Neanderthal News

[Cognito]

DB, I ran your mtDNA observation by Milford Wolpoff at the Univ. of Michigan. He is the foremost champion of the Multiregional Approach as you may know. His response is as follows:

The earliest European "moderns" are said to be Romanians from about 35000 years ago, and actually I don't believe that much (I suspect they are dated too old). Anyway, that's far too recent for a 52kyr European origin to have been in moderns.

BUT (bad news) - I don't believe any attempt the date mtDNA is valid, its under selection and inherits as a single molecule, so the selection determines the variation of this single gene, and this variation does not reflect age.

On the other hand (good news), there is evidence of Neandertal contributions to the human nuclear genome. These come, among other places, in the studies of introgressions, where genes under selection are much older than the date when they are estimated to have entered into the human population. This is much more convincing because it comes from the study of large modern samples, not small and possibly contaminated ancient ones. Below is an example. So the mtDNA observations may be correct, but are unconvincing.

Evans, P.D., N. Mekel-Bobrov, E.J. Vallender, R.R. Hudson, and B.T. Lahn 2006 Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103:18178-18183.

I hope, if nothing else, that I gave you guys something to talk about.

Wolpoff's reference is to the microcephelin D allele as mentioned here earlier. Here is the live link to the PNAS article:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstrac ... view=short

This entire problem is similar to stumbling upon a fraternity/sorority drunk fest the morning after and trying to figure out who did what to whom ... we know there was sex, we just cannot determine who the players were or which females were successfully impgregnated.

[Beagle]

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/nea ... ation.html

That's a very high amount of contamination. Remember, this comes from the same extracts that Green and colleagues (2006) showed had more than 94% Neandertal-like mtDNA transcripts.

Yet, there is one big sticking point in this analysis: If the data were really around 80% modern human contaminants, then the fragments shouldn't have "Neandertal-specific" mutations in such high numbers.

Remember, that all the comparisons underlying the "divergence dates" are based on the human-chimpanzee differences, and not the human-Neandertal differences. This is because a genuine ancient sequence has a high number of misincorporated bases, which inflate the apparent divergence. As I explained last year, both Neandertal genome papers avoided the direct comparison, and instead placed the Neandertal sequence at its location on the mutational spectrum separating humans and chimpanzees.

But it isn't very hard to just count all the Neandertal-specific mutations, and that count should be very high for genuine sequence (which includes both real and damaged changes), and substantially lower for contaminant sequence (which might include some damaged changes, but few real ones). The Green and Noonan datasets have the same proportion of Neandertal-specific changes, which seems like a pretty strong argument against the idea that contamination explains the difference -- especially at the high levels (80%) required to account for the proportion of derived human SNP alleles in the "Neandertal" sequence. Wall and Kim (2007) hypothesize that the Green data have both a very high contamination rate, and a higher proportion of sequencing errors, possibly explaining both observations.

Personally, I want to have some explanation of a mechanism that could contaminate the Green data at a level of 80%, without showing a contamination rate of more than 6% in the mtDNA, and without showing any sign of contamination in the Noonan data taken from the same extracts. By no means do I think that's impossible, by the way -- I've seen a lot of crazy problems at labs. But if it's true, I certainly think it should drain our confidence in these approaches for the time being.

Picking an admixture model
Here's a potential problem with the study: the results of the analysis relating to "divergence times" and "admixture proportions" depend very strongly on the particular model of admixture that Wall and Kim have assumed. They assume a complete isolation after some date TS, followed by a short episode of horizontal admixture at a later date ta. They then attempt to estimate TS and the amount of horizontal admixture, p, given the data.

That is one model for admixture, but not the only one. Even this simple model includes six parameters (including mutation rate, pre-split and post-split human effective population sizes). The mutation rate is estimated from the human-chimpanzee divergence, while the pre- and post-split effective sizes are estimated from recent humans. The paper claims that the preferred 325,000-year species divergence is "more consistent" with paleontological evidence, but this is just cherry-picking; they could just as easily have chosen to cite somebody who things a 35,000-year divergence is most "reasonable." So, including this one, we have three parameters to estimate using our one degree of freedom. Not helpful.

