Provider: Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic

TY  - JOUR
JO  - Anthropologie (Brno)
TI  - Die Bedeutung der paläolithischen Fingerlinientradition
AU  - Bednarik RC
Y1  - 1984
VL  - 22
IS  - 1
PB  - Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic
SN  - 0323-1119
SP  - 73
EP  - 79
KW  - Early rock art
KW  - Hominid Intellect
KW  - Western Europe
KW  - Australia
N2  - 
N2  - Digital fluting is a tradition of finger lines produced by Palaeolithic man on soft parietal Montmilch deposits in Europe and Australia. A current study of the world's known sites of this phenomenon has given rise to two hypotheses. In contrast to earlier concepts describing the finger lines as traces of activities restricted to remote parts of caves, they are interpreted as the vestige of a once common mode of hominid behaviour. This postulate is based on precisely the restriction of the petroglyphs to Montmilch, the only soft material whose surface could survive for many millennia. Furthermore, the striking parallels between these psychograms and electrically induced phosphenes are demonstrated. Psychograms are thus interpreted as externalised projections of subjective light images in the cerebral visual centre. This definition will demand a re-assessment of our concepts concerning the evolution of hominid intellectual facilities.
ER  -