Art and the ancients

Dienekes points me to this article, Aurignacian ethno-linguistic geography of Europe revealed by personal ornaments. In case you don't know, the Aurignacians were the first modern humans in Europe and flourished between 35-20,000 years BP. It isn't surprising that cultural diversity was a feature of our species at this point, the famous "Great Leap Forward" had come and gone, but this story reminds me of a book I read a few years ago, The Ancestress Hypothesis. In many ways the author's argument is a focused response to the ideas promoted by Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind. While Miller argues that human evolution was driven forward (in particular the constant increase in brain size up until about 200,000 years BP) by competition between males in the context of a polygynous loose-pair-bonded lifestyle, the author of The Ancestress Hypothesis argues for a gynocentric and monogamous species where female lineages were strengthened through marriage. And how do matriarchs delineate lineages? They do it through art, and in particular body paint. The reality I suspect is somewhere in the middle, the genetic evidence and the history of sexual dimorphism suggests that we are neither obligate monogamists (like gibbons) or polygynists (like gorillas). To be human is to choose.