Birds and Humans Are Depicted Together in This Rare Scene From 12,000 Years Ago
Birds and Humans Are Depicted Together in This Rare Scene From 12,000 Years Ago
Researchers believe the discovery, detailed in a new study, represent an “exceptional milestone in European Paleolithic rock art”
By Jason Daley
smithsonian.com
March 15, 2019 3:00PM
A 12,000-year-old piece of limestone found in Spain includes something extremely rare: depictions of both human and bird figures. Only a handful of examples of Paleolithic European scenes depicting birds and humans interacting have been discovered to date.
As George Dvorsky at Gizmodo reports, the nearly 12-inch rock art was located in the Hort de la Bequera archaeological site in 2011, in an area of Catalonia due east of Barcelona near the village of Margalef.
The limestone has four main figures inscribed on it, two that appear to be humans and two that appear to be birds, including one long-necked animal, likely a crane, and one that appears to be a chick. It’s believed that the figures were incised into the stone by an ancient artist using a piece of flint. University of Barcelona researchers have detailed the portable art scene in a new study that appears in the journal L’Anthropologie.
The rock art is all the more remarkable because it was composed to tell a narrative story. “This is one of the few found scenes so far which suggest the birth of a narrative art in Europe,” Inés Domingo of the University of Barcelona, the study’s first author, says in a press release. The scene could depict two narratives: humans hunting the birds and the motherhood relationship of the adult bird and chick. That being said, it's difficult to say the creator's intent in carving the scene. “We do not know the meaning of the scene for prehistoric peoples, but what it says is that not only they were regarded as [prey] but also as a symbol for European Paleolithic societies," Domingo says.
More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/birds-and-people-mingle-rare-piece-rock-art-180971690/