[HN Gopher] Oldest cave art found
___________________________________________________________________
Oldest cave art found
Author : rntn
Score : 188 points
Date : 2024-07-03 21:47 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| nuz wrote:
| Almost rorschach painting levels of ambiguity in that thing
| talldayo wrote:
| "A pig? Looks like two bears high-fiving to me."
| red_trumpet wrote:
| I'd say the pig is somewhat recognizable, with four legs and a
| tail. The humans on the other hand...
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> This animal figure is represented as a pictorial outline
| shown in side (profile) view with an infill pattern consisting
| of painted strokes or lines. It is therefore consistent in
| style with the visual convention used to represent pigs and
| other animals in the dated Late Pleistocene rock art of South
| Sulawesi, including at Leang Bulu' Sipong 4_ [1]
|
| They base the interpretation off of other cave art in the area
| that's better preserved [2] and the fact that it's missing
| facial details of other animals found in the local cave art
| [3].
|
| There's usually other context in archaeological speak, like
| buried bones and fossils that limit the possibilities.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7
|
| [2]
| https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/bfnews/uploads/sulawesi_p...
|
| [3] https://cdn.sci.news/images/enlarge6/image_7902_1e-Leang-
| Bul...
| swayvil wrote:
| I heard that pigs, pre-selective-breeding, were pretty cute
|
| https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/images/uploads/_fullla...
| winety wrote:
| Wild piglets are very cute [1], adult wild pigs less so [2].
|
| [1]:
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20180429-155847_Fris...
| [2]:
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ausgewachsenes_Wilds...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| We used to have warthogs in Africa.
|
| Def not-cute.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warthog
| datameta wrote:
| They have an unbelievably small brain case for a medium-
| sized quadruped mammal
| usrusr wrote:
| The head of the pig in the cave is such a nice "friendly pink
| pig" cartoon of a modern breed that I do feel like it would be
| more appropriate to call it "drawing of a creature that happens
| to look deceptively like a drawing of a pig" instead of
| "drawing of a pig". Far more appropriate.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| > it would show humans at the time had the capacity for abstract
| thinking
|
| This was 50,000 years ago, they were Homo Sapiens, we are 200,000
| years old. We can see abstract thinking through the advancement
| of our early tools and through linguistic studies that trace
| lineage of abstract language patterns to points in time using
| archeological knowledge of migration periods. So this confirms it
| further I guess.
| Sharlin wrote:
| The "Upper Paleolithic Revolution" hypothesis proposes that
| around 50,000 years ago, there was some sort of a qualitative
| jump in human behavioral complexity, based on the fact that
| around that time we start seeing clear evidence of cultural and
| symbolic behavior such as rock art and burial rituals, and also
| of a period of rapid innovation in toolbuilding. Critics of the
| hypothesis counter that the apparent jump could just as well be
| merely a selection effect caused by the scarcity of evidence.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity
| AnonHP wrote:
| > This was 50,000 years ago, they were Homo Sapiens, we are
| 200,000 years old.
|
| I don't know enough about the migration of human species and
| subspecies. Was this concluded in the article that they were
| Home Sapiens and not Neanderthals or Denisovans (or interbred
| between these and Homo Sapiens)? The latter two were around
| 50,000 years ago.
| throwup238 wrote:
| There's quite a bit of evidence that Homo sapiens,
| denisovans, and floresiensis might have coexisted in
| Sundaland (the land mass containing much of Indonesia before
| the oceans rose and created the SEA islands) at the time but
| the cave art is more consistent with Homo sapiens in the rest
| of the world than either of the other two. That's the default
| conclusion until more artwork conclusively belonging to other
| species is discovered.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| denisovans, neanderthals, and their hybrids are not out of the
| picture for that time period and location
| lkrubner wrote:
| The distance between the known examples of early art also further
| pushes back the date when humans became capable of art. Unless
| you believe that people from Indonesia painted this art 51,000
| years ago and then migrated to Europe, and thus brought art to
| Europe via migration, then instead you would have to believe that
| the artists who eventually arose in Europe and Indonesia had a
| common ancestor who was capable of art. If we have art in
| Indonesia at 51,000 years ago, and art in Europe about 35,000
| years ago, and if the last common ancestor of those 2 populations
| lived 100,000 years ago (hypothetically) then you'd have to
| believe that humans have been capable of this kind of art for at
| least 100,000 years.
