7 ms·

Oldest cave art found

193 points by rntn 2y ago

nuz 2y ago
Almost rorschach painting levels of ambiguity in that thing
- talldayo 2y ago
  "A pig? Looks like two bears high-fiving to me."
- red_trumpet 2y ago
  I'd say the pig is somewhat recognizable, with four legs and a tail. The humans on the other hand...
- throwup238 2y ago
  > This animal figure is represented as a pictorial outline shown in side (profile) view with an infill pattern consisting of painted strokes or lines. It is therefore consistent in style with the visual convention used to represent pigs and other animals in the dated Late Pleistocene rock art of South Sulawesi, including at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 [1] They base the interpretation off of other cave art in the area that's better preserved [2] and the fact that it's missing facial details of other animals found in the local cave art [3]. There's usually other context in archaeological speak, like buried bones and fossils that limit the possibilities. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7 [2] https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/bfnews/uploads/sulawesi_pig6.jpg https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/bfnews/uploads/sulawesi_p... [3] https://cdn.sci.news/images/enlarge6/image_7902_1e-Leang-Bulu-Sipong-4.jpg https://cdn.sci.news/images/enlarge6/image_7902_1e-Leang-Bul...
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swayvil 2y ago
I heard that pigs, pre-selective-breeding, were pretty cute https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/images/uploads/_fulllandscape/image-2-sus-scrofa-zeug-1596-1610-Anselmus-Boetius-de-Boodt.png https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/images/uploads/_fullla...
- winety 2y ago
  Wild piglets are very cute [1], adult wild pigs less so [2]. [1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20180429-155847_Frischling_Wildschwein_Bokeh_-_Flickr_-_torstenbehrens.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20180429-155847_Fris... [2]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ausgewachsenes_Wildschwein_beim_Suhlen.JPG https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ausgewachsenes_Wilds...
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    We used to have warthogs in Africa. Def not-cute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warthog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warthog
    - datameta 2y ago
      They have an unbelievably small brain case for a medium-sized quadruped mammal
- usrusr 2y ago
  The head of the pig in the cave is such a nice "friendly pink pig" cartoon of a modern breed that I do feel like it would be more appropriate to call it "drawing of a creature that happens to look deceptively like a drawing of a pig" instead of "drawing of a pig". Far more appropriate.
moffkalast 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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riazrizvi 2y ago
> it would show humans at the time had the capacity for abstract thinking This was 50,000 years ago, they were Homo Sapiens, we are 200,000 years old. We can see abstract thinking through the advancement of our early tools and through linguistic studies that trace lineage of abstract language patterns to points in time using archeological knowledge of migration periods. So this confirms it further I guess.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  The "Upper Paleolithic Revolution" hypothesis proposes that around 50,000 years ago, there was some sort of a qualitative jump in human behavioral complexity, based on the fact that around that time we start seeing clear evidence of cultural and symbolic behavior such as rock art and burial rituals, and also of a period of rapid innovation in toolbuilding. Critics of the hypothesis counter that the apparent jump could just as well be merely a selection effect caused by the scarcity of evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity
- AnonHP 2y ago
  > This was 50,000 years ago, they were Homo Sapiens, we are 200,000 years old. I don’t know enough about the migration of human species and subspecies. Was this concluded in the article that they were Home Sapiens and not Neanderthals or Denisovans (or interbred between these and Homo Sapiens)? The latter two were around 50,000 years ago.
  - throwup238 2y ago
    There's quite a bit of evidence that Homo sapiens, denisovans, and floresiensis might have coexisted in Sundaland (the land mass containing much of Indonesia before the oceans rose and created the SEA islands) at the time but the cave art is more consistent with Homo sapiens in the rest of the world than either of the other two. That's the default conclusion until more artwork conclusively belonging to other species is discovered.
- stainablesteel 2y ago
  denisovans, neanderthals, and their hybrids are not out of the picture for that time period and location
lkrubner 2y ago
The distance between the known examples of early art also further pushes back the date when humans became capable of art. Unless you believe that people from Indonesia painted this art 51,000 years ago and then migrated to Europe, and thus brought art to Europe via migration, then instead you would have to believe that the artists who eventually arose in Europe and Indonesia had a common ancestor who was capable of art. If we have art in Indonesia at 51,000 years ago, and art in Europe about 35,000 years ago, and if the last common ancestor of those 2 populations lived 100,000 years ago (hypothetically) then you'd have to believe that humans have been capable of this kind of art for at least 100,000 years.
- addaon 2y ago
  … or that the ability to create art arose independently in two separated populations. As for example writing did, many millennia later.
  - mkoubaa 2y ago
    Writing arose independently. The cognitive ability necessary to invent writing may have existing for much longer
    - criley2 2y ago
      We call that anatomically modern human or early modern human, and we have fossils going back over 300,000 years. An infant from 300k years ago, if brought to modern times, should grow up and be capable of everything modern humans are.
      - dash2 2y ago
        Behaviourally modern is thought to be a bit more recent, isn't it... partly because of evidence like art!
      - mkoubaa 2y ago
