REDATING CHAUVET ?

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Here is something I was reminded of by a recent post that popped up on the Palanthsci list, and that is certainly worth some bandwidth. The whole story has to do with with the “remise en question” of the Chauvet Cave dates. To avoid confusion, some of my very short and personal notes and comments, on this interesting New Scientist piece are in red and in []s .

Doubt cast on age of oldest human art.

Jenny Hogan

Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition -11:00 18 April 03

If the rock art in the Chauvet cave is 30,000 years old, [actually, between 30,300 and 32,400] it is the most ancient example of human art in existence and the implications for the evolution of culture are immense. [Incorrect; there are older or equally old, or nearly as old examples in France as well as elsewhere in the world. Not to mention that some of these examples also consist of pprtable art]. This date is accepted and celebrated by archaeologists. [It is not a date that reference should be made to, but a large series of dates (see below). Age, in this case would be a more appropriate term]. But could it be wrong?

"I would be astounded if this date proves to be correct," [idem].  leading archaeologist Paul Bahn says now. "It flies in the face of all we know about ice-age art." [It might also suggest that what we thought we knew was not necessarily correct]. He has reignited the debate about the age of the paintings at Chauvet by questioning the science [From what I have read, what is being “questioned” is not so much the “science” itself (i.e., radiocarbon dating), but the fact that the dates obtained so far have not been duplicated or triplicated, etc.  by other labs]. that says they are so old. The controversy is currently dividing the archaeology community [If one wants to sell copy, I suppose the use of the term “controversy” is permissible. I should also mention that the “controversy” regarding Chauvet and, for that matter, Cosquer Cave, is a bit more complicated that just a matter of radiocarbon dating. But I don’t have time to get into this, right now.

The Chauvet cave was discovered in a valley in southern France in 1994. Its walls are a spectacular gallery of prehistoric art and the depictions of wild animals - rhino, lions and bison among others – are so sophisticated that specialists in ice-age art first assumed they must be relatively recent. Certain features, such as animals shown face on, also suggested that the cave paintings were about 15,000 years old. [This is all based on the traditional periodization that had been developed, over many years, by quite a number of scholars, and whose last, most formidable and convincing version was that of Leroi-Gourhan. All I will say, here, is that Leroi-Gourhan never had the opportunity to confront, as it were, his “parietal art stylistic, relative chronology” with the more formal one provided by the more recent advances in dating techniques].

But a few months later, tiny samples of black charcoal were scraped from
some of the pictures and sent away for radiocarbon dating. The date [see earlier comments] that came back from the Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Science (LSCE) in Gif-sur-Yvette, France, shocked everyone. It suggested that the paintings dated to the very beginning of the Upper Paleolithic era, around 30,000 years ago (New Scientist print edition, 13 July 1996). [A gross over simplification of the UP chronology.]


Picasso or Michelangelo

People are generally wary of stylistic dating, explains Paul Pettitt, an
archaeologist at the University of Oxford. So once the more "scientific" [!!! – an amazingly naïve view of what scientific interdisciplinarity is all about] radiocarbon results were available, most researchers dismissed the more
recent date suggested by the paintings themselves.

Instead the carbon data was used to support the revolutionary [hype] theory  that sophisticated art developed extremely rapidly once modern humans arrived in Europe, and archaeologists who thought culture evolved over millennia were sidelined. [hype, again, and completely false].

There is good reason to doubt chronologies based purely on style, admits Chris Witcombe, an art historian at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. He explains the difficulty with an analogy: "Imagine you are living in the distant future and only two objects survive from a lost and forgotten past: a painting by Picasso and a painting by Michelangelo. Which is the earlier work and which the later?" [I hope that this very poor analogy is the product of the author of the article, Ms. Jenny Hogan and not of Professor Witcombe. It is clearly indicative of a rather poor understanding of what the Palaeolithic archaeological record is all about].

