Untitled Page

bradshaw foundation ilectures chauvet cave chauvet cave chauvet cave chauvet cave chauvet chauvet jean clottes chauvet cave chauvet chauvet cave bradshaw foundation bradshaw foundation bradshaw foundation chauvet chauvet

ilectures



Untitled Page

Chauvet Cave

The cave paintings and rock art of Chauvet


The Chauvet Cave is located near the Vallon-Pont-d'Arc in the Ardèche region of southern France. The Cave Paintings of Chauvet date to 30,000 to 32,000 years ago. In the Chauvet Cave hundreds of animal paintings have been found making Chauvet Cave one of the world's most important rock art sites.



The Barrinean People

The Barrinean People of Australia — The First Settlers


There is some evidence for the presence of different ethnic groups in Australia during the past. For instance,considerable research amongst Aboriginal people was carried out by individuals such as Joseph Birdsell and Norman B. Tindale. They presented a series of papers and publications in which it was argued that the Australian Aboriginal population represented several waves of culture, rather than a single group as is frequently the expounded philosophy. Birdsell... formally named the Australian representatives of this type the Barrinean, after our 1938 work in the Lake Barrine area had confirmed their presence.

Tindale and Birdsell claimed they ‘probably saw five hundred present-day descendants’ of these small stature indigenous individuals, but their population when the area was first settled in the 1890’s was estimated at two thousand.

Barrinean Barrinean Map
Distribution of the ‘main types’ of Australian people at the time of first European contact, as identified by Birdsell and Tindale. After Tindale and Lindsay 1963. Photograph of Professor Joseph B. Birdsell and adult male Barrinean native, near lake Barrine


Tindale also was of the opinion that the earliest migrating waves of culture represented individuals of small stature, as is evident in this summary of these findings. “Evidence available up to the present suggests that the first human invaders of the virgin Australian continent, some forty thousand or more years ago, were a people of small stature of a type still to be found in small hideaway groups in the rain forests of Southeast Asia and New Guinea, and as far out into the Pacific as the New Hebrides. They are collectively known as the Negritos, a separate small framed type of modern man forming one of the earliest stocks in southern Asia, and geographically somewhat remote from the negrillo peoples of Africa”.


Barrinean Barrinean
Photographs of a bushman family and
van der Post with an adult male and grandmother


Further information on pygmy populations has been put forward by Peter Bellwood, who claimed that the Negritos of the Andaman Islands (Indian area), central Malaya (Semang), the Philippines and the pygmies of highland New Guinea are all dwarf Australoid populations. Bellwood considers these dwarf populations represent ‘the most daunting phylogenetic problems of the Pacific area’.

The question proposed is, was there once an ancient Negrito continuum from Africa right through Southeast Asia, which has now been swamped, or have the dwarf populations evolved in several places independently? The later seems unlikely but is possible.


Barrinean Barrinean
Bushman hunter and J. Michael Fay with a Congo pygmy


Return to page |12|


Untitled Page

Untitled Page

| Chauvet Intoduction | 2005 Expedition | 2001 Expedition | 1999 Expedition | Venus and Sorcerer |
| Paintings Gallery | Publications | Paleolithic Art in France | Other French Caves |

If you have enjoyed visiting the Chauvet Cave section of this website
please consider adding a link to www.bradshawfoundation.com/chauvet


| Bradshaw Foundation Site Map | Friends of the Foundation |

Social bookmarking add link to this page to share content with others