Holocene Art

 

 

Picture from Don's Maps   The black stag is one of the most well known pieces of parietal art from the Lascaux caves. This iconic painting occupies a prominent position in a section of Lascaux known as the Axial Gallery. Many writers on the iconography of Lascaux refrain from assigning a particular species to this representation, "stag" being a generic term often used to refer to representations of deer in European cave art; however, in every instance I have seen where the black stag is suggested to represented a particular species, that species is invariably the extinct giant deer, Megaloceros giganteus . It's easy to see why this interpretation has so much traction, the antlers of the black stag are certainly large and imposing, and the size of the painting, especially compared to the smaller depictions of  deer found in the cave, suggests an animal of great bodily magnificence . However, I think a closer consideration of the particulars of the painting reveal...

  I have dubbed the skeleton above "the Jilin aurochs". It is the skeleton of a female,  found in Gan'an County in 1998,  and dated to between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. It is held at the Jilin Museum in   Changchun, China.   Another view of the Jilin Aurochs When I first saw this skeleton, I was immediately struck by how strange looking it is. The skull in particular has a very unusual character, it certainly doesn't look like any typical aurochs skull you would see in a western European museum. Through the magic of Google, I was able to find some more pictures of Chinese aurochs fossil material, and many of the skulls show showed the same unusual features as that of the Jilin aurochs. I wondered whether or not the apparent distinctiveness of these Chinese skulls was just an illusion, or if it had in fact been noted before, either in the literature or through the naming of separate subspecies.  Well as it turns out, there have been aurochs...

This is another one of my old posts at Carnivora that I've decided to move to my blog; in it, I argue that several of the Neolithic (and even Paleolithic) examples of rock art from the Indian subcontinent that depict humped bulls may actually be contemporary illustrations of the Indian aurochs; Naturally, I also argue that the Indian aurochs possessed a hump, as its domestic descendants, zebu cattle, do. Without further ado: OK, my apologies for the delay; I was both under-motivated and fairly busy with other things over the past two days, but, I can spare some time now. Here is a post compiling some example of Indian rock art which may show Bos namadicus. Before we begin looking at the images though its important to get some obvious caveats out of the way: 1. Most Indian rock art I have seen is quite minimalistic and done in profile view, and often it is not possible to determine conclusively exactly which species a particular glyph is supposed to represent. Between prehistory...