Oldest artist's workshop in the world discovered

Andy Coghlan
13 October 2011
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21046-oldest-artists-workshop-in-the-world-discovered.html

Grind up some ochre, melt some bone-marrow fat, mix the lot with a splash of urine – and paint your body with it. It sounds like an avant-garde performance but it may have happened some 100,000 years ago, in the oldest known artist's workshop – a cave in South Africa. The complex pigments that humans mixed there, and the tools they used to do it, are revealing just how cunning some of our earliest ancestors were.

The purpose of the paint is unknown, but the researchers who discovered the workshop at the Blombos cave on South Africa's southern coast think it was most likely applied to skin for decoration or ritual, or perhaps even as an insect repellent.

Inside the cave, Christopher Henshilwood of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and his team found tools and two abalone shells that were used for mixing and storing the paint. Alongside one of them were quartzite stones used to hammer and grind ochre to a powder, and animal bones used to stir the powder with other materials, which included bone, charcoal, quartz fragments and other stones.

They also discovered evidence that some of the bones had been heated, probably to melt fat from the marrow that would have then bound the minerals. "There were also quartzite fragments to cement it, mixed with a liquid, probably urine," says Henshilwood.

The whole lot survived together in one place because after the cave was abandoned it filled with wind-blown sand, sealing the cache as a "time capsule", says Henshilwood.

Early planners

Whatever our ancestors did with their paint, the simple fact that they were mixing minerals to prepare it 100,000 years ago is in itself a major discovery, and tells us something about our ancestors' cognitive abilities at the time.

For instance, Henshilwood points out that this is the first known use of containers from that time. What's more, the artists would have had to collect ochre and other materials with the specific purpose of making paint in mind – a sign that they were planners – and needed a "basic knowledge of chemistry".

The nearest known source of ochre, he says, is at least 20 kilometres away from the cave, so the find demonstrates that Homo sapiens was capable of this high degree of organisation and planning only 50,000 to 100,000 years after the species emerged.

"It's quite simply stunning, first-rate work, and unambiguously dated," says Paul Pettitt, an anthropologist at the University of Sheffield, UK.

"What takes this into the stratosphere is the degree of organisation, of intent and of industry," he says. "It's highly thought out, and repeated, so this is a systematic production of paint."

Art or body art?

Could the paint have been used for murals rather than as body paint? Possibly, but no ancient painting has been discovered nearby. A few years ago, also in Blombos cave, the same team did find 13 engraved tablets of ochre, each about 2 centimetres square, bearing leaf-like or hatched designs. They are the same age as the abalone shells, and may have been some of the earliest lipstick.

Pettitt says that the earliest unambiguous art was made around 35,000 years ago, in the Chauvet caves of south-east France, and the earliest evidence of ochre pigment production dates from 60,000 years ago. The new Blombos find, however, shows that early humans were capable both of organised activity and of creatively making and using pigments much earlier than we knew before.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1211535

New Libya More Arab, Less African?

Joe DeCapua
August 25, 2011
http://www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/decapua-libya-au-arab-laegue-25aug11-128388573.html

Libyan rebels patrol to try to find any of Moammar Gadhafi's relatives in Tripoli, Libya, August 24, 2011.The Arab League Thursday recognized Libya’s rebel Transitional National Council (TNC) as the country’s legitimate government. It said it’s time Libya once again had a permanent seat on the league’s council.

Libya’s representative to the Arab League said the country would take part in a ministers meeting on Saturday.

Too much, too soon?

“I think that it’s premature. The government of Libya under Gadhafi is not completely overthrown as yet. Gadhafi is still at large. And the United Nations has not officially recognized a new government for Libya. And I think it’s premature for individual states or even groupings like the Arab League to take that step,” said Na’eem Jeenah, executive director of the Afro Middle East Center in Johannesburg.

He said the question remains as to exactly whom the Transitional National Council represents.

“It’s a council that was formed in the east in Benghazi. When it was formed and up to recently, and I would say up to now, it still represents groupings of people in the east. Even the so-called rebels in the west, like the people who rose up in Tripoli, etc., are not necessarily accountable to or within the constituency of the Transitional National Council,” said Jeenah.