| addaon wrote:
| ... or that the ability to create art arose independently in
| two separated populations. As for example writing did, many
| millennia later.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Writing arose independently. The cognitive ability necessary
| to invent writing may have existing for much longer
| criley2 wrote:
| We call that anatomically modern human or early modern
| human, and we have fossils going back over 300,000 years.
|
| An infant from 300k years ago, if brought to modern times,
| should grow up and be capable of everything modern humans
| are.
| dash2 wrote:
| _Behaviourally_ modern is thought to be a bit more
| recent, isn 't it... partly because of evidence like art!
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Yes exactly. Though I would expect that they may be more
| neurotypical on average than modern humans
| RoyalHenOil wrote:
| Out of curiosity, why do you think that? My instinct is
| that the selection pressure against autism would not have
| been meaningfully stronger back then (and might actually
| have been weaker, due to people living in much smaller
| communities).
| mkoubaa wrote:
| I think people who are eager and happy to do repetitive
| tasks are adapted towards agriculture as opposed to
| hunting.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| There are a lot of highly repetitive tasks in a hunter
| and gatherer lifestyle (e.g. gathering, making tools and
| clothes, tracking, plus all of the memorizing that comes
| with a non-written cultural tradition). I'm sure someone
| with a deep special interest in horse behavior would have
| been extremely useful for groups that subsist on the wild
| horses of the European tundra. Same for people with ADHD,
| someone who is highly motivated by novelty and prone to
| risk-taking should be pretty useful for finding new
| hunting and gathering opportunities and adapting to
| changing environments. You won't find out there are plump
| tasty BBQ birds on that island in the distance if you
| don't brave the journey.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| In any case this isn't exactly a testable hypothesis
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| This ignores any evolution that is not present in a
| skeleton. So, their brains could have been very different
| from ours, but we have no way of knowing.
| bloopernova wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocast
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| The cranial vault is an open space surrounded by bone.
| Yes, some evolutionary brain changes would reflect
| themselves in the endocast, but would all major brain
| changes do that?
| dsign wrote:
| > . So, their brains could have been very different from
| ours, but we have no way of knowing.
|
| Great point. I like to consider birds for questions like
| this one.
|
| Bird brains come in a relatively set range of sizes, but
| in a wider range of skills[^1], and hominids living in
| earlier times may have definitely needed different
| skills. Birds have had many millions of years to evolve.
| To remain flying they needed to keep their bodies small,
| nimble and light and they can't grow larger heads, so
| evolution works within those constraints. Now, there are
| generalists among birds, and even tool users, but who
| knows how long it took them to evolve their "3 nanometer
| process."
|
| On the other hand, hominid's brains are very plastic,
| which can be due to evolution saving on "design
| optimization time" (and we haven't been around for as
| many millions of years as birds). A figurative way to
| explain it is this: to fish at the local pond, it's more
| economical to buy two general purpose computers ("have
| more general-purpose thinking matter") and to pay for
| their upkeep than to design a new computer from scratch.
| Later, if you decide to live from honey-farming, your
| computing could be used for that as well. You may need an
| order of magnitude or two more fish or honey to pay for
| your higher mental elasticity running in a sub-optimal
| "300 nanometer process", but it's a small price to pay
| for not being hostage to a fixed ecological niche.
|
| So, I bet that humans that had made it in a short period
| of time from Africa to a different continent where highly
| adaptable, and they could probably understand most things
| we do today.
|
| [^1]: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-neuroscientists-
| uncover-secret...
| moralestapia wrote:
| Wait, why couldn't the Indonesians migrate to Europe in a span
| of 20,000 years.
| mseepgood wrote:
| Google Maps says it takes about 5 months on foot from Borneo
| to Lascaux. So it could have been the same person who left at
| New Year's and was back home by Christmas.
| tim333 wrote:
| Plus you'd need a boat. Borneo is about a hundred miles
| from the mainland.
| bleuarff wrote:
| Not sure that was the case 50ky ago. That was during a
| glacial period, sea level was probably 100+m below
| current level.