        Yes exactly. Though I would expect that they may be more neurotypical on average than modern humans
aprilthird2021 2y ago
The way they keep pushing things back such neat round numbers makes it feel like when tech evangelists say "Oh yeah we'll have everyone in self driving cars / BTC at $1M / safe AGI in 5 years / 10 years / 20 years / etc." I know there's science behind the dating of these artifacts, but it just feels that way to me.
- kergonath 2y ago
  The tidy round numbers come from the uncertainty of the datation method. It makes no sense to say, e.g. that they are 32049 years old when the dates are accurate to, say, 2000 years. The fact that uncertainty is usually not properly reported is a tragedy in the scientific literature, and unfortunate in vulgarisation.
- pikseladam 2y ago
  radiocarbon is mostly just guess and most of the headlines are just there for clicks. radiocarbon dating is shows a range like 2000 to 50000 years. headlines takes 50K. radiocarbon date is also acknowledged to be the age of the material, not the date of the manufacture of an item. if item is a rock, mostly they don't know when the art is manufactured. probably they asked how old is the art and somebody said "it could bew oldest ever found" hence the headline.
  - jdthedisciple 2y ago
    This is exactly what everyone must keep in mind when reading any pop-science article ever.
smokel 2y ago
There appears to be some more information here, also on the dating method used (which apparently is laser ablation U-series analysis): https://news.griffith.edu.au/2024/07/04/cave-painting-in-indonesia-is-the-oldest-known-picture-story/ https://news.griffith.edu.au/2024/07/04/cave-painting-in-ind... I'm not entirely convinced about the human-like figures, though. Does anyone have more background knowledge on how one can jump to that conclusion? Edit: found the publication in Nature. The picture circulating in the media is a tracing of the actual painting, which is nearly impossible to see on the actual rock. Enjoy! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7
- throwup238 2y ago
  > I'm not entirely convinced about the human-like figures, though. Does anyone have more background knowledge on how one can jump to that conclusion? I think they're basing it off another painting in South Sulawesi where the human forms are a little clearer [1]. It might be some kind of "protostyle" where they draw the animal much bigger than the humans hunting them. [1] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/2473/production/_110113390_art2.jpg https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/2473/product...
  - smokel 2y ago
    Thanks for sharing. Note that that example is from the same research group, and also had its contrast artificially enhanced. I find it a bit odd that the humans are so small and lack details, whereas the boar even has fur, two distinguishable toes, and seems to bend its legs correctly. Then again, I have yet to publish something in Nature, so I'm probably a bit too skeptical for this game :)
    - throwup238 2y ago
      You're not wrong to be skeptical. These papers are written for other archaeologists who have a lot more perspective on both the uncertainty inherent in the field and the games academics play thanks to publish or perish. They don't need the caveats repeated every paper like the rest of us. The people might have been added later by a less skilled artist or even just a child doodling, they could have been drawn with more detail in another other material that didn't survive but sketched with the longer lasting stuff underneath, or they could be artifacts of the process they use to increase contrast, etc. There's a bunch of possibilities but authors will usually gravitate towards the interesting conclusion. That said, animals drawn with higher detail than people is almost a trope in archaeology. They probably held a spiritual significance and the hunters would have spent a lot of time studying them.
permo-w 2y ago
I'd like to see generative AI try to reconstruct the full image
- mock-possum 2y ago
  Give it to that lady who ‘restored’ the painting of Jesus, let’s see what she comes up with.
  - petersonv 2y ago
    [flagged]
- brink 2y ago
  That's not how AI works. It would distort it to match the examples it's been trained on.
  - discreteevent 2y ago
    Exactly. The AI shows an abstraction of an abstraction (to the AI its all just bits and patterns) but the thing that's immediately fascinating about the painting is that it is echoing someones experience in the flesh of a wild pig so long ago. The stuff about "humans ability to express abstraction" is very much in second place for me.
    - permo-w 2y ago
      the replies to this comment are some of the least brain-intensive pieces of information you could ever come up with. do you think generative AI has not been trained on images of pigs?
  - permo-w 2y ago
    which would be precisely the idea. I think you may be struggling with the word "works". and "exampled". and perhaps even "trained" vague image + entire corpus of human imagery = ?
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dash2 2y ago
"The discovery pushes back the time that modern humans first showed the capacity for creative thought." Hmm. The very simplest model you could have of this would be the German Tank Problem [1]. If discoveries of X (e.g. art, hunting tools, whatever) are made at random, i.e. evidence of X is not more likely to be destroyed as time passes, then you are sampling times from a distribution with a maximum of the first invention of X, and the best estimator for this is (m-1)(k-1)/(k-2) where m is the oldest discovery and k is the number of discoveries. In particular, a new record for oldest art will almost always push your estimate up (as long as k is large so (k-1)/(k-2) is about 1). But you should also be taking into account all the discoveries of art which aren't records. This matters especially when k is not yet big. This page only lists 30-40 pieces of paleolithic art [2]. A better model would take into account that older stuff is less likely to be discovered because e.g. rocks erode. I wonder if anyone has done this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art
- eafer 2y ago
  That's for uniform distributions. We don't know the distribution here, that's part of the problem, but I would expect early cave art to be more sparse and worse preserved.
