15 ms·
200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring
- neaden 5y ago“These prints, however, are more carefully made and have a specific arrangement—think more along the lines like how a child presses their handprint into fresh cement.” A good reminder of the fact that for all that society has changed we as people haven't really.
- sva_ 5y agoIt is interesting to see how people seem to intuitively experience joy from changing their environment, in particular when it seems to not serve any direct use.
- delecti 5y agoIt leaves me feeling very connected to think that across hundreds of thousands of year, you'll still find humans being humans. Creating handprint art has to be one of the most lasting and quintessentially human behaviors.
- uniqueid 5y agoEither that or we have changed enough that we are now capable of being creative, in terms of both art and theorizing about prehistory. Personally I think it's the latter. If we were capable of appreciating art 200,000 years ago, we also must have been incredibly lazy. How could well over another 150,000 years pass before we left signs that we were improving our technology? It doesn't make any sense.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoIt’s inspiring to get hints at what life was like back then when the universe was younger.
- Razengan 5y agoI think that even at the scale of “just” a two hundred thousand years, to the universe it’s probably just yesterday.
- ASalazarMX 5y ago"When humanity was younger" would have been a perfect phrasing.
- dylan604 5y agoor even just an hour ago.
- tejtm 5y agoIt was, (and still is), 40-50 million years since the mountains formed.
- Sharlin 5y agoWhen the universe was an appreciable fraction younger, all life on Earth was unicellular.
- edgyquant 5y agoIt’s fascinating to think how they lived full lives and probably even pondered the ancients (relative to them.)
- themgt 5y agoFound at 14,000ft on the Tibetan Plateau. Very likely altitude adapted denisovans, whose genetic adaptations to living in such low oxygen are still present in modern day Tibetans. Really incredible.
- toshk 5y agoThere are lots of them. In many places in Tibet I've seen them, especially in the old Kham area, they were all over the place. The Tibetans believe it's prove of the depth of meditation that one can put the hand in the rock. Source: https://books.google.es/books?id=OUhmDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=handprints+in+tibet+himalaya&source=bl&ots=x9_hcHtfcN&sig=ACfU3U09SIhMI7agqN6KpvTVjwlxTBSzRA&hl=nl&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwid-4ftw5jzAhWQHxQKHfSaD1YQ6AF6BAgcEAM#v=onepage&q=handprints%20in%20tibet%20himalaya&f=false https://books.google.es/books?id=OUhmDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA101&lpg=P...
- subsubzero 5y agoThats right, the explanation for these handprints is that Tibetan Buddhist monks have transcended normal human abilities and made handprints in stone. This is for Vajrayana Buddhism or what westerners refer to as Tibetan Buddhism.
- dwaltrip 5y agoSeems unlikely.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cletus 5y agoWhat was the evolutionary advantage that being able to live at high altitudes 200,000 years ago gave you? There really weren't that many people around so finding land with available food and water doesn't seem like it would be that much of an issue. One possible argument is that such people would transit high altitudes going between hunting grounds (for example) but is this really enough pressure to produce a genetic advantage like this? Now nature does tend to want to find niches because having food only you can eat tends to be of more value than having abundant food other people can also eat (eg pandas and bamboo). But it's not easy for humans to live at 14,000 feet elevation. Animals are scarce. Vegetation is limited (eg trees likely to be conifers). This is different to just, say, living in Arctic regions as those do have much more available food options (eg fish, migrating game, plants that can grow in the summer) than high altitudes. Has anyone put much thought into this?
- nanna 5y agoHugely enjoyed The Hunters of Prehistory by Andre Leroi-Gourhan. Such an inspiring introduction to paleolithic archeology, even if it's inevitably a bit dated these days, and it is Eurocentric. Great as an introduction to structuralism too, and philosophy of technics.
- aomobile 5y agoHello message from the ancestors!
- vanderZwan 5y agoOldest "Hello world!" ever
- tclancy 5y agoMore like a dirty joke, surely.
- jfengel 5y agoSome of those hand prints are highly distorted. Is that just due to the topology of the rock?
- werdnapk 5y agoOr the fact that these have been slowly eroded over 200,000 years.
- therealdrag0 5y agoIn case anyone else forgot the timeline, I just googled, and there’s evidence going back to ~2 million years ago of huminoids in Eurasia.
- mc32 5y agoWouldn’t that upend most theories about when the people who left Africa left Africa? Never mind, new estimates go as far back as 300,000ya.
- elvongray 5y agoThere are other hominids apart from homo sapiens during those periods. These will probably be Denisovans
- grillvogel 5y agomost of the established timelines are based on "well this is the oldest thing we've found so far". most of it is probably wrong
- mytailorisrich 5y agoNo, it's known that Homo Erectus left Africa and colonised Eurasia up to East Asia a bit more than 2 million years ago. The estimate on when "we" left Africa often means modern humans, Homo Sapiens.