| nkrisc wrote:
| No, not in the general timeframe being discussed. Most is
| SEA was connected by land to continental Asia. Even North
| America and Asia were connected by Beringia. It's
| possible you could have even walked to Australia from
| Asia, though I might be mistaken about that.
| doitLP wrote:
| Sure with excellent roads and 99% of predators gone and
| most importantly, a reason to do it.
| aksss wrote:
| Predators including the human variety.
| nkrisc wrote:
| I'm not aware of studies involving radiocarbon dating of
| paved roads, so I can't say conclusively, but I believe the
| leading hypothesis is that they didn't exist 50,000 years
| ago.
| croisillon wrote:
| some kind of exchange program for artists to residence in
| various places in the world, i like your hypothesis!
| dekhn wrote:
| It's not impossible, but the mainstream theories such as 'Out
| of Africa' and most anthropological evidence suggests that
| the flow was from Africa to Indonesia and Africa to Europe,
| and not "back from Indonesia". But see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indonesia and
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#History and
| https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/science/polynesian-
| ancest... as well as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregio
| nal_origin_of_modern...
|
| Europe is mostly believed to have been settled via Africa,
| the Middle East, and Western Asia.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Europe
|
| (I am absolutely amazed by all the various humanity and
| technology origins. It's almost as if there is a direct path
| from the first person who used teeth and fingernails to pry a
| rock and fiber to make a spear to kill an animal and use its
| bones to make high quality tools for knapping stone, all the
| way to the lathe, which was the tool that bootstrapped the
| industrial revolution).
| lukebuehler wrote:
| I've never heard of the idea that the lathe bootstrapped
| the industrial revolution. Can you say more, and any
| pointers to read?
| rdlw wrote:
| There's a great Machine Thinking video about the history
| of the lathe that makes this point:
| https://youtu.be/djB9oK6pkbA
| dekhn wrote:
| I'm not sure there's any really good book that furthers
| this argument (possibly The Perfectionists or One Good
| Turn?) but it sort of becomes obvious when you read about
| Maudsley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Maudslay
| and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe)
| and Wilkinson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkins
| on_(industrialist) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John
| _Wilkinson_(industrialist)...
|
| the cannon boring machine was what enabled the efficient
| steam engines which unlocked large mechanical shops
| (along with high quality cannons), while the lathe
| enabled precision machine tool making. I am sure many
| things had to happen around the same time for the
| revolution but IMHO the lathe was the true linchpin
| dekhn wrote:
| Based on a number of lines of evidence, I would suspect nearly
| everything related to early art (including abstraction) was
| done in africa first and radiated from there (from the Out of
| Africa hypothesis, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_Afr
| ican_origin_of_moder...)
|
| The history of anthropology is full of pushing events back as
| we improve our methods.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| The way they keep pushing things back such neat round numbers
| makes it feel like when tech evangelists say "Oh yeah we'll have
| everyone in self driving cars / BTC at $1M / safe AGI in 5 years
| / 10 years / 20 years / etc."
|
| I know there's science behind the dating of these artifacts, but
| it just feels that way to me.
| kergonath wrote:
| The tidy round numbers come from the uncertainty of the
| datation method. It makes no sense to say, e.g. that they are
| 32049 years old when the dates are accurate to, say, 2000
| years. The fact that uncertainty is usually not properly
| reported is a tragedy in the scientific literature, and
| unfortunate in vulgarisation.
| pikseladam wrote:
| radiocarbon is mostly just guess and most of the headlines are
| just there for clicks. radiocarbon dating is shows a range like
| 2000 to 50000 years. headlines takes 50K. radiocarbon date is
| also acknowledged to be the age of the material, not the date
| of the manufacture of an item. if item is a rock, mostly they
| don't know when the art is manufactured.
|
| probably they asked how old is the art and somebody said "it
| could bew oldest ever found" hence the headline.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| This is exactly what everyone _must_ keep in mind when
| reading any pop-science article ever.
| smokel wrote:
| There appears to be some more information here, also on the
| dating method used (which apparently is laser ablation U-series
| analysis):
|
| https://news.griffith.edu.au/2024/07/04/cave-painting-in-ind...
|
| I'm not entirely convinced about the human-like figures, though.
| Does anyone have more background knowledge on how one can jump to
| that conclusion?
|
| Edit: found the publication in Nature. The picture circulating in
| the media is a tracing of the actual painting, which is nearly
| impossible to see on the actual rock. Enjoy!
