Lower Palaeolithic Art in Britain?

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Hi Richard et al...

Richard, if possible, you would do well to determine the actual lithology of at least the finds you consider most compelling. For starters, you can quickly check for limestone by doing the fizz test with plain old white vinegar. Since you are near London, you should be able to find a geologist (preferably petrologist) willing to help identify these rocks with suitable accuracy. Don't mention artifacts. If you are very lucky, as I have been, he (or she) will notice on his own that a stone has not acquired its current form through entirely natural processes.

There are certain pat explanations one can expect from an orthodox archaeologist (over here, anyway) when one presents an apparent artifact that does not fit preconceptions (e.g., not an arrowhead, a refined sculpture, etc.). All round holes are crinoid fossils or created by dripping water, and lines are fractures, trace fossils, or glacial striations if he/she doesn't realize the stone is from an unglaciated venue. These folks have learned just enough from geologists to more or less sound like one, and most people become intellectually intimidated and drop the matter. (Incidentally, naturally formed features like holes, colored spots and nodules, etc. were very often incorporated into the imagery of "portable rock art" and even into elaborate petroglyphs and cave paintings.)

The context of your stone in question (which is very timely in our Halloween season, by the way) in an area known to be rich in Paleo artifact material strongly supports your assertion that it is artificial.

Stan has in his last and in preceding comments raised some interesting and thoughtful questions along the line of what constitutes "art", and whether or not simple images, when they are very old, can be dismissed as natural coincidence because of their lack of virtuosity. My hypothesis is that, whether or not it is technically art, it is the habitual (and from our perspective, seemingly obsessive) expression of an animistic belief system of extreme antiquity. Those people worked stones constantly. In the Rift Valley of Africa, the habitation sites of very early hominins yield enormous quantities of simple hand axes, far more than needed, most of them showing little or no signs of use - who knows how long this habit persisted? So the presence of a large quantity of lithic artifacts of similar form at one venue, even in Europe, is not in itself an argument against human agency. Applying Ockham's Razor, the simplest explanation answering the salient questions is that a lot of people were doing the same thing for a long time (perhaps also explaining in part why they were not building automobiles).

The question of the extent to which our ancestors (or predecessors) 400,000 years ago were capable of abstract thought and symbolic representation certainly does comes into play. But what does this mean, exactly? Zoologists etc. do a very rough assessment of a given species' capacity for abstract thought by determining whether or not an animal (or a very young human) realizes that its reflection in a mirror is an image of itself and not another member of the same species. Humans, many primates, dolphins, and, I heard recently, elephants can do this, with variation among individuals at different ages (as I recall, I had this figured out by fourteen or so). Of course we're assuming from stratigraphic context that Richard's simple quasi-anthropomorphic and zoomorphic stones would have been fashioned by homo erectus (although for some reason the evolution and migration time lines keep changing), and although physiological parameters strongly suggest they had not attained our own level of intelligence(?), I think it is absurd to assume a priori that they were utterly incapable of abstraction. Human infants, not "thinking" about much of anything beyond the rapid acquiring and processing of information, fixate on the human face from the time they are able to visually focus on anything. Recognizing and reading the face was a very primal survival skill, certainly at the forefront of consciousness very early in the evolution of the human species - and so also was modifying rocks from an early time in the process. Is there any good reason to insist that a homo erectus (or whatever) individual, spending a huge amount of his/her time shaping stones, could not have inadvertently chipped two eyes and a mouth, presenting the gestalt of the human face, and thought "That's cool!" and kept on doing it? And obviously they were capable of imitating each others' behavior.

Incidentally, Kurt Kocher of Heko Verlag (Verlag = press) and Ursel Benekendorff have both received professional/academic verification of human agency in some of their material. (I am in fairly regular e-mail correspondence with them, as well as several other of the European investigators.)

This got long - sorry...

Regards, Alan

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Hi Bruce...

That's interesting about the katcina, and not surprising. I've seen this skewed/offset mouth on Inuit/Yupik shaman masks, and it does appear occasionally in European rock art.

If you are interested in some hypothesis/raving(?) about cultural affiliation, take a look at my own website http://www.daysknob.com It's rather disjointed, having rapidly expanded from something much simpler, but does address the subject, and it shows and links to photos of European Paleo portable rock art. In this discussion thread, I don't want to vector off from the topic Richard has started - it's his show. Just give it some thought...

