B 01

Project B 01 deals with the resource use of late Neanderthals and early anatomically modern humans. Against the background of the immigration of Homo sapiens to Europe and the encounter with 'indigenous' Neanderthals, the project examines continuities and breaks in human behaviour in this important phase of human history, using material and immaterial resources as examples. An important change at the beginning of the Upper Palaeolithic is the presumably first emergence of figurative art and other innovations in the symbolic field, which the project will deal with in the third phase of funding. Since the Upper Palaeolithic, people invested considerably in actions, which have left behind objects that are now addressed as 'art'. Art thus seems to become both a material (cave art, pigments, ivory) and immaterial resource (symbolism, animism, religious acts).
Within the Aurignacien, which occurs in Europe in the form of island-like centres, for example in the Swabian Alb, Veneto, Burgundy or the Dordogne, different kinds of objects with symbolic meaning can be observed. While deeply engraved carvings in limestone blocks are predominant in the Dordogne, the ivory figures of the Swabian Alb form an exceptionally delicate ensemble of the earliest art. The discovery of the Grotte Chauvet (Ardèche, France) in 1994 with its extraordinary cave art, parts of which date to the Aurignacian, revealed something completely different again. On the other hand, there are phenomena in lithics, the bone industry and also in artistic expressions that are repeated in almost identical form across the continent. Project B 01 deals with a number of central research questions: Did Aurignacian art emerge spontaneously or were there precursors? What was the demographic and palae-ethnological reality of this period in the field of tension between regional entities and pan-European commonalities? What was the function of art in the ResourceCulture of the people of the time? What dynamics are evident in the complex structure of resources and forms of expression?

The diversity of the respective artistic expressions of the Aurignaciens argues against systemic and biologistic behavioural norms specifically assigned to Homo sapiens, which could be evaluated as an evolutionarily advantageous toolkit compared to Neanderthals, but rather for regionally and temporally effective contingent solutions and for a resource structure that shows independent dynamics in diachronic comparison to previous and subsequent cultural complexes. Geographically, the case studies of project B 01 – with Burgundy and the Swabian Alb – are located at first-class hinge points between Central and western Europe, where both the last Neanderthals and a very early appearance of anatomically modern humans are observed.