[HN Gopher] Wielding lamps and torches shed new light on Stone A...
___________________________________________________________________
Wielding lamps and torches shed new light on Stone Age cave art
Author : diodorus
Score : 34 points
Date : 2021-07-11 05:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencenews.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencenews.org)
| necrotic_comp wrote:
| Is there a good video or animation of what this looks like ? I've
| seen a bunch of text descriptions but I'm curious how this
| _actually_ appears.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Try drawing a picture of a forest on a moonless night. It is
| very difficult to portray how we see things when our eyes are
| at the limits of their abilities. For instance, our peripheral
| vision can see better in dim light than our focused vision,
| causing us to see things in the corner of our eye that
| disappear when we look strait at them. Try simulating that
| effect in a photograph. Perception of color also changes over
| time. If you sit in a cave with a fire (mostly red/yellow)
| after several hours you will start seeing color differently.
| Something that looks yellow on a computer screen (lots of
| blue/green) may be perceived as white after hours bathed in the
| red/yellow of firelight.
|
| These are areas where painters are better than photographers.
| Nobody can make a good photograph of a dark forest and all the
| effects that entails. But a painter with a brush can
| communicate through artistic trickery.
| marshray wrote:
| IIRC, Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) has some
| scenes where the cave walls are illuminated by flickering
| light.
| tokai wrote:
| Saw that in 3d. It was really interesting to see the
| paintings undulating over the cave walls. Still the only film
| I have seen where 3d had a real impact to the viewing
| experience.
| dylan604 wrote:
| "That suggests the artists may have wanted to keep their work
| hidden, the researchers say."
|
| Uh-oh, today's HN reader would be looking for a way to pirate
| that work so they could view any time they want.
|
| More seriously, were they wanting to keep it hidden because they
| weren't sure it was good enough? A bit of self-conciousness on
| how my stick figures are a lot less realistic than Bob's
| paintings in his cave? Were they afraid of the poparazzi effect
| of everyone wanting their autograph for being the rockstar
| painter of their day? Or are we just congecturing too much about
| wanting to keep them hidden? More questions than answers.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Imagine the power of being able to say, with certainty, the sun
| will rise higher than it did the previous day, that the spring
| is coming, that rains are ending soon, and so on.
|
| I'm reading "The Human Cosmos" (Marchant). In it is proposed
| that lots of cave art / building was related to stars, and
| therefore seasons and therefore plants and animal patterns. It
| was a kind of future-telling. It appears in many, many cultures
| in strikingly similar forms.
|
| The Chumash in CA kept this kind of knowledge sacred and known
| only to a few. They used spirit quests, hallucinogenics, and
| celestial-inspired art to guard, interpret, and pass on
| knowledge.
|
| If these artworks are part of a teaching / fortune-telling
| ritual, then they would need to be hidden and preserved for
| generations.
| soperj wrote:
| Sounds a lot like the way Pacific navigators passed down
| their knowledge. Wasn't just given to anyone.
| ElViajero wrote:
| > to pirate that work
|
| I doubt that copyright existed in the Stone age, so it's public
| domain.
|
| > they weren't sure it was good enough? A bit of self-
| conciousness on how my stick figures are a lot less realistic
| than Bob's paintings in his cave?
|
| It could have been a curse, a pay to get better hunting that
| some other people in the tribe or even a new religion. I agree
| that is difficult to say, I hope that future discoveries get
| more light into this drawings.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >even a new religion.
|
| I was going to suggest it being against their religion. Maybe
| Ra was punishing them because they realized how to use the
| Stargate.
| atoav wrote:
| Or they wanted it to be protected and stored away for the
| times. Or the act of getting to those paintings was some kind
| of special act that was carried out under certain circumstances
| (and therefore it being hard to reach was part of the plan).
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| > Using just a torch or a lamp from below, the paintings and
| engravings stay hidden. But lit fireplaces on the ledge
| illuminate the whole gallery so that anyone on the cave floor
| can see it. That suggests the artists may have wanted to keep
| their work hidden, the researchers say.
|
| I dunno. To me, this suggests that the artists may have used
| the cave art in theatrical productions, with the audience on
| the gallery floor, and stage crew working lights up on the
| ledge. Combined with the difficult trek into the cave to build
| suspense, some good storytelling and potent entheogens, I can
| imagine this being quite an attraction outlasting the original
| painter(s) and benefiting their descendants for generations.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-07-12 23:01 UTC)