RE: Did Neanderthal man make the art?

oops that should read, the evidence for anatomically modern man making
the earliest Upper paleolithic art is weak.

-----Original Message-----
From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu [mailto:asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu] On
Behalf Of Glenn Morton
Sent: Thursday, July 08, 2004 8:00 PM
To: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Did Neanderthal man make the art?

I have on several occasions suggested that the data for Neanderthals
making the earliest Upper Paleolithic art is weak. It is largely based
upon a bias that it couldn't be therm. You can see these statements at
<http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/200012/0022.html>
http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/200012/0022.html and
<http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/199911/0103.html>
http://www.calvin.edu/archive/asa/199911/0103.html .

The reality is that very few of the earliest art sites have human
remains with them. Thus one can only guess who made the art. The one
site which had art and human bones was Vogelherd. There is a new article
in Nature which now discounts the best evidence that modern humans made
the exquisite art at Vogelherd, Germany. One should compare the last
sentence of the abstract with what I said in 1999 concerning who
invented the Upper Paleolithic. The abstract says:

"Unexpectedly recent dates for human remains from Vogelherd NICHOLAS J.
CONARD, PIETER M. GROOTES & FRED H. SMITH Nature, 430, 198 - 201 (08
July 2004)

The human skeletal remains from the Vogelherd cave in the Swabian Jura
of southwestern Germany are at present seen as the best evidence that
modern humans produced the artefacts of the early Aurignacian.
Radiocarbon measurements from all the key fossils from Vogelherd show
that these human remains actually date to the late Neolithic, between
3,900 and 5,000 radiocarbon years before present (BP). Although many
questions remain unresolved, these results weaken the arguments for the
Danube Corridor hypothesis-that there was an early migration of modern
humans into the Upper Danube drainage-and strengthen the view that
Neanderthals may have contributed significantly to the development of
Upper Palaeolithic cultural traits independent of the arrival of modern
humans.
Received on Thu Jul 8 23:04:39 2004