Suppose instead that we adopt a simpler four-parameter model: long-term coexistence of Neandertal and modern populations with a (possibly very low) level of gene flow between them. Here, the four parameters are (1) the level m of gene flow, (2) the date t of the Neandertal sample, (3) the human long-term effective size, and (4) the Neandertal long-term effective size. The date t is directly estimated by radiocarbon, and the human effective size may be estimated from recent humans as above. This leaves our one degree of freedom to estimate the level of gene flow m relative to the Neandertal effective size.

In that model, there is nothing exceptional about a divergence time of 35,000 years, which merely means that some genetic loci may show recent common ancestors between some living humans and some Neandertals.

Also, the HapMap SNPs have an ascertainment bias (toward common, and on average older alleles). This makes it more likely that a real Neandertal would have a human-derived SNP allele, by descent from an ancient common ancestor with a living person. The description of simulations in the paper does not indicate that this bias has been corrected

There is one potential explanation that so far everyone is ignoring. There is a very real possibility that the bone in question, Vi 33.16, is not a Neandertal at all. The bone is not securely provenienced, and the only things making it a Neandertal right now are its mtDNA sequence and a radiocarbon date of 38,310 BP. The date is less than convincing -- it is by no means impossible that the bone is modern at that date, and it is unclear how recent changes in AMS protocols might affect it. The mtDNA is only convincing if you assume admixture to be impossible.

Still, if Vi 33.16 were modern, that wouldn't explain the inconsistency between the Noonan and Green datasets in the proportion of derived human SNPs. But then, the Noonan data only include a small number of HapMap SNP sites -- indeed only three derived HapMap SNPs are present in the dataset (Noonan et al. 2006). If the population mixture that led to the apparent "human" character to the sequence was very recent (i.e., within the first few generations of the specimen's ancestry), then the genome might be substantially heterogeneous, meaning a small sample might yield an idiosyncratic result.

The John Hawks article I referenced above. Bold print mine.

[Forum Monk]

Having already, apparently; shown my ignorance, I continue. I have continued to look at the HN burial claims. The so-called grave with flowers is one of those stories that has taken on a life of its own and has evolved from a possible explanation to the only explanation. And yet from what I see, the entire concept of HN ritualistic burial is far from a given. As pointed out previously in a paper I posted, there are relatively few potential grave sites to begin with (only 500 individuals have been found and a fraction of those are under consideration for possible burial). One feature of intentional burial is signs of excavation of a grave which is appropriately sized. Several of these sites are rather like existing depressions or dug out spaces created for other purposes, not necessarily graves, some appear to be accidental, others are undetermined and in dispute.

We have probably all seen the video of the chimpanzees appearing to pine and mourn over a young chimp killed by a leopard. The chimps seemed to show respect, even grooming the corpse, moving it about, older males defended it. It was starling to watch in a way, but seems as life-forms become more evolved and intelligent, such mourning behaviour would become more complex as well. I continue to be skeptical but open for real evidence.

[Beagle]

That's cool but keep reading Monk. Regarding the paper you posted. In that, a lump of red ochre was said to be a dropped rock. I would bet that in an HSS gravesite it would be called a grave good. These guys are sometimes worse than us forum folks at seeing what they want to see. There's mountains of papers out there.

[Beagle]

DB, I ran your mtDNA observation by Milford Wolpoff at the Univ. of Michigan. He is the foremost champion of the Multiregional Approach as you may know. His response is as follows:

The earliest European "moderns" are said to be Romanians from about 35000 years ago, and actually I don't believe that much (I suspect they are dated too old). Anyway, that's far too recent for a 52kyr European origin to have been in moderns.

BUT (bad news) - I don't believe any attempt the date mtDNA is valid, its under selection and inherits as a single molecule, so the selection determines the variation of this single gene, and this variation does not reflect age.

On the other hand (good news), there is evidence of Neandertal contributions to the human nuclear genome. These come, among other places, in the studies of introgressions, where genes under selection are much older than the date when they are estimated to have entered into the human population. This is much more convincing because it comes from the study of large modern samples, not small and possibly contaminated ancient ones. Below is an example. So the mtDNA observations may be correct, but are unconvincing.

Evans, P.D., N. Mekel-Bobrov, E.J. Vallender, R.R. Hudson, and B.T. Lahn 2006 Evidence that the adaptive allele of the brain size gene microcephalin introgressed into Homo sapiens from an archaic Homo lineage. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103:18178-18183.

