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12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed

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Re: 12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed

#43

What a crazy week for old things discovered this statue at Göbekli Tepe and the 400,000 year-old notched lumber beams in Zambia. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66846772

Wow, didn't see that Zambia one, that's big news to me. Question - how can they prove that someone in more recent times didn't notch more ancient wood?

As I understand it, in that case it is by dating the age of the materials the wood in question was buried in. The minerals are dated using luminescence dating. That tells you when those particles were last exposed to sunlight.

Re: 12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed

#47
post #35
post #4

That's not what I consider a "realistic human statue" ?

I maybe wasn't expecting Bernini level of realism, but "Augustus of Prima Porta" is around 2000 years old which greatly predates Renaissance tooling.

This predates that statute by at least 7,000 years or more.

Re: 12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed

#48
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. > Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistory The big deal is that these art works are far more sophisticated that anything else we have seen so early.

This is one common definition of the term history, but it's not a very good one and largely relegated to outdated encyclopedia entries rather than describing how professionals investigate history. It's very poor as a technical definition. For instance, does "history" in an area start when someone writes something, or does the writing have to survive to the present day? Does only one person need to write, or does it n…

look, you can quibble all you want about how the rest of the world is misusing a word, but at the end of the day you're in the minority here.

Re: 12,000-year-old realistic human statue was unearthed

#50

> featuring a lifelike facial expression Notice that, although it was a completely alien culture in a very far away time, before agriculture and writing, we still know what a lifelike facial expression looks like. Many things vary from culture to culture. Facial expressions, at least many of them, are consistent across humanity. If someone stubs their toe or tastes something delicious, you'll know without words. Look…

How many of these universals are shared with other mammals (especially apes)?
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