Communication Development Since Ancient times

Whether one subscribes to the orthodox ‘Clovisfirst’ paradigm (i.e. that the earliest entrants into the New World arrived from Siberia and became the Clovis culture about 13 500 years ago) or to the now generally accepted notion that there were multiple waves of immigrants prior to Clovis it is surprising that pictorial evidence for the co-existence of pre-Clovis people and Ice Age megamammals has not to date come to light. Because humans elsewhere in the world were imagemakers one assumes that the earliest Palaeoamericans whether pre-Clovis or Clovis would have brought with them universal predispositions for image-making including the making of rock art. Yet until the present study no unambiguously ancient rock art imagery of Ice Age megafauna has been found. In this paper we present strong evidence for the pre-Historic depiction of mammoths at a site insouthern Utah. Instrumental methods for dating petroglyphs such as cation-ratio varnish microlamination and x-ray fluorescence are currently considered experimental and generally show large error parameters that often do not meet the scientific expectations of contemporary rock art research.