- vonadz 5y agoImpressive that this didn't get worn away.
- Aardwolf 5y ago200k years ago, that's incredible, not even the wildest science fiction can imagine what the world will look like 200k years from now
- toshk 5y agoThe assumption by some of the scientist is that the handprints were created in the mud and then stones formed. But others question this, could also be created after: https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/art-not-ancient-handprints-spark-debate-rcna2028 https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/art-not-ancient... It's very common to find handprints in the Himalayas in rocks, they are everywhere.
- axiosgunnar 5y agoprobably like Mercury looks today - a ball of fire
- bradlys 5y agoMaybe you mean Venus. Regardless of which - it's a massive over exaggeration. We're not gonna be experiencing fluctuations of 500C+ on the surface of our planet or an atmospheric pressure of 90x+ ours.
- Bobylonian 5y agoMercury today is ball of fire from one side and ball of cold charcoal from other. 200k is quite a massive time period and the only thing is certain that modern humans would be long dead and most of them would share fate of Denisovans, where most of modern people would not be direct ancestors to people of that distant future. That is a very long time for humanity to exterminate itself to near extinction and achieve the same technological level 3-4 times over again.
- booleandilemma 5y agoHopefully people thinking about us 200k years from now will consider us as primitive as we consider the people from 200k years ago.
- 5y ago
- jrsdav 5y agoWhenever I see things like this, I'm reminded of Arthur C. Clarke's novel Childhood's End. spoilers I like to imagine I've been given the device used by the overlords to monitor earth for X years, and I can stand affixed in a position to experience the timelapse as I push "rewind". It would be so cool to watch history unfold this way.
- dmux 5y agoSounds like something I'd really enjoy. Observing one particular space over time is the concept behind the graphic novel** "Here" by Richard McGuire. ** It's really light on dialogue (and characters for that matter). Way more emphasis on the Graphic part than the Novel part.
- redleggedfrog 5y agoArt is (almost) forever.
- csomar 5y agoGiven that the Tibet is particularly cold place, shouldn't these humans wear something to resist the cold? Can humans (or any fur-less animals) survive such cold climate without extra-fat or really good clothes?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Terr_ 5y agoYeah, I can't tell if the clothing is supposed to be historically accurate (what clothing would survive that long?) or whether it's only there to satisfy modern viewers.
- adolph 5y agoEarly practitioners of Wim Hof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof
- mysecretaccount 5y agoThis is covered in the article, but: the term art is quite generous here. These may not even have been imprinted intentionally. Fascinating nonetheless.
- unknownOrigin 5y agoIt doesn't dispute that they were made intentionally - in fact, it says the opposite. (These are carefully made so they don't overlap and they were not produced by locomotion.) If this is "art" art... is up to everyone to interpret for themselves. But then again, today you can give yourself a paint enema, squirt it from your asshole all over a canvas and some people will call it art.
- mysecretaccount 5y ago> It doesn't dispute that they were made intentionally - in fact, it says the opposite. > The fossil impressions, which date to between 169,000 and 226,000 years ago and seem to have been created intentionally, could represent the earliest known art of its kind. > According to Matthew Bennett, a geologist at Bournemouth University who specializes in ancient footprints and trackways, it’s likely that these ancient imprints were intentional. Emphasis mine.
- xwdv 5y ago> But then again, today you can give yourself a paint enema, squirt it from your asshole all over a canvas and some people will call it art. Jesus, what artist is this a reference to?
- mycoborea 5y agoAny chance they could recover some DNA?
- Kibae 5y ago> A study of DNA extracted from the leg bones of extinct moa birds in New Zealand found that the half-life of DNA is 521 years. [1] So at most ~5.6% of DNA could have survived. It would be interesting if researchers would be able to detect a fraction of that amount, but it seems implausible. [1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-long-does-dna-last/ https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-long-does-dn... | https://archive.is/S39fv https://archive.is/S39fv
- pomian 5y agoArticle states found at 12000'. I wonder how much lower the mountains were, 100k years ago? They are for sure not static. Bet some geologist somewhere should be able to give us a yearly estimate. Interesting.
- masklinn 5y agoIIRC the himalayas grow at 1~2cm/year, assuming a constant growth rates 100kya the area would have been about 1km lower, or about 8500ft
- xwdv 5y agoIncredible that a child 200k years ago left something behind that we can still see today. I struggle to imagine what I could do today that someone 200k years from now would find. Any ideas?
- akomtu 5y agoBuild a massive coil out of stone around a ferromagnetic core, 500 feet high, engrave walls with Maxwell and QM diff equations, so future generations would know that our civilization was built around electromagnetism. In reality, though, they'll think it's a tower of power with inscripted incantations for rituals.
- sandworm101 5y agoScratch your name into Hoover Dam? A handprint in wet cement?
- over_bridge 5y agoCollect plastic drink bottles?