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Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- readarticle 6y agoColonisation and early peopling of the Colombian Amazon during the Late Pleistocene and the Early Holocene: New evidence from La Serranía La Lindosa https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.04.026 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.04.026 for those interested, wasn’t linked in the article.
- nerfhammer 6y agoOne thing that strikes me as possibly interesting about this is that there are human figures depicted, something that strangely virtually never appears in cave art.
- romanhn 6y agoDon't think this is true? I typed "cave art" into Google image search and the majority of pictures had human figures (stick figures, but still) in them.
- Igelau 6y agoLascaux has human figures. It's pretty common.
- nerfhammer 6y agoThere's only one, and it's a human-animal hybrid with a bird head https://archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en/themes-0 https://archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en/themes-0
- joubert 6y agoI don’t know ratio if humanoid vs. non-humanoid life forms, but I recall from visiting archaeological sites in South Africa as a youngster a pretty high incidence of humanoid depiction. You can see some of it here: https://www.google.com/search?q=south+african+cave+drawings&client=safari&hl=en-us&prmd=insv&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiw9tPpi6ztAhUNFjQIHehCB7EQ_AUoAXoECAcQAQ&biw=375&bih=635 https://www.google.com/search?q=south+african+cave+drawings&...
- da39a3ee 6y agoThis article is an embarrassment to the anglophone world. The rock art in Chiribiquete is already well-known in Colombia. Perhaps this expedition discovered some new cliffs with paintings, or perhaps not. I doubt it personally, more like they got a film crew there. But the article gives the distinct impression that Colombians (including the indigenous people of the amazon basin) themselves aren't capable of discovering anything, but require an "expedition" from the UK and an associated channel 4 film crew to discover it for them. You'd have thought we left that sort of patronising colonial fantasy stuff behind when we left the 19th century. The Indiana Jones-lite anecdote about the fucking snake they encountered? It sounds brainless even by the standards of an evening documentary to show on British TV, but to plaster it on the front page of the Guardian is even more ridiculous, especially considering the Guardian's politics and the great anglophone lurch wokeward of 2020.
- breals 6y agoThere is even a Wikipedia article on this already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiribiquete_National_Park https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiribiquete_National_Park That contains pictures of the rock art that goes back to 2013. Maybe "discovered" is the wrong word or they knew it would get clicks.
- ingenieros 6y agoThere's even a documentary from 2015 called Colombia Wild Magic available on Netflix and Amazon Prime: https://youtu.be/qY-lL8GscUo?t=167 https://youtu.be/qY-lL8GscUo?t=167
- Igelau 6y agoEasy there, before you start foaming. In case you blacked out after the first paragraph, they mentioned that site. > The site is in the Serranía de la Lindosa where, along with the Chiribiquete national park, other rock art had been found. The documentary’s presenter, Ella Al-Shamahi, an archaeologist and explorer, told the Observer: “The new site is so new, they haven’t even given it a name yet.”
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- there_the_and 6y agoRock art is really weird because there are exactly same motifs using the same materials (usually red ochre) all over the world and separated by tens of thousands of years. People act like it’s no big deal, but it sure looks like a pretty big deal that raises some interesting questions. We have a global view of information flows now, and I feel like I haven’t seen a lot of behaviors in humanity that explain how this has been working. What is happening here? Every few thousand years some small group of people in a new random spot on earth somehow magically decides to do that hand thing with red ochre on a rock face? By what mechanism? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence that we are innately drawn to hand symbols in red ochre, aside from these examples separated by diameter of the earth and tens of thousands of years. Given the time scale and given our current visibility into humanity, human information, and human creativity, it seems like whatever would cause that to happen should be something that’s still observable in the modern world.
- pengaru 6y agoHands are the universally present and usable drawing implements, what you're questioning seems incredibly obvious.
- tootie 6y agoHand prints and basic shapes is the first thing every toddler with fingerpaints will draw. Followed by people and animals.
- mikem170 6y agoMaybe rock art is a secondary effect of whatever evolutionary leap brought about language in the human species. Whatever brain mechanisms facilitated that also facilitated cave paintings. The rest can be explained by many independent inventors over tens of thousands of years. Maybe even call these paintings a first attempt at writing, a precursor to hieroglyphics.
