For centuries, the “Unicorn Cave,” or “Einhornhöhle,” in central Germany has been famous for its many thousands of bones. In medieval times, people thought the bones came from unicorns.
But a few years ago, archaeologists excavating the cave unearthed an unusual object: a toe bone from a giant deer. The material itself was noteworthy: Although giant deer were once prey for Europe’s prehistoric hunters, the animals usually roamed much farther north, indicating this bone had been brought from afar.
And it was clearly different from others in the cave: Several large grooves had been carved at angles into the bone’s upper surface, creating a prominent chevron-like pattern.
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Even more extraordinary was its age: Radiocarbon dating of the bone showed that the deer lived around 51,000 years ago, when the Unicorn Cave was occupied by Neanderthals, our extinct human relatives.
“The engraved bone from Einhornhöhle is at least 50,000 years old and thus ranges among the oldest known symbolic objects,” said Dirk Leder, an archaeologist with the Lower Saxony state government who has published research on the object. The meaning of the symbolism is lost to time, but it may have been “a device intended to communicate with other group members, outsiders, spirits or the like — we simply don’t know,” he said.
The bone is one of several contenders for the much-disputed title of the “world’s oldest art.” This is a broad and crowded field — encompassing what look like accidental chicken scratches and representational imagery that is breathtakingly realistic.
Over the past decade, increasing evidence suggests artistic expression emerged much earlier in human evolution than scientists once thought, and it’s reshaping…
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