thats pretty cool, its amazing how they could do that with the tools they had back then:!:

Pot — This is excellent! Immediately, a major and little known story of humanity’s final development within a wholly wild nature comes to mind. Let me check back in with Val Geist on the details, and I’ll lay it on ‘ya as concisely as possible. Any guesses as to the significance, if any, of the un-realistic parallel hash marks on the caribou’s side? 8) dave

That is awesome. And the craving is exquisite!8)

That is really awesome! Just to think that it was made that many years ago ….. Wow!

Just think 13,000 years from now when they find the wheel bow that I don’t use anymore that hanging on my basement.
“What was that thing” 😆

Art transcends time. Puts things in perspective. Reminds me of a pair of pierced ear rings that I am always drawn to at the Nasher that are more than 5,000 years old. It isn’t the beautiful golden honey bee motiff that gets me as much as the hangers that look just like the hangers on those that my wife wears in her pierced ears. The more things change, the more some things just stay the same.

Imagine how important to daily life those animals were to the carver (artist, to the layperson):D

These days, the artist might carve two Big Macs on a pic nic table.

With all the things we KNOW of what we call “history”…imagine what we do NOT know.

Just signed in here…like it.

OK I just heard back from Valerius Geist. If you’re not familiar with the name, Val is widely considered the world’s leading expert on all deer species, and especially ethology, or animal sociology. He specializes is the evolution of Pleistocene megafauna, which includes both caribout and humans. My question about the hasmarks on the side of the female in the carving was based on having read a long essay of Val’s on how early humans, during a long period when we were very much dependent on caribou and salmon migrations, developed crude calendars, or “batons,” which hashmarks that tracked the lunar calendar and reminded them when they need to be at the caribou river crossings for the big annual meat massacre, and same with the salmon runs. So I presumed the hash marks on the carved cow’s side, perhaps served the same purpose. I was wrong, as Val’s response indicates. For clarify, he believes the hash marks are in fact the dots that are common on cows but not bulls of the species — just another artistic touch of detail, but since it’s exceedingly difficult to carve dots into ivory — it would require painstaking work with a burin, or stone drill — the artist substituted hashmarks. Anyhow, here’s what Val has to tell us:

“As to the reindeer: it’s a matter of the artist knowing the animals exceedingly well! What he marked into the first animal is a series of dots such as are visible in a good many reindeer, and in Canada especially in Parry’s caribou of the high Arctic. These dots are more pronounced in females, than males, so that he carved a bull following a cow reindeer. Although Upper Paleolithic culture depended heavily on reindeer, as over 90% of all bones in archeological digs are from reindeer, they virtually excluded this animal from cave art. It crops up mainly as portable art especially late in the period, and by then the people were more dependent on reindeer than ever, as they had all but exterminated the large grazers – horses, bison, mammoth. My interpretation of that sculpture would be sexual, a male interested in a female, a common enough theme in the Upper Paleolithic non-cave art.

“There is some mystery associated with painted dots in cave art. It has been suggested that it has something to do with the counting of days, often within a lunar calendar context. This carving is not the only one honoring the side dots in caribou, which modern artists tend to overlook. It may be as innocent as enjoying a caribou fur with strong dots incorporated for art’s sake into a piece of clothing. The carving was probably a good luck omen, as reindeer migrations can be a touch unpredictable.”

Thanks, Val!

Mark — I read a novel on that premise a few years ago: cro magnon (us) were starting to herd caribou and the Neandertal hero didn’t like that and returned the captives to freedom. In reality, I’m certain Val will say no herding anywhere near that long ago. Along with inventing a crude lunar calendar that reminded the wanderers at which moon they needed to be at the salmon spawning stream or the tranditional caribou migration stream crossing place, this period also made great gains in long-term meat preservation. So it was, I recall Val having written somewhere, that they were able to kill large numbers of salmon and caribou and smoke and jerk and otherwise preserve the meat for many months. The reason, Val says, that caribou rarely show up in cave art of the time is that they were basically boring to the hunters — plentiful, easy to kill and their daily bread. Rather, the cave paintings represented ancient “trophy hunting” boasts. Even the horses which are so plentiful in these paintings, says Val, were fairly dangerous game and provided a hunter with a degree of bragging rights. I don’t agree with everything Val says, as he’s a prolific interpreter of history. But I buy int 90+ percent of it because he’s so damn amazingly good. In any event it’s all a kick and really enriches my understanding and love for both hunting and how we came to be as a species and how that still influences us today whether we know it or not. Dave

Maybe when certain animals become scarce they have an artist draw or sculp them to hopefully bring them back in numbers again. 💡