Animal painting found in cave is 44k years old
bbc.com
bbc.com
It blows my mind to think that another human species walked on this same planet and drew this art. To me, that's as profound as the discovery, if ever, of another intelligent species in the universe.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/22/neanderthals...
Also worth considering, is the art of Chauvet Cave and the excellent Werner Herzog documentary about it. The artistry is incredible. It stands up to anything we could draw today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave
This art from when I last read is considered to have been done around the time that Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals were both present in Europe. It's incredible to see that these people who lived in ancient France where drawing wild animals such as Rhinos and Lions.
I'm not saying it wasn't made by a Neanderthal, and I don't think it's unlikely that Neanderthals made cave paintings, but there were human expeditions out of Africa during that time[0].
> To me, that's as profound as the discovery, if ever, of another intelligent species in the universe.
For me, the fact that Neanderthals are so closely related to us removes some of the amazement. If octopuses were making paintings on the ocean floor, that would seem more comparable to finding aliens doing the same thing.
[0]: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/01/oldest-human...
It's not so much about them being closely related. Rather it's the idea that a mind so distant from my own, that lived a life so alien from my own drew that. I find that deeply fascinating.
The fact that they are lost to us just makes them seem even more interesting, the fact that we can never really know, we can never really understand why they drew that, why they took the time out of their harsh and unforgiving lives to draw some lines on a wall that one day, a different species would ponder over.
I think I'm using the former as a proxy for the latter. If Neanderthals were more distantly related then I would imagine their minds to be more distant from my own. If less, then less. I imagine that my mind is much closer to that of a chimpanzee than that of an octopus, so I would be less amazed by similar behavior in the former than the latter. This isn't to say that I find no amazement in what little we know of Neanderthal culture, just that it's nowhere near the amazement I would find in seeing a truly alien culture. They're on the same continuum, but not at the same point on that continuum.
Well, genetically they were not much different, close enough for interbreeding.
But their mind ... and culture was probably very alien to us.
My point was actually that the DNA difference probably does not lead to a very different thinking. But different culture does.
I can't even imagine the impact they would have had on the evolution of our culture and religions if they'd stuck around. The "winning" religions hinge on humans having dominion over all other animals in clear-cut ways.
Might belief systems like Buddhism or Jainism be more hegemonic if there had been a bridge species to tell us we're not so clearly special. And if they'd stuck around, would we still be having such a nail-biting time threading the needle on this extinction event that's predicated on our dominant cultures seeing nature as "other.
Has this been proven? I mean both conditions, ie: that everyone of sub-Saharan descent having no Neanderthal DNA? Also, the percentages are really low, eg: my friend from China did 23andme and his Neanderthal percentage was 0.1%.
There are also people that have far more than the average (2-3%) - for every person like your friend there are other with way more.
What does it mean to be a separate species if you're interbreeding in a significant way?
What does it mean to have n٪ Neanderthal DNA if that DNA is found in a significant proportion of "modern humans"?
If 'Neanderthal DNA' is found in a huge percentage of 'modern humans', on the face of if, it seems to me the notion that Neanderthals should be considered a separate species is the preposition that seems somewhat/increasingly spurious...
There is evidence that the offspring of the Neanderthal hybrids follow Haldane's Rule [1].
Species is a squishy concept. You might be amazed at how much intense arguing that continues to be about what delineates two closely related species. I think it's hard to consider Neanderthals a separate species, given what we now know thanks to ancient DNA. I think the term sub-species makes more sense.
> What does it mean to have n٪ Neanderthal DNA if that DNA is found in a significant proportion of "modern humans"?
It means that before the point at which the lineage that we call "humans" interbreed with the lineage that we call "neanderthal", these particular pieces of DNA were found only in the neanderthal lineage.
I admit my sort of base assumption is that simple quantitative metrics such as n% African/n% Neanderthal peddled by the likes of online genetics testing labs are grossly oversimplified at best and probably borderline meaningless at worst...
Regarding ancestry testing: it’s pretty valid, in general. DNA extracted from ancient human remains has completely revolutionized our understanding of recent, ancient, and extremely ancient human history. The online testing companies use the same methods and data sets. The way they present results boils a lot of different stuff down to a single number, so nuance and some fidelity is inevitably lost, but that’s always an issue when you try and make a nuanced subject understandable to laypeople. But, generally speaking, if an online test says that your DNA is 5% Neanderthal whereas someone else’s is 1%, or that you’re 20% Western European and 40% Eastern European, that is probably a valid way to present things.
