Two engraved bones were unearthed at the Lingjing site in Central Eastern China. The remarkable thing about these bones is that they were dated to 105,000 - 125,000 years and the incissions were done deliberately, not as the result of removing meat from a carcass, but with a symbolic intent. The bones were also coated with ochre.
The paper (Engraved bones from the archaic hominin site of Lingjing, Henan Province, Zhanyang Li, Luc Doyon, Hao Li, Qiang Wang ... DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2019.81Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 July 2019) finds these bones as the earliest evidence of human populations using ochre for symbolic or abstract purposes.
The age of these bones means that they were done by "archaic" hominins that lived prior to and during the evolution of Homo sapiens in Africa (according to the prevalent "out of Africa" theory).
Ochre is a clay with an iron content that once it has oxidized (rusted) gives the clay a tone which can range from yellow to red to brown. It has been used around the world for religious purposes and sacred art (even by Neanderthals, 73 kya - see paper).
Its bright red color may have symbolized blood and therefore life, afterlife, fertility. It is also very visible in the dimly lit caves and was used as raw material for many of the cave rock paintings from the origin of humankind onwards, all across the globe.
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Indeed, these engravings in bone from East Asia, coupled with the use of ochre, suggest a strong reminiscence of certain cultural remains found in South Africa …particularly in Blombos Cave, a site with a wide chronological range of human presence, in which different manifestations of what researchers called “the first signs of symbolic art up to now” took place in Middle Stone Age (MSA) times…among them, engraved bones coated with ochre since 73 Ka, and a some sort of ”tool kit” (a shell filled with ochre with some tools associated) for working with this pigment, dated at 100 Ka….being all these finding attributed to H. sapiens.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that similar manifestations were found in East Asia somewhat before, is suggestive (at least to me), though is not enough to extract final conclusions.
But… even if it is absolutely imperative to gather more evidence, these “not so weak and/or diffuse” signs encourages me to, at least, speculate about some subjects related;
- Who where these “archaics”???...¿Were they descendent from our supposed unique ancestors from Africa?...or ¿Were they authentic byproducts of a regional and independent evolution towards an “certain species”… whose anthropological and behavioural parameters could perhaps be considered to be indistinguishable from what we know as H. sapiens ones??
These findings, at 125-105 ka, could perhaps contribute to fill a “chronological gap”, that East Asia has always had in the anthropological record, which had prevented the development of a more seriously backed up hypothesis of a local and direct evolution from H erectus to H. sapiens (based on transitional species, such as Jinniushan man and Dali man, dated between 300 to 200 ka)
Anyway (and whatever the species involved ,and/or its origin, was)…what I can conclude is that the manifestations of abstract thinking capabilities during MSA, appear to be, definitely, not privative from our supposedly unique ancestors from Africa.
More evidence will clarify our thoughts (as you usually say)…but in the meanwhile, we can make our own speculations.