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ENGLAND - Prehistory

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Bianca
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« on: January 18, 2009, 07:51:13 pm »










Artistic streak



So what were the Cro-Magnons like? Well, anatomically they were essentially like us, but slightly larger bodied and larger brained. Their technology and society were far more advanced than anything seen before them.

Beautifully carved harpoons made of red deer antler and jewellery made of stone and amber dating from around 11,500 years ago have been found at Starr Carr in Scarborough. Even more remarkable was the discovery there of 21 masks made from deer skulls, originally thought to have been worn during hunts but now believed to be part of some kind of ritual.

At sites all over Eurasia, from Portugal to the Urals, the arrival of H. sapiens has been linked with an explosion in cave art. Until recently, however, early British H. sapiens was thought to have missed this early artistic flowering, their struggles with the environment held to have diminished their desire for self-expression.

But in collaborative research involving a member of the AHOB team, 90 possible engravings, including depictions of horse, bison, bear, birds and women, were found on the walls of Church Hole cave in Creswell Crags, Derbyshire. Other caves in the same region have also revealed art on their walls. These finds not only raise early British H. sapiens to the same artistic level as their peers elsewhere, but as the style of the images is similar to that of finds elsewhere in Europe from this time, it suggests that groups may have been linked via a land bridge where the North Sea is now located.

While these early British H. sapiens were relatively advanced, this was still a primitive world, as illustrated by the apparent evidence of cannibalism at Gough’s Cave. The skull fragment, found in 1987, clearly shows cut marks made as a stone knife was used to scalp it. As more human fossils emerged, the picture looked darker still. “I think the evidence of cannibalism here is very strong,” says Stringer. “It looks as if the butchery is for meat. They are cutting out the tongues, smashing the long bones open to get the marrow out – that makes it look as if this was done for nutritional purposes. Of course, these people may simply have been starving and someone died and they did this – in my view ‘crisis cannibalism’ such as this must have happened from time to time.

But it isn’t only the Cheddar site, there are others with similar evidence, so I think it was a more widespread activity, probably groups killing and eating each other.”As exciting as many of the AHOB researchers’ finds have been, one particular piece of the puzzle still eludes them. “It’s still my dream to find an early human fossil in Britain,” says Stringer. “But in Europe as a whole, human fossils are rare. There weren’t that many people around, and that isn’t surprising. Humans were carnivorous by this time, so they are at the top of the food chain.

There are always fewer carnivores than herbivores, and look at the competition, there were lots of very successful predators around – lions, sabre-toothed cats, several species of hyenas, wolves…” he pauses, laughing at the gravity of the situation facing our distant ancestors. “Humans, especially in the earlier stages, weren’t yet that successful – they were thin on the ground – in many ways you just have to admire them for surviving at all.”



http://www.geographical.co.uk/Features/Chris_stringer_-_Mar_2007.html
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