LOS ANGELES – Cave painters during the Ice Age were more like da Vinci than Dali, sketching realistic depictions of horses they saw rather than dreaming them up, a study of ancient DNA finds.
via www.usatoday.com
Prehistoric cave paintings at sites such as Lascaux, France illustrate early man's ability to draw his surroundings from memory. There is an astoudingly rich account of horses, bison, buffalo and other animals recorded deep within the caves. The article published today in USA Today decribes a team of researchers who used genetic DNA samples to investigate if drawings of spotted horses "were real or fantasy". Past DNA studies had only produced evidence of brown and black horses.
USA Today reports: "To get at the genetics of equine coat color, an international team led by the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany analyzed DNA from fossilized bones and teeth from 31 prehistoric horses. The samples were recovered from more than a dozen archaeological sites in Siberia, Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the Iberian peninsula.
It turned out six of the horses had a genetic mutation that gives rise to a spotted coat, suggesting that ancient artists were drawing what they were seeing. Brown was the most common coat color, found in 18 horses."
So genetic evidence suggests that prehistoric man may have seen spotted horses and drew them from memory...that early human kind were "realist artists" who worked in the recesses of earth in their own "indoor artist studios".
Reproduction of a cave painting from Lascaux available at Museumize.com
Comments