Word: prehistorians
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That's not to say that he or the cave's curator, the prehistorian Jean-Michel Geneste, could have been entirely surprised. The previous spring, workers had finished installing a $28,000 air-conditioning system beneath the stairs leading down to the cave. The new machine represented a major change in the way Lascaux's delicate balance of temperature and humidity had been regulated for more than three decades. The old system, installed in 1968 after years of minute studies of the cave's climate, relied on Lascaux's natural currents to pass air over a cold point and ensure...
...ritual trance or hallucination in the artists? No answer, though some naturally occurring manganese oxides, the base of some of the blacks used in cave paintings, are known to be toxic and to act on the central nervous system. And the main technique of Cro-Magnon art, according to prehistorian Michel Lorblanchet, director of France's National Center of Scientific Research, involved not brushes but a kind of oral spray-painting-blowing pigment dissolved in saliva on the wall. Lorblanchet, who has re-created cave paintings with uncanny accuracy, suggests that the technique may have had a spiritual dimension: "Spitting...
...anything at all), the Iceman "was snatched from life completely outfitted with the implements of everyday existence!" exclaims Markus Egg, the German archaeologist who is overseeing the delicate process of restoring the Iceman's belongings. In effect, the find brings the remote Neolithic period vividly to life, says prehistorian Lawrence Barfield of England's University of Birmingham. "It is as though you are walking around a museum looking at pottery and flint, then turn a corner and find a real person...
...with threads of sinew or plant fiber, in what appears to be a mosaic-like pattern, belying the popular image of cavemen in crude skins. "The person who made the clothes initially was obviously skilled. This indicates that the Iceman was in some way integrated into a community," says prehistorian Egg, who is restoring the clothes at the Roman-Germanic Central Museum in Mainz, Germany. As for the repairs, made with grass thread, Egg says, "We assume he did them himself in the wilderness." Shredded during the Iceman's recovery, the garment arrived at Mainz in nearly a hundred pieces...
...Iceman's day, much of the world had made the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic society -- from the Old to the Late Stone Age -- a change that University of Frankfurt prehistorian Jens Luning calls "the revolutionary event in human history." It marked the transition from subsistence hunting and gathering to agriculture and the domestication of animals; the stockpiling of food; extensive use of copper; the manufacture of increasingly sophisticated tools and pottery. A dependable food supply in turn led to a population explosion: by about 4000 B.C. there were an estimated 86.5 million people on earth, about eight times...