Yes, great question. Pheasants and chickens can breed and produce fertile offspring, along with many other combinations. Are they different species? Most say they are, but why given matching chromosomes?
They look dramatically different and are from different areas, true, but just like Native American Chihuahuas and Greek Harehounds, both which we claim to be dogs. They definitely don't look the same to me, or to most people.
As far as Homo Sapiens Neanderthals goes, well... yes, some still say that's actually Homo Neanderthals, but a lot now agree it's not really a different species. Source of quite a few bitter fights in academia though.
As for what it means if some of us have Neanderthal DNA and some don’t is some of us are a hybrid species [1].
My guess is that when Homo sapien met the people who live in caves, they got to talking about africa and one human was trying to explain rhinocerous and after a while they got frustrated and said "no you're still not getting it. Give me that ink over there, I'll show you."
And then they drew the rhino and also a group of people, for scale.
Err, what?
Edit:
To elaborate, this strikes me as completely ridiculous.
We're only talking about thousands of years, this is not a long time.
Just imagine if every person living in the united states alone were born sequentially, and that the average lifetime were 60 years. There's over 300M people in this country alone. That's what, 18B years? Even hundreds of thousands of years isn't a long time.
If anything's profound it's how quickly things have drastically changed. Not how impressive it is to find art in caves from less than a million years ago.
[1]: ~100B people ever[2] * ~50 years of life span = ~5T person years.
It's not uncommon for two related but different species to be capable of interbreeding with viable offspring. That doesn't detract from distinct speciation.
You will find in various sources, the names homo sapiens neanderthalensis and homo neanderthalensis, it would appear Wikipedia prefers the latter, which is of course conclusive.
What a species is, exactly, is the biggest spook in biology.
And if they're not the same species, it presents an interesting problem, as it would mean many humans today aren't 100% the same 'species'...
Taxonomy is not a settled question, and I'm not trying to imply it is. But neanderthals exhibited significantly different traits from humans. There is probably a case to be made that modern homo sapiens are a subspecies of neanderthals and another hominid. Hybridization can (and frequently does) result in new species distinct from the forebear species, after many generations. But speciation doesn't preclude interbreeding.
Take the Greek legends of Hercules defeating the Nemean Lion, Nemea is in present-day Greece.
Well, it's certainly something to think about, but I have to say that it is surely nowhere, absolutely nowhere at all near as mind blowingly profound as the discovery of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be.
Pure calcite does not contain uranium. How do we know the calcite didn't form in an environment already containing traces of old decaying uranium and thus trapped both thorium and uranium as the crystal formed?
Edit: I think I've figured it out (from the wiki[1])
> Thorium is not soluble in natural water under conditions found at or near the surface of the earth, so materials grown in or from this water do not usually contain thorium.[citation needed] In contrast, uranium is soluble to some extent in all natural water, so any material that precipitates or is grown from such water also contains trace uranium, typically at levels of between a few parts per billion and few parts per million by weight.
So what I'm guessing is happening is this: Running water is dissolving uranium and going down a cave wall. The water contains no thorium because thorium is not soluble and the water is running (i.e. by the time the uranium decays it will not be on the wall anymore). Calcite forms using the minerals in the running water, and traps the dissolved uranium. Only then can it decay inside the crystal into thorium.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium%E2%80%93thorium_dating
"Mate" ?
Analytically the UK is actually higher I believe, but they are just to cool to brag about it - https://onemilliontweetmap.com/?search=cunt (Possibly a bit off atm because of elections)
The NPR story quotes one of the authors of a paper published today in Nature... but then brings in an unrelated graduate student to say, without evidence, that painting was invented somewhere other than Southeast Asia: "Personally, I think ... Africa."
"While not everyone in the field agrees, and no figurative cave art in Africa has been dated older than the Indonesian works, Brumm says he has the same gut feeling."
Makes you wonder if future archaeologists would have the same ore and wonder at finding a McDonalds menu board buried some 50,000 years on from now. When you think of it like that, you wonder what people of the time would make of interpretations of them and how accurate they are.
