Ice Age Art: Where it all began - April Nowell

ARARA presents...

Around 50,000 years ago, humans began to paint images of animals, enigmatic symbols and even people on cave walls. For over a century, researchers have been interested in the meanings of these images and how they were created. Drawing on examples from Australia, Indonesian and Europe, this lecture will discuss current research in Ice Age art and its implications for our understanding of what it means to be human.

Biography: Dr. April Nowell is a Paleolithic archaeologist and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Victoria, Canada. She received her BA from McGill University (Montreal, Canada) and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA). She directs an international team of researchers in the excavation of Lower and Middle Paleolithic sites in Jordan and collaborates with colleagues on the study of cave art in Australia. She and her team working in Jordan published the world's oldest identifiable blood on stone tools, demonstrating that 300,000 years ago early humans ate a range of animals from duck to rhinoceros. She is known for her publications on Paleolithic art, cognitive archaeology, the evolutionary basis for storytelling, Neanderthals, the archaeology of children and the relationship between science, pop culture, and the media. Her work has been covered by more than 200 outlets including Nature Briefings, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist, and National Public Radio, and her team's blood residue work was named one of Time Magazine's top 100 discoveries. Her co-authored research on puberty in Ice Age teens was named one of 2024's Top Stories in Human Evolution. She often serves as a Smithsonian Journey's expert on their trips to visit the prehistoric painted caves of France and Spain. She is the co-editor of multiple volumes including Archaeology of Night: Life After Dark in the Ancient World and is the author of the book Growing Up in the Ice Age, winner of the 2023 European Association of Archaeologists Book Prize. Watch her in episode 5 of the NOVA series Ancient Earth (2023) and in the CBC documentary Little Sapiens (2024) (soon to be released world wide) https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=416404351043888