drghirlanda

The New York Times reports on newly discovered rock art in Borneo, dated to 40,000 years old and providing further evidence that figurative art was not born in Europe. The idea that a full-fledged capacity for complex culture evolved in Europe is a traditional one, based on the fact that, until some time ago, the earliest finds of complex artifacts (art, stone tools, and so on) were from Europe. However, the idea is problematic because it fails to explain why every extant human population has the same cultural capacity, as there is no record of gene flow from Europe to all the rest of the world successive to the appearance of European complex culture.  A few years ago, we analyzed evidence of cultural capacity and we came to the conclusion that this capacity is probably as old as the human species. The new find in Borneo joins the ones we had examined in pointing in this direction. In fact, we argued that even Neanderthals may have had the same cultural capacity as Homo sapiens, in agreement with the discovery 40,000 year-old paintings that may have been made by Neanderthals (announced as our paper was being published).

A summary of our paper on the origin of human cultural capacity is in a previous post.