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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

"That suggests the artists may have wanted to keep their work hidden, the researchers say."

Uh-oh, today's HN reader would be looking for a way to pirate that work so they could view any time they want.

More seriously, were they wanting to keep it hidden because they weren't sure it was good enough? A bit of self-conciousness on how my stick figures are a lot less realistic than Bob's paintings in his cave? Were they afraid of the poparazzi effect of everyone wanting their autograph for being the rockstar painter of their day? Or are we just congecturing too much about wanting to keep them hidden? More questions than answers.

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> Using just a torch or a lamp from below, the paintings and engravings stay hidden. But lit fireplaces on the ledge illuminate the whole gallery so that anyone on the cave floor can see it. That suggests the artists may have wanted to keep their work hidden, the researchers say.

I dunno. To me, this suggests that the artists may have used the cave art in theatrical productions, with the audience on the gallery floor, and stage crew working lights up on the ledge. Combined with the difficult trek into the cave to build suspense, some good storytelling and potent entheogens, I can imagine this being quite an attraction outlasting the original painter(s) and benefiting their descendants for generations.

Imagine the power of being able to say, with certainty, the sun will rise higher than it did the previous day, that the spring is coming, that rains are ending soon, and so on.

I'm reading "The Human Cosmos" (Marchant). In it is proposed that lots of cave art / building was related to stars, and therefore seasons and therefore plants and animal patterns. It was a kind of future-telling. It appears in many, many cultures in strikingly similar forms.

The Chumash in CA kept this kind of knowledge sacred and known only to a few. They used spirit quests, hallucinogenics, and celestial-inspired art to guard, interpret, and pass on knowledge.

If these artworks are part of a teaching / fortune-telling ritual, then they would need to be hidden and preserved for generations.

Sounds a lot like the way Pacific navigators passed down their knowledge. Wasn't just given to anyone.

Or they wanted it to be protected and stored away for the times. Or the act of getting to those paintings was some kind of special act that was carried out under certain circumstances (and therefore it being hard to reach was part of the plan).

I have no idea the specifics but I do think about this a lot.

For all we know of all art of the time 99.9% of it was done on wood outside in the elements but all those would be destroyed by now.

We have a selection bias issue where we may be looking at a very small fragment of the total art/messaging done at the time.

This question makes me wonder if artists at the time understood that cave paintings were pretty durable, and that they intended for these particular works to survive many generations.

> to pirate that work

I doubt that copyright existed in the Stone age, so it's public domain.

> they weren't sure it was good enough? A bit of self-conciousness on how my stick figures are a lot less realistic than Bob's paintings in his cave?

It could have been a curse, a pay to get better hunting that some other people in the tribe or even a new religion. I agree that is difficult to say, I hope that future discoveries get more light into this drawings.

>even a new religion.

I was going to suggest it being against their religion. Maybe Ra was punishing them because they realized how to use the Stargate.

Maybe the willingness to keep them secret is caused by the meaning of the paintings shared among people

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