But archaeologists must also be wary of radiocarbon dates, argue Pettitt and Bahn in a paper that appeared in Antiquity last month. Bahn's suspicions were aroused when he translated the latest coffee-table book [Not nice] on the Chauvet cave into English. Around 30 radiocarbon ages are presented in this book, but the measurements were all made at the same French laboratory. Using results from only one team, however skilled, just is not scientific, says Bahn. [On principle, I agree with this statement, but just up to a point. In other words, it is not a valid “scientific” argument. Not to mention that it is quite unrealistic. Economically speaking. If such “scientific” idealistic standards were to be put in place at this time, most radiocarbon based chronologies would have to be dismissed or, at the very least, put on hold in some sort of a radiometric purgatory].

Worse, the same laboratory is currently embroiled in an argument over the age of the artwork in another cave, Candamo in Spain. They dated black dots on its walls to 30,000 years ago, but Geochron Laboratories in Cambridge, Massachusetts, estimated the age of a second sample to be just half that. [Hype, again. Problems like this are a dime a dozen. Not to mention that the example in question appears to be brought up in order to throw doubt on and thus discredit the Chauvet , Gif-sur-Yvette dates].

The point is that carbon dating rock art is difficult. [So is dating many other types of samples, especially when one is getting very close to the limits of readability of C14]. Because the samples tend to be incredibly tiny, it is difficult to measure the number of carbon-14 atoms relative to other carbon isotopes - the key ratio for pinning down the age. [Pollen grains, hair samples, etc. are also very tiny and this does not prevent people to attempt dating them. As mentioned by M. Rowe (below), one of the biggest problem has to do with contamination. Especially at that fine level of radiometric resolution].

"Everybody agrees there are problems," says Marvin Rowe, who heads a radiocarbon-dating lab at Texas A&M University in College Station. Contamination from groundwater or rock scrapings may further confuse the results.

Jean Clottes, the archaeologist at the French Ministry of Culture who led the team exploring the cave, stands by his Chauvet results. But he has agreed to send Rowe a sample of charcoal from the cave floor, so that they can compare their results. This is crucial, says Pettitt. "We are not saying the dates are necessarily incorrect, but they need to be checked."

Now, I don’t doubt that more dates – from a site like Chauvet Cave – obtained from a number of labs would certainly be the ideal. But whether or not such results would satisfy all the researchers, is another story. As “souhaitable” as it can be, this type of dating approach would inevitably increase the possibilities of obtaining “contradictory” results which, in turn, could well prevent us to maintain some focus on the forest. And in this regard, it should be noted that the chronological “position” of the Chauvet Cave art is based on much more than just radiometric arguments. Jean Clottes, in his many publications, presents them quite clearly. For starters, one can have a look HERE and HERE.

If you want to see further material (images & other pertinent links, CLICK HERE.

The Antiquity articles that address this “dating” issue are:

Pettitt, Paul and Paul Bahn. 2003. Current problems in Dating Palaeolithic cave art: Candamo and Chauvet. Antiquity 77(295).

Valladas, Hélène and Jean Clottes. 2003. Chauvet, art and radiocarbon. Antiquity 77(295).


Boaretto, Elisabetta, Charlotte Bryant, Israel Carmi, Gordon Cook, Steinar Gulliksen, Doug Harkness, Jan Heinemeier, John McClure, Edward McGee, Philip Naysmith, Goran Possnert, Marian Scott, Hans van der Plicht, and Mark van Strydonck. 2003. How reliable are radiocarbon laboratories?: A report on the Fourth International Radiocarbon Inter-comparison (FIRI) (1998-2001). Antiquity 77(295).

If you are lucky enough to have access to the online edition, you will find them HERE.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[John Hawks]

So are we to believe any radiocarbon dates? Here is what Richard Klein wrote about late Neandertals in his recent Science piece:

There is also the ever-present possibility of minute, undetectable contamination with recent carbon, which can make a sample that is 50,000 to 40,000 radiocarbon years old appear 20,000 to 10,000 years younger.

Such contamination may explain radiocarbon dates that suggest the survival of Neanderthals in southern Russia (11), Croatia (12), and Spain (13) for 7000 years or more after Cro-Magnons had appeared nearby. Only the alternation of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon layers within a single site could provide unequivocal evidence for substantial chronological overlap. No known site provides such alternation. Wherever Middle Paleolithic and early Upper Paleolithic layers occur in the same site, the Upper Paleolithic layers directly overlie the Middle Paleolithic ones, with no indication for a significant gap in time. The implication is that in most places the Neanderthals disappeared abruptly.

