Paleoanthropology Essay

Major Questions in Paleoanthropology: The First Art Three articles by Aubert, Joordens, and Vidal all display the beginnings of art which come from all over the world including Siberia, North Africa, South Africa, and Australia. The time period in which we have evidence of this art is called the Upper Paleolithic, which is considered to be what is commonly called “The Stone Age”. These articles describe early art as simple geometric engravings, paintings, stencils, and even portable stone sculptures. In spite of the fact that these works were simple, they had intent and purpose behind them. Each have a different research goal, but all relate their works to the larger concept of how early art plays a role in human evolution. Early art, or symbolic images, is considered to be a major cognitive and evolutionary step in early human and hominin behavior. The article by Aubert is set in Sulawesi which is an island off of Indonesia. Sulawesi has provided nearly 90 rock caves that contain early artwork, within these caves art is poorly preserved due to weathering. At the cave site of Leang Bulu Bettue, twelve hand stencils and two animal paintings were found. In order to find the dates of the artwork, a uranium dating process was used by taking pigments and coralloid from the …show more content…
It provides many great examples of early art, because there are fourteen pieces, as opposed to the other articles, which have only a few. The most interesting and persuasive part of this article is that the researchers believe art was already a part of these early humans culture before they got to Sulawesi. The implications of this study are very important to how scientists move forward in the continuous study of early human evolution. This could mean that early humans and hominins were practicing art much earlier than we had previously thought, which may mean that they may have had much larger cognitive abilities as