[HN Gopher] 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring ___________________________________________________________________ 200k-year-old hand art found near a Tibetan hot spring Author : Hooke Score : 175 points Date : 2021-09-24 18:36 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (gizmodo.com) (TXT) w3m dump (gizmodo.com) | csomar wrote: | Given that the Tibet is particularly cold place, shouldn't these | humans wear something to resist the cold? Can humans (or any fur- | less animals) survive such cold climate without extra-fat or | really good clothes? | [deleted] | Terr_ wrote: | Yeah, I can't tell if the clothing is supposed to be | historically accurate (what clothing would survive that long?) | or whether it's only there to satisfy modern viewers. | themgt wrote: | 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. | [deleted] | loonster wrote: | 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. | Leherenn wrote: | I don't have an answer, but I would say not necessarily the | same height. Mountains do not grow all at once or at a | constant rate. For instance, there are some parts of the | Himalayas that are currently growing at 1-2 cm/y. It is thus | not impossible that this place was several hundred meters | lower 200k years ago. | hutzlibu wrote: | Yeah, 200k is not much in geological terms. | Sharlin wrote: | And they're really young for mountains (which is why they're | so high!) | [deleted] | adriand wrote: | 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 that was created in ancient Egypt. It was in a museum | and I lingered at the display case, essentially just gazing | into her eyes. Her personality shone through in some | undefinable way: it felt like encountering another human being | across an incredible expanse of time. | | These moments, I find, are very poignant in the way they remind | us of our own mortality -- but also our deep connection to our | ancestors and to the past. | mrspeaker wrote: | I got the same feeling reading the "Pompeii wall graffiti". | It's not beautiful, but it hit me hard: 2000+ years, and | people are the same people! | (https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/history/the-bawdy-graffiti- | of-p...) | jbay808 wrote: | 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. | dint wrote: | https://www.billemory.com/dillard/dillard.html | bspammer wrote: | 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. | 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: | In the face of accelerating change, every moment feels like | an inflection point, and the past always looks stagnant in | comparison. Measured from the baseline of where things are | now, the past was so different. Measured from the baseline | of how quickly things change now, the past was so slow. | | The catch is that it's true no matter when you say it from, | so long as change is accelerating. Exponential growth is my | favorite example. Plot y=k^t for any k from t=long time ago | to t=T. It will look like y is at an 'insane inflection | point,' regardless of the T you choose. | willcipriano wrote: | > I disagree, there is something special about this moment | in time. | | Your ancestors all felt the same way. So will your | children. | bspammer wrote: | 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 civilization doesn't end. | radicaldreamer wrote: | 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 | paper with screens and tvs with bigger, flatter tvs. | | The most conceptually difficult thing would be | understanding that wireless telegraphs with cameras are | pocket-sized and everywhere. | bspammer wrote: | On the scales we're talking about, I would include the | 1950s as "present-day". I would include the last 300 | years as "particularly special" | adventured wrote: | > is there anything at all that they conceptually | couldn't fathom? | | Well you set the bar artificially high with that | phrasing. 1950s Americans, or any citizens around the | world at the time, would be more than astounded by 3-4 | billion people being essentially always connected on a | gigantic, seemingly instantaneous global communications | and commerce network. The modern smartphone would | similarly astound, what they can do all-in-one and the | quality of it (the audio, the video, the music, movies, | news, communication, click-button services & purchasing, | digitization of money, the quality of digital photographs | and how many you can take with no regard for space, it | would all astound). Someone from the 1980s would be just | as astounded by a recent iPhone, they'd feel like a time | traveler. | | 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. Maybe | people have now widely forgotten the shock effect it had, | I haven't forgotten. | | That said, the parent's claim was an exaggeration. We're | not inventing/harnessing such extraordinary stuff every | year. Maybe a few things of note per decade globally. | | CRISPR, cracking the human genome, modern antibiotics, | Internet, Web, transistor and microprocessor, software, | computers including personal, space flight, powered | flight, various engines, electricity and electric light, | fossil fuels, nuclear power and weapons, various green | revolution outcomes (food production), etc. | | There are several dozen things that can be added to that | list from the last 