  - adolph 2y ago
    What are your priors for that expectation? Wouldn’t it make just as much sense that once a site reaches X age it will likely make it to 10X since the conditions that allowed it to get to X are slow to change?
- dekhn 2y ago
  It's commonly observed in anthropology that we keep pushing back the dates for all sorts of technologies as the methods improve and more cave sources are found. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
- api 2y ago
pyinstallwoes 2y ago
"These hand paintings in Sumpang Bita cave in South Sulawesi were once thought to be among the oldest paintings in the world at 39,000 years" Why are these cave paintings with hands all over the world? It is kind of ominous to think of the reasons and conditions why they are found everywhere.
- dekhn 2y ago
  My understanding is that hand paintings like this fall out fairly naturally- after collecting and grinding the iron oxide for paint (there's a great but now unavailable Google+ post by Yonatan Zunger that explains why barns are red for the same reason: supernovas), you want to use some sort of mask or template, and a hand is pretty much the most available thing for early societies.
  - wayeq 2y ago
    ah Google+, speaking of archeology..
    - dekhn 2y ago
      Fortunately, Yonatan (who was in fact the main engineer working on Google+) reposted it to Medium: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/how-the-price-of-paint-is-set-in-the-hearts-of-dying-stars-c33e520186a8 https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/how-the-price-of-paint-is-... After he wrote it I pointed out most historical barns in many parts of the US are white, using whitewash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewash) which doesn't really change the conclusion of the article, which itself is a masterclass in explaining the root cause of metallicity in the universe.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  It seems like a fun way to make a little mark that represents yourself.
- OJFord 2y ago
  What are you thinking of? I thought those were by far the coolest, even if not oldest. (I haven't seen that before, didn't realise it was so common as you say.) Partly because they are absolutely identifiable in a way that the humans and pig.. really isn't to a layman, but also it's just so personal, much more of a 'connection', to me anyway, to the person who did it. The 'someone was actually there tens of thousands of years ago, painting around their hand, and now I'm looking at it' feeling hits a lot harder.
einpoklum 2y ago
Forget the cave art, that place is just gorgeous! Sulawesi: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sulawesi&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sulawesi&iax=images&ia=images
- chilling 2y ago
  pictures from internet mostly don't represent an accurate reality (in Indonesia is even more true than everywhere else). The other thing about Sulawesi is that the trasportation there is horrible and very time consuming. It's also not really touristic so better to bring your local friend with you.
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
If you want to be immortal as an artist, paint your works on cave walls, for that deep time gallery. It would be cool to have a history painting, of all that happened on earth as we know it today. Similar to the empires history painted in the foundation in a cave. All those discoveries, all those triumphs and failures. One huge picture. It would also make sense to search for similar painted caves near caves where such paintings are discovered, expecting filled up cave entrances and collapsed entrances (erosion, ocean, etc.) . Goto outdo the Johnosons next door. Even back then.
mharig 2y ago
"Something seems to have happened around 50,000 years ago, shortly after which all other species of human such as Neanderthals and the so-called Hobbit died out." Isn't the current estimate, that Neanderhals and Danisovans died out around 45000 years ago? Or does he refer only to the region of the cave? And the Homo floresiensis died out 10000 years ago (or 100 years ago, or he still exists, if some Anthropologists are right). And what I do not understand about the cave archeology: nobody who lives as a nomadic hunter & gatherer lives in a cave. The climate inside is near unbearable if you are accustomed to free air. Maybe one can stay a little time in the mouth of a cave. When the weather conditions outside are as ugly as they can get. Or if the population density got so bad, that an easy to defend place is necessary. The findings IMO are more probable a result of population dynamics than brain development.
- rdlw 2y ago
  Homo floriensis appears to have died out around 50k years ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35930979 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35930979 And isn't 45k around 50k? That seems like a reasonable statement to me.
odyssey7 2y ago
The human body and the human mind are perfectly fitted to one another. They co-evolved. Any fundamental change in the human brain would imply a fundamental change in the human form, to enable acting on the enhanced understanding. Otherwise, the enhanced understanding would be useless for survival. The contrapositive would mean that for as long as the human form has been about the same, human ingenuity and creativity have also remained about the same. If you want to locate when human creativity and ingenuity began, it will have been at or before the basic structure of the hands, larynx, feet, eyes, etc. came to be.
malkosta 2y ago
Curiosity: in Brazil, Serra da Capivara National Park, there are painting form 30000 years ago and artifacts from 50000 years ago...which challenges the theory that man came to america 12000 years ago via bering strait. Source: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parque_nacional_de_la_Sierra_de_la_Capibara https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parque_nacional_de_la_Sierra_d...
ojo-rojo 2y ago
How did humans cross these oceans and seas 50 thousand years ago? To land on the Indonesian islands, South Pacific islands, Australia, New Zealand... Did they have massive ships that we'll never know about? Did they learn how to sail? Was it just small rafts and canoes? Oh, the sea-faring stories these people must have told.

