[HN Gopher] Eight-mile frieze of Ice Age beasts found in Amazon ...
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Eight-mile frieze of Ice Age beasts found in Amazon rainforest
(2020)
Author : vinnyglennon
Score : 159 points
Date : 2023-06-25 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| atentaten wrote:
| Can someone explain what eight-mile has to do with any of this?
| It's only mentioned in the title and not in the article's text.
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| I found this paragraph on Wiki:
|
| >A site including eight miles of paintings or pictographs that
| is under study in Colombia, South America at Serrania de la
| Lindosa was revealed in November 2020. Their age is suggested
| as being 12,500 years old (c. 10,480 B.C.) by the
| anthropologists working on the site because of extinct fauna
| depicted.
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art -
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chap...
| olddustytrail wrote:
| There are 3 sites within 8 miles of each other.
| tomrod wrote:
| Fascinating!
| billsmithaustin wrote:
| I would not have guessed any of those were mastodons.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| Why would you? I never even knew there _were_ mastodons in
| South America until today.
| oidar wrote:
| The rectangles seem suggestive of agriculture as well.
| akiselev wrote:
| Primitive forms of agriculture ("intensive gathering" and
| cultivation) among hunter gatherers were around long before
| sedentary agriculture developed, on the order of 10,000 years
| or more [1]
|
| [1]
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
| olddustytrail wrote:
| > frieze of Ice Age beasts
|
| I wonder how long the headline writer has been waiting for an
| opportunity to use _that_ one!
| froggit wrote:
| More evidence you can find anything on Amazon.
| oldstrangers wrote:
| "probably made around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago"
|
| Interesting timeline if you're entertained by the 'lost
| civilization' / cataclysm discourse.
| bcraven wrote:
| The ABC (Aussie) documentary _First Footprints_ is one of the
| most mind-boggling documentaries I have ever seen. It covers
| 50,000 years of Australian history.
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/australia-culture-b...
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| I had a hard time believing the 1st image were the actual
| drawings found. They look extremely well preserved, and quite
| frankly, gorgeous!
| nkingsy wrote:
| At the very end of the article, they state that local communities
| knew of and lead researchers to this art as a side effect of
| demilitarization of the area.
|
| So not exactly "found", more "officially documented".
| roughly wrote:
| "Columbused: discovered for white people"
| lostlogin wrote:
| You hit a similar thing with the language used to describe
| European colonising explorers 'discovering' populated lands.
| When was Australia discovered? When was New Zealand discovered?
| jahewson wrote:
| I never understood this artificially forced point. Any
| explorer can only "explore" from the frame of reference of
| their culture's knowledge. Even Australia's indigenous
| population has distinct groups from different origins and
| necessarily different "discoveries".
| darkerside wrote:
| Yes. The argument is over whether one frame of reference is
| valid and another is not, and why.
| bagacrap wrote:
| To discover simply means to find. If I'm playing hide and
| seek, and my location is uncovered, I might cry out "you
| found me!" This is not to deny that I existed or knew of
| my own whereabouts prior to being located.
|
| To say that some European "discovered" Australia is
| simply a statement that they found something they didn't
| hitherto know about. There's no implication of validity.
| goatlover wrote:
| At different times by different people. Humans were not the
| first hominids out of Africa.
| mrkstu wrote:
| The way I approach that is by any civilization with an
| existing written corpus going back in time- European/Chinese
| for example.
|
| If the Chinese had knowledge of the Americas they'd have been
| the 'discoverers' in mondernity.
|
| Without written continuity it's hard to credit discoverers...
| hobs wrote:
| A significant amount of archeology is like this - Las Monedas
| cave (for example) has prehistoric cave paintings, but its
| named after someone dropped 20 coins (or so) in it in the
| 1700s, many caves that were "discovered" in a modern sense just
| mean in the context of described by science.
| bpicolo wrote:
| Petra is another one that comes to mind
| pentagrama wrote:
| The title font is really hard to read. Thanks Firefox for your
| reader mode.
|
| Someone here browse the web blocking remote fonts? How was your
| experience? I know uBlock Origin has this option, I may give it a
| try.
