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National Geographic : 2015 Jan
Contents
first artists 41 progress down the highway to the wedding ring on your finger and the icons on your iPhone. There’s something else telling about these early African and Middle Eastern eruptions of symbolism: They come, and then they go. The beads, the paint, the etchings on ocher and os- trich egg—in each case, the artifacts show up in the archaeological record, persist in a limited area for a few thousand years, and then vanish. The same applies to technological innovations. Bone harpoon points, found nowhere else be- fore 45,000 years ago, have been uncovered in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in sedi- ments nearly twice that old. In South Africa two relatively complex stone and bone tool traditions appear—the Still Bay 75,000 years ago and the Howieson’s Poort 65,000 years ago. But the lat- ter lasted just 6,000 years, the former 4,000. No- where has a tradition been found to spread across space and through time, gathering richness and diversity, until just before 40,000 years ago, when art began to appear more commonly across Af- rica, Eurasia, and Australasia. As far east as the Indonesian island of Sulawesi (Celebes), sten- ciled handprints—once thought of as an inven- tion of the European Upper Paleolithic—were recently shown to be almost 40,000 years old. It seems unlikely, therefore, that some genetic “switch” flipped in our African ancestors to pro- duce the capacity for a new, higher-order level of cognition that, once it evolved, produced a lasting change in human behavior. So how do we explain these apparently spo- radic flare-ups of creativity? One hypothesis is that the cause was not a new kind of person but a greater density of people, with spikes in popu- lation sparking contact between groups, which accelerated the spread of innovative ideas from one mind to another, creating a kind of collective brain. Symbols would have helped cement this collective brain together. When populations again fell below critical mass, groups became isolated, leaving new ideas nowhere to go. What innova- tions had been established withered and died. Such theories are difficult to prove—the past holds its secrets close. But genetic analyses 65,000 | 75,000 A block of red ocher (above) found in Blombos Cave in 2000 bears a pattern of cross-hatchings and parallel lines etched by a human hand 75,000 years ago. At left, Henshilwood holds a red ocher crayon found in nearby Klipdrift Shelter in 2013. “This is where it all began,” says Henshilwood. 0mi 400 0km 400 Mediterra nean Sea Black Sea ATLANTIC OCEAN Dan ube EUROPE AFRICA ASIA MOROCCO SPAIN FRANCE GERMANY CZECH REP. RUSSIA TURKEY IRAQ ISRAEL Lascaux Brassempouy Dolní Věstonice Chauvet Berekhat Ram Tito Bustillo Renne Zaraysk Geissenklösterle and Hohle Fels Hohlenstein-Stadel and Vogelherd Altamira and Monte Castillo Pigeon Skhul and Qafzeh Paris Berlin Moscow Madrid To Malta (SIBERIA), 2,500 mi (4,023 km) SOUTH AFRICA DEM. REP. OF THE CONGO NAMIBIA AFRICA Diepkloof Blombos and Klipdrift NGM MAPS
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