Read and discuss the following text.
Prehistoric dots and crimson hand stencils on Spanish cave walls are now the world's oldest known cave art. According to new dating results Neanderthals were Earth's first cave painters. If that's the case, the discovery narrows the cultural distance between us and Neanderthals – and fuels the argument, that the heavy-browed humans were not a separate species but only another race. Of the subterranean sites that have been studied along Cantabrian Sea coast in Spain, the cave called El Castillo have the paintings of 40,800 years old. If the new dates are correct, they also could make the El Castillo art the oldest known well-dated cave paintings in the world. It has been previously held that France’s Chauvet cave paintings to be at least 37,000 years old. The new dates raise the possibility that some of the paintings could have been made by Neanderthals, who are thought to have lived in Europe until about 30,000 or 40,000 years ago. Modern humans are believed to have also been in the area at the time, arriving about 41,500 years ago. However many scientists had long doubted whether Neanderthals were capable of producing symbolic art. But that has begun to change in recent years, thanks in part to the discovery of pigments, tiny art objects, and what might be body paint at Neanderthal sites. Yet more evidence is needed to establish that some of the Spanish cave paintings were products of Neanderthal minds.
Ker Than. World's Oldest Cave Art Found—Made by Neanderthals?
Express your ideas concerning the first cave painting artists in writing.
SUPPLEMENTARY READING
Read, translate and discuss the following text.
Over the past few decades, in Tennessee, archaeologists have unearthed an elaborate cave-art tradition thousands of years old. The pictures are found in dark zone sites – places where the Native American people who made the artwork did so at personal risk, crawling meters or, in some cases, miles underground with cane torches. The first of these sites was discovered in 1979. The walls of it were covered in a thin layer of clay sediment left there during long ago floods and maintained by the cave's unchanging temperature and humidity. The stuff was still soft. It looked at first as though someone had finger-painted all over. The images that emerged from the fields around there were bird men, a dancing warrior figure, a snake with horns. Here were naturalistic animals, too: an owl and turtle. Some of the pictures seemed to have been first made and then ritually mutilated in some way, stabbed or beaten with a stick. That was the discovery of Mud Glyph Cave. The cave's closest parallel may be caves in the south of France which contain Ice Age art. The glyphs (by carbondating charcoal) were roughly eight hundred years old and belonged to the Mississippian people, ancestors too many of today's Southeastern and Midwestern tribes. The imagery was classic Southeastern Ceremonial Complex meaning it belonged to the vast but still dimly understood religious outbreak that swept the Eastern part of North America around 1200 CE.
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Twenty-five years later there have been more than seventy known darkzone cave sites east of the Mississippi, with new ones turning up every year. A handful of the sites contain only some markings or crosshatching, but others are quite elaborate, much more so than Mud Glyph. Several are older, too. One of them, the oldest so far, was created around 4000 BCE. The sites range from Missouri to Virginia, and from Wisconsin to Florida, but the bulk lie in Middle Tennessee. Of those, the greater number are on the Cumberland Plateau, which runs at a southwest slant down the eastern part of the state, like a great wall dividing the Appalachians from the interior.
The Plateau is positively worm-eaten with caves. Pit caves, dome caves, big wide tourist caves, and caves that are just little cracks running back into the stone for a hundred feet – not even a decade ago, explorers announced the discovery of Rumbling Falls Cave, a fifteen-mile system that includes a two-hundred-foot vertical drop and leads to a chamber they call the Rumble Room. All of that is inside the Plateau and in the limestone that skirts its edges.
Sullivan J.J.America's Ancient Cave Art
Unit 2
CAVE PAINTING
PRE-READING TASKS
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