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> I 'm not entirely convinced about the human-like figures,
| though. Does anyone have more background knowledge on how one
| can jump to that conclusion?_
|
| I think they're basing it off another painting in South
| Sulawesi where the human forms are a little clearer [1]. It
| might be some kind of "protostyle" where they draw the animal
| much bigger than the humans hunting them.
|
| [1]
| https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/2473/product...
| smokel wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Note that that example is from the same
| research group, and also had its contrast artificially
| enhanced.
|
| I find it a bit odd that the humans are so small and lack
| details, whereas the boar even has fur, two distinguishable
| toes, and seems to bend its legs correctly.
|
| Then again, I have yet to publish something in Nature, so I'm
| probably a bit too skeptical for this game :)
| throwup238 wrote:
| You're not wrong to be skeptical. These papers are written
| for other archaeologists who have a lot more perspective on
| both the uncertainty inherent in the field and the games
| academics play thanks to publish or perish. They don't need
| the caveats repeated every paper like the rest of us.
|
| The people might have been added later by a less skilled
| artist or even just a child doodling, they could have been
| drawn with more detail in another other material that
| didn't survive but sketched with the longer lasting stuff
| underneath, or they could be artifacts of the process they
| use to increase contrast, etc. There's a bunch of
| possibilities but authors will usually gravitate towards
| the interesting conclusion.
|
| That said, animals drawn with higher detail than people is
| almost a trope in archaeology. They probably held a
| spiritual significance and the hunters would have spent a
| lot of time studying them.
| permo-w wrote:
| I'd like to see generative AI try to reconstruct the full image
| mock-possum wrote:
| Give it to that lady who 'restored' the painting of Jesus,
| let's see what she comes up with.
| brink wrote:
| That's not how AI works. It would distort it to match the
| examples it's been trained on.
| discreteevent wrote:
| Exactly. The AI shows an abstraction of an abstraction (to
| the AI its all just bits and patterns) but the thing that's
| immediately fascinating about the painting is that it is
| echoing someones experience in the flesh of a wild pig so
| long ago. The stuff about "humans ability to express
| abstraction" is very much in second place for me.
| permo-w wrote:
| the replies to this comment are some of the least brain-
| intensive pieces of information you could ever come up
| with. do you think generative AI has not been trained on
| images of pigs?
| permo-w wrote:
| which would be precisely the idea.
|
| I think you may be struggling with the word "works". and
| "exampled". and perhaps even "trained"
|
| vague image + entire corpus of human imagery = ?
| furyofantares wrote:
| Or perhaps they are not struggling with the word
| "reconstruct"
| permo-w wrote:
| it sounds to me like people don't like/are sceptical
| about generative AI, not that they're so expert in the
| area that they can give a valid opinion on whether this
| is possible or useful.
|
| part of the technique that diffusion models use is
| literally to take a vague image of something and then use
| training data to build it into something more clear. this
| whole comment chain is so confidently wrong it's
| unbelievable
| furyofantares wrote:
| Something more clear is totally different than
| reconstructing.
|
| If an artists rendition of what it might have looked like
| would be useful, then genAI may be cheaper for that task.
| But we wouldn't call an artist's rendition of what it
| might have looked like "reconstructing".
|
| And you couldn't be much more wrong about how much I like
| and use generative AI.
| rcyeh wrote:
| I speculate your comment has been downvoted because you haven't
| explained why you'd "like to see generative AI try to
| reconstruct the full image".
|
| What would be the purpose of that reconstruction? To help
| visualize the most likely original scene using a contemporary-
| biased lens? Why would we want that?
|
| Imagine you found a box of macaron sandwich cookie fragments,
| and your model only knows about Oreos. Would such a
| reconstruction have value? Could it also apply inappropriate
| bias?
|
| On the other hand, the right models can be critical. Look at
| how researchers created an image of black holes. [0] This is a
| reconstruction, and it is an average, and it relies on physics
| models; but those assumptions are in some ways more transparent
| than generative AI.
