My research into prehistoric subjects ranges from the development of new perspectives on human evolution to the discovery and interpretation of prehistoric art – and covers decades in the field in Africa and Europe. Some recent peer-reviewed publications include:

- “Palaeolithic Whistles or Figurines? A preliminary survey of pre-historic phalangeal figurines” (Rock Art Research, 2009, Vol. 26, No. 1: 65-82). Prehistoric phalanges with anthropogenic holes through one side of their shafts have usually been interpreted as whistles. But identical bones are used by several peoples as human effigies — most commonly of women and babies. Distal limb bones with incised or sculpted heads, eyes, arms and vulvas prove that such bones were also interpreted anthropomorphically by Eurasian cultures in the past. The use of phalangeal figurines from central Siberia to Greenland also suggests that the practice spread around the Arctic from ancient sources.

The paper uses ethnographic examples to illustrate a few roles women have played in the region’s cold weather economies and how female effigies reflect such roles, but none of the examples are offered as strict analogies with Paleolithic counterparts. Instead this article goes on to make a case from new internal readings of several prehistoric objects incorporating feminine imagery — including the “femme au renne” (reindeer’s woman) from Laugerie-Basse and an engraving from Étiolles — that some ancient feminine images reflect a vision of women in keeping with the division of labor in northern “hunter-sewer” subsistence models. Economic necessities may partly explain how pregnancy and compact feminine effigies have been viewed ideologically in cold Eurasian areas for millennia.

Finally, the possible existence of perforated phalanges from the Middle Paleolithic and even earlier is noted and a protocol of tests is suggested for determining whether their holes are anthropogenic or natural. If any of the holes in these older specimens turn out to be manmade, then the conclusion that prehistoric perforated phalanges are likely to be figurines will have to be extended to those made by archaic humans like Neanderthals.

 

- “The Identification of the First Palaeolithic Animal Sculpture in the Ile-de-France: The Ségognole 3 Bison and its Ramifications.” This paper uses the discovery of the first Paleolithic bas-relief of an animal in the Ile-de-France to open an investigation into the previously un-noticed complexity of several famous examples of Paleolithic art, including ones from such sites as Font-de-Gaume, Laugerie-Basse and Isturitz. It unveils:

• the first known use of decomposed, interactive, "cubist" conventions, over 15,000 years ago (pp. 32-37),

1. • the intentional hiding of secondary readings within more blatant images (pp. 38-42), and even
   

2. • the oldest known figure-ground illusions, which play upon similarities between the contours of bison and mammoths (pp. 26-27)
   

3. -all of which show how complex art has been for tens of thousands of years.
   

Andrew Howley of National Geographic reported on the paper’s revelation of the world’s oldest known intentional optical illusion - a sculpture from Canecaude that has eyes on either side of a crescent: an upper one which turns the crescent into a mammoth’s tusk, and a lower one that turns it into a bison’s horn.

The paper was accepted by Dr. Jean Clottes on behalf of the International Federation of Rock Art Organisations (IFRAO) for presentation at the organization’s World Congress, which took place in the Prehistory Park of the Ariège in September 2010, and is being published in the Acts of the congress. In the meantime, it can be downloaded by clicking on an icon below.

- “Are Neanderthal Portraits Wrong? Neanderthal adaptations to cold and their impact on Palaeolithic populations” (Rock Art Research, 2008, Vol. 25, No. 1: 101-116). This paper turned out to be the only peer-reviewed hypothesis to have predicted correctly that modern lineages from outside sub-Saharan Africa would have a small admixture of Neanderthal genes (up to 4%, as it turns out, from the latest analysis of the Neanderthal genome) from contact with gracile Levantine Neanderthals, but would have almost none from more robust cold-weather Neanderthals to the north. The discovery that non-African lineages have some Neanderthal genes is not nearly as surprising, given the existence of fossils that show some hybridization, as the fact that all those lineages have the same amount of Neanderthal genes! This proves that the genes entered modern genomes after the root population of anatomically modern humans (AMHs) had left Africa around 70,000 years ago but before it had split into separate Eurasiatic and Australian branches, during the brief period when AMHs were still limited to the relatively warm Middle East.

What’s even more surprising is that the descendants of branches that expanded northwards after the initial contact with Neanderthals did not continue to accumulate their genes, since some of those branches continued to have contact with our archaic cousins tens of thousands of years after AMH populations, which stayed around the Indian Ocean. That should have been plenty of time for Caucasians, for example, to acquire an extra dose of Neanderthal genes. But Europeans have no more Neanderthal in them than do Polynesians, Australian Aborigines, or American Indians. What could have prevented northern Moderns from adding to their Neanderthal inheritance once they began encountering cold-weather Neanderthals rather than warm-weather ones? 

