I have written previously in RockArtBlog that rock art in general, and cave art in particular, might provide insights into extinct animals that otherwise are only known from fossils. Of course, in the past decade or so, DNA analysis has reached the point that quite an amazing amount of knowledge can be gleaned from those fossils. However, I believe that having good art showing a subject can also help in the understanding of the real creature. A paper published in 2016 by a team of researchers led by Julien Soubrier of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA at the University of Adelaide described the DNA discovery of a new species of bison, only to find it already pictured on the painted cave walls in Europe.
In 2016 Soubrier wrote that “the two living species of bison (European and American) are among the few terrestrial megafauna to have survived the late Pleistocene extinctions. Despite the extensive bovid fossil record in Eurasia, the evolutionary history of the European bison (or wisent, Bison bonasus) before the Holocene (<11.7 thousand years ago (kya)) remains a mystery. We use complete ancient mitochondrial genomes and genome-wide nuclear DNA surveys to reveal that the wisent is the product of hybridization between the extinct steppe bison (Bison priscus) and ancestors of modern cattle (aurochs, Bos primigenius) before 120 kya, and contains up to 10% aurochs genomic ancestry. Although undetected within the fossil record, ancestors of the wisent have alternated ecological dominance with steppe bison in association with major environmental shifts since at least 55 kya. Early cave artists recorded distinct morphological forms consistent with these replacement events, around the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ~21–18 kya).” (Soubrier et al. 2016:1)
Over the
millennia that early humans inhabited Europe there were swings in climate
between glacial and non-glacial which affected the biome. These early humans
recorded some of those changes in the images they created.
‘More than 30,000 years
ago, early cave artists in what is now southwestern France ventured deep
underground into limestone caves, where they painted elaborate and detailed
frescoes of the huge animals that dominated their lives. The accuracy of the depictions
was remarkable – far better than most of us could manage crouched under a
sloping damp wall under the flickering light cast by flaming bundles of
vegetation and fat. The paintings record a world of cave lions, mammoth, bison
and horses, which we are only just beginning to unravel using the combined
technologies of ancient DNA and radiocarbon dating. The results show that
despite studying cave art for hundreds of years, we have been blind to some of
the important stories the artists were telling.” (Cooper and Soubrier
2016) This is, of course, due to the modern jingoistic assumption that these
Paleolithic peoples were primitive and unsophisticated, an assumption that we
are finally beginning to understand as seriously wrong.
“Our research is a case in
point. We have used ancient DNA from fossil bones to deduce the existence of a
newly discovered bison species – only to discover that it was already recorded
on the walls of caves across Europe, such as in Niaux Cave in southwestern
France 17,000 years ago.” (Cooper and Soubrier 2016)
“Since the DNA from our ancient bones was neither Steppe bison nor wisent, we appeared to have found a new species - or had we? We started referring to it as the “Higgs bison”, because – just like the elusive Higgs boson which physicists spent decades tracking down – we had surmised the existence of something without knowing what it looked like.” (Cooper and Soubrier 2016) This would appear to be the result of a kind of compartmentalization in scholarship, the idea that only we know the truth about whatever it is we are studying. While art historians knew of the differences in the images of bison we did not actually know the cause, while the scientists had hints of the cause but had no idea that the images existed.
Once the research was made more public other data began to come in
that would help clarify the situation. “Dutch
colleagues reported that among the many Steppe bison and Aurochs bones dredged
from the North Sea they had noticed another, less common, smaller animal.
Meanwhile, French cave art researchers replied that they had noticed that among
the cave drawings were two distinct forms of bison: a wedge-shaped one with big
horns, rather like a modern American bison; and a more evenly shaped animal
with smaller horns, like a modern wisent.” (Cooper and Soubrier 2016) In
other words, putting the genetic evidence together with the differences in
stylistic representation of bison in the caves of southern France and northern
Spain the researchers discovered that pictures of the different species
actually existed and could be studied.
The DNA
studies of fossil bison from the Paleolithic period indicated that steppe bison
and aurochs had interbred and led to the hybrid species of bison and the
ancestor of the wisent. “Combined evidence from genomic data,
paleoenvironmental reconstructions and cave paintings strongly suggest that the
hybridization of steppe bison with an ancient aurochs lineage during the late
Pleistocene led to a morphologically and ecologically distinct form, which
maintained its integrity and survived environmental changes on the European
landscape until modern times. Although further analyses of deeper ancient genome
sequencing will be necessary to characterize the phenotypic consequences of
such hybridization, this adds to recent evidence of the importance of
hybridization as a mechanism for speciation and adaptation of mammals as is
already accepted for plants. Lastly, the paraphyly of Bos with respect to Bison, and the evidence
of meaningful hybridization between aurochs and bison, support the argument
that both groups should be combined under the genus Bos.” (Soubrier et al. 2016:1) The new bison species, a
result of hybridization of had been noticed by cave art researchers as a
different body shape and horn length. Their question of whether it was a
different animal, or a different style of portrayal, was answered by the DNA
studies confirming a new bison. In this way both fields, genetics and art
history, combined to confirm each other’s findings. How great is that?
NOTE: Some images in this posting were retrieved from the internet with a search for public domain photographs. If any of these images are not intended to be public domain, I apologize, and will happily provide the picture credits if the owner will contact me with them. For further information on these reports you should read the original reports at the sites listed below.
REFERENCES:
Cooper, Alan, and Julien Soubrier, 2016, How we disovered the ‘Higgs bison’, hiding in plain sight in ancient cave art, 18 October 2016, https://theconversation.com. Accessed online 7 September 2024.
Soubrier, Julien et al., 2016, Early cave art and ancient DNA record of the origin of European bison,
18 October 2016, Nature Communications, DOI:10.1038/ncomms13158,
www.nature.com/naturecommunications.
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