Paintings of mythical animal-human hybrids are among the oldest surviving art ever produced. New research suggests that minotaurs, satyrs, the werewolves beloved of Hollywood and even Egypt鈥檚 animal-headed gods are latecomers to the art scene compared with the 鈥渢herianthropes鈥� carved by the earliest artists on bone and painted on stone.
鈥淭hey go back to the dawn of humanity, to the first fully modern people,鈥� claims rock art expert Paul Ta莽on of the Australian Museum in Sydney.
He has found that in Australia and South Africa there are dozens of animal-headed people in rock paintings and carvings more than 10,000 years old. Some may be far older. The oldest was an androgynous feline-headed statuette from Germany, thought to be around 32,000 years old.
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Together with Christopher Chippindale at Cambridge University鈥檚 Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Ta莽on conducted the first rigorous worldwide survey of prehistoric therianthrope images. They surveyed nearly 5000 examples of rock art, most from northern Australia, Europe and South Africa.
Composite beings
They recorded the frequency and types of therianthropes portrayed, and reviewed their age. Because many images have not been radiocarbon dated, the team also assessed artistic style and content 鈥� say, portrayals of extinct animals 鈥� and looked at whether motifs were superimposed on top of each other.
Ta莽on and Chippindale say that belief in therianthropes was common in the distant past. Although they comprised only about one per cent of the works studied, the researchers found examples worldwide, indicating that today鈥檚 fascination with hybrids such as werewolves is nothing new. Early humans were just as fascinated by supernatural 鈥渃omposite鈥� beings who exist between the everyday and spirit worlds.
Sven Ouzman of the National Museum of South Africa in Bloemfontein says it is notoriously difficult to date rock art, so he is sceptical of the claim that therianthropes were the first beings ever portrayed. 鈥淸But] what Paul and Chris鈥檚 paper does do is set up a testable hypothesis,鈥� he says.