Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 160 posts

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

#131

Post by masklinn »

cletus wrote: post #48
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.

What 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…

> What was the evolutionary advantage that being able to live at high altitudes 200,000 years ago gave you?

Having exclusive use of an ecological niche is pretty advantageous.

> 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.

While density was (likely) quite low, so was "productivity", and people were no less territorial, just because you didn't need all that space didn't mean you'd allow other groups to exploit it.

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

#132

Post by masklinn »

pomian wrote: post #105

Article 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.

IIRC the himalayas grow at 1~2cm/year, assuming a constant growth rates 100kya the area would have been about 1km lower, or about 8500ft

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

#133

Post by masklinn »

hutzlibu wrote: post #13
loonster wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how high it was 200k years ago. Edit: another comment mentions the mountains were formed 40-50 million years ago. So I would presume roughly the same height.

Yeah, 200k is not much in geological terms.

The himalayas grow actively and quickly, we're talking of cm/year scale.

So 200kya means the site could have moved 2+km up (assuming a roughly constant growth rate), which is nothing to sneeze at or ignore. There's one hell of a difference living at 4000m versus 2000.

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

#134

Post by bouncycastle »

rvense wrote: post #125
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People in 2007 were truly astounded by the iPhone. It almost felt like a product delivered from the future. It put all industry jaws on the floor and reset the grid for everyone in the tech industry, without exception. This is a large exaggeration. I was there as an adult. It was another cool piece of tech, sure, but come on.

I think it depends who you were. Some people went more or less directly to being always connected to an iPhone from a world of monochrome Nokias and portable CD (or cassette, even) players and the internet being on a PC tower in a separate room of the house, if you had it at home at all. The intermediate steps - laptops, Palm pilots, iPods - were far from universal, at least in my world.

I was already using a PDA by that time (pocket PC), and the technology was already there, so not like it came out overnight. The only thing Apple improved on was the UX.

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

#135

Post by olalonde »

xwdv wrote: post #118
unknownOrigin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It 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.

> 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?

The Big Lebowski has a scene not quite like that but in the same spirit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuMbc1Q2OQ4.

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

#136

Post by hutzlibu »

masklinn wrote: post #133
hutzlibu wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, 200k is not much in geological terms.

The himalayas grow actively and quickly, we're talking of cm/year scale. So 200kya means the site could have moved 2+km up (assuming a roughly constant growth rate), which is nothing to sneeze at or ignore. There's one hell of a difference living at 4000m versus 2000.

I remembered that fact, too and was wondering about it, how it fits with it. My conclusion was rather, that the growth rate was probably not constant over that time, because yeah, 2km is quite a lot. But others mentioned that this area was quite unchanged.

I am going to investigate..

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

#137

Post by Jensson »

sfblah wrote: post #128
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By symmetry of the exponential curve, your ancestors would be just as justified.

I don’t think this is quite right. To take a European example, the ancient Romans discovered concrete, then successor civilizations largely forgot how it worked for ~500+ years. Not all eras of history even had a positive slope to the curve.

Another example of Rome. It took over 1000 years before another city in the world became as big as Rome in its heyday.

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

#138

Post by z3t4 »

adventured wrote: post #71
radicaldreamer wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really true? If someone from 1950s America time-travelled to the present day, is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom? Maybe if you transported someone from 1950s China to present-day China, they would be more shocked, but a present day suburban home in 2021 is not all that markedly different than a 1950s home -- and neither is the workplace, the commute, the cars. Mostly replaced pape…

> is there anything at all that they conceptually couldn't fathom? Well you set the bar artificially high with that phrasing. Is there ever anything people of the last couple thousand years would be literally unable to conceptually fathom? No. We know that from ancient texts, they would be able to grasp anything we have today (even if it might take more elaborate explanation). 1950s Americans, or any citizens around…

People give too much credit to the iPhone. There where a lot of full screen smart-phones before the iPhone

The same with mp3 players before iPod.

Apples hardware and design is OK, but their marketing is in their own league, like for example a company selling flavored water bottles while there's good quality water taps available almost everywhere. They can take something that is already readily available and sell it for 2x the price, and at the same time make people think it's revolutionary.

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

#139

Post by erdos4d »

bspammer wrote: post #55
willcipriano wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree, there is something special about this moment in time. Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your children.

It doesn't really matter what my ancestors felt, it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right now, and faster than 10,000 years ago. Back then, you'd be lucky to see a single revolutionary invention in a lifetime. Now we're seeing them every decade, if not annually. I don't disagree that my descendents will be justified in feeling the same way, as long as the exponential curve keeps on going and civilizati…

> Now we're seeing them every decade, if not annually.

Where do you live? The last sorta revolutionary tech I saw in my life was the cellphone, and I strain to see that as actually revolutionary in any meaningful way, to be honest.

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

#140

Post by akomtu »

xwdv wrote: post #117

Incredible 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?

Build 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.
Post reply on HN