An archeologist who spotted what looked like faces carved into a rock in Italy has discovered the world’s oldest art?made not just by a different culture, but by a different species, 200,000 years ago.
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Archeologists have long insisted that people first came to the Americas by crossing the Bering land bridge from Siberia between 10,000 and 18,000 years ago. However, most indigenous people in both North and South America deny this. South Americans say they came from the sea and many Native Americans say they came from the South. Now it’s been discovered that they couldn’t have crossed the Bering Bridge, since it didn’t exist then.
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Prehistoric art in Australia that is invisible to the naked eye is being discovered by digital cameras and image-enhancing computers. Archeologists take pictures of blank walls and enhance them, and ancient images magically appear.
Archeologist Bruno David says, “Sometimes you can see a trace of something, but even when a painting has faded completely from view, the colors have gone into the rock. With image enhancement, we can separate out those colors from the gray of the rock and transpose them with ones that our own eyes and brains are more sensitive to. Suddenly we can see what was invisible before.”
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We almost went the way of the dinosaur. Humans came close to extinction 70,000 years ago, when genetic research shows that there were only about 2,000 of us alive. Just one major disease or environmental disaster (like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs), and we wouldn’t be here today. Unlike chimps, who are our closest relatives, all human DNA is almost identical. We split off the family tree 5 or 6 million years ago, which is plenty of time for lots of genetic differences to turn up. The fact that we’re all so alike means that in the recent past, there weren’t many of us around. Everyone on Earth today came from that tiny, struggling population.
But once we got on our feet again, we traveled extensively.