I hope, if nothing else, that I gave you guys something to talk about.

Wolpoff's reference is to the microcephelin D allele as mentioned here earlier. Here is the live link to the PNAS article:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstrac ... view=short

This entire problem is similar to stumbling upon a fraternity/sorority drunk fest the morning after and trying to figure out who did what to whom ... we know there was sex, we just cannot determine who the players were or which females were successfully impgregnated.

Cool Patrick. Very cool.

[Minimalist]

we know there was sex,

Reminds me of my youth!

[kbs2244]

Beagle:
I have been only half watching this thread, but you comment about a red ocher rock caught my attention.
Are we saying the it was important to Neanderthals as well as early humans?
I just cannot get the worldwide distribution and importance of this stuff out of the back of my mind. It just keeps showing up everywhere.
And now we are saying it pre-dates humans in it’s importance?

[Minimalist]

just cannot get the worldwide distribution and importance of this stuff out of the back of my mind. It just keeps showing up everywhere.

That bugs the living hell out of me too, kb. Why red ochre?

[daybrown]

Lessee if I can tie a few threads together here. The holes in the flute are not round, but I can see how, over time, round holes would be worn oval by the fingertips during performances. Why bother making the holes oval?

Sykes refers to 7 mtDNA lines found all over Europe. But the Fins have 2 more, which nobody else there has. Of course, If you grew up in Minnesota like I did among Germans, Swedes, & Norwegians, you know the Fins are weird. I never knew any, but going into a big hot box naked, with women no less, well- that was just beyond the pale.

I read of a campfire from 38,000 BP someplace just east of Finland near the arctic coast. Either HNS had shelter technology we didnt know about, or Cro Magnon really hot footed it to get all the way up there that early.

In any case, I dont think we have the kind of precise paleo-climate record on which to figure out where it was possible to go, an issue that keeps coming up with hominid immigration into America also. So, I dont think it is possible to delineate where the haplotypes came from. Where did the Kennebic man come from?

Wasson, "Persephony's Quest" shows us petroglyphs of Amanita Muscarias in Kamchatka on a cliff face by the Pegtymel Riiver. 175 deg E, 68deg N, above the arctic circle, and several thousand miles East of where the same iconography is found in SE Europe. Of shrooms that are still used by Finish Shamen. Dikov thot the Kamchatka artwork was 3000BP, and in a region that has always been too cold for A. Muscaria.

Archeology still suffers from the Mosaic model, where some great leader takes his peoples into a new land. But the more realistic vision is like what went on when Europeans found out about America. They came in small groups or even as just individuals. And have been mixing it up ever since they got here. Only an academic twit would think it could be sorted out.

The other problem is that there is no 'moment of conception'. while you have only one direct mtDNA line, it aint so simple with the Y chromosome. Because of Christian sensibilities, you dont hear much about hermaphrodites, but because I have contacts in the gay community, I have met two in two different states, utterly unconnected with each other. But gays dont get their panties in wad over people with ambiguous sexuality.

Now, *why* are there people with XXY? because sometimes more than one sperm gets in an egg, and if they are not all XX or XY, what you get is some kind of hermaphrodite.

Too much has been made of the HNS chromosome count and characteristics. if some sperm are HSS and some HNS, then inside the egg, there's a kind of chaotic free for all, and you end up with progeny that have more than one father. This really messes with Christian cosmology, and on that account alone would lead to challenges of hybridization.

Do we have any posts by Buddhists, Taoists, Confucians, Hindus, or some other *non-levantine* religion that has a problem with this? Nietzsche said that Christian dogma permeates the culture so much that people dont even know how it controls the way they can think.

So, not only do we not know where people came from, or when they got there, neither do we know how their haplotypes got mixed up. One other point, is that HSS lived in the Levant for scores of millennia before moving to Europe. Where is the art from this era? No. where it emerged was where the HNS and HSS cultures met, and realized there were other ways of doing things, a process we see is still going on.

the first great artistic following on Earth happened in Southern France in the very era when HSS and HNS were coming in contact. The realism of the Cave paintings vastly surpassed anything going on anywhere, and were never equaled until the Chalcolithic art of Danube & Dneister rivers and delta. By their own descendants.

