Word: aurignacian
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Earth Movers. French Archaeologists place the ancient art work in two distinct periods. The first, Aurignacian, is roughly 25,000 to 30,000 years old, the other, Magdalenian, dates from 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. With the drawings fully authenticated (a thick layer of limy deposit, like candle wax, covers many of them, dismissing the possibility of a modern hoax), the cave is rated as a major archaeological find. Many art historians believe that cave art had magical meaning, purposely put in as cramped a space as possible in a sort of protective return to the womb. Though...
...curious eyes of the cave's living tenants, the shaft sank, foot after foot, toward the dimmest beginnings of human history. Subtle changes in bits of stone, covered by the garbage of ancient man, told of the shifts of culture. Solecki spent many feet of digging in the Aurignacian period (of the well-built Cro-Magnon men). Then he entered the Mousterian period (of the Neanderthal men, stooped and beetle-browed). At 26 feet below the surface, he found the scattered bones of a child less than a year old who had died something like 70,000 years...
Father Was Human. Some 37 feet down, Father Ewing found Egbert. His little body must have been buried right at home by affectionate elders and gradually covered with material which lime-charged seepage turned to hard stone. He is an Aurignacian boy, genuinely human but following closely in period the semi-human Neanderthals. In fact, he may be a link between the two types. Perhaps his Aurignacian father captured a lowbrowed Neanderthal girl, kept her as a slave, and had a child...
...Neanderthalers had no art. The first artists were the Cro-Magnon men, whose earliest culture-period is called the Aurignacian. The newfound cave at Montignac represents this glimmering dawn-culture on the vastest scale yet found. Its significance, says U.S. Prehistorian George Grant MacCurdy, is that the appearance of art "marks a distinct epoch in mental evolution." The Abbe Breuil calls the Montignac cave "the Sistine Chapel of Aurignacian...
Technique. The earliest cave pictures were not painted but scratched on walls with sharpened flints. Profiles were absolute with but single fore and hind legs, and lacking were such details as hooves, eyes, hair and nostrils. But as Aurignacian scratching developed into painting, remarkable sophistication of draftsmanship appeared. In the Montignac group, stiffness of profile has relaxed and action abounds - the beasts run, leap, browse, swim, lie down, chew their cuds. The head of an ancient long-horned cow (see cut) displays an excellent eye and nostril, subtle shading and dappling. To the Paleolithic artist, the more realistic...