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200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

gizmodo.com

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Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#31

Post by dmux »

jrsdav wrote: post #25

Whenever 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.

Sounds 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.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#32

Post by jbay808 »

adriand wrote: post #20
themgt wrote: post #5

Found 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.

Really amazing. I find this sort of thing absolutely haunting. It's a vivid reminder that there is nothing particularly special about this moment in time: it's only special to us because we're living it. But their present moment was no less vital and immediate and real to them as this moment is to us. And yet, it happened so incredibly long ago! I had the same feeling when I encountered a beautiful statue of a woman…

I noticed the same thing with a Roman marble statue! It was so lifelike, it felt like a real person with personality, draped with delicately light cloth about the shoulders and a keen but still vulnerable look in the eyes. It was hard to believe that it was made over a thousand years ago, and made me feel much closer as a human to both the sculptor and the model.

Each of us feels we are the ones living in a modern age, the past so distant and the future so uncertain.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#33

Post by f0e4c2f7 »

adriand wrote: post #20
themgt wrote: post #5

Found 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.

Really amazing. I find this sort of thing absolutely haunting. It's a vivid reminder that there is nothing particularly special about this moment in time: it's only special to us because we're living it. But their present moment was no less vital and immediate and real to them as this moment is to us. And yet, it happened so incredibly long ago! I had the same feeling when I encountered a beautiful statue of a woman…

I know just the feeling you mean. I get it when I read history too, especially biographies that cover a whole life.

I can't remember where I originally read this but once someone suggested that you could also invert this idea for a fresh perspective on the modern world.

If there was a time machine that I could step into to meet these ancient people and ask them about the hand prints they left I would take that trip in a snap! (assuming there is enough fuel in the Delorean to get back of course) In fact I would take that chance to time travel to any period and see what that time was like up close.

While we can't go back and see that, we can time travel to exactly one place. You can look around and see how humans were living in September 2021. Maybe this is the moment stranded time travelers 200k years from now would really like to visit. It was a weird time in human history. Lots of interesting things to observe, questions to ask, and people to meet.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#36

Post by Bobylonian »

axiosgunnar wrote: post #22
Aardwolf wrote: post #21

200k years ago, that's incredible, not even the wildest science fiction can imagine what the world will look like 200k years from now

probably like Mercury looks today - a ball of fire

Mercury 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.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#38

Post by bspammer »

adriand wrote: post #20
themgt wrote: post #5

Found 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.

Really amazing. I find this sort of thing absolutely haunting. It's a vivid reminder that there is nothing particularly special about this moment in time: it's only special to us because we're living it. But their present moment was no less vital and immediate and real to them as this moment is to us. And yet, it happened so incredibly long ago! I had the same feeling when I encountered a beautiful statue of a woman…

I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. We're in an insane inflection point of human development. For millions of years things stayed roughly the same. It's really only in the last 10,000 years that stuff has really kicked off, and the last 300 where human development has gone absolutely crazy. There's several existential threats that might destroy civilization over the next few hundred years (eventually a nuke is going to fall into the wrong hands, not to mention climate change etc).

There's a very good chance we're living the most comfortable lives that any creature on this planet will ever experience, past and future. It's truly mindblowing how lucky we are.

Re: 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring

#39

Post by toshk »

themgt wrote: post #5

Found 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.

There 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=P...

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