[Beagle]

Beagle:
I have been only half watching this thread, but you comment about a red ocher rock caught my attention.
Are we saying the it was important to Neanderthals as well as early humans?
I just cannot get the worldwide distribution and importance of this stuff out of the back of my mind. It just keeps showing up everywhere.
And now we are saying it pre-dates humans in it’s importance?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_ochre

Ochre was one of the first pigments to be used by human beings. Pieces of hematite, worn down as though they had been used as crayons, have been found at 300,000 year old Homo heidelbergensis sites in France and Czechoslovakia. Neandertal burial sites sometimes include ochre as a grave good.

Even before Neanderthal KB. Probably used for body paint.

[Manystones]

No. where it emerged was where the HNS and HSS cultures met, and realized there were other ways of doing things, a process we see is still going on.

the first great artistic following on Earth happened in Southern France in the very era when HSS and HNS were coming in contact. The realism of the Cave paintings vastly surpassed anything going on anywhere, and were never equaled until the Chalcolithic art of Danube & Dneister rivers and delta. By their own descendants.

DB, I am wondering which caves and what date exactly you have in mind here since there is a fair amount of misunderstanding regarding the dating of various cave paintings?

see for instance http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/epistem/web/crisis.html (Bednarik again). Apologies for the rather large quote but it all seemed fairly relevant to the perception of an "explosion" of creativity occurring.

Problems with spatial biases

Nearly all publications on Pleistocene art have either heavily emphasized the Franco-Cantabrian traditions of south-western Europe, or have even restricted their coverage entirely to this small geographic region. This has resulted in greatly distorted models of the origins and evolution of art, language, culture and human consciousness, all of which have been predicated on the false idea that the non-utilitarian human behaviour traces we collectively describe as palaeoart first appear in south-western Europe during the Aurignacian.

In reality, the question of geographical distribution is exceedingly complex. Firstly, the extant evidence has been subjected to various highly selective selection processes which are collectively called taphonomic factors. Extant indices of distribution, quantity and type of evidence are of little significance in reconstructing the traditions responsible for creating this evidence (Bednarik 1994a), they can only tell us what has survived. As if this taphonomic determinant were not sufficient reason to reject most claims made regarding this class of evidence, there is a second major encumbrance: the enormous geographical disparity in research efforts. For instance it is obvious that European Pleistocene art is a part of a larger, Eurasian corpus, but while we have many thousands of learned publications about the European part of this greater body of evidence, only one writer has ever considered the Ice Age art of Asia on a pan-continental basis (Bednarik 1994b). In any other field of inquiry, such an incongruity would seriously impair the acceptance of any universal interpretative model, but in this field it has become almost customary to publish books supposedly about the art of the Pleistocene, and to consider in fact only that of the Franco-Cantabrian region. The impression one gains from this vast body of literature is that its authors are quite ignorant about the subject, they genuinely believe that ‘art’ first emerged in France and Spain.

Among the exceptions to this trend is the work of Jelínek (e.g. 1988, 1990) which provides a more balanced overview by stressing the importance of central and eastern European as well as pre-Upper Palaeolithic evidence. Other attempts to break out from a Eurocentric mould are Bahn and Vertut (1988), the first major work on Ice Age art that featured examples from continents other than Eurasia, and Bahn (1991).

To appreciate the full effects of these geographical biases, let us consider the following points. Pleistocene art occurs in all continents, although in the Americas it is so far limited at best to the very end of the Pleistocene. Many of the authors restricting their coverage to south-western Europe believe that there is no evidence of art-like productions before the Upper Palaeolithic. Yet practically all of the Pleistocene art of Australia is from an essentially Middle Palaeolithic context (the initial settlers of Australia were clearly seafarers of Middle Palaeolithic technology, which in Tasmania was preserved to the 19th century), and since this corpus alone is thought to be greater than that of the entire Upper Palaeolithic art of Europe, it follows that there may in fact be more ‘art’ surviving from the Middle Palaeolithic than from the Upper. This is the exact opposite of what is being taught at the universities of Europe, in two ways. Firstly, the extensive evidence of Middle and even Lower Palaeolithic art-like traditions (Bednarik 1995a) from all continents except the Americas and Antarctica discredits the claims concerning temporal distribution, and secondly, the larger quantity of Pleistocene rock art in Australia in comparison to Europe indicates the extent of European misinformation regarding geographical distribution. This is so even before we consider the evidence of Pleistocene arts in Siberia, China, Japan, India, the Near East and sub-Saharan Africa (Bednarik 1994c). Consequently the geographical biases inherent in most existing models of art origins seriously discredit all of these constructs.