Regards, Alan

[War Arrow]

[Roberto]

Manystones, seeing your additional pictures, I would adgree with you, it looks definitely like flint, and flint that has been heat treated. I'm sure your aware that heat treating of flint to make it shatter, prior to shaping,napping a point or tool was a common technique for prehistoric people.
But the stone that resembles a face, I still feel is just a natural occurrance.
You can still have a piece of flint or chert, with holes like this in it caused from some other type of element that dissolved, or was replaced in time. Some time you might even see quartz surrounding the inside of these holes due to mineral replacement that evolved through time. If it was a man-made piece of art, I would expect the holes to be more even, perhaps more circular or something, not so irregular in shape and depth. But of course anything could change through time I guess. Even man-made objects I guess, but not so much with a piece of lithic. It's just coincidental that it resembles a human face, in my oppinion. But a very neat rock regardless of the situation!
Do you notice any minute fossils in that flint or chert? You can still have
fossils in flint or chert. They are all sedimentary rocks, and things are just diissolved or replaced in time as the sediment turns to it's present state.
That thick outside cortex is not unusual. Just a weathering aspect of the rock, which forms a thick outside crust.
CHEERS!

[Manystones]

Hi Bruce...

That's interesting about the katcina, and not surprising. I've seen this skewed/offset mouth on Inuit/Yupik shaman masks, and it does appear occasionally in European rock art.

If you are interested in some hypothesis/raving(?) about cultural affiliation, take a look at my own website http://www.daysknob.com It's rather disjointed, having rapidly expanded from something much simpler, but does address the subject, and it shows and links to photos of European Paleo portable rock art. In this discussion thread, I don't want to vector off from the topic Richard has started - it's his show. Just give it some thought...

Regards, Alan

No problem.

Bruce, Roberto thanks for the feedback.

I tend to think that the crooked mouth is deliberate - it is something seen in a many of the face images. Actually my partner pointed this out to me a while back. The mouth has "coincidentally" a slight toothed or jagged appearance in comparison to the relative roundness of the eyes and nose.

Just did a quick google on katcina, inuit and also aborigines and it strikes me that all three have - in one sense - very similar "frameworks". Thanks again Bruce for an interesting lead.

[Manystones]

"Hehea Katcina, a being with zigzag lines on the cheeks and phallic symbols on the breast, represented like a totem-pole"

This description remind me of a piece from my friends site. It is a little difficult to make out but looks like a face with tongue out and symmetrical zig zag lines on both sides of the "face".

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/richard.wi ... 20007a.jpg

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/richard.wi ... 20008a.jpg

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/richard.wi ... 20009a.jpg

I realise I am probably sticking my neck out with this one!

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Well, you're sticking your neck out to the extent that this figure is not exactly a poster child for someone not attuned to this stuff, but it's an interesting piece. The imagery is not really an extended tongue, but a head emerging from the mouth, an extremely common theme of regeneration, apparently. I put some photos on the web page http://www.daysknob.com/Ref005.htm to show this in old stone figures from Ohio, Australia, and Holland, as well in as two Inuit/Yupik ceremonial objects. This theme is also highly developed in large Central and South American sculpture.

I also show a Yupik mask with the offset/crooked mouth (and lots of teeth).

Another important feature of the stone you show is "reflective symmetry", supporting evidence of human agency - the image on one side is much like that on the other.

[War Arrow]

Well, you're sticking your neck out to the extent that this figure is not exactly a poster child for someone not attuned to this stuff, but it's an interesting piece. The imagery is not really an extended tongue, but a head emerging from the mouth, an extremely common theme of regeneration, apparently. I put some photos on the web page http://www.daysknob.com/Ref005.htm to show this in old stone figures from Ohio, Australia, and Holland, as well in as two Inuit/Yupik ceremonial objects. This theme is also highly developed in large Central and South American sculpture.

I tried to find an image of heads emerging from mouths in Mexican iconography, but unfortunately a lot of Mexican websites bombard you with pop-ups, so I gave up. Anyway, AD's spot on. Said imagery is prolific in Central America as a rebirth symbol (often associated with Quetzalcoatl and his namesakes). INAH is full of that stuff. I think there's an argument for the idea that early religions tend to follow similar lines (as in the case of rebirth images) simply because we're all human and tend to react to our environments in similar ways.

Anyway. It looks like a tongue to me, but it certainly is an interesting object.

[Manystones]

I think there's an argument for the idea that early religions tend to follow similar lines (as in the case of rebirth images) simply because we're all human and tend to react to our environments in similar ways.

I tend to agree... this is essentially what David Lewis-Williams (who I quoted earlier) puts forward in Mind In The Cave with regard to the range of conscious experiences and the interpretation thereof - i.e. the basis of religion. Maybe I am out of my depth here though!!



Back to the pebble face, it is also worth noting that the two stones in each eye are "opposite" colours.. in a way similar to another theme - one eye open one eye closed - also seen in Lower (Early) Palaeo art and persisting (in a form) to the present day.

