In fact, NOAA scientists recorded a mysterious sound in the Pacific Ocean in that they called "The Bloop," and the source of this sound has never been identified. The Discovery program mentioned this finding. Listen to "The Bloop" at here. For conspiracy theorists, there is a website called believeinmermaids. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which oversees the seizure of web sites engaged in criminal activity.
Studies of genes and fossils agree that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa , years ago. Intellectual breakthroughs in human evolution such as tool-making were mastered by other hominin species more than a million years ago.
Such sophisticated thinking was a huge competitive advantage, helping us to cooperate, survive in harsh environments and colonize new lands. It also opened the door to imaginary realms, spirit worlds and a host of intellectual and emotional connections that infused our lives with meaning beyond the basic impulse to survive. And because it enabled symbolic thinking—our ability to let one thing stand for another—it allowed people to make visual representations of things that they could remember and imagine.
Until Aubert went to Sulawesi, the oldest dated art was firmly in Europe. The spectacular lions and rhinos of Chauvet Cave, in southeastern France, are commonly thought to be around 30, to 32, years old, and mammoth-ivory figurines found in Germany correspond to roughly the same time.
So it has long been assumed that sophisticated abstract thinking, perhaps unlocked by a lucky genetic mutation, emerged in Europe shortly after modern humans arrived there about 40, years ago. Once Europeans started to paint, their skills, and their human genius, must have then spread around the world. But experts now challenge that standard view. Archaeologists in South Africa have found that the pigment ocher was used in caves , years ago. They have also unearthed deliberately pierced shells with marks suggesting they were strung like jewelry, as well as chunks of ocher, one engraved with a zigzag design—hinting that the capacity for art was present long before humans left Africa.
Still, the evidence is frustratingly indirect. And the engravings could have been one-offs, doodles with no symbolic meaning, says Wil Roebroeks, an expert in the archaeology of early humans, of Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Other extinct hominin species have left similarly inconclusive artifacts. By contrast, the gorgeous animal cave paintings in Europe represent a consistent tradition. The seeds of artistic creativity may have been sown earlier, but many scholars celebrate Europe as the place where it burst, full-fledged, into view. Humans were more or less comparable to you and me. Yet the lack of older paintings may not reflect the true history of rock art so much as the fact that they can be very difficult to date.
Radiocarbon dating, the kind used to determine the age of the charcoal paintings at Chauvet, is based on the decay of the radioactive isotope carbon and works only on organic remains. This is where Aubert comes in. Instead of analyzing pigment from the paintings directly, he wanted to date the rock they sat on, by measuring radioactive uranium, which is present in many rocks in trace amounts.
Uranium decays into thorium at a known rate, so comparing the ratio of these two elements in a sample reveals its age; the greater the proportion of thorium, the older the sample. But it can also date newer limestone formations, including stalactites and stalagmites, known collectively as speleothems, which form in caves as water seeps or flows through soluble bedrock. To do this would require analyzing almost impossibly thin layers cut from a cave wall—less than a millimeter thick.
Then a PhD student at the Australian National University in Canberra, Aubert had access to a state-of-the-art spectrometer, and he started to experiment with the machine, to see if he could accurately date such tiny samples. Within a few years, Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at the University of Wollongong, where Aubert had received a postdoctoral fellowship—today they are both based at Griffith University—started digging in caves in Sulawesi.
Brumm was working with the late Mike Morwood, co-discoverer of the diminutive hominin Homo floresiensis , which once lived on the nearby Indonesian island of Flores.
Brumm hoped to find them. As they worked, Brumm and his Indonesian colleagues were struck by the hand stencils and animal images that surrounded them. But the archaeological evidence showed that modern humans had arrived on Sulawesi at least 35, years ago. Could some of the paintings be older?
After that, Brumm looked for paintings partly obscured by speleothems every chance he got. As soon as he got home, he told Aubert to come to Sulawesi. Aubert spent a week the next summer touring the region by motorbike. He took samples from five paintings partly covered by popcorn, each time using a diamond-tipped drill to cut a small square out of the rock, about 1. Back in Australia, he spent weeks painstakingly grinding the rock samples into thin layers before separating out the uranium and thorium in each one.
Unable to get funding for the project, he had to pay for his flight to Sulawesi—and for the analysis—himself. The very first age Aubert calculated was for a hand stencil from the Cave of Fingers.
I said, are you sure? I had the feeling immediately that this was going to be big. Ancient Origins has been quoted by:. At Ancient Origins, we believe that one of the most important fields of knowledge we can pursue as human beings is our beginnings. And while some people may seem content with the story as it stands, our view is that there exist countless mysteries, scientific anomalies and surprising artifacts that have yet to be discovered and explained.
The goal of Ancient Origins is to highlight recent archaeological discoveries, peer-reviewed academic research and evidence, as well as offering alternative viewpoints and explanations of science, archaeology, mythology, religion and history around the globe. By bringing together top experts and authors, this archaeology website explores lost civilizations, examines sacred writings, tours ancient places, investigates ancient discoveries and questions mysterious happenings.
Our open community is dedicated to digging into the origins of our species on planet earth, and question wherever the discoveries might take us. We seek to retell the story of our beginnings. Skip to main content. Updated 14 January, - Mark Miller. Read Later Print. Cave paintings. Login or Register in order to comment.
Magdi wrote on 26 January, - Permalink. The cow seems to be from Shaw's cave at Gebel Kantara. That's pretty interesting. Maybe they are depicting some sort of ancient swim team or something.
Related Articles on Ancient-Origins. A remarkable cave in France is revealing secrets about early human ritual practices and burial traditions. Grotte de Cussac cave is located in Dordogne, in southwest France, set between the Loire When and where did humans develop language? To find out, look deep inside caves, suggests an MIT professor. More precisely, some specific features of cave art may provide clues about how our symbolic Archaeologists and historians have produced a number of curious finds which still await a logical explanation.
0コメント