193 points by rntn 2y ago

nuz 2y ago

Almost rorschach painting levels of ambiguity in that thing

talldayo 2y ago
"A pig? Looks like two bears high-fiving to me."
red_trumpet 2y ago
I'd say the pig is somewhat recognizable, with four legs and a tail. The humans on the other hand...
throwup238 2y ago
> This animal figure is represented as a pictorial outline shown in side (profile) view with an infill pattern consisting of painted strokes or lines. It is therefore consistent in style with the visual convention used to represent pigs and other animals in the dated Late Pleistocene rock art of South Sulawesi, including at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 [1] They base the interpretation off of other cave art in the area that's better preserved [2] and the fact that it's missing facial details of other animals found in the local cave art [3]. There's usually other context in archaeological speak, like buried bones and fossils that limit the possibilities. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7 [2] https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/bfnews/uploads/sulawesi_pig6.jpg https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/bfnews/uploads/sulawesi_p... [3] https://cdn.sci.news/images/enlarge6/image_7902_1e-Leang-Bulu-Sipong-4.jpg https://cdn.sci.news/images/enlarge6/image_7902_1e-Leang-Bul...

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swayvil 2y ago

I heard that pigs, pre-selective-breeding, were pretty cute https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/images/uploads/_fulllandscape/image-2-sus-scrofa-zeug-1596-1610-Anselmus-Boetius-de-Boodt.png https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/images/uploads/_fullla...

winety 2y ago
Wild piglets are very cute [1], adult wild pigs less so [2]. [1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20180429-155847_Frischling_Wildschwein_Bokeh_-_Flickr_-_torstenbehrens.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20180429-155847_Fris... [2]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ausgewachsenes_Wildschwein_beim_Suhlen.JPG https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ausgewachsenes_Wilds...
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  We used to have warthogs in Africa. Def not-cute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warthog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warthog
  - datameta 2y ago
    They have an unbelievably small brain case for a medium-sized quadruped mammal
usrusr 2y ago
The head of the pig in the cave is such a nice "friendly pink pig" cartoon of a modern breed that I do feel like it would be more appropriate to call it "drawing of a creature that happens to look deceptively like a drawing of a pig" instead of "drawing of a pig". Far more appropriate.

moffkalast 2y ago

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riazrizvi 2y ago

> it would show humans at the time had the capacity for abstract thinking This was 50,000 years ago, they were Homo Sapiens, we are 200,000 years old. We can see abstract thinking through the advancement of our early tools and through linguistic studies that trace lineage of abstract language patterns to points in time using archeological knowledge of migration periods. So this confirms it further I guess.