100-150 years. A few per decade | globally might be a reasonable peg. | gumby wrote: | > it's blatently obvious that there's more going on right | now... | | Blatantly _obvious_? Not to me. I 'm a technologist (e.g. | wrote a bunch of code the results of which you use every | day) with a degree in history and in many ways ancient | Greece seems more vital than today. | gumby wrote: | Well, that is unclear. Writing from Europe 100-1500 years | ago suggests that most people felt quite different about | time and did not have the impression the GP espoused. The | overwhelming impression seems to be that things had | fallen since the end of the (western) Roman Empire; there | was a contrast in millenarian movements in the 10th | century as the turn of the millennium approached. | | However people are not uniformly distributed and such | belief does not seem to have been the case in, say, the | contemporaneous Arab world. | | All that being said: I agree with you that claims that | our era is somehow amazingly unique are way overblown. | sgregnt wrote: | Just wanted to share my opinion. I'm not sure if the number | of existential threads for humanity is now larger than 200k | years ago. My take would be it is probably much smallest | than even 1k years ago. Nukes will not destroy civilization | (it might be horrible disaster on the scale of WW2 but not | civ. distruction.). Arguably we are now have better ways to | adapt to climate changes and it or meteorite impact. And | who knows, in another 100 years we might be an | interplanetary species. AI might not be a thread like some | suggests, and the up sides to productivity are enormous. | ugh123 wrote: | I think you could say that about the industrial revolution. | However, the events in the past 20 years seem to indicate | humanity is moving backwards | | >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. | | The disparity between the haves and the have-nots in this | moment in time would truly bewilder anyone in ancient | history if they could see whats happening today. There are | likely _more_ people living in poverty today than there | were 200 years ago, in absolute numbers - not percentage. | yostrovs wrote: | In percentage, poverty is probably at its lowest in | history. | tshaddox wrote: | Could it be that in the distant future if you at human | history (or even the history of life on Earth) from far | enough away to smooth out the little bumps, it turns out | that we 20th and 21st century humans are in fact in a | pretty unremarkable point along an exponential curve? | katzgrau wrote: | Def, as far as we know, we're just a little slope upward. | | And I'm not sure what the Y axis is even measuring. | bspammer wrote: | If that's true (and I hope it is, because it means things | go very well for humanity), we're still one of the first | generations to see major change _within_ our short lives. | For millions of years, technology and tools stayed | roughly the same from generation to generation. I'm 25, | and the technological progress since I was born is mind- | blowing. | tshaddox wrote: | > we're still one of the first generations to see major | change _within_ our short lives. | | One could argue that people were seeing major | technological/scientific/philosophical/cultural changes | within their lives at least as far back as the | Enlightenment (and I'd argue much further back than | that), and what has actually changed is just that the | number of people affected by those changes has grown | (perhaps exponentially). Likewise in the future the rate | of change we're so impressed by now may look laughable, | and that's even ignoring the possibility of significant | lifespan extension in the future! | spullara wrote: | Only if we populate the galaxy. Which isn't that hard if | we try. But even then we lived at the origin of the | galactic species. Pretty special. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument | tshaddox wrote: | The Universe is a lot bigger than our galaxy though. Why | is it more special to live near the beginning of humans | populating the galaxy than, say, living near the | beginning of humans populating that new subdivision | they're developing out at the edge of my town? | f0e4c2f7 wrote: | 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. | neilv wrote: | And one could help those people we find today to tell their | stories, in a way that will be accessible to people in the | future (decades, centuries, or hours in the future). | cletus wrote: | 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 advantage like | this? | | Now nature does tend to want to find niches because having food | only you can eat tends to be of more value than having abundant | food other people can also eat (eg pandas and bamboo). | | But it's not easy for humans to live at 14,000 feet elevation. | Animals are scarce. Vegetation is limited (eg trees likely to | be conifers). | | This is different to just, say, living in Arctic regions as | those do have much more available food options (eg fish, | migrating game, plants that can grow in the summer) than high | altitudes. | | Has anyone put much thought into this? | prescriptivist wrote: | Just spitballing but maybe at that altitude humans tipped | some sort of scale where they were more efficient predators | of whatever was up there but below that altitude the