With regard to the crooked mouth I found a story behind it, I am sure there are more.

from http://www.mnh.si.edu/arctic/features/yupik/index.html

This mask shows a distorted human face, with one eye partly closed and wrinkled forehead. Yup'ik Paul John of Nelson Island recalled stories about a strange noise coming from outside the qasgiq (communal men's house). When the people saw the face of the creature that had come to them, it would have a bent face with a sideways mouth.

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War Arrow, thanks for that input! I see your primary area of interest is Mesoamerican cultures, certainly a fascinating one. Yes, it's not always easy to put one's hands on a photo when one needs it. Take a look at this link to creature-from-mouth imagery in Colombia: http://rupestreweb.tripod.com/motif.html
This website also discusses related shamanic ritual in the Amazon region of Peru. (You may not want to be eating anything while viewing/reading this.)

Knowing the ancient iconography of that region as you do, you will also quickly recognize the similarity of the bird-on-head motif (quite elaborate and embellished in Central America) to that appearing here in Ohio - see http://daysknob.com/Bird_on_Head.htm This is also very much present, although maybe not as consistently, in the European material, and also in Australia.

Regarding "the idea that early religions tend to follow similar lines", that's very true, I think. Carrying this further, I'm currently hypothesizing that the remarkable consistency of the imagery and arrangement of its subcomponents in the "rock art" we are seeing indicates that primal "spirituality" was essentially the same wherever there were humans - and that birds, moving between earth and sky, were a major part of this. The consistency of the iconography leads me to speculate that it originated in one place (in Africa?) and then was carried far and wide over a very long period of time. (In an earlier posting in this thread I mentioned recent discoveries indicating that proto-humans were on the move hundreds of thousands of years earlier than we have been taught to believe.)

Richard - nice mask! And I agree with your analogy of the different colored eyes in the stone to dissimilarly shaped eyes (one open, one shut). The only example of the eye coloration I can offer from here is a very small dancing figure (about 1 cm) in resin(?) and who-knows-what on a piece of bone: http://www.daysknob.com/images/DBS01_01.JPG

Regards, Alan

[War Arrow]

Excellent link there, AD - so good that I'm printing it out to read at my leisure. I've found it difficult getting material on the Muisca, who I find of particular relevance through belonging to the Uto-Aztecan language stream and therefore probabling sharing more than coincidental cultural traits with the Mexica etc. So yes, thanks big-time for that.

Regarding "the idea that early religions tend to follow similar lines", that's very true, I think. Carrying this further, I'm currently hypothesizing that the remarkable consistency of the imagery and arrangement of its subcomponents in the "rock art" we are seeing indicates that primal "spirituality" was essentially the same wherever there were humans - and that birds, moving between earth and sky, were a major part of this. The consistency of the iconography leads me to speculate that it originated in one place (in Africa?) and then was carried far and wide over a very long period of time. (In an earlier posting in this thread I mentioned recent discoveries indicating that proto-humans were on the move hundreds of thousands of years earlier than we have been taught to believe.)

At the moment, I'm tending towards a suspicion that parallel mythologies might develop independent of source or ancestry. For example, there's a lot of Mayan architecture that bears an uncanny stylistic resemblance to that of Cambodia etc - which has always been big with the ancient contact/astronauts set, unfortunately if in some ways understandable. My theory (and by theory I don't mean something I've done any real research into, so I suppose I mean hunch) is that the human mind has a set group of responses to certain environments. People's living by water the world over will tend to view their environment in terms of boats, fishing, water/coast/inland etc. Those living in rain forests will have another set of priorities. Then of course people working in similar materials will most likely produce objects with at least some common factors. I know it's a big leap to get from that to things of some complexity which, despit being half a world apart suggest a shared visual alphabet if not a shared visual language, but, I don't know, there could perhaps be something in it.

Anyway, further to the lopsided head thing, and I don't know why this didn't occur to me before, inevitably that turns up in Mexico too. Notably a mask from Tlatilco dated to the early formative era depicting a half-living, half-dead face - amongst many others (I'll start being a bit more useful once I get my scanner fixed). Anyway, the point here is that deformity (as frequently illustrated by this type of assymetrical sculpture) was seen as something outside the norm, hence something on the fringes of mundane reality, and hence something with a direct tie to the sacred - and whether that was a good or a bad thing is another matter. It might, I guess, be argued that bird images and depictions of wonky faces/hunchbacks etc amounted to similar ideas.

Then again. You could argue that (at least in Mexican terms) just about everything is linked to the sacred thus rendering my point a bit too obvious to be of use.