| froggit wrote:
| I block remote fonts w/ ublock! It's pretty handy in a "I
| always know text is gonna be rendered with a font I can read
| and it cuts down on having to make the connections to get them.
| ublock has a bit of a learning curve (half an hour reading on
| their wiki) to get the most outta it, but just blocking remote
| fonts just takes a couple clicks in check boxes.
| pentagrama wrote:
| Just tried for a bit, all good til I noticed in some sites
| using icon fonts I got a weird character, it make sense, but
| is a problem there, specially for icons without labels, eg:
| https://imgur.com/a/8D1OC9n
|
| Don't know why devs will use fonts instead of svgs for icons,
| I guess there is a reason.
| velosol wrote:
| I have and briefly the majority of the time you're missing
| little to nothing by not using webfonts. Occasionally the
| design language of a physical media property is carried forward
| with the font in a way that is interesting enough to be
| worthwhile (ie _The Atlantic_'s title font is instantly
| recognizable but not critical).
|
| If you're bandwidth starved (ie ISDN or worse) then it's also a
| nice speedup.
| pentagrama wrote:
| Yeah, but as I mentioned in other comment, I found many
| issues with icons by blocking remote fonts, look at Google
| Podcasts https://imgur.com/a/6de4uNL
| qup wrote:
| What is "eight-mile" referencing? It's totally unclear to me.
| version_five wrote:
| If you had one shot to paint any frieze you ever wanted, would
| you capture it, or just let it slide?
| jibbit wrote:
| I struggle to find an outdoor paint that lasts 2 years
| someweirdperson wrote:
| It's the fault of modern regulation, requiring it to never
| cause health issues or problems for the environment.
| mistercheph wrote:
| Yes, 20,000 years ago, people used cancer-causing chemicals
| to dye rocks that have been regulated out of existence, no
| small part of the improvements in mortality since that
| primitive time.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| It seems to be an overhang, but still... I've also never seen
| that anywhere in the tropics. Are there others? All the rock
| paintings I know are either in caves or very different
| climates.
| roger_ wrote:
| Where could one find high resolution photos of these?
| seaknoll wrote:
| I've been here and to a few other, equally spectacular sites in
| this general part of Colombia. They're well-known among local
| people, but some are VERY hard to get to (freight or chartered
| plane to a community completely unattached to the rest of the
| country by road + hours-long boat journey + hours of hiking).
|
| They can be quite sad though, e.g. the relatively newer images
| depict colonization encroaching upon the region - horses
| (introduced by the colonists), swords, and scenes that appear to
| show imprisonment of people.
| cardamomo wrote:
| The "relatively newer" images you refer to seem to be nearly
| 12,000 years newer than the images mentioned in this article.
| They're likely from a different culture entirely.
|
| EDIT: Changed "older" to "newer."
| seaknoll wrote:
| The images are of various ages. This article describes the
| subset that are the oldest, but there are newer ones mixed
| in. In some places you get layers of them, where you can see
| that the older ones were drawn over. They can estimate how
| much later they were added based on the presence of animals
| and objects that did not exist there 12,000 years ago.
|
| It's true that there's a huge gap in time between the
| earliest paintings and the newer ones and so some aspects of
| the culture probably did change. But the area has been
| continuously populated for millennia.
| olddustytrail wrote:
| You mean 12k years newer, not older.
| freedomben wrote:
| I'm not positive what GP meant either, but if they were
| talking about horses, that is mentioned in the article as
| being there about 12,000 years ago, which is significantly
| before colonization that first GP mentioned as having
| brought horses to the area:
|
| > _the rock art shows how the earliest human inhabitants of
| the area would have coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with
| pictures showing what appear to be giant sloths, mastodons,
| camelids, horses and three-toed ungulates with trunks._
| amatic wrote:
| Apparently, there were horses in the Americas, but they
| went extinct about 12k years ago, along with the other
| megafauna. What I understand is that different images
| could have been made in multiple time periods, from the
| first inhabitants up to today.
| gort52467 wrote:
| s/went extinct/were hunted to extinction by man
| atlantic wrote:
| Blaming megafauna extinction on humans aligns with
| current misanthropic fashions, but rapid global warming
| at the end of the last ice age is a far more likely
| culprit.