The answer probably lies in the difference between the bones of Levantine Neanderthals, which are gracile, and their cold-weather cousins, which are much more robust. They are so different that the two Neanderthal populations should probably be divided into two races or even sub-species: a Middle-Eastern one adapted to warmth and the other to "hyper-arctic" conditions involving severe wind chill factors. 

If the osteological and other analyses detailed in this paper are correct, then the northern Neanderthal population must have had more extreme thermo-regulatory adaptations than the southern one, which would have been adapted to almost the same range of temperatures as the even more gracile AMHs coming out of Africa. Just as the similarity between the thermo-regulatory controls of southern Neanderthals and AMHs could explain why they could occasionally hybridize, the different biological approaches to temperature of AMHs and northern Neanderthals could explain why there is so little evidence that they ever cross-bred. 

Back in 2008, I hypothesized that the only way for AMHs and cold-weather Neanderthals to maintain such different thermo-regulatory adaptations would have been for each population to have its own conservative sexual preferences. AMH preferences would have maintained whole-body cooling systems based on sweat and bald bodies, which could only be insulated against glacial conditions with seamed clothing, while northern Neanderthal preferences ensured that each new generation was equipped with bodies that grew winter insulation in the form of sub-cutaneous fat and fur, which would have required the addition of nothing more than draped clothing. The fact that AMHs and northern Neanderthals were so invested in such contrasting thermo-regulatory solutions would have locked them into preferences that prevented much hybridization.

But the corresponding fact that neither AMHs nor the Levantine Neanderthals they encountered before 60,000 years ago were invested in biological adaptations to extreme cold - with their incompatible sets of sexual cues - would have opened the path to limited cross-breeding in the Middle East, just as the latest genetic results have demonstrated.

- My latest peer-reviewed paper, which is entitled the “Identification of a possible engraved Venus from Předmostí, Czech Republic” (Journal of Archaeological Science (JAS), 2011, n° 38, Issue 3 (March): 672-683), can be downloaded by clicking on the appropriate icon at the bottom of this page. It was co-authored by Dr. Martina Lázničková-Galetová of the Moravian Museum in the Czech Republic and Dr. Francesco d’Errico of the Université de Bordeaux and the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. Based on microscopic analyses, the paper concluded that an engraving of a woman composed of geometric forms that belonged to René de Poilloüe de Saint-Périer and Raymonde-Suzanne de Saint-Périer could be Gravettian and could be by the same hand as the famous Schematic Venus discovered in the 1890s. If so, the two engravings are apparently the only remaining works of one of the oldest and most original of Paleolithic artists – the Master or Mistress of the Schematic Venuses.

Left: Tracing of the main lines engraved on the bone analyzed in the Journal of Archaeological Science (JAS); grey = recent thin lines; black = smoothed lines depicting the schematic female representation.

Center: location of micrographs presented in Figs. 4 and 5 of the JAS study.

Right: a - area presenting scraping marks; b - area in which lines penetrate concavities produced by weathering of the bone surface; c - lines with sediment residues. Scale = 1 cm. (Figure 3 in the JAS article, Courtesy of my co-author, Dr. Francesco d’Errico). 

The most important of my essays still under peer review, “Human Hair Distribution, Increased Immuno-resistance and the First Baby Slings”, examines the effects of selective pressures associated with microenvironments within the first baby-carrying devices. It postulates that infectious and parasitic conditions in such sacks had a range of consequences, ranging from changes in juvenile hair distribution to immunological adaptations, and that a convergence of datable mutations and osteological changes indicates that infants in our lineage were forced to adapt biologically to the invention by 1.2 million years ago, and perhaps as early as the late Pliocene.

It further argues that the side effects of this artificial environment may have even destabilized the status quo within an early hominan (hominid) population, causing speciation – and a key step in the evolution of our lineage.

One of the advance readers, Robert Bednarik, the editor of Rock Art Research, had this to say about the manuscript: “I think that your paper is very well argued, but will be hard to ‘sell’, because of its sophistication” (email, 10 Dec. 2008). On the other hand, the most recent advance reader, Francesco d'Errico, wrote that “... I found the idea and integrated interdisciplinary way you deal with the question fascinating. It is certainly worth publishing” (email, 12 Jan. 2010). So, after undergoing peer review, the article may be published relatively soon.