Now I would have naively figured that three or four cases of something at different sites was confirmatory evidence. But this and the Chauvet case, among others, seem to indicate that some archaeologists blithely ignore radiocarbon dates when it suits them.

To me, that indicates that there is simply no standard of evidence, or else such people would never be taken seriously. Am I wrong?

--John

[lagarvelho]

Dr. Hawks:

I don't want, at this point, to take any sort of "position" on the Chauvet dates(although it's nice that there is apparently such "early" dated art), but are you perhaps suggesting that some people are eager to accept early dates for anything made by "modern" humans, while at the same time dismissing or ignoring possible evidence for similar sorts of artifacts made by Neandertals or other "archaic" humans?  And if the latter, wouldn't that imply some sort of double standard operating?

Hoping not to sound *too* naive,
Anne g

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

So are we to believe any radiocarbon dates? Here is what Richard Klein wrote about late Neandertals in his recent Science piece:

There is also the ever-present possibility of minute, undetectable contamination with recent carbon, which can make a sample that is 50,000 to 40,000 radiocarbon years old appear 20,000 to 10,000 years younger.

Such contamination may explain radiocarbon dates that suggest the survival of Neanderthals in southern Russia (11), Croatia (12), and Spain (13) for 7000 years or more after Cro-Magnons had appeared nearby. Only the alternation of Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon layers within a single site could provide unequivocal evidence for substantial chronological overlap. No known site provides such alternation. Wherever Middle Paleolithic and early Upper Paleolithic layers occur in the same site, the Upper Paleolithic layers directly overlie the Middle Paleolithic ones, with no indication for a significant gap in time. The implication is that in most places the Neanderthals disappeared abruptly.

Now I would have naively figured that three or four cases of something at different sites was confirmatory evidence. But this and the Chauvet case, among others, seem to indicate that some archaeologists blithely ignore radiocarbon dates when it suits them.

To me, that indicates that there is simply no standard of evidence, or else such people would never be taken seriously. Am I wrong?

--John

Apologies for not having responded earlier, but, as you may have noticed, the Forum is having a few problems with its server.

Bluntly put, I would say that you are not entirely wrong about the latter part of your question. As for  the first part, the approach taken by Klein (and, actually, quite a few other people) can indeed provide one with good reasons for wonderment.

But, keeping in mind that research on radiometric dating techniques is a very dynamic field, there are indeed standards of evidence when it comes to radiocarbon dating, and on how to proceed when making use of them.

In my view, the contamination question raised by Klein is somewhat of a red herring. True, contamination can be a problem (particularly with AMS and minute samples), and is likely to be so for years to come. In fact, a good deal of the research I mentioned is directed at identifying and dealing with such problem(s) and I think it can be demonstrated that much progress has been made since the early 80s. More specifically, in conjunction with this work is that which has led to quite a few advances in bone dating – a material that is much in demand when it comes to dating early human remains!

Contamination works both ways. If undetected, the presence of younger carbon in a given sample will make it come out younger and, conversely the presence of older or even dead carbon will make it come out older. In both cases, however, you need a fair bit of  “younger” or “older” contaminants to make a big difference. I don’t have in hand the exact figures, but for a > 50-40,000 bit of bone to end up yielding a 27,000 year old date would require enough contaminant so that it would be picked up in the analysis of the sample.

Another point, is that – as far as an can tell – contamination can be viewed as some sort of a series of random events, the more so if one is taking about many types of samples/dates obtained from numerous sites spread over large (at times) continental areas.

It seems, from the brief excerpt you brought up that Klein makes a very selective (and self serving, i.e., for his main thesis) use of the effects of contamination. Not only does he seem to see (very conveniently) contamination problems as unidirectional, but, if I read him correctly, this contamination is a region specific phenomenon. To get back to your question, it is certainly not a convincing demonstration that there are indeed “standards of evidence”.