Sharlin 2y ago
The "Upper Paleolithic Revolution" hypothesis proposes that around 50,000 years ago, there was some sort of a qualitative jump in human behavioral complexity, based on the fact that around that time we start seeing clear evidence of cultural and symbolic behavior such as rock art and burial rituals, and also of a period of rapid innovation in toolbuilding. Critics of the hypothesis counter that the apparent jump could just as well be merely a selection effect caused by the scarcity of evidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_modernity
AnonHP 2y ago
> This was 50,000 years ago, they were Homo Sapiens, we are 200,000 years old. I don’t know enough about the migration of human species and subspecies. Was this concluded in the article that they were Home Sapiens and not Neanderthals or Denisovans (or interbred between these and Homo Sapiens)? The latter two were around 50,000 years ago.
- throwup238 2y ago
  There's quite a bit of evidence that Homo sapiens, denisovans, and floresiensis might have coexisted in Sundaland (the land mass containing much of Indonesia before the oceans rose and created the SEA islands) at the time but the cave art is more consistent with Homo sapiens in the rest of the world than either of the other two. That's the default conclusion until more artwork conclusively belonging to other species is discovered.
stainablesteel 2y ago
denisovans, neanderthals, and their hybrids are not out of the picture for that time period and location

lkrubner 2y ago

The distance between the known examples of early art also further pushes back the date when humans became capable of art. Unless you believe that people from Indonesia painted this art 51,000 years ago and then migrated to Europe, and thus brought art to Europe via migration, then instead you would have to believe that the artists who eventually arose in Europe and Indonesia had a common ancestor who was capable of art. If we have art in Indonesia at 51,000 years ago, and art in Europe about 35,000 years ago, and if the last common ancestor of those 2 populations lived 100,000 years ago (hypothetically) then you'd have to believe that humans have been capable of this kind of art for at least 100,000 years.

addaon 2y ago
… or that the ability to create art arose independently in two separated populations. As for example writing did, many millennia later.
- mkoubaa 2y ago
  Writing arose independently. The cognitive ability necessary to invent writing may have existing for much longer
  - criley2 2y ago
    We call that anatomically modern human or early modern human, and we have fossils going back over 300,000 years. An infant from 300k years ago, if brought to modern times, should grow up and be capable of everything modern humans are.
    - dash2 2y ago
      Behaviourally modern is thought to be a bit more recent, isn't it... partly because of evidence like art!
    - mkoubaa 2y ago
      Yes exactly. Though I would expect that they may be more neurotypical on average than modern humans

aprilthird2021 2y ago

The way they keep pushing things back such neat round numbers makes it feel like when tech evangelists say "Oh yeah we'll have everyone in self driving cars / BTC at $1M / safe AGI in 5 years / 10 years / 20 years / etc." I know there's science behind the dating of these artifacts, but it just feels that way to me.

kergonath 2y ago
The tidy round numbers come from the uncertainty of the datation method. It makes no sense to say, e.g. that they are 32049 years old when the dates are accurate to, say, 2000 years. The fact that uncertainty is usually not properly reported is a tragedy in the scientific literature, and unfortunate in vulgarisation.
pikseladam 2y ago
radiocarbon is mostly just guess and most of the headlines are just there for clicks. radiocarbon dating is shows a range like 2000 to 50000 years. headlines takes 50K. radiocarbon date is also acknowledged to be the age of the material, not the date of the manufacture of an item. if item is a rock, mostly they don't know when the art is manufactured. probably they asked how old is the art and somebody said "it could bew oldest ever found" hence the headline.
- jdthedisciple 2y ago
  This is exactly what everyone must keep in mind when reading any pop-science article ever.

