in Italy there are "the stones of famine".
not that old but interesting anyway.
one reads "if you see me you must be crying".
https://blog.3bee.com/pietre-della-fame-siccita/
sorry... can't find english version.
Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
11–20 of 86 posts
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#12People generally dont know it, but the facts/debate around the sophistication of populations thousands of years ago, and how those vary across geographies, is extremely political. There is generally an unseen hand that dictates the narrative around the distant human past. You can pull the facts together, but the full picture is almost never presented cohesively to the non academic population.
How so?
Like horses in the Americas. There is a narrative that horses were in the Americas, then died off, then were reintroduced by Spanish conquistadors. But, there is sporadic evidence that horses did exist in the Americas the entire time.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#13Oh to dream of the dreams of these ancient people. What did they think? What did they believe? Maybe two thousand years in the future someone will read this comment on hacker news and wonder similarly of me
Depending on how well digital records are preserved I think future people might run into the opposite problem, so much information that there is absolutely no mystery about what people thought and believed.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#14The article closes by quoting an historian involved: "Having our rivers back (flooded) and keeping the engravings submerged will help preserve them, even more than our work."
Is there a risk to the carvings by being exposed to air rather than the erosive river currents? In colder climates, freezing can erode rocks, but I don't imagine that's relevant here.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#15Oh to dream of the dreams of these ancient people. What did they think? What did they believe? Maybe two thousand years in the future someone will read this comment on hacker news and wonder similarly of me
Depending on how well digital records are preserved I think future people might run into the opposite problem, so much information that there is absolutely no mystery about what people thought and believed.
Even with all the information at our fingertips, I still don't know what a person dreams of, hopes for, cries about, longs for, and ultimately, who the person really, truly, is, because us humans are all too good at sharing everything, but the truth of our humanity, the things that make us vulnerable, so we invent a shallow shell of a personality over the years to protect ourselves and thus we put out there only that we think is acceptable to put out there all while remaining in solitude with our actual self. I wish it would be different.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so?
Like horses in the Americas. There is a narrative that horses were in the Americas, then died off, then were reintroduced by Spanish conquistadors. But, there is sporadic evidence that horses did exist in the Americas the entire time.
Mind sharing a link to that evidence?
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Depending on how well digital records are preserved I think future people might run into the opposite problem, so much information that there is absolutely no mystery about what people thought and believed.
Even with all the information at our fingertips, I still don't know what a person dreams of, hopes for, cries about, longs for, and ultimately, who the person really, truly, is, because us humans are all too good at sharing everything, but the truth of our humanity, the things that make us vulnerable, so we invent a shallow shell of a personality over the years to protect ourselves and thus we put out there only that…
and on the inside of that shell, we're all pretty much the same...
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#18Oh to dream of the dreams of these ancient people. What did they think? What did they believe? Maybe two thousand years in the future someone will read this comment on hacker news and wonder similarly of me
For some reason, I've always felt that comments here are ephemeral.
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#19Engravings that are 2,000 years old: so the river was (at least) this low without the current climate change, no?
I'm going to generously assume that you're asking a sincere question and not trying some tired political baiting, even though you mentioned climate change out of nowhere.
Yes, rivers are extremely dynamic -- they run dry, flood, and change course over time. Often, those changes are dramatic and oscillatory so the same path may repeatedly run dry or wet over periods of years, decades, centuries, millennia, and longer. This is why we can often predict where droughts and floods are likely to recur, without precise timing of when. None of that has anything to do with climate change.
I hope this answered your question!
Re: Drought in Brazil's Amazon reveals ancient engravings
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
How so?
Like horses in the Americas. There is a narrative that horses were in the Americas, then died off, then were reintroduced by Spanish conquistadors. But, there is sporadic evidence that horses did exist in the Americas the entire time.
Honest question as I have no horse on this race (pun intended) and you picqued my curiosity. How the hell can the pre existence of horses be politicized?