In other words, yes, it is very possible to believe in some radiocarbon dates as long as one realizes that – as I have said before - “they are not all born equal” and always have to be evaluated against other levels of evidence.

On the same issue, I’ll shortly bring up a few pertinent (I hope), additional comments in another post, a follow up dealing with the recent Chauvet "dating" controversy.

Jacques

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

As mentioned in my earlier response to your post, here are a few additional comments.

<snip>
Now I would have naively figured that three or four cases of something at different sites was confirmatory evidence. But this and the Chauvet case, among others, seem to indicate that some archaeologists blithely ignore radiocarbon dates when it suits them.

To me, that indicates that there is simply no standard of evidence, or else such people would never be taken seriously. Am I wrong?

--John

Very briefly, here are a few points that, hopefully, will be of help in figuring out some aspects this apparent controversy.

The discovery context.

From day one, the Chauvet Cave has caused controversy. Shortly after its discovery, a few researchers saw it as a “fake” of high magnitude, but, following detailed examinations by various experts, they ended eating crow. By the way, pretty much the same situation occurred with the Cosquer Cave discovery, a few years earlier.

The first dating.

The first age estimate of the Chauvet paintings were based on stylistic evidence alone. The general style of some of the representations were initially and enthusiastically viewed by most workers as corresponding best to one of the (then) earliest known “phase” of parietal art, belonging to the Solutrean and dating back to around 20-19,000 years ago.

The first radiocarbon dates.

When the first AMS dates came out, indicating or, at the very least suggesting, that some of the Chauvet paintings fell closer to 32-30,000, they caused a major stir in the research community and, very rapidly, noises started to be made, by a few people (who were hanging on dearly to the traditional or classic sequence) about the fact the  dates could not be right, possibly, because of samples contamination. As far as I recall, nothing was said at the time about the reliability of the lab and about the fact that no inter-lab “double-checking” had been done.

The additonal dates.

They kind of caused a problem to the “nay-sayers” (spelling?) because they kept coming out on target. They all (the first ones and the incoming ones) indicated or suggested, quite clearly, that the main period of cave use (i.e., the paintings) dated back to between 32-30,000 years ago. A younger date, in the range of 27-26,000 ka, was interpreted as indicative of a brief human exploration of the cave, having nothing to do with the earlier painting activities. It was obtained from a “mouchage de torche” (this is the charcoal left on surface when you rejuvenate the tip a wooden torch), superimposed on a calcite (film) covered painting. In this regard, here are two brief quotations (lifted from the Web) that can also put all this into context:

Extracted from the Adorant magazine 2002 (Article by Jean Clottes)

5. Chronology

Until the end of the eighties, it was impossible to date paintings directly, as the quantity of pigment necessary for such an analysis was too important. Accelerator mass spectrometry now enables us to obtain a date with less than one milligram of charcoal. Consequently, a number of direct dates are now available for six French caves : Cosquer, Chauvet, Cougnac, Pech-Merle, Niaux, Le Portel. When the caves have only got engravings (Les Combarelles, Cussac) or red paintings, or black paintings made with manganese dioxide (Lascaux, Rouffignac), it remains impossible to get a direct date because of the lack of organic material. Chronological attributions are then made with time-honoured methods, generally by taking advantage of the archaeological context whenever possible or from stylistic comparison with other better dated sites. For example, when the Cussac cave was discovered in the Dordogne in October 2000, Norbert Aujoulat and Christian Archambeau attributed its engravings to the Gravettian because of the similarities with Pech-Merle and Gargas (Aujoulat et al. 2001). When, in August 2001, a 25,120 BP ±120 date was obtained from a human bone in the same cave, it corroborated the initial estimate of those specialists (op. cit.).

Among well-established facts, the most important is the duration of cave art, over at least twenty millenia. The oldest dates are so far those of the Chauvet Cave (between 30,000 and 32,000 BP) and the most recent one that in Le Portel (11.600 ± 150 BP).