smokel 2y ago

There appears to be some more information here, also on the dating method used (which apparently is laser ablation U-series analysis): https://news.griffith.edu.au/2024/07/04/cave-painting-in-indonesia-is-the-oldest-known-picture-story/ https://news.griffith.edu.au/2024/07/04/cave-painting-in-ind... I'm not entirely convinced about the human-like figures, though. Does anyone have more background knowledge on how one can jump to that conclusion? Edit: found the publication in Nature. The picture circulating in the media is a tracing of the actual painting, which is nearly impossible to see on the actual rock. Enjoy! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7

throwup238 2y ago
> I'm not entirely convinced about the human-like figures, though. Does anyone have more background knowledge on how one can jump to that conclusion? I think they're basing it off another painting in South Sulawesi where the human forms are a little clearer [1]. It might be some kind of "protostyle" where they draw the animal much bigger than the humans hunting them. [1] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/2473/production/_110113390_art2.jpg https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/2473/product...
- smokel 2y ago
  Thanks for sharing. Note that that example is from the same research group, and also had its contrast artificially enhanced. I find it a bit odd that the humans are so small and lack details, whereas the boar even has fur, two distinguishable toes, and seems to bend its legs correctly. Then again, I have yet to publish something in Nature, so I'm probably a bit too skeptical for this game :)
  - throwup238 2y ago
    You're not wrong to be skeptical. These papers are written for other archaeologists who have a lot more perspective on both the uncertainty inherent in the field and the games academics play thanks to publish or perish. They don't need the caveats repeated every paper like the rest of us. The people might have been added later by a less skilled artist or even just a child doodling, they could have been drawn with more detail in another other material that didn't survive but sketched with the longer lasting stuff underneath, or they could be artifacts of the process they use to increase contrast, etc. There's a bunch of possibilities but authors will usually gravitate towards the interesting conclusion. That said, animals drawn with higher detail than people is almost a trope in archaeology. They probably held a spiritual significance and the hunters would have spent a lot of time studying them.

permo-w 2y ago

I'd like to see generative AI try to reconstruct the full image

mock-possum 2y ago
Give it to that lady who ‘restored’ the painting of Jesus, let’s see what she comes up with.
- petersonv 2y ago
  [flagged]
brink 2y ago
That's not how AI works. It would distort it to match the examples it's been trained on.
- discreteevent 2y ago
  Exactly. The AI shows an abstraction of an abstraction (to the AI its all just bits and patterns) but the thing that's immediately fascinating about the painting is that it is echoing someones experience in the flesh of a wild pig so long ago. The stuff about "humans ability to express abstraction" is very much in second place for me.
  - permo-w 2y ago
    the replies to this comment are some of the least brain-intensive pieces of information you could ever come up with. do you think generative AI has not been trained on images of pigs?
- permo-w 2y ago
  which would be precisely the idea. I think you may be struggling with the word "works". and "exampled". and perhaps even "trained" vague image + entire corpus of human imagery = ?

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dash2 2y ago

"The discovery pushes back the time that modern humans first showed the capacity for creative thought." Hmm. The very simplest model you could have of this would be the German Tank Problem [1]. If discoveries of X (e.g. art, hunting tools, whatever) are made at random, i.e. evidence of X is not more likely to be destroyed as time passes, then you are sampling times from a distribution with a maximum of the first invention of X, and the best estimator for this is (m-1)(k-1)/(k-2) where m is the oldest discovery and k is the number of discoveries. In particular, a new record for oldest art will almost always push your estimate up (as long as k is large so (k-1)/(k-2) is about 1). But you should also be taking into account all the discoveries of art which aren't records. This matters especially when k is not yet big. This page only lists 30-40 pieces of paleolithic art [2]. A better model would take into account that older stuff is less likely to be discovered because e.g. rocks erode. I wonder if anyone has done this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art

eafer 2y ago
That's for uniform distributions. We don't know the distribution here, that's part of the problem, but I would expect early cave art to be more sparse and worse preserved.
- adolph 2y ago
  What are your priors for that expectation? Wouldn’t it make just as much sense that once a site reaches X age it will likely make it to 10X since the conditions that allowed it to get to X are slow to change?
dekhn 2y ago
It's commonly observed in anthropology that we keep pushing back the dates for all sorts of technologies as the methods improve and more cave sources are found. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
api 2y ago

pyinstallwoes 2y ago

"These hand paintings in Sumpang Bita cave in South Sulawesi were once thought to be among the oldest paintings in the world at 39,000 years" Why are these cave paintings with hands all over the world? It is kind of ominous to think of the reasons and conditions why they are found everywhere.