Anyway, hope that's of relevance, and hope I haven't just reiterated what someone's already said. Time for my bath now followed by a good, hard look at those links.

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Hi War Arrow...

You're right, of course - we quite independently do pretty much the same things, intelligent and otherwise. I'm certainly not dogmatic about much of anything.

Interesting about the asymmetrical face... Maybe the one-eye-open/other-eye-shut is both a juxtaposition and a "morphing" of life and death - that would seem consistent with the overall iconography.

Incidentally, I've heard that among the "Indians" the toothy grin is the grimace of death - don't know if this is true.

...just about everything is linked to the sacred thus rendering my point a bit too obvious to be of use.

Not obvious to everyone, certainly, and a very interesting observation.

Regards, Alan

[War Arrow]

Thanks once again for that link, AD. I printed it out and read it on the bus on the way to the British Museum with my girlfriend where, by odd coincidence, we found ourselves stood before a Muisca golf figurine holding the very same spirals discussed in the article (coincidence because the British Museum didn't have anything at all from South America on display last time I was there). I'll get back to that in a moment...

Incidentally, I've heard that among the "Indians" the toothy grin is the grimace of death - don't know if this is true.

Very possibly. In Nahua (and I think also Maya) cultures it denoted great age and old people. Unless we're talking about the more obvious grinning skull imagery, although it doesn't take too much detective work to see the death associations there, although as an interesting aside you sometimes see grinning skulls where the teeth seem to bear a closer resemblance to a maize cob pattern, which I suspect is that old life-death duality thing.

Right. Sorry. In the article for which you provided a link, I noticed:

Privileged shamans in trance state communicate with the upper world by being carried by bird spirit helpers or themselves being transformed into birds.

which is of more direct relevance to this thread, unless someone already made that point and I missed it (getting hard to keep track around here).
Possibly another response to Richard's question of 'why birds?' (It was you, wasn't it, Rich? Or was it Charlie?) Actually, with that in mind there's a few other points in the article that might also relate to the possible bird heads seen here earlier.
Any thoughts?

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Hi War Arrow...

Glad you liked that web page. It certainly further confirmed my own ideas. Incidentally, early European explorers in North America reported that the people of the Mississippian culture had an impressive projectile vomiting ritual fueled by rapid ingestion of large quantities of hot yaupon tea. (And young Americans even today do something similar with beer, although without the spiritual component.)

Privileged shamans in trance state communicate with the upper world by being carried by bird spirit helpers or themselves being transformed into birds. ... Possibly another response to Richard's question of 'why birds?' (It was you, wasn't it, Rich? Or was it Charlie?)

Yes, I think that must be a correct assessment of the bird symbology. I knew nothing about this when I was looking over hundreds of the bird and bird-human figures at the site I am investigating here in Guernsey County, Ohio, but pretty much arrived at the conclusion that it was a shamanistic iconography. Then on the internet I saw the Inuit/Yupik stuff and also what looked very much like it (much cruder, of course) in European "portable rock art". It's clearly what Richard and quite a few Europeans have been finding. The internet is great! Prior to this, people were seeing this stuff in isolation, showing it to the Wise Ones, and being told they just had random rocks. Now we can compare and correlate the obvious similarities. Things are going to change - don't know how quickly, though...

Incidentally, in the winter after I had identified the birdies, etc. in my local material, just on impulse I hauled out for a close look two little stones that I had brought back from near the 1220 m (4000') summit of Ben Lawers in the Scottish highlands in 1992. I had picked these up simply because they were very pretty, as souvenirs for my six-year-old daughter who also made the climb (just "hill walking" to us Scots, of course). It was an almost transcendental experience to recognize in these (quite unexpectedly) almost exactly the same distinctly carved imagery, but with little colored crystals forming the eyes. (Dr. Arsen Faradzhev, an anthropologist and rock art specialist from Moscow, who, with Dr. James Harrod, visited the site here with his own microscope, verified that the one of these he examined was clearly of human manufacture.)

And speaking of professional verification, take a look at http://daysknob.com/H05.htm showing a very nice quartz sandstone figure clearly incorporating the human-to-bird transformation motif.

Fun stuff... Thanks for your contributions!

Regards, Alan

[Roberto]

Incidentally, early European explorers in North America reported that the people of the Mississippian culture had an impressive projectile vomiting ritual fueled by rapid ingestion of large quantities of hot yaupon tea. (And young Americans even today do something similar with beer, although without the spiritual component.)

You know, being from Mississippian I've seen a lot of friends performing that (not so impressive) projectile vomiting ritual during Mardi Gras. I never thought of it as ritual, but then again quite a few of them do it each year. Guess that's just Mississippian Culture ...
CHEERS...