A friendly review: Ian Tattersall on Randall White

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

All,

If you happen to be into palaeolithic art, here is [a review of] a book worth adding to your library or coffee table -- if only for the pictures.

Scientific American, July 2003 issue

Drenched in Symbolism
A dazzling record of prehistoric carvings and paintings testifies to the cognitive complexity of our species
By Ian Tattersall

Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind
by Randall White
Harry N. Abrams, New York, 2003

About 40,000 years ago the first Homo sapiens--the Cro-Magnons--began to trickle into Europe, displacing the resident Neanderthals in the process. The contrast between the records of their lives that these very different hominids left behind could hardly be more striking. For no extinct human species, not even the large-brained Homo neanderthalensis, has bequeathed us evidence of a complex symbolic existence, based on the extraordinary cognitive capacities that distinguish us from all other living species today. In contrast, the lives of the Cro-Magnons were drenched in symbolism.

Well over 30,000 years ago these early people were creating astonishing art on the walls of caves. They crafted subtle and beautiful carvings and engravings and kept records by incising intricate notations on bone plaques. They made music on bone flutes, and if they did this, they surely sang and danced as well. They ornamented their bodies and buried their dead with elaborate grave goods, presumably to serve them in an afterlife. Technologically, a cascade of innovations included nets, textiles and ropes, even the first ceramics. In short, those Cro-Magnons were us: members of a species whose relationship with the rest of the world was totally unprecedented in the entire history of life.

For the full text, CLICK HERE

[Jacques Cinq-Mars]

Here is a very brief review by Paul Bahn, indicating that he doesn't seem to share Tattersall's views on Randall White's recent book.

Jacques Cinq-Mars

NEW SCIENTIST.COM

Prehistoric Art: The symbolic journey of humankind
Randall White
$45/£30 Abrams

Paul Bahn

RANDALL White himself considers this book's title "pretentious". I consider it misleading, since the vast majority of this work deals with the Palaeolithic art of Eurasia - a tiny, if important, fraction of world prehistoric art.

And White seems not to be aware, for example, that the art in the Ignatiev cave is no longer thought to be Palaeolithic, nor that the early dates for the rock art in the Chauvet cave urgently need to be verified (19 April, p 8). And what about the stone and bone Neanderthal "mask" found at La Roche-Cotard a couple of years ago? It makes a nonsense of the view that clueless Neanderthals could only copy their cultural superiors the Cro-Magnons.

But, of course, an early date for Chauvet is crucial to White's preferred view of a "cultural explosion", and the Neanderthal "mask" is highly inconvenient. Prehistoric Art does have an attractive design, and contains some fine photographs, most of which are the right way round.