The Humanoid Stain: Art lessons from our cave-dwelling ancestors | Hacker News Reader

The Humanoid Stain: Art lessons from our cave-dwelling ancestors

thebaffler.com

37 pointsprismatic7 comments

If you were hoping for an insightful piece written by someone with an archeological background on the subject, or even avocational interest in the subject of rock art, you'll want to keep looking. This piece is borderline ignorant, wildly factually inaccurate, and full of strange conclusions and opinion. Pass.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sometimes a refutation cost too much time/energy. His dismissal without arguments is better than nothing, it's an heuristic that tell me I shouldn't risk spending my precious time reading such a risky article.

Just read the article and it seems fine to me. No idea what OP is going on about.

I agree with dang and the HN guidelines. It would be useful if you could correct some of the major factual inaccuracies, and also give us a link to something that you think is more insightful.

Also, you might see if you can figure out why it was necessary for us to explain all this to you.

I am inclined to agree, for philosophical ponderings of cave art we have much better[1] options[2]. Of course, it's no surprise that rock art is a topic that people can't help but write about, for 40,000 years our ancestors invested significant effort into producing it.

1: https://poets.org/text/introduction-juniper-fuse

2: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/23/first-impressi...

I partially agree with @notadoc that it's basically not good, but also his criticisms could be fleshed out.

As for faces, well, the very jean clottes mentioned in the article explored chauvet, and the lions there (http://thestorybehindthefaces.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04...) had such odd faces that clottes (or someone) speculated that they may have represented particular (edit: I meant specific) people. They're surely very odd for lions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com