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21201-8
| mc32 wrote:
| Horses are not extinct.
| cardamomo wrote:
| Yes, that's what I meant!
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I wonder if it's possible that these were documenting something
| that they were losing, or had lost, as opposed to simply just a
| document to how they were living currently. Like a historical
| record of sorts.
|
| That specific period 18000 years ago, was the middle-end of the
| quaternary megafauna extinction [1] and the earth was
| transitioning from plenty of mega fauna to none - leading to the
| birth of property and modernity.
|
| [1] https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf
| LouisSayers wrote:
| In the paintings there are many cosine / sine wave type patterns,
| as well as www type patterns as well.
|
| Any ideas what these are referring to? It seems like they're
| documenting something?
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with pictures showing what
| appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, camelids, horses and three-
| toed ungulates with trunks
|
| "Coexisted" is a loaded term given that the coexistence lasted
| for maybe a couple hundred years before every single one of those
| was hunted to extinction.
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| That's a theory but not proven. Could have been climate change
| too, or another cause.
| abeppu wrote:
| Is it surprising that a mere overhang in the rock has been
| sufficient to preserve art for that long? It sounds like they
| really are just pigment on cleaned rock, and I would have thought
| that water dripping, wind, lichens, animals or _something_ over
| the millennia would have ruined it.
| ChatGTP wrote:
| Same with Australian Aboriginal paintings, some very ancient,
| some had been repainted yes but even the fact the images last
| 100 years is pretty amazing.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I too was baffled by this, in my experience modern _paint_ isn
| 't going to last that long. But I looked it up and supposedly:
|
| > _Because ochre is a mineral, it doesn 't wash away or decay,
| allowing it to persist through the ages._ [1]
|
| > _...the ancient artisans of Babine Lake in British Columbia
| harvested ochre sediment... Then, MacDonald says, they
| carefully heated it to around 750 to 850 degrees Celsius over
| open-hearth fires to achieve the colour they desired... Not
| only would the process yield the vivid red, the ancient
| artisans must have known, but it would "improve colourfastness,
| stability and resistance to degradation", the scientists'
| article says... The iron in the material bonds easily to
| surfaces that are high in silica, like the rock faces, ensuring
| their durability._ [2]
|
| So it seems it's due to actual chemical bonding.
|
| Which makes me wonder -- if you applied ochre to rock today,
| how hard would it be to then remove? Would it be impossible
| with regular washing, would you need power washing, or
| sandblasting even?
|
| [1] https://www.livescience.com/64138-ochre.html
|
| [2] https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/11/21/scientists-
| uncove...
| flybrand wrote:
| > how hard would it be to then remove?
|
| Permanent graffiti through science!
| jvm___ wrote:
| City workers hate that teenagers learned this one trick...
| soligern wrote:
| [dead]
| dudinax wrote:
| +1 for the theory that humans wiped out the megafauna in America.
| hrpnk wrote:
| "(2020)" missing in the title? Story was published 1:51 PM EST,
| Wed December 2, 2020.
| [deleted]
| RagnarD wrote:
| Every square millimeter of this work needs to be digitized in
| high color resolution with 3D scans, ASAP.
| [deleted]
| wumms wrote:
| Covered eight years ago (2015):
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/20/colombia-wilde...
|
| Edit: Channel 4 (UK) documentary from 2020 [0,1] as teased here
| [2]
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/aDmKC_h9Www
|
| [1] Show me the paintings! https://youtu.be/aDmKC_h9Www?t=3073
|
| [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-
| chap...
| wswope wrote:
| Just to add-on: Channel 4 has also put out related "Lost
| Kingdoms of Africa/South America/Central America" series, all
| of which are well-done and showcase offbeat archaeological
| sites in the same vein as this frieze.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=lost+kingdoms&d=programmes_ps
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(page generated 2023-06-25 23:00 UTC)