A research team led by Dr. Mae Goder-Goldberger of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben-Gurion University of the Negev published a new study that revolutionizes the timeline of prehistoric art in Israel.
Until now, it was believed that art in Israel was 50.000 years old. However, based on a new analysis of intentionally decorated stone tools found in various prehistoric caves in the country, Israeli and European scientists have concluded that art and abstract thought were practiced in Israel 100.000 years ago.
The artefacts analysed include a stone core from the Qafzeh Cave, a plaquette from Quneitra and a piece from the Manot Cave.
Scientists used 3D models to study the engravings, confirming that they were not made by accident. At Qafzeh Cave, for example, parallel marks on another tool reinforce the theory that early humans were already experimenting with symbolism.
However, the most surprising find comes from Quneitra, where they found a decorated flint plaquette with no apparent practical purpose, only for decoration.
While intentionally engraved artifacts remain rare in the archaeological record, their existence demonstrates that Middle Paleolithic humans—whether early Homo sapiens or Neanderthals—possessed the cognitive capacity to create art.
Part of the importance of the discovery is due to the fact that the first manifestations of prehistoric art are centred in Europe and not in the Middle East, where these first European artists are supposed to have come from, or where it is known that they later returned or interacted with each other. In the Middle East, there are few remains of Paleolithic art, nothing to do with the many artistic demonstrations in European caves. According to a recently published theory, led by the Israeli researcher Ran Barkai, art was due to the need for food, nothing to do with primitive manifestations of religions based on gods or mysticism, and more specifically it was due to the need for the fat of the large prey they hunted, so these animals became an object of worship, one could say that religion came from the stomach and not from the heart or the brain, but as in the Middle East there were no large prey or they had been hunted in excess, then this cave art would not exist or it had no reason to exist.
Food was also very important in one of the main periods of human evolution many centuries later, in the Neolithic, starting from the Middle East. It was also food, and during this period, that caused Europeans to “whiten” themselves – no racist nonsense about genes, no teleportation from Shangri-La in Tibet, no invented European primitive human species, no Martians, etc. During the Paleolithic, or until just 10.000 years ago, absolutely all of these Europeans were black or very dark-skinned and had black or very dark, somewhat curly hair, although later the DNA was mixed with that of the various Neolithic invasions from Anatolia and the Middle East, who introduced agriculture, livestock, city life, and social classes to Europe. All of the latter in turn were previously “bleached”, going from black to increasingly white skin, due to the need for vitamin D synthesized in white skin by the sun, since with the change to a sedentary lifestyle or a diet based on agriculture, humans could not obtain the much-needed vitamin D, mainly to avoid the childhood disease rickets, which they previously obtained from the liver and kidneys of game animals and some fish. Even worse, at least for racists, according to recent scientific discoveries in paleogenetics, published since 2017, the Basques are the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula who genetically most resemble Europeans, or rather are the prototype of Western Europeans, that is, they are those who have more DNA inherited from the Yamna or Yamnaya, a people of shepherds from the steppes in present-day Ukraine-Russia who about 4500 years ago arrived in the Iberian Peninsula after colonizing or forcibly invading all of Europe, they replaced practically all of the previous European male DNA or Y chromosome DNA, practically all of the indigenous or previous DNA disappeared in all Europeans, however the part of the feminine DNA or mitochondrial DNA remained, the previous one or that of the indigenous Europeans of the Paleolithic, those with black or very dark skin, mixed with that of the immigrants of the Neolithic, from the Middle East and Anatolia, plus this very mixed European would have “whitened” by itself with the change of diet. from the Neolithic.