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/Ol_SB5Zfv-Y?si=O6CL-kjDcgBB0bWm ,
| 4-minute overview
| dash2 wrote:
| "The discovery pushes back the time that modern humans first
| showed the capacity for creative thought."
|
| Hmm. The very simplest model you could have of this would be the
| German Tank Problem [1]. If discoveries of X (e.g. art, hunting
| tools, whatever) are made at random, i.e. evidence of X is not
| more likely to be destroyed as time passes, then you are sampling
| times from a distribution with a maximum of the first invention
| of X, and the best estimator for this is (m-1)(k-1)/(k-2) where m
| is the oldest discovery and k is the number of discoveries.
|
| In particular, a new record for oldest art will almost always
| push your estimate up (as long as k is large so (k-1)/(k-2) is
| about 1). But you should _also_ be taking into account all the
| discoveries of art which _aren 't_ records. This matters
| especially when k is not yet big. This page only lists 30-40
| pieces of paleolithic art [2].
|
| A better model would take into account that older stuff is less
| likely to be discovered because e.g. rocks erode. I wonder if
| anyone has done this.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art
| eafer wrote:
| That's for uniform distributions. We don't know the
| distribution here, that's part of the problem, but I would
| expect early cave art to be more sparse and worse preserved.
| adolph wrote:
| What are your priors for that expectation?
|
| Wouldn't it make just as much sense that once a site reaches
| X age it will likely make it to 10X since the conditions that
| allowed it to get to X are slow to change?
| dekhn wrote:
| It's commonly observed in anthropology that we keep pushing
| back the dates for all sorts of technologies as the methods
| improve and more cave sources are found.
|
| See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
| api wrote:
| I was listening to a podcast about Native American history once
| and it just hit me: of course we think all the early advanced
| civilizations were in Egypt, Greece, etc. It's because they
| built with stone in arid regions.
|
| North American native civilizations had trade, roads, writing,
| libraries, complex systems of law and jurisprudence, etc., but
| they built with the materials that were most abundant to them:
| wood, animal hides, bone, etc. Wood is an amazingly versatile
| material so if you have a lot of it there's no incentive to
| develop advanced stone construction or even a lot of
| metallurgy. The only exception would be civilizations like the
| Maya and Aztec that appeared to have monument cults, but not
| all advanced civilizations have monument cults.
|
| Wood degrades over time though, and things like writing don't
| last anywhere near as long in a wet humid climate.
|
| There could easily have been incredible works of literature and
| philosophy in all kinds of places in ancient human history.
| They're just gone.
|
| I worry sometimes about our own civilization making everything
| digital. One mega solar flare and our collective cultural
| memory is as gone as the Iroquois writings on animal hides.
| Future civilizations will know nothing of ceiling cat.
| detourdog wrote:
| I think the large earth monuments were part of successful
| agricultural projects. The stone work was to keep the
| cultural organized and focused. The most successful left
| large stone constructions.
| api wrote:
| Dubai is far more architecturally impressive than London,
| New York, or Los Angeles. Now compare their city GDPs. That
| was kind of my point.
|
| Some degree of excess wealth is clearly a necessary
| condition for large scale stone monument construction, but
| the inverse doesn't hold. A society could have a lot of
| excess wealth and lack any cult, state mandate, or other
| construct to drive stone monument building.
| detourdog wrote:
| The problem with Dubai is that it won't have the staying
| power that Egypt or even Rome boasts.
|
| It's definitely tied to economics. I think the big
| difference is that today our values are different and are
| monuments refl ct the difference.
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| "These hand paintings in Sumpang Bita cave in South Sulawesi were
| once thought to be among the oldest paintings in the world at
| 39,000 years"
|
| Why are these cave paintings with hands all over the world? It is
| kind of ominous to think of the reasons and conditions why they
| are found everywhere.
| dekhn wrote:
| My understanding is that hand paintings like this fall out
| fairly naturally- after collecting and grinding the iron oxide
| for paint (there's a great but now unavailable Google+ post by
| Yonatan Zunger that explains why barns are red for the same
| reason: supernovas), you want to use some sort of mask or
| template, and a hand is pretty much the most available thing
| for early societies.
