tOMOrrOW's AnsWers tODAY - AkzoNobel

19
NeaNDerthaLs:
saVagEs Or tHE
First intEriOr
DEcOratOrs?
They are generally perceived as dim-witted, knuckledragging
cavemen. But were Neanderthals actually
the first to start using paint to decorate their homes?
WORDS Jim Wake
When Alistair Pike was seven years old, growing up
in England, his mother told him that if he dug far
enough, he’d get to Australia. So he got to work
digging a tunnel. Although he didn’t quite reach
his destination, he managed to dig down about six feet, where
he came across the complete skeleton of a horse. Quite an
achievement for a seven-year-old, but you could say that he’d
only just scratched the surface.
Fascinated in nearly equal measure by science and archaeology,
he followed a unique course in archaeological sciences at
Bradford University, which equipped him to apply his knowledge
of chemistry to gain an understanding of historical artifacts.
Early in his career, he was hanging from cables on London’s
Battersea Bridge, chipping off paint samples to analyze the
original coating. He was even admitted to the inner sanctums of
the Palace of Westminster to look at historic paint layers, as well
analyzing Queen Victoria’s bathing machine on the Isle of Wight.
About nine years ago, he began studying cave art, starting
in Britain. Although there was much evidence of early humans
in the British Isles, no one had come across the sorts of Paleolithic
creations that early humans had applied to caves elsewhere
in Europe. Then a colleague found some engravings in a cave in
Nottinghamshire, so he called Pike to try and put a date on them.
“I noticed that these things were associated with very thin
films of calcium carbonate that I knew we could date by looking
at the radioactive decay of uranium,” explains Alistair. “So we
scraped off some of these deposits and found that they were
older than 12,000 years and matched the archaeology that had
been dug out of the ground. Sure enough, it was Britain’s earliest
and only Paleolithic cave art.”
The “uranium-thorium” dating method he applied in the
British caves is based on the idea that seepage in the cave leaves
behind the calcium carbonate film – known as calcite – as well
as traces of naturally-occurring uranium. That uranium decays
at a known rate, so it is possible to quite accurately state the age
of the deposit. Since the deposit is on top of the artwork, at the
very least, the minimum age of the artwork can be extrapolated
from the dating method. What isn’t possible is deciphering how