Link to Nat Geo http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/07/080702-cave-paintings.html http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/07/080702-cave-paintings.html
---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com> wrote: Love it. If both this and the other story are true, it would mean the women doing the cave paintings were likely priestesses and/or shamans. The mental image--both visually and in terms of the type of energy involved--is so different from the one I've had up to now that it gives me chills up my spine. And it must say some important things about the nature of the society outside the caves as well. I'll never look at cave paintings the same way again. Do you have a link to the Nat Geo story about the acoustics in the caves? Or was what you quoted all there was to it? Seraphita wrote: Interesting - you learn something new every day but the mystery deepens. National Geographic had this intriguing story: Prehistoric peoples chose places of natural resonant sound to draw their famed cave sketches, according to new analyses of paleolithic caves in France. In at least ten locations, drawings of horses, bison, and mammoths seem to match locations that focus, amplify, and transform the sounds of human voices and musical instruments. "In the cave of Niaux in Ariège, most of the remarkable paintings are situated in the resonant Salon Noir, which sounds like a Romanesque chapel," said Iegor Reznikoff, an acoustics expert at the University of Paris who conducted the research. The sites would therefore have served as places of natural power, supporting the theory that decorated caves were backdrops for religious and magical rituals. ---In fairfieldlife@yahoogroups.com, <authfriend@...> wrote: Three-quarters of handprints in ancient cave art were left by women, study finds. Women made most of the oldest-known cave art paintings, suggests a new analysis of ancient handprints. Most scholars had assumed these ancient artists were predominantly men, so the finding overturns decades of archaeological dogma. Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female. Archaeologists have found hundreds of hand stencils on cave walls across the world. Because many of these early paintings also showcase game animals—bison, reindeer, horses, woolly mammoths—many researchers have proposed that they were made by male hunters, perhaps to chronicle their kills or as some kind of “hunting magic” to improve success of an upcoming hunt. The new study suggests otherwise. "In most hunter-gatherer societies, it’s men that do the killing. But it’s often the women who haul the meat back to camp, and women are as concerned with the productivity of the hunt as the men are," Snow said. "It wasn’t just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around." Experts expressed a wide range of opinions about how to interpret Snow’s new data, attesting to the many mysteries still surrounding this early art. "Hand stencils are a truly ironic category of cave art because they appear to be such a clear and obvious connection between us and the people of the Paleolithic," said archaeologist Paul Pettitt of Durham University in England. “We think we understand them, yet the more you dig into them you realize how superficial our understanding is.” http://museumofclassicalantiquities.tumblr.com/post/63652239781/archaeology-were-the-first-artists-mostly http://museumofclassicalantiquities.tumblr.com/post/63652239781/archaeology-were-the-first-artists-mostly
