Editor Mike Fredericks kindly sent Everything Dinosaur a preview image of the forthcoming summer edition of “Prehistoric Times” magazine. This quarterly magazine is aimed at prehistoric animal enthusiasts and collectors of dinosaur models. Each edition is packed with amazing articles, reviews of the latest models and interviews with leading artists and Earth scientists.

Issue 138 (summer 2021), features the stunning artwork of renowned American palaeoartist Mark Hallett.

Oregon-based Mark was working on a book describing the evolution of the horse, to be published by Columbia University Press. He had been busy preparing illustrations for “The Horse: A Natural History”, however, he has found time to produce some stunning artwork reflecting current thinking about our close cousins the Neanderthals.

Neanderthals Revisited

Our views of the hominin Homo neanderthalensis have changed dramatically over the last three decades or so. Early perceptions about Neanderthals being brutish ape-like creatures have largely been replaced with a very different view. They made a variety of sophisticated tools, cooked using fire, lived in shelters and made and wore clothing. Neanderthals were very capable hunters of large game, hence the herd of mammoths in the background of Mark Hallett’s front cover art as a wooden spear wielding female Neanderthal looks on.

Neanderthals Made Jewellery

Evidence has emerged that Neanderthals deliberately buried their dead and in some instances marked the graves and provided grave goods and offerings such as shells and flowers. They probably had language skills and they made jewellery. Artefacts found in the Iberian Peninsula and dated to around 40,000 years ago prove that Neanderthals used eagle talons as necklace pendants. The female in the Mark Hallett illustration is wearing a shell necklace and has a very fetching eagle talon earring. Only two species of hominins are known to have demonstrated such sophisticated behaviour, the Neanderthals and our own species Homo sapiens.

We look forward to reading the article about Mark Hallett’s work in the forthcoming edition of the magazine.

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