EDIT - Spilling error
I rather think they have religious meaning.
"The original cultural meaning and purpose of these artefacts is not known. It has frequently been suggested that they may have served a ritual or symbolic function. There are widely varying and speculative interpretations of their use or meaning: they have been seen as religious figures,[5] an expression of health and fertility, grandmother goddesses or as self-depictions by female artists"
The secret of why some savage tribe worships monkeys or the moon is not to be found even by travelling among those savages and taking down their answers in a note-book... The answer to the riddle is in England; it is in London; nay, it is in his own heart. When a man has discovered why men in Bond Street wear black hats he will at the same moment have discovered why men in Timbuctoo wear red feathers. The mystery in the heart of some savage war-dance should not be studied in books of scientific travel; it should be studied at a subscription ball. If a man desires to find out the origins of religions, let him not go to the Sandwich Islands; let him go to church. If a man wishes to know the origin of human society, to know what society, philosophically speaking, really is, let him not go into the British Museum; let him go into society.
This total misunderstanding of the real nature of ceremonial gives rise to the most awkward and dehumanized versions of the conduct of men in rude lands or ages. The man of science, not realizing that ceremonial is essentially a thing which is done without a reason, has to find a reason for every sort of ceremonial, and, as might be supposed, the reason is generally a very absurd one — absurd because it originates not in the simple mind of the barbarian, but in the sophisticated mind of the professor. The learned man will say, for instance, "The natives of Mumbojumbo Land believe that the dead man can eat and will require food upon his journey to the other world. This is attested by the fact that they place food in the grave, and that any family not complying with this rite is the object of the anger of the priests and the tribe." To any one acquainted with humanity this way of talking is topsy-turvy. It is like saying, "The English in the twentieth century believed that a dead man could smell. This is attested by the fact that they always covered his grave with lilies, violets, or other flowers. Some priestly and tribal terrors were evidently attached to the neglect of this action, as we have records of several old ladies who were very much disturbed in mind because their wreaths had not arrived in time for the funeral." It may be of course that savages put food with a dead man because they think that a dead man can eat, or weapons with a dead man because they think that a dead man can fight. But personally I do not believe that they think anything of the kind. I believe they put food or weapons on the dead for the same reason that we put flowers, because it is an exceedingly natural and obvious thing to do. We do not understand, it is true, the emotion which makes us think it obvious and natural; but that is because, like all the important emotions of human existence it is essentially irrational. We do not understand the savage for the same reason that the savage does not understand himself. And the savage does not understand himself for the same reason that we do not understand ourselves either.
The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science. It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite; this mortal has put on immortality. Even what we call our material desires are spiritual, because they are human. Science can analyse a pork-chop, and say how much of it is phosphorus and how much is protein; but science cannot analyse any man's wish for a pork-chop, and say how much of it is hunger, how much custom, how much nervous fancy, how much a haunting love of the beautiful.
There's also caves that feature symbols and hand prints, sometimes without animal drawings. Frequently the animals drawn aren't animals that were actually hunted, and scenes would be drawn describing predation by other animals. Perhaps describing the story of the area, only the main characters aren't humans, but the megafauna dominating the environment.
It's easy to hypothesize, but impossible to ever know the purpose. One thing is true, early humans were artists, painting everything including themselves.
This is truly the age of pure humanity. War was something that had to be invented, and only came about ~10k years ago. We are all descendants of the survivors of war, the most brutal and feared killers are our ancestors; the predisposition towards violence is in our blood. The humans who worked in these caves and elsewhere, consuming migratory reindeer and avoiding larger and more dangerous fauna, our ancestors slaughtered these men and enslaved these women. How different the world might be if war was never waged, it's hard to imagine as we've become so accustomed to constant warfare.
Many historians feel that the neolithic revolution, with the resulting social stratification and development of warfare that has been with us ever since, was the worst development in human history.
I was totally with you up until this point. Modern humans have achieved amazing things, but have also invented whole new catagories of potential self inflicted catastrophies.
We are one nuclear war or environmental collapse away from being a complete failure of a culture, and taking thousands of other species down with us. The biggest modern advances have only just happened, in historical terms, and we've already had some very close calls, with more on the way.
