Prehistoric people may have used firelight to create the illusion of movement in their art.
An analysis of 50 engraved stones excavated in France suggests that when the stones were placed near a fire, the flickering light made the engraved animals seem to move, researchers report April 20 in PLOS ONE.
These stones, or “plaquettes,” were found in the 1860s in a rock-shelter called Montastruc, and are engraved with animals such as horses, ibex and deer. The site was used by Magdalenian people, hunter-gatherers who inhabited the area between 23,000 and 14,000 years ago. The researchers analyzed heat damage on the stones, which was indicative of them being directly exposed to high temperatures for a prolonged period, and created 3-D models of the plaquettes. Those models were imported to a virtual reality software where they were placed next to a virtual hearth so that the areas of heat damage were closest to the flames, mimicking how the stones may have been placed in real life. The researchers then observed the visual effects of the virtual reality light.
It was surprising to see how dynamic the art was and “how changed your experience of the art was by a simple thing, just putting it close to a fire,” says Andy Needham, an archaeologist at the University of York in England. The work suggests that the artists purposely engraved along the contours of the rock to influence viewers to see meaningful movement through the random pattern of firelight, he says.
The finding adds to archaeologists’ understandings of the relationship between early people’s artwork and fire. Another recent study found that Stone Age humans created “hidden” art in dark caves which could be illuminated and made visible only with the help of the right lighting. Researchers who examined the Blackwater Draw finds saw them as clear evidence of mammoths having been killed by human hunters sometime in the past. Ensuing generations of archaeologists filled out the picture of an intrepid mammoth-killing bunch, dubbed the Clovis people, who spread across North America between around 13,500 and 12,500 years ago. Clovis points or skeletal damage presumably caused by them have been found among mammoth bones at 11 North American sites, including Blackwater Draw. Two other North American sites containing mastodon bones, one featuring remains of extinct elephant-like creatures called gomphotheres, plus a site that yielded camel and horse fossils also include Clovis points or evidence of injuries from sharp, pointed stones (SN: 8/9/14, p. 7).
Archaeologists typically refer to these places as kill sites. It’s long been assumed that Clovis hunters must have left spearpoints lying among the bones of mammoths and other massive creatures after killing and butchering them. If so, Clovis big-game hunters possibly contributed to the extinction of their enormous prey (SN: 11/24/18, p. 22).
But the Clovis people’s status as adept killers of tusked beasts weighing up to about 9 metric tons has come under fire. New experimental and archaeological studies suggest an entirely different scenario, says archaeologist Metin Eren of Kent State University in Ohio. Clovis points had many uses, like a Swiss Army knife, Eren contends. Spear-throwing hunters might have occasionally killed a mammoth, especially one separated from its group or slowed due to injury. More often, these tools served as knives to cut meat off carcasses of already dead mammoths or as dart tips hurled to scare away other scavenging animals drawn to mammoth remains, Eren and his colleagues conclude in the October Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
You must be logged in to post a comment.