A psychology expert pointed to the hand-eye coordination involved in hunting with throwing spears and drawing representation art as a possible explanation why modern humans drew better than Neanderthals. He based his theory on an examination of archaeological evidence, genomics, neuroscience studies, animal behavior, and prehistoric art in caves.
Richard Cross, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Davis, said that despite their large brains and the ability to make complex tools, the Neanderthals did not show the ability to draw recognizable images. In contrast, Homo sapiens created drawings of animals and other figures on rocks and caves.
Artistic gap
He explained the artistic gap to the differences in the way that the Neanderthals and modern man hunted. The Neanderthals used thrusting spears to hit a tamer prey in Eurasia, while the modern humans hunted for thousands of years using a spear to catch dangerous and wary animals on Africa's open grasslands.
Because the Homo sapiens run after a wary prey, Cross believes that the modern humans developed rounder skulls and grew bigger parietal cortexes. It is the region of the brain which integrates motor coordination and visual imagery.
By throwing spears for more than 500,000 years in sub-Saharan Africa, it led their prey, which became increasingly watchful, to develop better flight-or-fight survival skills. Cross observed that while some anthropologists have suggested that throwing the spear from a safe distance made hunting big animals – such as the Cape buffalo and the hippopotamus – safer, there is no explanation why it was considered safer.
He observed that the other non-threatening species that forage near the large animals do not trigger an alert of aggressive behavior, unlike humans. Cross cited a 2015 study when he and a former graduate student tried to come near zebras that live near human settlements. But as soon as they saw people approaching, the zebras fled like wild horses and stayed outside the effective range of poisoned arrows used by the African hunters 24,000 years ago.
The Neanderthals killed horses, reindeer, bison, and other large game animals using thrusting spears at close range. Yet, these animals did not develop an innate wariness of humans, Cross said.
Drawing classes
Because Cross taught drawing classes early in his teaching career and focused on art and human evolution in his previous research, he observed that while the Neanderthals could mentally visualize from memory the animals they had previously seen, they could not translate the mental images effectively into the coordinated hand-movement patterns needed for drawing.
To draw visual images, it requires the regulation of arm movements in a way similar to how the hunters visualized the arc that their spears must make to hit their animal targets.
Cross said that the drawings could have acted as teaching tools. But since the act of drawing enhances observational skills, he believed the drawings were useful for conceptualizing hunts, evaluating the attentiveness of their prey, selecting as targets the vulnerable body parts, and fostering group cohesiveness through spiritual ceremonies.
He added that the advent of drawing may have set the stage for cultural changes.
Neanderthal art
Among the art attributed to Neanderthals are engraved lines found in a cave in Gibraltar. The art is believed to be 40,000 years old, The Guardian reported. It is then older than the oldest-known cave paintings by modern humans that could be seen in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in southern France.
Experts initially dismissed as fake or modern graffiti ice-age art by Homo sapiens which were first discovered in the Altamira cave in northern Spain in 1878. But after a few decades, the paintings and carvings made by hunter-gatherers in ice-age Europe were eventually recognized as true art.
BBC reported that the pattern bears a passing resemblance to the grid for a game of tic-tac-toe. It was inscribed on a rock at the back of Gorham's Cave. But these scattered candidates for artistic expression by the Neanderthals are not universally accepted because of the perception that they were brutes, while art – which is a high expression of abstract thought – is considered the exclusive preserve of Homo sapiens.
The geometric pattern identified in Gibraltar was found beneath undisturbed sediments that also yielded Neanderthal tools. Commenting on the discovery, Professor Clive Finlayson, the director of the Gibraltar Museum, said it brought the Neanderthals close to us again.
The discovery was published in the PNAS journal. The researchers, to understand how the markings were made, created experimental grooves by using different tools and cutting actions on blocks of dolomite rocks similar to the one at Gorham cave.
It was the one that used a pointed tool or cutting edge that was carefully and repeatedly inserted into an existing groove and passed along in the same direction that best matched the method of engraving used in the Gorham cave markings. It would rule out an accidental origin of the design such as the Neanderthal cutting fur or meat on top of the rock.
[researchpaper 리서치페이퍼=Vittorio Hernandez 기자]