Extracted from: http://www.culture.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/fr/index.html

Direct dates obtained in 1995 have added an unexpected dimension to the discovery. Three samples taken from charcoal drawings of two rhinoceroses and one bison have yielded dates between 30,340 and 32,410 BP (before present). Considering the statistical margins of error, this means that the paintings were made at the very ancient date of approximately 31,000 years ago, within an interval of 1,300 years. The dating of a torch mark   (26,120 ± 400) superimposed on a calcite layer that covers a drawing proves that at least some of the representations were created at very early dates. Consequently, we must dismiss, or consider as highly improbable, the hypothesis that Solutrean or Magdalenian visitors collected some Aurignacian-age charcoal from the floor and used it to draw images on the wall thousands of years after the passage of the first occupants.

The contamination argument.

I have already discussed some of this, in my post on the Klein’s Science paper excerpt you passed on earlier.

With regards to problems of contamination, the ones that can be present on cave paintings are, admittedly, quite different than the one that are found in bone. It has been known for a while and there is a growing body of literature dealing with such issues. In this regard, a number of interesting reviews and sets of references can be found on the Web:
CLICK HERE and HERE.

I have not had the chance to read detailed reports on the Chauvet sampling and processing carried out prior to the actual AMS dating, but having talked at length with Jean Clottes about the entire, multi-year Chauvet research project, I cannot imagine that major efforts were not made by the Gif-sur-Yvette people to deal with all possible problems of contamination.

The “single lab” argument.

Here are two excerpts from an interview with Paul Bahn, published electronically in a  Newsletter called Oxen. For the full text, CLICK HERE.[/b] In there, Paul Bahn summarizes this particular argument in a quite reasonable (if a bit idealistic) and somewhat cautious manner.

The final straw came when I learned that some black dots in the Spanish cave of Candamo had been dated to more than 31,000 years ago by the lab which dated Chauvet; but samples from the same group of dots, dated by an American lab, produced two results of 15,000. So I have written an article with the palaeolithic archaeologist Paul Pettitt, a radiocarbon specialist, which is due to appear in the March issue of Antiquity, and in which we explain the Candamo anomaly, and examine the possible implications for Chauvet. I must stress that some figures in Chauvet may indeed be Aurignacian in date - we do not reject this - but we do argue that this is far from proven. What we urge - since it has not been done yet - is that multiple laboratories must be used in the direct dating of cave art (almost all dates so far, dozens of them, from umpteen caves, have come from the same lab); that samples should be split, where possible, for verification of results by different labs; that undecorated walls should be checked for natural contamination; and that the existing dates should be published with full data in specialised journals - the new series of dates for Chauvet, for example, have as yet only been published in the coffee-table book. These points appear to us to be basic science, but none of them has yet been implemented.

He does, however, goes a bit overboard by calling the Candamo date “the final straw”. It is, in my view, an isolated incident, of a kind that can always happen and that has little bearing on whether or not the Chauvet Caves dates are correct. Except, perhaps, as one among a number of equally informative examples that can can be pulled out of one’s pocket to demonstrate that, in some sense, from both macro and micro taphonomic points-of-view, cave sites and samples – like dates -- are not all born equal.

<snip>

Now, however, we are sobering up, and starting to realise that contamination may be having radical effects, and that these results from the cutting-edge of prehistory need to be validated and checked, not just accepted at face value. If valid, the early dates for art at Chauvet do indeed have profound implications for our view of palaeolithic Europe, the development of art, and so forth, and that is why it is absolutely imperative that the cave's dating must be checked and rechecked. Jean Clottes once wrote in an Oxbow book (Rock Art Studies: the Post-stylistic era) that "one date is no date", and in this case one must add that "one lab is no lab". Paul Pettitt and I are not casting aspersions on the lab involved - we would feel exactly the same whichever lab had been used - but we insist that for dates of such global importance, independent verification is absolutely crucial.

What is interesting to note, here, is that Bahn happens to be a strong defender/supporter of the great antiquity of the Brazilian Pedra Furada site – something he briefly discusses in the latter part of the interview. But nowhere does he show concern for the fact that, in this case, the very large and stratigraphically coherent series of dates has also been run in its entirety by the Gif-sur-Yvette lab without, I believe, much, if any at all, double(lab)checking.

