Encyclopedia of Evolution.pdf - Online Reading Center

The Venus of Willendorf, a limestone figure carved about ,000 years
ago, was found in Germany. (Courtesy of Erich Lessing, Art Resource,
New York)
Many are of animals, and some are of humans. The carvings
are artistically advanced. Some carvings were very realistic.
Some were very abstract, such as the numerous Venus
figurines (see figure on page 103). Abstraction included the
melding of human and animal motifs. Most of the portable
carvings are from what is now Germany and areas of Eastern
Europe (in particular Dolní Vĕstonice in what is now
the Czech Republic) rather than from the regions of France
and Spain where most cave paintings are found.
• Bodily ornaments. Cro-Magnon people made many thousands
of beads, and carved holes in many thousands of
shells, for use in necklaces.
• Ceramics. Many clay figurines were produced and baked
into ceramics at Dolní Vĕstonice.
• Musical instruments. Some Cro-Magnon people made
flutes from limb bones of animals, into which they carved
finger holes. Modern researchers have produced musical
scales from replicas of these instruments. Bull-roarers are
flutelike objects which Cro-Magnon musicians attached to
a rope and whirled around in a circle.
Cro-Magnon 0
An explorer named Ruben de la Vialle entered the cave
now known as Salon Noir in 1660. He discovered many great
paintings in this cave but assumed they were of recent origin.
He inscribed his name and date on the wall. The earliest
discovery of a painted cave whose antiquity was recognized
occurred in 1879. Amateur archaeologist Marcelino Sanz
de Sautuola explored a cave on his property at Altamira in
Spain. He looked down and collected artifacts, but his young
daughter looked up and saw the paintings on the ceiling. He
publicized the discovery, and even King Alfonso XII visited
the cave. Sautuola was convinced that the paintings were very
old but could not prove it. Interest in this discovery waned.
The Lascaux Cave was discovered in 1940 by three schoolboys
when Marcel Ravidat’s dog Robot fell down a sinkhole.
After they rescued the dog, the schoolboys decided to explore
the hole. When they found large chambers filled with animal
images, they told their schoolmaster, Léon Laval, who contacted
the anthropologist and clergyman Abbé Henri Breuil.
At first, some scholars resisted the idea that cave people
could produce great art. The French archaeologist Emile
Cartailhac claimed that caves such as Altamira had been
produced by modern artists. Another French archaeologist,
Édouard Harlé, even dismissed the Altamira paintings as a
forgery Sautuola had made himself. Long after Sautuola’s
death, Harlé changed his mind and admitted in a 1902 paper
that Sautuola had been right after all.
All of these discoveries revealed a rich cultural and spiritual
life among the Cro-Magnon (see religion, evolution
of). The community spiritual function of the cave paintings
was further suggested by the fact that (as in the cave at
Lascaux in France) the big, colorful paintings were in large
chambers near the mouth of the cave, while smaller, overlapping
pieces of art were found deeper in the cave, as if the
former represented public religious gatherings and the latter
represented individual spiritual quests. In addition, many
Cro-Magnon artifacts were made of materials that had to be
transported long distances, for example seashells in inland
caves. Some Cro-Magnon burials contained such a large
number of artifacts that they could not have been produced
by a single family or small band. A Cro-Magnon burial site
of two children at Sungir in Russia contained 10,000 beads,
each of which would have taken at least an hour to produce.
All of these discoveries revealed, in addition to cultural and
spiritual awareness, a complex social structure at least at the
tribal level and perhaps trading networks that spanned great
distances. In contrast, the Neandertal remains were virtually
devoid of any artifacts other than stone tools and provided
no evidence of complex social structure or trading networks.
All of this seemed to suggest that primitive Neandertals, who
thought only of getting food and shelter for survival, evolved
into Cro-Magnons, to whom culture was an essential part of
survival.
Another major difference between Cro-Magnons and
Neandertals was that each Cro-Magnon tribe appeared
to be culturally different from each other tribe. There were
recognizable regional differences in the stone tools that they
produced. From place to place, Cro-Magnon artistry also
took on different forms: animal tooth pendants in some