[HN Gopher] Monumental rock art: humans thrived in Arab. Desert ...
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Monumental rock art: humans thrived in Arab. Desert during
Pleistocene-Holocene
Author : ano-ther
Score : 49 points
Date : 2025-10-04 17:25 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| encyclopedism wrote:
| Absolutely fascinating. I'm surprised by the quality. Indicative
| of both a keen eye and a fine skill for art.
| c420 wrote:
| This isn't meant as a criticism of you personally, but rather
| of the general tendency to label all petroglyphs and
| pictographs as "(rock) art." There's no evidence that these
| were viewed that way by their creators, and using that term can
| bias how we interpret them
| MisterTea wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroglyph
|
| "A petroglyph is an image created by removing part of a rock
| surface by incising, picking, carving, or abrading, as a form
| of rock art."
| jhbadger wrote:
| I think the argument is there is a distinction to be made
| between signs that were made for practical purposes (as a
| sort of proto-writing) versus ones that were made to be
| pretty. We don't obviously know why these signs were made,
| but the the hypothesis that they were there to guide
| travelers to water sources suggests the former.
| bawolff wrote:
| Why not both? A lot of art has practical purposes.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > practical purposes (as a sort of proto-writing) versus
| ones that were made to be pretty.
|
| Why not both? It's obvious some effort was put into
| carving the figures as they look pretty to me. I am sure
| some people were better than others at making rock
| carvings making them artists IMO.
| nkrisc wrote:
| > I think the argument is there is a distinction to be
| made between signs that were made for practical purposes
| (as a sort of proto-writing) versus ones that were made
| to be pretty.
|
| That still fails to distinguish between "art" and "not-
| art". Your faulty assumption is that art can not serve a
| practical purpose.
| colechristensen wrote:
| "art" as a separate concept which is only for expression or
| decoration or things along those lines is relatively modern
| robgibbons wrote:
| When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green
| and gold, Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched
| with a stick in the mold; And the first rude sketch that the
| world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, Till the Devil
| whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
|
| -- Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum of the Workshops
| tristramb wrote:
| +1 for quoting Kipling in 2025
| hnhg wrote:
| You're right, it's not art until the artist has shown at a
| reputable gallery and sold their first piece to a collector.
| Muromec wrote:
| Was the climate different back then? How can one thrive in the
| desert
| proxysna wrote:
| People lived in arid places for as long we have existed.
| Civilizations rose and fell in deserts. Depicting these places
| as barren lifeless voids is a relatively new thing usually used
| to minimize the impact of whatever the current power is doing
| there (i.e. extraction, murder, exploitation). There is a good
| book about that "Deserts are not empty".
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Wow, what a tangent! The Sahara is extremely inhospitable and
| was harsh enough to separate human populations for long
| enough that it lead to racial differentiation between sub-
| Saharan Africans and north Africans.
| proxysna wrote:
| Yeah, because clearly Sahara is the only desert on Earth.
| And ofc, all of Sahara is like that through and through.
| libraryatnight wrote:
| In Arizona one example is the Hohokam:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hohokam
|
| They built canals for farming and understood how to use wild
| plants. Other cultures ( Akimel O'odham for one) are also
| interesting to read about how they lived.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Hohokam and the O'odham are related in much the same way the
| US is related to the British empire. One descends from the
| other.
| profsummergig wrote:
| I've read/heard that the Sahara was a rainforest around 6,000 BCE
| (or at least the area around the Great Pyramids was).
|
| Why do we believe that what is now Saudi Arabia was a desert in
| 11,000 BCE?
| sligor wrote:
| it was greener (grassland, savannas) but definitely not a rain
| forest. And in fact it was also the same for Arabia. More
| grassland and savannas than today.
|
| But it was only partial: there was some desert area too. They
| were just not a large and mostly very dry desert like today.
| ijk wrote:
| Not rainforest, but rather savanna [1].
|
| The Arabian desert is technically considered to be part of the
| Sahara, climate-wise, and participes in the same cycle [2].
|
| This article is about researching evidence for ehat those
| transitions looked like, focusing on evidence that dates around
| the end of that particular dry period, pre-Holocene.
|
| > Prior to the onset of the Holocene humid period, little is
| known about the relatively arid period spanning the end of the
| Pleistocene and the earliest Holocene in Arabia. An absence of
| dated archaeological sites has led to a presumed absence of
| human occupation of the Arabian interior. However,
| superimpositions in the rock art record appear to show earlier
| phases of human activity, prior to the arrival of domesticated
| livestock25.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
|
| [2]:
| https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/green...
| roughly wrote:
| The panels at Jeba Misa caught me for a second - they reminded me
| of graffiti on high buildings and overpasses and the like.
|
| As an anthropology aficionado, I'm supposed to say we don't know
| the purpose of these artifacts and any attempt to guess would be
| cultural projection, but privately I'm taking some comfort in the
| human connection.
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