I should also note, regarding Clottes’ "one date is no date" and Bahn’s "one lab is no lab" statements, that they do make sense in certain circumstances, but not all. It all depends on a large variety of factors that can only be weighed in the context of a well integrated interdisciplinary investigation. Many times, a single or very few dates (from a single lab), if they happen to be “harmonious”, as it were, with other types of chronological (archaeological, faunal, stratigraphic, etc. signals or indicators) will suffice. On the other hand, I must admit, with Bahn and Pettitt, that Chauvet’s dates, if only because of the site’s importance, are, indeed, in need of a double- or, even, a triple-check.

I could go on like this for a while, but, I think, I'll stop here.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[Daryl Habel]

(SNIP)
I should also note, regarding Clottes’ "one date is no date" and Bahn’s "one lab is no lab" statements, that they do make sense in certain circumstances, but not all. It all depends on a large variety of factors that can only be weighed in the context of a well integrated interdisciplinary investigation. Many times, a single or very few dates (from a single lab), if they happen to be “harmonious”, as it were, with other types of chronological (archaeological, faunal, stratigraphic, etc. signals or indicators) will suffice. On the other hand, I must admit, with Bahn and Pettitt, that Chauvet’s dates, if only because of the site’s importance, are, indeed, in need of a double- or, even, a triple-check.

I could go on like this for a while, but, I think, I'll stop here.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

Dear Jacques,

You might want to get started again <grin>

It appears that Paul Pettitt and Paul Bahn are resurrecting their complaint, concurrent with the release "this week" of "a French culture ministry" final report dealing with the Chauvet paintings.  There is a (new?) hardly-disguised accusation of "official pressure" to "promote" the paintings as the world's oldest.  See:

CLICK HERE FOR THE URL

The last paragraph seems to be the most legitimate complaint, if there is one.

Regards,
Dar

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Dear Jacques,

You might want to get started again <grin>

It appears that Paul Pettitt and Paul Bahn are resurrecting their complaint, concurrent with the release "this week" of "a French culture ministry" final report dealing with the Chauvet paintings.  There is a (new?) hardly-disguised accusation of "official pressure" to "promote" the paintings as the world's oldest.  See:

CLICK HERE FOR THE URL

The last paragraph seems to be the most legitimate complaint, if there is one.

Regards,
Dar

Dear Dar,

Frankly, I don't know what to say about this, and I certainly hope that the obvious journalistic hype is not driven by the researchers who are questioning the original Chauvet dates.

I'll just note that a very large number of important and not-so-important archaeological sites are living happily with ages obtained from single labs. Something which, as I mentioned earlier, doesn't seem to bother Paul Bahn, when he writes in support of the Brazilian Pedra Furada sequence, a sequence that was essentially obtained through the services of the Gif-sur-Yvette radiocarbon facilities.

Jacques

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Dear Jacques,

You might want to get started again <grin>

It appears that Paul Pettitt and Paul Bahn are resurrecting their complaint, concurrent with the release "this week" of "a French culture ministry" final report dealing with the Chauvet paintings.  There is a (new?) hardly-disguised accusation of "official pressure" to "promote" the paintings as the world's oldest.  See:

CLICK HERE FOR THE URL

The last paragraph seems to be the most legitimate complaint, if there is one.

Regards,
Dar

Chauvet – Just couldn't help it!

Britain and France in dispute over cave art

By Philip Delves Broughton in Paris

Electronic Telegraph (Filed: 16/10/2003)

The age of the cave paintings at Chauvet, the Sistine Chapel of palaeolithic art in south eastern France, has become the subject of a war of words between British and French archaeologists.

Unless I am completely wrong – -I need to check this – - the "Sistine Chapel" label has already been used for Lascaux.

The British claim the French may have exaggerated their age by 18,000 years under official pressure to promote them as the oldest cave paintings in the world.

This essentially implies that the researchers, namely, Clottes and Valladas (and others) have actually published, "under official pressure", dates that are different than the ones they have obtained. This is pushing things a bit too much for my taste. Nor do I believe that Pettitt and Bahn have gone so far as to say that actual "lying" has occurred in this debate.

