When a lifeless elephant is required to know prehistory | Culture | EUROtoday

La Elefanta Yoyo He died in 2024 on the Barcelona Zoo at age 54. It was an awfully longeva elephant – usually these magnificent animals dwell a most of 40 years in captivity – and, as well as, his physique offered a final service to science. A crew from the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) had found in Olduvai (Tanzania) bone instruments of 1.5 million years, which confirmed that the Man alertancestors of Homo sapiens They had a cognitive capability far superior to what was thought. But discoveries should not all the time sufficient: prehistoriators typically need to resort to experimental archeology, that’s, to confirm with the identical supplies how a sure object might be constructed, what perform might have and its effectiveness. Therefore, the CSIC crew wanted a lifeless elephant to make related instruments and take a look at them.

The physique of the elephant Yoyo He had been ceded by the Zoo to the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPhes), in Tarragona, which allowed the CSIC crew to recreate the identical knives as that species of the genus of the genus Homo He utilized in Africa on the daybreak of humanity. In the fantastic movie concerning the Gruta de Chauvet The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog, specialists seem in constructing and testing every kind of prehistoric weapons. Others have recreated pigments or lamps with reindeer fats that might be used within the deep darkness of the caves to color.

The fascinating and, on the similar time, the big problem that prehistory raises is that scientists all the time stroll blind: they will classify, however interpret – particularly within the case of what we name artwork, though we don’t actually know what its social perform was – it’s all the time very dangerous. First, as a result of lack of any doc that may ratify a thesis and, second, as a result of a discovery can fully change the imaginative and prescient of humanity’s distant previous. The Chauvet cave, whose discovery recounts Herzog’s documentary, broke down on a 1994 Christmas morning all of the hypotheses that had been up to now had on parietal artwork in Europe when work of 30,000 years older had been found than all of the figurative artwork recognized till then – amongst Chauvet’s lions and the altamira bison there may be extra distance than between the Cantabrian cave and Guernica. Third, by a paradox: that we’ve not discovered one thing doesn’t imply that it doesn’t exist. “The absence of proof is not a test,” he typically repeats the prehistoriator and knowledgeable in Neanderthals Marylène Patou-Mathis. When hundreds and even tens of millions of years have handed, it’s unattainable to measure what has been misplaced. All scientists thought it was unattainable for a cross between Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens to have occurred till the DNA confirmed that it had occurred.

Editorial Alliance has simply reissued a e book that tells all this as clearly as entertaining: The painters of the caverns. The thriller of the primary artists (Translation by Eugenia Vázquez Nacarino), by Gregory Curtis. It is an essay that deserves very a lot. Curtis, a veteran journalist, tells the historical past of the invention of prehistoric artwork within the nineteenth century and the way the imaginative and prescient of the researchers has modified all through the a long time, from the pioneers such because the abbe Henri Breuil or André Leroi-Gouran to Jean Clottes. He additionally has an essential function within the e book Marcelino Sanz de Sautola, the discoverer of Altamira within the nineteenth century, from which his contemporaries mocked even supposing he had the nice instinct that gave rise to the research of prehistory: sure, it was completely doable that hundreds of years in the past the human beings created terribly subtle artworks. But, in a world the place we wish to perceive every little thing, we discover an insurmountable barrier: we have no idea why they did these work, or what they imply, even supposing the emotion that causes its magnificence breaks all of the limitations of time.

“This is frustrating for scientists and fans equally, since, as works of art, the paintings manage to communicate directly and with great efficiency,” writes Gregory Curtis in his essay. “They were which were the cultural reasons that moved the ancient hunters to paint in the caves, the great artists between them took the annoyance of creating paintings of elegant lines, subtle color, precise perspective and a physical sensation of volume. The horses of lascaux, multicolored and stylized; the pride of the lions to hunt with the eyes lit in chauvet; Heavy, although delicate and winding, of Altamira and Font-de-Gaume are evidence that beauty is really eternal. ”