Children of the Past: Archaeology and the Lives of Kids
CHAPTER 1 CAVE ROAMING KIDS Western Europe Twenty Thousand Years Ago 18 000 BCE A handprint found in an ancient cave in Spain The paintings are some of the oldest ever found dating back to about thirty thousand years ago CHILDREN OF THE PAST
Approximate Landmass in 18 000 BCE Ancient landmass andma Your father swings you up onto his shoulder You Ocean laugh and hang on to his thick hair while you kick your feet on his chest Your kicking makes him laugh You look over at your mother who carries your baby brother Together you walk toward a cave near your family's campsite When you enter the cave you call out so the echo of your voice rolls back to you Giggling you slide down off your father s shoulders and run a little way ahead You know where you re going What you might not notice are the footprints you leave in soft clay on the cave floor When you reach your destination you reach up and touch a small handprint outlined on the rock It's yours put there when you were a baby Now it's Brother's turn Your father holds a small rock hollowed out in the middle to make a bowl It is filled with paint that you watched him make this morning It's a mixture of charcoal powdered red rock and water Your mother holds Brother s hand against the cave wall and nods at you to help her hold it still and steady Brother coos as he feels the cool stone Your father carefully sucks some of the paint into a hollow bird bone and then blows through the bone to spray the paint in an outline around the baby s hand You laugh as some red color lands on your hand too You climb back onto your father's shoulders giving a quick tug on his beard as you clamber up As you ride out of the cave you drag your fingers along the ceiling above you leaving long trails of lines in the soft clay there When your father notices what you're doing he starts weaving from side to side as he walks Your patterns become wavy What fun Cave Roaming Kids
For years archaeologists historians and others have admired ancient cave art found in countries such as Spain and France Radiocarbon dating of charcoal from the art shows that most were created between ten thousand and thirty thousand years ago What does it mean Some scientists think these paintings have to do with religion Others believe the art shows that early people needed to create One thing they didn't expect was that children had much to do with the art If children were involved at all they thought it was only as part of special ceremonies when boys symbolically became adults and joined the men as hunters RADIOCARBON DATING Radiocarbon is an element found in certain natural materials such as wood bone and shell Radiocarbon breaks down at a steady rate Scientists measure this rate to determine when the material was alive This helps establish the date of a sample and is a valuable tool for archaeologists A scientist takes a bone sample for radiocarbon
A painting in one of France's Lascaux caves shows a group of animals These images may be up to twenty thousand years old However many historians are beginning to think that we may be taking cave art a little too seriously Experts still believe that the finest animal paintings were done by adults and that there may have been ceremonies connected to this work But many other images and paintings were not made with such skill Archaeologists have come to believe that kids made a lot of this art and that the handprints and finger fluting don t have deep meaning but were just for fun These ideas shine new light on the lives of cave kids HANDPRINTS Handprints in European caves have two main forms Some are outlines or stencils as described in the story starting this chapter Others are full handprints that seem to have been made by putting paint on the hand and then pressing it against the wall Stencils show not just hands but also arms feet and even whole human bodies The fully painted prints found so far are almost all of hands only Cave Roaming Kids