<snip>

Paul Pettitt, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield, accused the French yesterday of "not being honest and open" about the real age of the paintings.

Again – and I may be wrong, I doubt that Pettitt could have come up with this exact statement.

The French have dated the paintings to 33,000 BC, which would make them the oldest paintings in the world.

Note, here, that a few Australians would disagree.

Mr Pettitt and Paul Bahn, an independent archaeologist, published a paper this year which said the style of the paintings suggested a date of about 15,000 BC. "If the French are right, it would be as if they had found a Renaissance painting from the early Middle Ages," said Mr Pettitt.

If Pettitt actually said that, it would mean that he doesn't know that the Chauvet Cave faunal representations fit perfectly well with what we know of the German Aurignacian mobiliary art (e.g., Vogelherd and what Nick Conard has recently discovered). Not only that, but the female/animal representation found at Chauvet, also fit well with that of the known Aurignacian/Gravettian finds. And even if therianthrops do occur in the Magdalenian, they are "males" and Magdalenian female figures are completely different.

The French allowed only a single French laboratory to analyse the carbon in the charcoal used in the drawings and refused to send comparable samples to other facilities around the world for dating.

I think "refused" is, at the very best, a gross overstatement.

Jacques

[trehinp]

Chauvet – Just couldn't help it!Unless I am completely wrong – -I need to check this – - the "Sistine Chapel" label has already been used for Lascaux.This essentially implies that the researchers, namely, Clottes and Valladas (and others) have actually published, "under official pressure", dates that are different than the ones they have obtained. This is pushing things a bit too much for my taste. Nor do I believe that Pettitt and Bahn have gone so far as to say that actual "lying" has occurred in this debate.

Indeed the "Sistine Chapel" label was coined by l'abbé Breuil , as noted in Nougier's book "Les grottes péhistoriques ornées de France, d'Espagne et d'Italie", Balland, Paris 1990.

Concerning the stylistic historical reversal of Chauvet paintings I don't think  the argument holds. By such argument perspective based paintings in Pompei would also be historically mysplaced since perspective was "discovered" at the renaissance and the Middle age art didn't have it.

By the same argument, even the most recent realistic paintings and drawings of Rouffignac, Combarelles and Niaux would be an historical impossibility since the "stickmen art" of the Neolithic are far less technically advanced than the ones of the late Magdalenian.

It is true though that this reverse order of art forms apparition, (reversed compared to the ontological process in individuals : going from scribbles, to sketchy stickmen then to better representations), is a most interesting element in the understanding of the origins of art.

A subject on which I am working as a prehistoric art amateur.

Paul Trehin

[lagarvelho]

Paul:

I have *no* idea whether the dating at Chauvet is good, bad, or indifferent. What I do know is, if Bahn and his colleagues are right, then Clottes and the others have a problem which they need to explain.  If, on the other hand Clottes and his colleagues are right, then Bahn has a lot of explaining to do.  The only other thing I know is that some artifacts have been wrongly or poorly dated in the past, and have recently been redated to earlier or more often, later times.  None of this, however, alters the fact that Chauvet is a spectacular find, and might well be meaningful in a larger context.
Anne G

[trehinp]

I agree with you Ann,

Chauvet art is absolutely fabulous whatever the date attributed to the paintings.

Dating has its importance however, from the point of view of some authors who link early art manifestations to some cognitive threshold that were overcome by Homo Sapiens Sapiens around the period -40K years ago and -30 K years ago, as for example in Stephen Mithen or Richard Klein works.

I won't develop here my hypothesis about early art origins, but for sure, it separates the cognitive overall cultural evolution of Palaeolithic populations from the exceptional capabilities for drawing of a few exceptional members of the same populations.

By the way, this hypothesis would annihilate the criticisms of Paul Bahn on the historical sequence of art production.

Remains the fact that Neolithic art and its “stickmen” representations, is apparently far simpler than the realistic Palaeolithic art. A much interesting subject in my opinion...

Paul Trehin

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Indeed the "Sistine Chapel" label was coined by l'abbé Breuil , as noted in Nougier's book "Les grottes péhistoriques ornées de France, d'Espagne et d'Italie", Balland, Paris 1990.

