The famous images decorating the walls of caves like Lascaux in France and Altamira in Spain hold their own among the acknowledged masterpieces of recorded history. Dating back some 12,000 to 17,000 years to the Magdalenian period, these elegant depictions, rendered in charcoal and ochre, captured the essences of horses, bison, rhinoceroses and other creatures the artists encountered in their Ice Age lives. Now new evidence reveals similarly sophisticated artwork to be twice as old as the Magdalenian material. Findings described today in the journal Nature confirm that paintings found in Chauvet cave in Vallon-Pont-d¿Arc, Ardeche, France date to the Aurignacian period, around 30,000 years ago.

French researcher Helene Valladas and colleagues obtained radiocarbon dates on charcoal from the paintings themselves and from charcoal found elsewhere in Chauvet¿s chambers. Two samples yielded dates of 26,000 years ago, but the others clustered between 29,000 and 32,000 years of age. This, the team notes, suggests that there may have been two significant periods of human occupation in the cave before a rockfall sealed it off.

The new dates "confirm that even 30,000 years ago, Aurignacian artists, already known as accomplished carvers, could create masterpieces comparable to the best Magdalenian art," the researchers write. "Prehistorians, who have traditionally interpreted the evolution of art as a steady progression from simple to more complex representations, may have to reconsider existing theories of the origins of art."

1 Comments

1. 1. nfiertel 09:01 PM 6/10/10

   I suggest that prehistorians ought to study art..actually do it to even begin to understand that art does not evolve from simple to more sophisticated..it is always as it is...it does not evolve but it does change in a sense laterally and not vertically. Style content and meaning is determined by the then and the now. A good line from 35k years ago is not less nor more than one good line done right now. The brain of Cro Magnon is our equal and thus one's sight and insight is not significantly different. The idea of Less is More from the Bauhaus era has always been there in the back of the artist's mind. Artists often say and mean it that there is nothing new in art. I stand by it. Technologies change and thus ways of expressing the otherwise inexpressible find different styles to do this but whether the artist lives today or in a cave across the world and in a different time and place, it us perfectly understandable to us all. One need not look into it to see its sophistication when it is sophisticated and its simplicity when done by someone simple and naive but this can be said just the same about people today as those from a thousand generations back. Just as some redneck can say of some art..my kid can do that one can say that Cro Magnon could also do what we do today..I speak as an artist with respect for the near infinite generations of creative individuals who have thanklessly decorated and communicated culture across the divide of life and death. They are the only real carriers of the fire of our ancestors to us today. One ought to look at modern artists with the same respect and dedication ( and give them support) as in the future, their ideas will be seen in millennia with respect and astonishment and surprise that we 'primitives' could have conjured up such images so long ago in our time. It is not evolution from the simple to the more sophisticated..it is always just our wonderful and agile minds and has always been so from when we evolved from those creatures who could not see what some of us can see.

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