Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
theguardian.com
Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
1–10 of 61 posts
Re: Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
#2[deleted]
Re: Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
#3Colonisation and early peopling of the Colombian Amazon during the Late Pleistocene and the Early Holocene: New evidence from La Serranía La Lindosa
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.04.026 for those interested, wasn’t linked in the article.
Re: Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
#4One thing that strikes me as possibly interesting about this is that there are human figures depicted, something that strangely virtually never appears in cave art.
Re: Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
#5This article is an embarrassment to the anglophone world.
The rock art in Chiribiquete is already well-known in Colombia.
Perhaps this expedition discovered some new cliffs with paintings, or perhaps not. I doubt it personally, more like they got a film crew there.
But the article gives the distinct impression that Colombians (including the indigenous people of the amazon basin) themselves aren't capable of discovering anything, but require an "expedition" from the UK and an associated channel 4 film crew to discover it for them. You'd have thought we left that sort of patronising colonial fantasy stuff behind when we left the 19th century. The Indiana Jones-lite anecdote about the fucking snake they encountered? It sounds brainless even by the standards of an evening documentary to show on British TV, but to plaster it on the front page of the Guardian is even more ridiculous, especially considering the Guardian's politics and the great anglophone lurch wokeward of 2020.
Re: Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
#6One thing that strikes me as possibly interesting about this is that there are human figures depicted, something that strangely virtually never appears in cave art.
Don't think this is true? I typed "cave art" into Google image search and the majority of pictures had human figures (stick figures, but still) in them.
Re: Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
#7Rock art is really weird because there are exactly same motifs using the same materials (usually red ochre) all over the world and separated by tens of thousands of years.
People act like it’s no big deal, but it sure looks like a pretty big deal that raises some interesting questions. We have a global view of information flows now, and I feel like I haven’t seen a lot of behaviors in humanity that explain how this has been working. What is happening here? Every few thousand years some small group of people in a new random spot on earth somehow magically decides to do that hand thing with red ochre on a rock face? By what mechanism? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence that we are innately drawn to hand symbols in red ochre, aside from these examples separated by diameter of the earth and tens of thousands of years.
Given the time scale and given our current visibility into humanity, human information, and human creativity, it seems like whatever would cause that to happen should be something that’s still observable in the modern world.
Re: Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
#8This article is an embarrassment to the anglophone world. The rock art in Chiribiquete is already well-known in Colombia. Perhaps this expedition discovered some new cliffs with paintings, or perhaps not. I doubt it personally, more like they got a film crew there. But the article gives the distinct impression that Colombians (including the indigenous people of the amazon basin) themselves aren't capable of discoveri…
There is even a Wikipedia article on this already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiribiquete_National_Park
That contains pictures of the rock art that goes back to 2013. Maybe "discovered" is the wrong word or they knew it would get clicks.
Re: Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
#9Rock art is really weird because there are exactly same motifs using the same materials (usually red ochre) all over the world and separated by tens of thousands of years. People act like it’s no big deal, but it sure looks like a pretty big deal that raises some interesting questions. We have a global view of information flows now, and I feel like I haven’t seen a lot of behaviors in humanity that explain how this h…
Hands are the universally present and usable drawing implements, what you're questioning seems incredibly obvious.
Re: Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
#10Rock art is really weird because there are exactly same motifs using the same materials (usually red ochre) all over the world and separated by tens of thousands of years. People act like it’s no big deal, but it sure looks like a pretty big deal that raises some interesting questions. We have a global view of information flows now, and I feel like I haven’t seen a lot of behaviors in humanity that explain how this h…
Maybe rock art is a secondary effect of whatever evolutionary leap brought about language in the human species. Whatever brain mechanisms facilitated that also facilitated cave paintings. The rest can be explained by many independent inventors over tens of thousands of years. Maybe even call these paintings a first attempt at writing, a precursor to hieroglyphics.