Cave art backs 'human revolution'

Pre-history/ dating challenged

FRESH archaeological evidence from France suggests that early human society developed much faster than many pre-historians suspected.

Tests on pigment from cave paintings, including rhino and bison, discovered last year in the Ardeche, south-eastern France, have revealed that some were painted around 34,000 years ago - 12,000 years older than archaeologists at first thought.

The new dating evidence will tip the balance in a long-running academic debate between those pre-historians who think sophisticated human society evolved slowly, and those who believe it emerged rapidly in the "human revolution''.

The new French dates are in line with evidence from Germany showing sophisticated, small-scale sculptures were being produced there around 36,000 years ago. The findings suggest that humans underwent a revolution as soon as they left the warmer Middle East and Africa and arrived in Ice Age Europe.

Both the climate and the utterly different animals they had to hunt forced early Europeans to become more sophisticated very rapidly. They almost certainly coalesced in larger groups, which in turn required the emergence of leaders and greater group identity, reinforced by increased ritual and religion.

Most cave art is thought to have been religious in function and its newly discovered early emergence is thought to reflect the more general human social revolution which now appears to have taken place immediately after the entry of our species, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, into Europe about 40,000 years ago.

The new French dates are likely to call into question dating assumptions about dozens, perhaps hundreds of other French cave paintings.

"A significant proportion may well turn out to be much older than has previously been thought," said Dr Paul Mellars, an authority on early Stone Age art at Cambridge University.

So far less than 1 per cent of the thousands of paintings in French caves have been scientifically dated. Even the date of the world's most famous painted cave - Lascaux (assumed at 17,000 BC) - is based on the flimsiest of evidence. Recent scientific dating on four painted caves in northern Spain and France revealed that the Stone Age artworks there were about 15,000 years old - 4,000 years younger than had been thought.

So now, with the oldest cave paintings known to date back at least 34,000 years, Europe's Stone Age cave painting tradition can be said to have lasted for some 20,000 years. Indeed, the early date of the Ardeche artworks makes them the oldest known paintings in the world.

Early naturalistic art seems to have been a phenomenon of the Ice Age - for as Europe became warmer, sophisticated art disappeared from the continent for some 10,000 years, until it was re-invented in a totally different form by the early Greeks 4,000 years ago.

The whole chronology of European Stone Age art, affecting hundreds of caves in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, will now have to be re-assessed.

"We will have to re-examine the flimsy basis on which cave art chronology has been based in the past and there could be a few surprises," said one of the world's leading experts on the Stone Age colonisation of Europe, Professor Clive Gamble of the University of Southampton.