of twelve, i.e. 3:00 a.m.?
* You will find the answers at the bottom of the newsletter
Picture of the week
Craig P. Burrows
These dendrobium orchids shine like alien flowers from a science fiction film in their cold neon tone. The US photographer Craig Burrows simply irradiated them with ultraviolet light. It is short-wave and many animals, for example bees, can see it. The human eye, like the camera, only perceives the long-wave fluorescence that triggers UV light - bluish and mysterious.
footnote
"Cheops", a space telescope from the European space agency Esa, is said to orbit 700 kilometers above the earth and is to be hoisted into space on December 17 from Kourou, French Guiana. The view above the hazy atmosphere enables the cosmic eye to examine some of the more than 4,000 planets outside our solar system, for the first proof of which the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded on Tuesday.
SPIEGEL + recommendations from science
- Climate change: Startups in the USA are practicing the renaissance of nuclear power in order to save the earth from too much CO2
- Nuclear power: Against nuclear power paranoia - Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the real dangers to humanity and how they can be averted
- Genetics: Mumpitz or Wissenschaft - How useful is genealogy via genetic analysis?
* Quiz answers: Tuberculosis claims 1.5 million lives annually. Treatment usually only takes six months and costs a whole $ 26. / "Plundervolt" is the name of a computer attack that exploits a specific processor vulnerability through targeted voltage fluctuations to steal data. / "Quarter twelve" stands for 11:15 a.m. If you want, you can replay our online quiz on regional languages here.
