Amazon rainforest rock art 'depicts giant Ice Age creatures' (2020) | Hacker News Reader

Amazon rainforest rock art 'depicts giant Ice Age creatures' (2020)

bbc.com

109 pointsThevet27 comments

I wonder how the archeologists came out with the fact that what is drawn is drawn at scale.

Proper relative scale in drawings is a (relatively new invention. When you look at ancient drawings, they are often out of scale for ego reasons (Egiptian art for instance), or just nobody cared (European Middle-Age).

We sure have other cases where the scale is more or less correct (Romans) but without more references than localized paintings I have doubts about teh ability to draw conclusions.

Some of the species do not/did not exist as smaller versions, e.g. the three-toed ungulate with a trunk.

Could be a tapir? From the side it looks 3 toed

As amazing as they are I let out a snort at the end when I saw "All photos subject to copyright.", I imagined prehistoric copyright law.

Well it's only fair.

It’s interesting that they consider those figures to be “turtle-type” men rather than people wearing “clothes” (vegetation, animal skins).

Looks like a shorthand for what they look like at first glance, not what they represent, in the same sentence the researcher hints to a far more probable "pregnant women" as the actual representation. Though I agree with you it might be a bit sensational and therefore probably included by the author.

Good point. Thanks for pointing out the complete sentence but too, that’s what I get for skimming the article.

Staying on the topic of turtles... I wonder what the box-like things with rectangular squiggles really depicts? The left side of the first picture.

They somehow remind me of the pattern on the back of a turtle.

Spent a few too many moments reading and anticipating how these rainforest rocks ended up for sale on Amazon.

The animals are interesting, but I'm fascinated by the accompanying symbols. Is there any good research on the geometric patterns and what looks like a writing system?

Fun imagining the dimly lit caves being used as shelter. The drawings were probably important to show the children some of the risks to expect outside the safety of the walls.

The article does not say the drawings are in caves, and as far as I know, rock art in South America tends to be out in the open.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_shelter

The article describes these types of caves.

Are those magic mushrooms growing in the mastodon poop? Where is Andy Lechter when you need him :-)

http://andy-letcher.blogspot.com/2011/07/selva-pascuala-mush...

This art shows a real lack of perspective

Perspective is in the eye of the beholder.

Perspective in art is a relatively recent invention--it didn't really become widespread in the West until the Italian Renaissance. But then the people who made these paintings didn't have the same visual language that we use today. So I don't really see it as a lack of talent from the artists, rather they were just using a different set of visual tools to make their art.

Generally true, though you do see it employed in Lascaux cave paintings. https://archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en/perspective

And linear perspective/DoF/foreshortening shows up in Ancient Greek art and the Ajanta caves in India, amongst other examples.

Understanding rules of perspective is an advanced skillset. I’m not sure I’d equate it to raw talent as it’s a learned skill, and once learned may or may not be employed. I’m not sure if the artists in the Amazon rainforest had the skillset and were making a choice to not employ it. Art skills do develop with leisure time and patronage, and in that sense this art was less developed in a broad sense. That shouldn’t take away from it though - they communicated ideas in ways that were recognizable - as you said, their visual language. I find the choices they make in sizing elements of an animal pretty interesting. More to their credit, they survived under extremely harsh environmental challenges and found some time to paint.

I was excited to see it, but..what that link shows, strangely, isn't use of perspective.

"The reserve technique involves leaving an uncoloured space between two anatomical segments that are normally joined or superimposed. The idea is to optically dissociate two planes that are found at two different depths."

Like, when painting two black animals and one is supposed to be behind another, use a white outline to differentiate their forms. Nothing to do with perspective, which is characterized by foreshortening.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)

That page does mention one kind of perspective not using foreshortening - aerial perspective, "the technique of creating an illusion of depth by depicting distant objects as paler, less detailed, and usually bluer than near objects." That does seem like a different thing though! Not one word of the 5 paragraphs in the Overview applies to "aerial perspective".

I think in the case of Lascaux it's more than just the use of color to show different planes.

Aerial perspective - "In addition, we note that the hooves in the foreground are more accomplished – their cleft mature is visible – than those in the background, for which the drawing is limited to an outline. We note the simplification of lines based on the relative distance of the viewer from the various elements in the scene."

And then to foreshortening, you can see the bison on the right in particular is illustrated in such a way that the hind quarters are abnormally smaller than the front of the animal. Further, the artist is making use of the contours of the cave wall to amplify the effect - "The choice of the location of this panel contributes to the illusion of an explosion of the diptych's elements. To heighten the effect, the artists chose a wall with a very obtuse angle, and painted a bovine on each plane. Additionally, we can see that the wall is not vertical but leans forward. The corbel created by this position strengthens the illusion that the image is falling towards the viewer below."

Not bad for a bunch of Neanderthals. :) Chauvet cave would be another example, I think.

Some further reading on them, in these examples the foreshortening aspects are mentioned, though I'm sure there are more/better sources of material with some searching:

https://mindfuldrawing.com/2019/08/07/crossed-bison-of-lasca...

https://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/arts/visual/prehisto...

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/cave-painting.ht...

This following quote is from a read you may find quite interesting:

"It was not until the Renaissance that artists in the West, after a long apprenticeship, routinely drew with such realistic perspective, as did the Aurignacian [paleolithic] artists. "

https://jamanetwork.com/HttpHandlers/ArticlePdfHandler.ashx?...

Also, an awesome podcast episode on cave art:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mqn7

> you can see the bison on the right

If you mean the one here[0], the back legs don't seem forshortened to me, at all. That's what bison look like! Huge at the front, small at the back.[1]

> Not bad for a bunch of Neanderthals.

I think ancient cave painting is truly amazing. I just don't remember ever seeing a painting with foreshortening, i.e. what "perspective" usually means in visual art.

> from a read you may find quite interesting

Mostly about how a brain-damaged girl's drawings look like ancient cave art?! Oh, seems it's from a psychiatric journal. And just reading someone's (apparently a psychiatrist's) words about how it's perspective isn't the same as actually seeing it for myself.

Thanks for reminding me about that great site Stone Age Cave Painting, I spent hours on there once before!

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/prehistoric/cave-painting.ht...

[0] https://mindfuldrawing.com/2019/08/07/crossed-bison-of-lasca...

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=bison&tbm=isch (This theory, that I have, is mine. See https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2oh8ia )

It may be our lack.

When I read your comment, my mind mused about perspective and context.

Maybe they were telling us, others in the future about how the big animals were dying. People surviving.

>That’s because perspective is a lie. If I know a pond is round then why should I draw it oval? I will draw it round because round is true. Why should my brush lie to you just because my eye lies to me?

-The Last Continent

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