- there_the_and 6y agoIndeed. It seems possible that there’s something about the red ochre hand motif is hardwired into human brain and is related to language development. But on a time scale of tens of thousands of years, even if we somehow outgrew it as a species, it seems there would still be residual evidence.
- aazaa 6y ago> Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses. The article doesn't describe what other means were used, but this is important. It's also a little disappointing that there are no close-up, high-resolution images of the extinct megafauna being depicted. I imagine the interpretation of what constitutes a Giant Sloth, for example, could be quite subjective.
- StanislavPetrov 6y ago>It's also a little disappointing that there are no close-up, high-resolution images of the extinct megafauna being depicted. I got the impression that this announcement was more or less a teaser for their upcoming show, which is due to premiere in a few days. Perhaps that's why they didn't reveal too much. They've certainly aroused my interest enough to tune in.
- thinkingemote 6y agohttps://twitter.com/bendormiki/status/1330826184746278917?s=21 https://twitter.com/bendormiki/status/1330826184746278917?s=... for some photos including the sloth
- perfmode 6y agodoes anyone have digital scans of the rock face? would love to see the paintings.
- Igelau 6y ago> One figure wears a mask resembling a bird with a beak. Tinfoil time: that one's a fairly common image in petroglyphs on several continents. See also the "Squatter Man".
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoTheory one: People retained certain cultural traits during the spread of humans across the world, like the squatter man, and these cultural figures were forgotten or replaced at a much slower rate than they have been in the past 5-10K years. Theory two: The figures were independently reinvented multiple times over. I mean birds appear pretty much everywhere. Same with e.g pyramid shapes appearing all over the world; it's the most simple, most stable shape to build something tall ish, yet a bit prettier than just a mound.
- ddmma 6y agoMight consider as the first social media wall
- zaroth 6y agoI’m a bit disappointed it isn’t shaped like a monolith.
- kristopolous 6y agoThere seems to be an organization to this. I'd almost think it's guide, almanac, or calendar. Maybe the wiggly lines mean something, 12 days after planting some seeds or something. It really looks like an information writing system
- fleddr 6y ago"The site is so remote that, after a two-hour drive from San José del Guaviare, a team of archaeologists and film-makers trekked on foot for around four hours." So...not remote at all? This is less remote than the typical national park over there. The snake danger is overstated as always, for extra sensationalism. Snakes don't hunt people. Unlikely attacks are defensive, when provoked, and virtually always happen domestically. The death rate after an unlikely bite of the top 3 most dangerous snakes in Colombia is in the range of 1-3%. Not 80%. And surely when you see it, it's easy to avoid. "The territory where the paintings have been discovered was completely off limits until recently and still involves careful negotiation to enter safely." Given the nonsense in the rest of the article, likely another exaggeration. Even in areas of Colombia declared red (= do not travel to in any case), you can just go. They are giant areas, where locals know exactly the 95% of the area safe to visit. Where nothing has happened for many years, with zero rebel presence. Just avoid that 5%. FARC is gone and ELN focuses on sabotaging infrastructure. There's no interest in visitors or tourists. The latter has been true for about 2 decades now. A true and real risk over there is running into somebody in a forest doing something illegal (narco, logging, gold mining). Then you de-escalate, pay, and wish them a good day. None of this dismisses the beauty and importance of the discovery, just triggered at these constant falsehoods about Colombia and sensationalist writing.
- kristianpaul 6y agohttps://www.instagram.com/p/CHg0lcLjebp/?igshid=1tpomcztoh3gs https://www.instagram.com/p/CHg0lcLjebp/?igshid=1tpomcztoh3g...
- fleddr 6y agoTrue. "Discover" is a very inappropriate term to use in this case, it's "first to document". And possibly not even that. Furthermore, film crews don't get in unless there's somewhat of a path, so even more likely it was locally known.
- koheripbal 6y agoI was sort of expecting the art to be in a cave - but out in the open as it is, I expect that local folks had known about it for a long long time and it just hadn't been properly documented / published. I wonder how many more there are like that. Maybe getting remote communities more connected to the internet would help them publicize some of their local artifacts and sites.