Petroglyphs of mammoths found in Utah

[mootsman]

Stone Pages Archaeo News: Prehistoric petroglyphs of mammoths found in Utah

[uniface]

Neat stuff !

[Indianasmith]

Very cool. Oldest petroglyphs known from the New World, I'm guessing.

[FIRSTVIEW]

Thank you

[BenjaminEble]

http://www.stonepages.com/docs/malotki-wallace.pdf

The photos of the petroglyphs can be found in the above link. In looking at the glyphs, it looks to me like the glyphs were first traced on the panel. Then, they were pecked. Afterwards, they may have been ground. For this reason, some portions show signs of heavy pecking, while other sections appear to be ground fairly well. Possibly, the glyphs were not finished in their entirety.

Also, later depictions, from the archaic era, onwards, tend to reveal more geometric styles. But, these glyphs appear to be more lifelike, as can be seen in the Vero Beach find.

Ben

[uniface]

Great link, Benjamin !

Thanks !!

[Mojave]

My two cents:
Some of the pictures are interesting, some are misinterpreted IMO. Some may actually be what they are claiming. That would be awesome if they found Mammoth petroglyphs that were more obvious. But why in the world do they (Malotki & Wallace) begin the article (the very first sentence) with “Whether one subscribes to the orthodox ‘Clovisfirst’ Paradigm…”?
I thought I was going to read about rock art in the Pleistocene. They started right of sucking readers in with the same old drama and controversy. That stuff is really getting old.
But then I gave up reading when I tried to digest the following:

“Nevertheless, until now, the earliest datable imagery in the western United States conformed to the pan-globally observable pattern that all earliest surviving palaeoart, both as rock art and mobiliary art, is nonrepresentational.”

Did they really mean to say that? Or am I mis-reading it?
Here are some “non-representational” paleo-doodles from Lascaux:

[rokdok]

Mojave, the key term in that statement was "earliest". Practically universally, including the America's, the earliest forms of art are cupules and incised lines. These go back to lower paleolithic times in the old world, and are thought to be associated with Homo erectus.Cupules were found in a neanderthal burial in Western Europe, and are 50-70,000 years old if i remember correctly.The oldest cave paintings in western europe are thought to date to 30-32,000 years old, not even in the running.

[Mojave]

Originally Posted by rokdok

Mojave, the key term in that statement was "earliest". Practically universally, including the America's, the earliest forms of art are cupules and incised lines. These go back to lower paleolithic times in the old world, and are thought to be associated with Homo erectus.Cupules were found in a neanderthal burial in Western Europe, and are 50-70,000 years old if i remember correctly.The oldest cave paintings in western europe are thought to date to 30-32,000 years old, not even in the running.

Rok,
Well I kinda thought about that but the article repeatedly states they think the NA art is between 11,000 and 13,000 years old.
Given that context, why would it make sense to discuss the the relevance of artistic form to that of Neanderthal 50,000-70,000 years ago and Homo Erectus even before that instead of something much closer in time like 15,000 years BP?
If you take that interpretation, they are completely ignoring tens of thousands of years of human artistic development BETWEEN the two periods to make a connection.
That interpretation would imply some artistic relation with Homo Erectus??
Either that is what they meant, or it isn't. Either way it is poorly written.
So the earliest PaleoINDIAN art (11-13k) is equivalent to >50k art from Europe and elsewhere?
Why would 30,000-50,000 year old art "not even be in the running" but 11k-13k year old art IS?
Don't mean to argue, just seems like filler nonsense that detracts from the actual subject and removes a bit of the objective logic. Just seems flawed to me...

[uniface]

Neandertals and Art

Scroll down about halfway to the skull with the eyes they added.