Beyond the realm of publications, I founded Prehistoric Art Emergency in May 1995, which initiated, centralized and forwarded international petitions against the destruction of the richest ensemble of open-air Upper Paleolithic art in Europe by a dam project in the Côa Valley of Portugal. This effort contributed to the decision to make the entire zone at Foz Côa an archaeological park – after half of the $300,000,000 construction budget had already been spent on making coffer dams and turbine tunnels.

I also organized and led the archaeological survey of the Great Sand Sea and Gilf el Khebir by GREPAL, which continues to generate numerous publications by GREPAL archaeologists Luc Watrin and Emmanuelle Honoré that are changing our understanding of the ancient cultures of the Sahara and the origins of the Neolithic cultures of the Nile.

GREPAL archaeologists Emmanuelle Honoré and Luc Watrin making the tracing that figured in her article “The Shelter of Headless Bovines: A Study of Wg 35 (Gilf el Kebir, Egypt)”. The same shelter was discussed in another article, “The Headless Beasts of Wadi Sûra II Shelter in the Western Gilf el Kebir: New Data on Prehistoric Mythologies from the Egyptian Sahara”, which they co-wrote with Khaled Saad and presented at the Tenth International Congress of Egyptologists, which was held at the University of the Aegean, on Rhodes, from 22-29 May 2008. (Photo by D. Caldwell)

As a result of my paleoanthropological articles on Neanderthal soft tissue reconstructions, research on New England’s paleo-fauna, extensive re-interpretation of prehistoric feminine imagery, and other work, I was elected a Fellow of the Marine and Paleobiological Research Institute in 2009. The editor of Rock Art Research has also asked me to be one of the journal’s referees and I have been an organizer, participant or speaker at numerous conferences, including work on the editorial committee of The International Conference on the Heritage of the Naqada and Qus Region at the request of Dr. Hany Hanna of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. Most recently, I was asked to teach graduate students at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris and sit on the jury for their oral examinations (Feb. 25, 2011: Module d’Ecole Doctorale, Département “Homme, Nature, Société”, M.N.H.N. QP26).    

I’ve also had the opportunity to contribute to numerous exhibitions, including:

1. •“Maroc - Mémoire de la Terre” (Morocco - Memory of the Earth, 1999) at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris,
   

2. •“Ancient Art of the Cyclades” at the Katonah Museum of Art in 2006,
   

3. •“Lucy” at the Centre Européen de Recherches Préhistoriques  in Vallon-Pont d’Arc, France, and
   

4. •the creation of the Comparative Prehistory Hall of the National Museum of the Dominican Republic.
   

I hope there will continue to be many opportunities for collaboration around the world.

Finally, decades of prospecting for prehistoric art amid megaliths and boulder formations just south of Paris with Laurent Valois, editor of the GERSAR journal of rock art research, continue to inspire my design of museums dedicated to the exploration of deep time. In the most recent of these projects, for example, Mount Olive College adopted a design for a thoroughly modern building incorporating aspects of a tumulus, rock shelters and megalithic alignments – with a stream cascading from a glass channel, which bisects the roof and illuminates one of the terraced galleries below.

Duncan & Pat Getz-Gentle (Getz-Preziosi) examining

Neolithic feminine figurines

© 2009 Duncan Caldwell

The Foz Coa / Coa Valley prehistoric rock art scandal

Prehistoric Art Emergency &  Foz Coa / Coa Valley home page

Archaeological tours

A Murder, Bombing, and Trip to “Dolmens”

Key words: Human evolution; Neandertal extinction; The Neanderthal insulation hypothesis; Baby sling adaptations; The baby-sling hypothesis  for human body baldness, Paleolithic venus / venuses; The “prey-mother” hypothesis -  A new interpretation of Paleolithic feminine imagery; Archaeological & prehistoric art cave tours; Testimonials; Prehistoric phalangeal figurines; Neanderthal extinction; Alan Dershowitz; Dan Burstein, Secrets of the Code; Marine and Paleobiological Research Institute (MPRI); New Dominion Pictures; GREPAL; Gaumont; Wellspring Museum; Neanderthal / Neandertal adaptations and extinction; Architecture & landscape design; Neanderthal diet; Neanderthal behavior; Evolution of large brains; Balkan prehistory; Vinca, Lepenski Vir; Martha’s Vineyard Community Services Possible Dreams auction; Robert Bednarik; Rock Art Research; Susiluola (Wolf) Cave, Lappfjärd, Finland; paleontology museum in Paris / Montmartre quarries; Neolithic mortuary monuments; Dolmens; Prehistoric French sites; Cave art; Prehistoric art; World’s oldest optical illusion;