So long and goodbye

The Arab League’s recognition of the TNC may simply be a signal that it’s glad to see Mr. Gadhafi go.

“I think that’s a big part of it,” he said, “Remember that they were very quick to come out against Gadhafi when the uprising began. There’s no real love lost between Gadhafi and almost all the heads of state in the Arab League.”

Jeenah said Mr. Gadhafi had two main problems with the league.

“One was his kind of policy of, as far as they were concerned anyway, turning his back on the Arab world and turning towards the rest of Africa. He was kind of regarded either as something of a traitor or as a maverick, who just looked to where his bread was buttered politically,” he said.

The other problem was the Libyan leader’s personal style.

“It’s very difficult to expect the Emir of Qatar, for example, to like you very much when in a public forum you loudly call him a fat man and things like that. Or call the King of Saudi Arabia stupid. It was that kind of interpersonal relations that he really messed up,” he said.

African Union

Mr. Gadhafi once proposed that countries on the continent form a United States of Africa. Now that his days appear to be numbered, Libya’s relationship with the AU may never be the same.

“I think that the relationship will change quite significantly. I think that the importance that Gadhafi had given to the African Union and to the African continent will be reduced. And in general there will be much more of an emphasis on being part of the Arab League and the Arab world and developing stronger relations with other Arab states and with Europe,” he said.

The AU’s response to the Libyan situation may have sealed its fate.

“With the Arab League having come out so strongly against Gadhafi in favor the rebels,” he said, “there’s been a kind of stronger relationship and camaraderie that’s developed with other Arab states. The African Union, on the other hand, as far as the rebels are concerned, were not very helpful and didn’t come out in clear support of the rebel groups as many Arab states did,” he said.

Under Gadhafi, Libya was a major financial backer of the AU. Jeenah expects that to change.

“I think it’s going to be a problem, at least financially. Libya itself had been contributing about 15 percent of the AU’s budget. And it has also been paying the dues of a number of other countries that had defaulted. Well, it won’t stop completely because I think that Libya will remain a member of the AU and will continue paying its dues. But those dues will be much smaller than 15 percent of the budget,” he said.

Jeenah thinks it will be difficult for the AU to make up for the expected shortfall.

Neanderthals Mated With Humans Outside of Africa

Katie Scott July 18, 2011
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/07/neanderthal-human-mating/

It has been a long held belief that our human ancestors came into contact with Neanderthals, and recent findings not only confirm this, but also suggest exactly how “close” this contact was.

Damian Labuda of the University of Montreal’s Department of Pediatrics and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center and team have found part of the human X chromosome comes from the Neanderthals and is found only in people outside of Africa.

In a paper published in the July issue of the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, the geneticists write: “We provide evidence of a notable presence (nine percent overall) of a Neanderthal-derived X chromosome segment among all contemporary human populations outside Africa”. The team analyzed 6,092 X-chromosomes “from all inhabited continents”. Their discovery confirms earlier hypotheses that early modern man and Neanderthals mixed and mated.

The ancestors of the Neanderthals are believed to have left Africa between 400,000 to 800,000 years ago. However, by 30,000 years BC, they had disappeared. The ancestors of modern man left Africa between 80,000 and 50,000 years BC, suggesting that there was a definite crossover between the two.

Discovery News adds: “The team believes most, if not all, of the interbreeding took place in the Middle East, while modern humans were migrating out of Africa and spreading to other regions.”

This finding comes nearly ten years after Labuda and team identified a piece of DNA in the human X chromosome (called haplotype) that seemed different. A release detailing the findings explains: “When the genome of Neanderthals was sequenced in 2010, they quickly compared to 6,000 chromosomes from across the world with the haplotype of the Neanderthal. The sequence of the Neanderthal man was found in people of all continents, including Australia, but with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa.”

David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and one of the researchers involved in the project of deciphering the genome of Neanderthals says: “Labuda and his colleagues were the first to identify in non-African genetic variation may come from an archaic population. At the time, they have identified without access to the genome sequence of the Neanderthal. Today, in light of the Neanderthal genome sequence, it is clear that they were absolutely right.”