dekhn 2y ago
My understanding is that hand paintings like this fall out fairly naturally- after collecting and grinding the iron oxide for paint (there's a great but now unavailable Google+ post by Yonatan Zunger that explains why barns are red for the same reason: supernovas), you want to use some sort of mask or template, and a hand is pretty much the most available thing for early societies.
- wayeq 2y ago
  ah Google+, speaking of archeology..
  - dekhn 2y ago
    Fortunately, Yonatan (who was in fact the main engineer working on Google+) reposted it to Medium: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/how-the-price-of-paint-is-set-in-the-hearts-of-dying-stars-c33e520186a8 https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/how-the-price-of-paint-is-... After he wrote it I pointed out most historical barns in many parts of the US are white, using whitewash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewash https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewash) which doesn't really change the conclusion of the article, which itself is a masterclass in explaining the root cause of metallicity in the universe.
bee_rider 2y ago
It seems like a fun way to make a little mark that represents yourself.
OJFord 2y ago
What are you thinking of? I thought those were by far the coolest, even if not oldest. (I haven't seen that before, didn't realise it was so common as you say.) Partly because they are absolutely identifiable in a way that the humans and pig.. really isn't to a layman, but also it's just so personal, much more of a 'connection', to me anyway, to the person who did it. The 'someone was actually there tens of thousands of years ago, painting around their hand, and now I'm looking at it' feeling hits a lot harder.

einpoklum 2y ago

Forget the cave art, that place is just gorgeous! Sulawesi: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sulawesi&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sulawesi&iax=images&ia=images

chilling 2y ago
pictures from internet mostly don't represent an accurate reality (in Indonesia is even more true than everywhere else). The other thing about Sulawesi is that the trasportation there is horrible and very time consuming. It's also not really touristic so better to bring your local friend with you.

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

If you want to be immortal as an artist, paint your works on cave walls, for that deep time gallery. It would be cool to have a history painting, of all that happened on earth as we know it today. Similar to the empires history painted in the foundation in a cave. All those discoveries, all those triumphs and failures. One huge picture. It would also make sense to search for similar painted caves near caves where such paintings are discovered, expecting filled up cave entrances and collapsed entrances (erosion, ocean, etc.) . Goto outdo the Johnosons next door. Even back then.

mharig 2y ago

"Something seems to have happened around 50,000 years ago, shortly after which all other species of human such as Neanderthals and the so-called Hobbit died out." Isn't the current estimate, that Neanderhals and Danisovans died out around 45000 years ago? Or does he refer only to the region of the cave? And the Homo floresiensis died out 10000 years ago (or 100 years ago, or he still exists, if some Anthropologists are right). And what I do not understand about the cave archeology: nobody who lives as a nomadic hunter & gatherer lives in a cave. The climate inside is near unbearable if you are accustomed to free air. Maybe one can stay a little time in the mouth of a cave. When the weather conditions outside are as ugly as they can get. Or if the population density got so bad, that an easy to defend place is necessary. The findings IMO are more probable a result of population dynamics than brain development.

rdlw 2y ago
Homo floriensis appears to have died out around 50k years ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35930979 https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35930979 And isn't 45k around 50k? That seems like a reasonable statement to me.

odyssey7 2y ago

The human body and the human mind are perfectly fitted to one another. They co-evolved. Any fundamental change in the human brain would imply a fundamental change in the human form, to enable acting on the enhanced understanding. Otherwise, the enhanced understanding would be useless for survival. The contrapositive would mean that for as long as the human form has been about the same, human ingenuity and creativity have also remained about the same. If you want to locate when human creativity and ingenuity began, it will have been at or before the basic structure of the hands, larynx, feet, eyes, etc. came to be.

malkosta 2y ago

Curiosity: in Brazil, Serra da Capivara National Park, there are painting form 30000 years ago and artifacts from 50000 years ago...which challenges the theory that man came to america 12000 years ago via bering strait. Source: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parque_nacional_de_la_Sierra_de_la_Capibara https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parque_nacional_de_la_Sierra_d...

ojo-rojo 2y ago

How did humans cross these oceans and seas 50 thousand years ago? To land on the Indonesian islands, South Pacific islands, Australia, New Zealand... Did they have massive ships that we'll never know about? Did they learn how to sail? Was it just small rafts and canoes? Oh, the sea-faring stories these people must have told.