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Stone Age artists are getting older

Recent discoveries in Italy and Germany have pushed back the age of Stone Age art in Europe by several millennia. Cave painting from near Verona and carved animal figures from the Danube valley suggest that our ancestors were creating art across a broad area well before 30,000 years ago ... Times Online

Most cave art the work of teens, not shamans - A landmark study of Paleolithic art

Long accustomed to lifting mammoth bones from mudbanks and museum shelves and making sketches from cave art to gather details about Pleistocene animal anatomy, renowned paleobiologist and artist R. Dale Guthrie offers a fascinating and controversial interpretation of ancient cave art in his new book “The Nature of Paleolithic Art.”

This ancient art was made during the late Pleistocene, about 10,000 to 35,000 years ago, and has typically been the purview of art historians and anthropologists, many of whom view Paleolithic art as done by accomplished shaman-artists. “This assumption may be true of a few of the best known and better-drawn images, but these are a small proportion of preserved Paleolithic art,” Guthrie said.

Using new forensic techniques on fossil handprints of the artists and examining thousands of images, “I found that all ages and both sexes were making art, not just the senior male shamans,” Guthrie said ... Institute of Arctic Biology

Early human ancestors walked on the wild side

Arizona State University anthropologist and Institute of Human Origins researcher Gary Schwartz, along with fellow anthropologist Dan Gebo from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, have studied fossil anklebones of some early ancestors of modern humans and discovered that they walked on the wild side ... EurekAlert