Problems with dating

During the 20th century, a finely honed taxonomy has been developed of the Palaeolithic rock art of Europe, attributing sites to several tool industries, ranging from the Aurignacian to the Magdalenian. This chronology is based on an inductive framework resting on supposedly dated portable art objects, purported minimum ages established at a small number of sites by excavating sediment-covered figures (and assuming that charcoal contained in the sediment corresponds to the time of sedimentation), co-occurrence with occupation deposits (which provides no evidence of age for rock art), but primarily on stylistic assumptions. Most of this rock art is not datable by archaeological methods, but is thought to resemble other art of supposedly established provenience. The stylistic taxonomy most frequently used in recent decades is that of Leroi-Gourhan (1971).

Until 1990 there were no attempts to underpin or test this chronology by scientific methods, even though ‘direct dating’ methodology had been introduced in 1980 in Australia (Bednarik 1984). The attempt to relate paint pigment in Tête-du-Lion (Combier 1984) to ochre found in the deposit does not amount to direct dating, because the physical relationship of the dating criterion and the art is neither falsifiable, nor is the age of the dating criterion itself unassailable: the age of the ochre is contingent upon the unprovable deduction that the relevant charcoal is of the same age as the occupation deposit.

In 1990, however, direct dating methodology was applied to parietal paintings first in France (Lorblanchet et al. 1990), then in Spain. At the time of writing, we have radiocarbon estimates from eight of the cave sites. While there are problems with most of them, it has already become apparent that many do not coincide with the stylistic chronology of this art. Two of the ‘dates’ from supposedly Palaeolithic charcoal paint residue are from the Holocene, so they were withheld from publication. Others that were obviously contaminated were published because they coincided with stylistic estimates (as reported in Clottes 1994). However, the majority did not. Lorblanchet abandoned his own attribution of the supposedly uniform art at Cougnac to the Magdalenian (Lorblanchet 1984) and now assigns that art to three periods (Lorblanchet 1994). The stylistic attribution of the art in Cosquer Cave had to be significantly revised (Clottes et al. 1992). But the crunch came in 1995, with the secure dating of spectacular black paintings as well as soot smudges in the newly discovered Chauvet Cave. According to traditional stylistic dogma, this art would belong to the Magdalenian, at the end of the Upper Palaeolithic, but the several dates placed it unequivocally in the Aurignacian, at its beginning (Clottes et al. 1995).

Before the discipline could even consider the implications of this important finding, the next calamity occurred. A series of about fifteen open air petroglyph sites in the Côa valley of northern Portugal had been confidently placed in the Solutrean, purely on the basis of style. In a series of blind tests conducted by several archaeometrists, they arrived independently and under controlled conditions at the same result in mid-1995: the supposedly Solutrean-style figures are of the late Holocene, possibly even of Historic age (Bednarik 1995b, 1995c, 1995d; Watchman 1995, 1996). There followed a chorus of Palaeolithic art experts, uniformly rejecting these findings as being unacceptable, and even rejecting the concept of blind tests as ‘unethical’ (Zilhão 1995). But by now the confidence of the experts of Palaeolithic style had begun to wane, even though some of them tried to salvage the credibility of their approach (Zuechner 1995, 1996). Their counter arguments became increasingly desperate and eventually irrational (Zilhão and Monge 1995; Zilhão 1995) as they tried to defend the traditional stylistic chronology of Palaeolithic rock art. For instance the bovids of the Côa valley were stylistically compared to those of Lascaux. Yet the Lascaux bovids are probably of the Holocene (Bahn 1994), and they are stylistically similar to the Levantine shelter art of Spain (which is now thought to be of the Neolithic or even younger), as even Breuil (1948, 1952) recognized many years ago (although he placed both traditions in the Perigordian). With the age of the Lascaux art now under review, and most of the charcoal dates from paint in disagreement with traditional chronology, the entire framework of stylistic dating of European Palaeolithic rock art is now at crisis point, and collapsing under the weight of the cumulative evidence.