larger | pleistocene megafauna of the time represented a higher | predation risk to humans themselves or there was less post | kill (scavenger) competition. | toshk wrote: | 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... | subsubzero wrote: | Thats right, the explanation for these handprints is that | Tibetan Buddhist monks have transcended normal human | abilities and made handprints in stone. This is for Vajrayana | Buddhism or what westerners refer to as Tibetan Buddhism. | mysecretaccount wrote: | This is covered in the article, but: the term art is quite | generous here. These may not even have been imprinted | intentionally. Fascinating nonetheless. | unknownOrigin wrote: | 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. | mysecretaccount wrote: | > It doesn't dispute that they were made intentionally - in | fact, it says the opposite. | | > The fossil impressions, which date to between 169,000 and | 226,000 years ago and _seem_ to have been created | intentionally, _could_ represent the earliest known art of | its kind. | | > According to Matthew Bennett, a geologist at Bournemouth | University who specializes in ancient footprints and | trackways, it's _likely_ that these ancient imprints were | intentional. | | Emphasis mine. | jrsdav wrote: | 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. | dmux wrote: | 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. | aomobile wrote: | Hello message from the ancestors! | vanderZwan wrote: | Oldest "Hello world!" ever | tclancy wrote: | More like a dirty joke, surely. | redleggedfrog wrote: | Art is (almost) forever. | jfengel wrote: | Some of those hand prints are highly distorted. Is that just due | to the topology of the rock? | werdnapk wrote: | Or the fact that these have been slowly eroded over 200,000 | years. | Aardwolf wrote: | 200k years ago, that's incredible, not even the wildest science | fiction can imagine what the world will look like 200k years from | now | toshk wrote: | The assumption by some of the scientist is that the handprints | were created in the mud and then stones formed. But others | question this, could also be created after: | https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/art-not-ancient... | | It's very common to find handprints in the Himalayas in rocks, | they are everywhere. | axiosgunnar wrote: | probably like Mercury looks today - a ball of fire | Bobylonian wrote: | 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. | bradlys wrote: | Maybe you mean Venus. | | Regardless of which - it's a massive over exaggeration. We're | not gonna be experiencing fluctuations of 500C+ on the | surface of our planet or an atmospheric pressure of 90x+ | ours. | therealdrag0 wrote: | In case anyone else forgot the timeline, I just googled, and | there's evidence going back to ~2 million years ago of huminoids | in Eurasia. | mc32 wrote: | Wouldn't that upend most theories about when the people who | left Africa left Africa? | | Never mind, new estimates go as far back as 300,000ya. | elvongray wrote: | There are other hominids apart from homo sapiens during those | periods. These will probably be Denisovans | mytailorisrich wrote: | No, it's known that Homo Erectus left Africa and colonised | Eurasia up to East Asia a bit more than 2 million years ago. | | The estimate on when "we" left Africa often means modern | humans, Homo Sapiens. | grillvogel wrote: | most of the established timelines are based on "well this is | the oldest thing we've found so far". most of it is probably | wrong | vonadz wrote: | Impressive that this didn't get worn away. | neaden wrote: | "These prints, however, are more carefully made and have a | specific arrangement--think more along the lines like how a child | presses their handprint into fresh cement." A good reminder of | the fact that for all that society has changed we as people | haven't really. | sva_ wrote: | It is interesting to see how people seem to intuitively | experience joy from changing their environment, in particular | when it seems to not serve any direct use. | delecti wrote: | It leaves me feeling very connected to think that across | hundreds of thousands of year, you'll still find humans being | humans. Creating handprint art has to be one of the most | lasting and quintessentially human behaviors. | mensetmanusman wrote: | It's inspiring to get hints at what life was like back then when | the universe was younger. | Razengan wrote: | I think that even at the scale of "just" a two hundred thousand | years, to the _universe_ it's probably just yesterday. | ASalazarMX wrote: | "When humanity was younger" would have been a perfect | phrasing. | dylan604 wrote: | or even just an hour ago. | tejtm wrote: | It was, (and still is), 40-50 million years since the mountains | formed. | Sharlin wrote: | When the universe was an appreciable fraction younger, all life | on Earth was unicellular. | scollet wrote: | And those uncultured bastards didn't even think to leave a | note. | nanna wrote: | Hugely enjoyed The Hunters of Prehistory by Andre Leroi-Gourhan. | Such an inspiring introduction to paleolithic archeology, even if | it's inevitably a bit dated these days, and it is Eurocentric. | Great as an introduction to structuralism too, and philosophy of | technics. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-09-24 23:00 UTC)