| wayeq wrote:
| ah Google+, speaking of archeology..
| dekhn wrote:
| Fortunately, Yonatan (who was in fact the main engineer
| working on Google+) reposted it to Medium:
| https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/how-the-price-of-paint-
| is-...
|
| After he wrote it I pointed out most historical barns in
| many parts of the US are white, using whitewash
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewash) which doesn't
| really change the conclusion of the article, which itself
| is a masterclass in explaining the root cause of
| metallicity in the universe.
| bee_rider wrote:
| It seems like a fun way to make a little mark that represents
| yourself.
| OJFord wrote:
| What are you thinking of? I thought those were by far the
| coolest, even if not oldest. (I haven't seen that before,
| didn't realise it was so common as you say.) Partly because
| they are absolutely identifiable in a way that the humans and
| pig.. really isn't to a layman, but also it's just so
| _personal_ , much more of a 'connection', to me anyway, to the
| person who did it. The 'someone was actually there tens of
| thousands of years ago, painting around their hand, and now I'm
| looking at it' feeling hits a lot harder.
| einpoklum wrote:
| Forget the cave art, that place is just gorgeous!
|
| Sulawesi: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sulawesi&iax=images&ia=images
| chilling wrote:
| pictures from internet mostly don't represent an accurate
| reality (in Indonesia is even more true than everywhere else).
| The other thing about Sulawesi is that the trasportation there
| is horrible and very time consuming. It's also not really
| touristic so better to bring your local friend with you.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| If you want to be immortal as an artist, paint your works on cave
| walls, for that deep time gallery.
|
| It would be cool to have a history painting, of all that happened
| on earth as we know it today. Similar to the empires history
| painted in the foundation in a cave. All those discoveries, all
| those triumphs and failures. One huge picture.
|
| It would also make sense to search for similar painted caves near
| caves where such paintings are discovered, expecting filled up
| cave entrances and collapsed entrances (erosion, ocean, etc.) .
| Goto outdo the Johnosons next door. Even back then.
| mharig wrote:
| "Something seems to have happened around 50,000 years ago,
| shortly after which all other species of human such as
| Neanderthals and the so-called Hobbit died out."
|
| Isn't the current estimate, that Neanderhals and Danisovans died
| out around 45000 years ago? Or does he refer only to the region
| of the cave? And the Homo floresiensis died out 10000 years ago
| (or 100 years ago, or he still exists, if some Anthropologists
| are right).
|
| And what I do not understand about the cave archeology: nobody
| who lives as a nomadic hunter & gatherer lives in a cave. The
| climate inside is near unbearable if you are accustomed to free
| air. Maybe one can stay a little time in the mouth of a cave.
| When the weather conditions outside are as ugly as they can get.
| Or if the population density got so bad, that an easy to defend
| place is necessary. The findings IMO are more probable a result
| of population dynamics than brain development.
| rdlw wrote:
| Homo floriensis appears to have died out around 50k years ago:
| https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35930979
|
| And isn't 45k around 50k? That seems like a reasonable
| statement to me.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| The human body and the human mind are perfectly fitted to one
| another. They co-evolved.
|
| Any fundamental change in the human brain would imply a
| fundamental change in the human form, to enable acting on the
| enhanced understanding. Otherwise, the enhanced understanding
| would be useless for survival.
|
| The contrapositive would mean that for as long as the human form
| has been about the same, human ingenuity and creativity have also
| remained about the same.
|
| If you want to locate when human creativity and ingenuity began,
| it will have been at or before the basic structure of the hands,
| larynx, feet, eyes, etc. came to be.
| malkosta wrote:
| Curiosity: in Brazil, Serra da Capivara National Park, there are
| painting form 30000 years ago and artifacts from 50000 years
| ago...which challenges the theory that man came to america 12000
| years ago via bering strait.
|
| Source:
| https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parque_nacional_de_la_Sierra_d...
| ojo-rojo wrote:
| How did humans cross these oceans and seas 50 thousand years ago?
| To land on the Indonesian islands, South Pacific islands,
| Australia, New Zealand... Did they have massive ships that we'll
| never know about? Did they learn how to sail? Was it just small
| rafts and canoes?
|
| Oh, the sea-faring stories these people must have told.
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