[daybrown]

"The Cave Painters" by Curtis does not have near as many photos of the artwork as I'd like, but the depiction of extinct species like rhinos & horses would seem to preclude the Holocene or any later date despite any quibbles we might have over the C-14.

And its not that the rest of the world didnt have art, but the degree of *artistry*, which I commented on, surpassed anything going on anywhere else for 20,000 years or more. The shading of the buffalo at Altimira along with the selection of just the right lines is as elegant as Tokugawa Japan just a few hundred years ago, rather than scores of millennia.

Its not that art did not exist elsewhere, but where we can reasonably see the interaction between two strikingly different cultures, namely HNS and HSS, produced art that is clearly in a class itself. It is this difference, not the total absence of art in other regions. If Bednarik wants to extol the value of art in other regions, I dont have a problem with it. The fact that other art was misdated does not affect my point. I dont claim to know how wide spread the artistic movement was.

http://www.dc-pc.org/artifax/artifax.html shows a couple of figures made by the descendants of these paleolithic European artists. The dispassion in the face of the enthroned queen found by Hallart stands in stark contrast to the images we know of kings, who always wanted to be sure everyone knew what his face looked like.

The family trypt a litle further down is Cycladic, dating from the same era as the early Egyptian dynasties, yet the animation and naturalness stands in stark contrast to the Egyptian and Fertile Crescent statuary. The fact that its a pair of dykes with their kid is never mentioned. The craftsmanship of the tailored garments also contrasts with the primitive character of Egyptian and Levantine clothes.

these figures resemble many of those Gimbutas shows us from the Chalcolithic, and the fabric technologies found there trace back into the paleolithic. But from the emergence of the cave paintings on, in one field or another, fabric, modeling in stone or clay, and then fresco, you can see it all as the work of a family line of artists who change medium from time to time over the millennia, and drifting around from Southern France down the Danube, to Anatolia and back.

Every time they move, there's a new burst of innovation. I can see also, that wherever they go, other artistic spirits will pick up on their trip and choose to go with them. As Mallory says of the Aryans, be assimilated.

Other cultures were run by men who didnt want new men coming into the community messing with their women. So- they didnt get the innovation.

[Forum Monk]

While researching neaderthal art, which there seems so far, to be precious little, I came this site which is actually a good collection of links to pictures, articles, etc of general interest relevent to this thread.

http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/H ... thals.html

[daybrown]

While researching neaderthal art, which there seems so far, to be precious little, I came this site which is actually a good collection of links to pictures, articles, etc of general interest relevent to this thread.

http://www-geology.ucdavis.edu/~cowen/H ... thals.html

Wow! Thanx. note that http://www.modernhumanorigins.net/laferrassie1.html,
http://www.modernhumanorigins.net/amud1.html, and http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articl ... 9EC588EF21,
have all their teeth. These guys were not brawlers.

[Manystones]

"The Cave Painters" by Curtis does not have near as many photos of the artwork as I'd like, but the depiction of extinct species like rhinos & horses would seem to preclude the Holocene or any later date despite any quibbles we might have over the C-14.

It's exactly this kind of dating based on perception of "style" or fauna which ought to be avoided since it has been shown to be very misleading.

And its not that the rest of the world didnt have art, but the degree of *artistry*, which I commented on, surpassed anything going on anywhere else for 20,000 years or more. The shading of the buffalo at Altimira along with the selection of just the right lines is as elegant as Tokugawa Japan just a few hundred years ago, rather than scores of millennia.

Altamira is dated between 14,000 and 18,000 years ago - what evidence is there for HSN this late?

Its not that art did not exist elsewhere, but where we can reasonably see the interaction between two strikingly different cultures, namely HNS and HSS, produced art that is clearly in a class itself. It is this difference, not the total absence of art in other regions. If Bednarik wants to extol the value of art in other regions, I dont have a problem with it. The fact that other art was misdated does not affect my point. I dont claim to know how wide spread the artistic movement was.

I appreciate that you were highlighting the difference in this set of art, but it is not strictly speaking a class in itself, spans thousands of years and is mostly wrongly interpretated (datewise and stylistically). Again, my understanding is that there are now difficulties in assigning this body of work to the end of the Palaeolithic period since much of it appears to originate from the Holocene. So my question is specifically which Cave painting(s) are you associating with the interaction of HNS and HSS? At the moment this aspect of your claim doesn't survive close scrutiny.