Sometime in around 25,000 years ago the people living in the area of Lascaux, France painted some of the earliest art known. Through an accident of geology the pigments painted on the walls of this cave were preserved for us to see and wonder at.
The early artists painted Mammoth, bison and horses. The horses are particularly interesting, because they were painted with spots, and there are no spotted horses now. The argument has been that they were more than just a representation of what our ancestors saw, that they had some kind of spiritual or celestial significance.
Well it seems that science has come to the rescue of Occam’s Razor and shown that while these early paintings might have been a lot of things, they were true representations of what the artists saw in their environment, including spotted horses.
A team at the University of York has looked at archaic horse DNA and found the gene coding for, you guessed it, horses with spots! This is a pretty big discovery and it came about through the highest of high tech archeology.
The team has been looking for when horses were first domesticated. Domesticated horses would have a lot more variation in their coats, so by finding when the genotypes for certain colors of coat developed they can pin point the time when we took a major step in partnering with animals.
This research in horses is aided by the fact that horses make a lot of, well horse crap, and that volume has led to a good amount of fossilized horse dung for the team to extract DNA from to study. From the New York Times article:
Previous research on DNA from the bones and teeth of horses that lived 7,000 to 20,000 years ago showed that those animals were either black or bay (a brown coat with a black mane and tail). That work was published in the journal Science in 2009. Since then, geneticists have deciphered the underlying code for the spotted pattern, known as leopard, in modern horses. So the scientists went back to their samples, looking for the leopard sequence in horses that lived in Europe 11,000 to 15,000 years ago.
“There is a striking correspondence between the coat-color patterns of horses painted in Paleolithic caves of France with what geneticists found in the genotypes” — the specific genetic sequences — “of color genes,” said Hopi E. Hoekstra, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard who studies pigmentation. Dr. Hoekstra was not involved in the study but called it “very convincing.”
This is one of the things that I just love about science, no matter what the discipline it is all trying to define and codify the physical universe and so a study of horse DNA can answer a question in anthropology. Talk about closing the circle!
What does it all mean? Well for one thing it means that we can put some of the theories about our early Europeans to bed. While they did have the idea for art, they didn’t seem (at least in the caves we’ve found so far) to be putting anything extra in the pictures they painted. They were depicting their world as it was, without an obvious mysticism as had been suggested by many an anthropologist.
Which is not to say that there was not some spiritual purpose to the paintings. There very well could have been something religious for these people, or it could be that young men painted them to impress young women, or visa versa or it could have been to train the young or it could have just been that they wanted something to look at other than the walls of the cave that protected them from the elements. We just don’t have enough evidence to say.
What we can say is that humans thought it was important enough to invest time and effort in at a time when survival was not assured. The life of these humans was incredibly tough by out standards. They did not refine metal, they did not farm, they had some knowledge about their world, but they did not know many of the things we take for granted. Yet they felt the need to express themselves, to make something permanent in a world where the process of decay was not understood.
Working with crude tools, and pigments they managed to make very good representations of what they saw. They put outlines of their hands on the walls as well, as if to say “I was here, this is my world” even if they had no conception that more than a score of centuries later their descendents would see that message from the distant past.
There are those (Right Wing Christianists mostly) who claim that since there can be no objective observers of distant history we can’t know the truth about anything that happened in the past, so any idea they come up with should be treated with equal validity to the current established thinking.
This bridge between disciplines shows just how wrong they are. The science of archaic DNA recovery and analysis has managed to answer a question that had been asked for 70 years, and it did it without intention. This is science at it’s very best, providing answers though knowledge rather than assertion.
So here is to you Cave Painters, you will never have known that we would see your work, but the journey of understanding that your efforts represents continues, even as we study your efforts at knowing your world.
The floor is yours.