Earliest parietal art:hominin hand and foot traces from the middle Pleistocene of Tibet

• 作者: David D.Zhang Matthew R.Bennett Hai Cheng Leibin Wang Haiwei Zhang Sally C.Reynolds Shengda Zhang Xiaoqing Wang Teng Li Tommy Urban Qing Pei Zhifeng Wu Pu Zhang Chunru Liu Yafeng Wang Cong Wang Dongju Zhang R.Lawrence Edwards
• 来源期刊: 科学通报（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（24）
• 所属期刊栏目: ARTICLES
• 页码范围: 2506-2515
• 页数: 10页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

At Quesang on the Tibetan Plateau we report a series of hand and foot impressions that appear to have been intentionally placed on the surface of a unit of soft travertine.The travertine was deposited by water from a hot spring which is now inactive and as the travertine lithified it preserved the traces.On the basis of the sizes of the hand and foot traces,we suggest that two track-makers were involved and were likely children.We interpret this event as a deliberate artistic act that created a work of parietal art.The tra-vertine unit on which the traces were imprinted dates to between ～169 and 226 ka BP.This would make the site the earliest currently known example of parietal art in the world and would also provide the ear-liest evidence discovered to date for hominins on the High Tibetan Plateau (above 4000 m a.s.l.).This remarkable discovery adds to the body of research that identifies children as some of the earliest artists within the genus Homo.