Concerning the stylistic historical reversal of Chauvet paintings I don't think  the argument holds. By such argument perspective based paintings in Pompei would also be historically mysplaced since perspective was "discovered" at the renaissance and the Middle age art didn't have it.

By the same argument, even the most recent realistic paintings and drawings of Rouffignac, Combarelles and Niaux would be an historical impossibility since the "stickmen art" of the Neolithic are far less technically advanced than the ones of the late Magdalenian.

Welcome to a very quiet Forum and best wishes for the New Year.

I agree with you that the "historical reversal" argument has little validity, in light of the examples you have come up with, and even more so, if one takes into consideration prehistoric art (developmental) trajectories from other regions of the world. To consider that cultural evolution has been orderly and has necessarily moved from "simple" to "complex" can be somewhat valid when viewed from a great, "synthetic/temporal distance", but not when one is dealing with relatively brief moments of Palaeolithic time. What has happened with Chauvet (assuming that it is well dated !), is that it has caused old models and hypotheses to be put into question. I think this is also clear when one takes various examples of mobiliary art into consideration. In other words, the devil is in the details and, in prehistory, the details, and our appreciation of them, are very much a function of ongoing work and new finds.

It is true though that this reverse order of art forms apparition, (reversed compared to the ontological process in individuals : going from scribbles, to sketchy stickmen then to better representations), is a most interesting element in the understanding of the origins of art.

A subject on which I am working as a prehistoric art amateur.

Paul Trehin

I would be careful, however, not to assume that the "reverse order" you are talking about is much more than the expression of an accidental chrono-taphonomic event. In other words, the likes of Chauvet (paintings) and and of the early German mobiliary art (e.g., Vogelherd and Hohle Fels) have to have been preceded – contrary to the opinion of some people -- by (simpler ?) antecedents that have yet to be found/identified.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

[trehinp]

Welcome to a very quiet Forum and best wishes for the New Year.

I would be careful, however, not to assume that the "reverse order" you are talking about is much more than the expression of an accidental chrono-taphonomic event. In other words, the likes of Chauvet (paintings) and and of the early German mobiliary art (e.g., Vogelherd and Hohle Fels) have to have been preceded – contrary to the opinion of some people -- by (simpler ?) antecedents that have yet to be found/identified.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

Thanks for your welcome message. I'm glad to have found this forum.

Concerning the last part of your message, I completely aggree that the lack of previous "simpler forms of art" may simply be due to the type of support on which they were made, and that they just didn't arrive to us.

In fact I consider that the discovery of such "simpler art forms" would constitute a refutation of my theory (which I have yet to expose on this forum, but didn't as I am looking for the right place to put it in).

For those who read French, there is a first version of an article on which I am still working. Actually there have been quite a few changes in the argument since I put it on the website :

http://perso.wanadoo.fr/gilles.trehin.urville/accueil.html

I am about to put on my website a newer version both in English and in French.

I'll be out for a couple of days so I won't answer rapidly.

Paul

[trehinp]

Just for information and for those of you who read French, the latest issue, dated January-March 2004, the magazine DOSSIERS Hors Série de  "Pour la Science" (the french edition of Scientific American) is dedicated to "Le temps des datations".

A very rich special issue with descriptions of the best adapted datation methods depending upon how far back in time one wants to assess a date.

Of interest to this specific topic on redating Chauvet, this issue contains an article signed H. Valladas, J. Clottes and J-M. Geneste "Chauvet, la grotte ornée la mieux datée du monde" (pp 82-87).

Behind the "show off" title, there is a well documented article...

This team confirms and stands by its previous datation of Chauvet, with two periods : one during the Aurignacian between -36,000 and -29,000 years ago and another period during the Magdalenian,  between -17,000 and -11,000 years ago.

In the same issue as this article there is one on the dating methodology using Carbon 14 with the correcting factors. The article also dates Chauvet's art in the same way.
E. Bard, G. Menot-Combes and G. Delaygue, "Des dates fiables pour les 50,000 dernières années", (pp 54-59)

Paul Trehin