[HN Gopher] Archaeologists Discover More Than 100 Ancient Drawin...
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Archaeologists Discover More Than 100 Ancient Drawings in a Spanish
Cave
Author : Hooke
Score : 110 points
Date : 2023-09-14 20:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| wiz21c wrote:
| I've looked at the picture but well, I can't see anything.
| IANAArcheologist :-(
| hobs wrote:
| It takes a bit of an eye to see them, you have to look for
| major features first.
|
| 1. Look for a triangluar shape that is slightly darker and
| redder than the rest of the background, in the middle of the
| frame, the right hand side is not drawn. Congrats, you found
| the muzzle.
|
| 2. Follow the outlines of the darker areas with your eyes.
|
| 3. Or just use this https://imgur.com/a/dDpVtDa
| wiz21c wrote:
| Oh thanks, now I see it (and was miles away of guessing it
| myself :-))
| aleign wrote:
| I skimmed the article and I'm definitely not well-versed in
| archaeological techniques, so I may just be uneducated here,
| but I'm wondering: how do they know that is a painting? And
| not just pareidolia?
|
| Maybe the pictures in the article are just poor quality, but
| I can't really see what they are claiming to see. Even with
| the outline you gave. It just looks like a few lines that
| could kind of possibly sort of look like a deer head.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| It's usually easier in person where you can move your head
| and see the natural color variation of the rock. Plus
| they'll have sketched this out, looking closely at
| different areas, and some will be more obvious than others.
|
| But yes, it's sometimes difficult and you have to have an
| eye for it.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I'm not sure what they used for painting this, but a few
| years ago there was a project in the university where
| high school students came to work in simple projects for
| a while.
|
| One of the projects was to make reproductions of the
| crayolas used for cave painting. They mixed fat of nandu
| (rhea, a local bird similar to ostrich) and iron oxide.
| The project was to use a spectrometer to measure how
| different fat, impurities and treatments changed the
| spectrum, probably to try to discover the original recipe
| and locals variations. (I don't have more details.
| Someone told me about this in a hallway conversation.)
| eep_social wrote:
| Thank you for 'this'. My first reaction was, wow, look at
| that vivid red! I wonder what kind of material they found to
| make that -- so I'm off to get some more coffee.
| [deleted]
| lokl wrote:
| Highly recommend visiting
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pech_Merle if you are interested in
| cave paintings. Easy to access if you stay in Cahors the night
| before.
| java-man wrote:
| It might still be too early to know the age of the drawings (the
| article estimates "at least 24,000 years old"), but I couldn't
| help noticing that these drawings are much simpler than much
| older art in the Chauvet cave (dated to around 30-35 thousand
| years old) [0].
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave
| EatingWithForks wrote:
| It makes sense to me because the article says that they used
| fingers and clay to make the drawings. The Chauvet cave is
| regarded as fairly unique in that outlines were scratched out
| and the cave wall itself was cleared out before starting the
| artwork.
| java-man wrote:
| Not always - many paintings were probably made with fingers
| using a very advanced technique (shading), see for example,
| the bear [0].
|
| [0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fate-of-the-cave-
| bear...
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Seems like there's very little of the drawings left, it might
| have lost some detail over time.
| kadoban wrote:
| I wonder if anything can be done to sense what they used to
| look like, maybe by scanning for places where residue of clay
| fell off or was covered over like they mentioned.
| civilitty wrote:
| There is a huge overlap between the later Paleolithic stone
| industries on the order of tens of thousands of years so it's
| safe to assume there was also a significant variation in
| artistic ability between tribes.
| koliber wrote:
| If I were to draw animals in a cave wall today, they would be
| even more crude.
|
| These paintings were made by individual people and each had
| different artistic ability. How long ago they were painted may
| not correlate directly with how intricate they are.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| I looked at the pics in the articles, and I do not see any of the
| things they say are painted.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I think the first is quite clear. I mande a version in
| https://imgur.com/a/y1i3Tzv IANAA [1] I'm not sure if the nose
| is painted or is just a dark spot in the rock that I'm over
| interpreting.
|
| [1] You can interpret is as " _I am not an Archeologist_ " or "
| _I am not an Artist_ ". Both are correct.
| deadalus wrote:
| I have never seen a more cute deer.
|
| I wish all ancient drawings had such a version so we can
| easily interpret what they are talking about in the article.
| Early cave drawings are very hard to decipher.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| It's an auroch, not a deer (actually the correct term seems
| to be "aurochs", but it's not what the article uses):
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs
| pvaldes wrote:
| clearly a cow, yep. You missed the posterior ear
| koliber wrote:
| Thank you for making this. It was hard to see anything
| before.
|
| After seeing your drawing, I see another way of interpreting
| this image. What if the bull is facing right and not left.
| The dark spot is his upper back. Can you see it that way too?
| gus_massa wrote:
| I can "see" a full bull facing right, the front legs are
| the neck in my drawing, but the rear legs are missing. Is
| that what you see? Anyway, the caption of the image says
|
| > _The painted head of an auroch, an extinct wild bull, was
| the first painting archaeologists discovered in the cave._
|
| so I think it's only the head.
|
| The other drawings are also only the head, so it may be a
| local style/preference (???).
| [deleted]
| blackoil wrote:
| Yeah, a red circle would have helped :|
| calibas wrote:
| Looking at these makes me wonder if I've just walked by ancient
| paintings and not even realized it.
| fractallyte wrote:
| Since most readers will be archaeological lay-people, would it
| have been so difficult for the article to have at least outlined
| some of these (supposed) drawings?
|
| There is such a thing as _pareidolia_ , the tendency to want to
| see meaningful imagery in what are just random patterns...
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia)
| borbulon wrote:
| I am endlessly fascinated by these finds. The more of these sorts
| of sites we find, the more we learn. They were documenting not
| just the animals around them, but their breeding seasons, their
| migrations if any, and probably a dozen other things we haven't
| even considered.
| lancesells wrote:
| And if the dates are correct it's pre-civilization, pre-
| agriculture, and during the ice age. It's incredible to me that
| the need to create is this old.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Wengrow/Graeber challenge the pre-civ/pre-ag timeline
| ljlolel wrote:
| Yes. I recommend the Dawn of Everything
| [deleted]
| tejtm wrote:
| I wonder if they will find more evidence of the lunar dot motif
|
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cave+painting+lunar+dots+animal+fe...
| staplung wrote:
| "Two years ago, when a team of archaeologists spotted a painting
| of an extinct wild bull called an auroch"
|
| The correct singular form of the word is aurochs. Little
| surprising Smithsonian magazine got this wrong
| [deleted]
| datavirtue wrote:
| Felt like I needed to escape that site the second I landed on it.
| ck2 wrote:
| fun rabbit hole
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| I bet the guy with the best cave paintings got all the best women
| ggm wrote:
| There's no compelling evidence painting was exclusively male,
| there are children's hand prints, and at least half the hand
| prints are plausibly women's hands and there is other evidence
| women hunted. Stereotyped roles are a comparatively modern
| invention set against 5k, 10k, timeframes.
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