Alistair Pike discusses the work he has done with Dirk Hoffmann in dating the cave paintings of Northern Spain in this short video that I shot for National Geographic. The open question that Pike is trying to answer in his research is are all the cave paintings of Europe Human or are some of them Neanderthal? Its an interesting question. Neanderthals certainly could have produced some art, but there is not overwhelming evidence that they did. Refined dating techniques have pushed the age of the first paintings in Europe back. The oldest paintings are now known to be older than 40,000 years. But by the same token refinements in tracing migration by looking at the human genome indicate that homo sapiens sapiens first entered Europe 55,000 years ago. So the current oldest painting in El Castillo in Spain is well within the date range that modern humans occupied Europe. Proving that...
A horned anthropomorphic petroglyph with rainbows enhanced with D-Stretch. Barrier Canyon Style Pictographs, Emery County Utah Within this faded group of Barrier Canyon Style pictograph is the Double Rainbow man. The figure is somewhat faded so I have run D-Stretch to bring it then recombined it with the original image to make the figure above. (more…)