Meanwhile, I suppose a super volcano or a shift to ice age temps would be disastrous for the environment and crop yields, but technology would be our only recourse for dealing with it and adapting to it.
I'll admit, there's trade-offs to modern tech. It's definitely a double-edged sword, and I'm not sure our physiological systems are well-tuned for modern society (i.e. hunting and gathering guaranteed an active lifestyle). But overall, I think it's a positive.
I get the feeling you aren't familiar with Vasily Arkhipov or Stanislav Petrov. Sorry, you will probably feel depressed/sick. I do when I consider these events, and a weird sense of unreality and insanity.
It wasn't government policy that prevented nuclear war, but people disobeying orders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov_(vice_admiral)
Chimps will tear apart rival tribes. Occam's razor would suggest these people would have been just as fearful of outside factors as most animals/tribes.
You are assigning some weird garden of eden analogy, that is not history, but wishful thinking. There is truth that homo sapien is probably the most violent, and perhaps that's also why it won out. Your comment about stick figures is also worthy of examination. But I think the leap to a `pure humanity` whatever that may mean is a bit of a stretch.
We could collapse, nearly entirely disappear and face another genetic bottleneck event, then have to rediscover all of our current society some two or three thousand years in the future and the Universe wouldn't even have ticked a single second in the grand scheme of things.
It's about the geological insignificance of humans, and how we could have done this all several times already and we wouldn't have any idea.
Very vaguely then ~60k years ago was "out of Africa", ~40-30k years ago was "Prehistoric Australasian art flourish", and ~4k years ago was "dawn of known civilizations". Makes you wonder what everyone was getting up to in the mean time... possibly killing off challengers! Nearby species died in the mean time - Flores hobbit[0] ~17k years ago, Red Deer Cave people[1] ~12k years ago.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_floresiensis [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Deer_Cave_people
The resolution of the info graphic is a joke, here is one with better resolution, found by reverse image search: https://www.eltiempo.com/uploads/2019/12/11/5df119644b023.jp...
My guess is that the first paintings were painted much earlier than 44,000 years ago, although most of the older paintings have probably been lost to time.
The art was also not likely limited to caves. Painting on hides, or exposed to the elements would not survive. Caves are ideal conditions for preservation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EQvqbiNg0o
Nice little stabber. I can understand the attack plan.
Slowly reading through it right now, and coming across the OP cave painting piece was interesting. Some rough notes below.
----
Rough timelines & theories:
Theories:
- Aiello & Dunbar "gradual and early" language hypothesis, Pinker, Chomsky
- Bill Noble & Iain Davidson - "sudden and recent"
- Ray Jackendoff (1999) - blend the two above theories, reframe from whether hominids "had language" to "what elements of a language capacity"
- 8 million yrs ago - Great rift valley challenges, birth of mimetic culture (see above)
- 2.5 million yrs ago - Olduvai - Homo habilis
- 2 million yrs ago - transition from mimetic forms to early language/symbolics?
- Jackendoff's development - development of mimetic language
- 300k yrs ago
- under Aiello/Dunbar "gradual and early" theory, we "crossed the Rubicon" to modern state just before anatomically modern humans
- Jackendoff, we developed protolanguage - small nets of symbols
- 40k years ago - upper paleolithic revolution
- Noble&Davidson, arguing this was a "sudden and recent" revolution and explosion of symbols, since we had less artifacts before this period.
- Jackendoff, modern language (giant net of symbols)
## Great Leap Forward Theory
- lascoux cave paintings from 17k yrs ago - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux
- [found recently] indonesian cave paintings from 44k yrs ago?
- https://www.npr.org/2019/12/11/786760790/44-000-year-old- indonesian-cave-painting-is-rewriting-the-history-of-art
- "great leap forward" theory (Jared Diamond)
- If humans were anatomically modern 150k yrs ago, why did it take so long for the upper paleolithic revolution (40k yrs ago)?
- "Why did it take so long for symbolic thinking to get going! This rather awkward question was first framed by archaeologist Colin Renfrew, who referred to it as the “sapient paradox“."
- "The revolution that wasn't" theory (Sally McBrearty & Alison Brooks)
- Contrary to "Great Leap Forward", argues things were slow and gradual.
- 70k yrs ago - humans expanded through africa, small contingent crossing red sea into arabia -> south asia -> australia