[HN Gopher] Eight-mile frieze of Ice Age beasts found in Amazon ... ___________________________________________________________________ Eight-mile frieze of Ice Age beasts found in Amazon rainforest (2020) Author : vinnyglennon Score : 159 points Date : 2023-06-25 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.cnn.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com) | atentaten wrote: | Can someone explain what eight-mile has to do with any of this? | It's only mentioned in the title and not in the article's text. | noSyncCloud wrote: | I found this paragraph on Wiki: | | >A site including eight miles of paintings or pictographs that | is under study in Colombia, South America at Serrania de la | Lindosa was revealed in November 2020. Their age is suggested | as being 12,500 years old (c. 10,480 B.C.) by the | anthropologists working on the site because of extinct fauna | depicted. | | - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_art - | https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine-chap... | olddustytrail wrote: | There are 3 sites within 8 miles of each other. | tomrod wrote: | Fascinating! | billsmithaustin wrote: | I would not have guessed any of those were mastodons. | olddustytrail wrote: | Why would you? I never even knew there _were_ mastodons in | South America until today. | oidar wrote: | The rectangles seem suggestive of agriculture as well. | akiselev wrote: | Primitive forms of agriculture ("intensive gathering" and | cultivation) among hunter gatherers were around long before | sedentary agriculture developed, on the order of 10,000 years | or more [1] | | [1] | https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... | olddustytrail wrote: | > frieze of Ice Age beasts | | I wonder how long the headline writer has been waiting for an | opportunity to use _that_ one! | froggit wrote: | More evidence you can find anything on Amazon. | oldstrangers wrote: | "probably made around 11,800 to 12,600 years ago" | | Interesting timeline if you're entertained by the 'lost | civilization' / cataclysm discourse. | bcraven wrote: | The ABC (Aussie) documentary _First Footprints_ is one of the | most mind-boggling documentaries I have ever seen. It covers | 50,000 years of Australian history. | | https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/australia-culture-b... | IG_Semmelweiss wrote: | I had a hard time believing the 1st image were the actual | drawings found. They look extremely well preserved, and quite | frankly, gorgeous! | nkingsy wrote: | At the very end of the article, they state that local communities | knew of and lead researchers to this art as a side effect of | demilitarization of the area. | | So not exactly "found", more "officially documented". | roughly wrote: | "Columbused: discovered for white people" | lostlogin wrote: | You hit a similar thing with the language used to describe | European colonising explorers 'discovering' populated lands. | When was Australia discovered? When was New Zealand discovered? | jahewson wrote: | I never understood this artificially forced point. Any | explorer can only "explore" from the frame of reference of | their culture's knowledge. Even Australia's indigenous | population has distinct groups from different origins and | necessarily different "discoveries". | darkerside wrote: | Yes. The argument is over whether one frame of reference is | valid and another is not, and why. | bagacrap wrote: | To discover simply means to find. If I'm playing hide and | seek, and my location is uncovered, I might cry out "you | found me!" This is not to deny that I existed or knew of | my own whereabouts prior to being located. | | To say that some European "discovered" Australia is | simply a statement that they found something they didn't | hitherto know about. There's no implication of validity. | goatlover wrote: | At different times by different people. Humans were not the | first hominids out of Africa. | mrkstu wrote: | The way I approach that is by any civilization with an | existing written corpus going back in time- European/Chinese | for example. | | If the Chinese had knowledge of the Americas they'd have been | the 'discoverers' in mondernity. | | Without written continuity it's hard to credit discoverers... | hobs wrote: | A significant amount of archeology is like this - Las Monedas | cave (for example) has prehistoric cave paintings, but its | named after someone dropped 20 coins (or so) in it in the | 1700s, many caves that were "discovered" in a modern sense just | mean in the context of described by science. | bpicolo wrote: | Petra is another one that comes to mind | pentagrama wrote: | The title font is really hard to read. Thanks Firefox for your | reader mode. | | Someone here browse the web blocking remote fonts? How was your | experience? I know uBlock Origin has this option, I may give it a | try. | froggit wrote: | I block remote fonts w/ ublock! It's pretty handy in a "I | always know text is gonna be rendered with a font I can read | and it cuts down on having to make the connections to get them. | ublock has a bit of a learning curve (half an hour reading on | their wiki) to get the most outta it, but just blocking remote | fonts just takes a couple clicks in check boxes. | pentagrama wrote: | Just tried for a bit, all good til I noticed in some sites | using icon fonts I got a weird character, it make sense, but | is a problem there, specially for icons without labels, eg: | https://imgur.com/a/8D1OC9n | | Don't know why devs will use fonts instead of svgs for icons, | I guess there is a reason. | velosol wrote: | I have and briefly the majority of the time you're missing | little to nothing by not using webfonts. Occasionally the | design language of a physical media property is carried forward | with the font in a way that is interesting enough to be | worthwhile (ie _The Atlantic_'s title font is instantly | recognizable but not critical). | | If you're bandwidth starved (ie ISDN or worse) then it's also a | nice speedup. | pentagrama wrote: | Yeah, but as I mentioned in other comment, I found many | issues with icons by blocking remote fonts, look at Google | Podcasts https://imgur.com/a/6de4uNL | qup wrote: | What is "eight-mile" referencing? It's totally unclear to me. | version_five wrote: | If you had one shot to paint any frieze you ever wanted, would | you capture it, or just let it slide? | jibbit wrote: | I struggle to find an outdoor paint that lasts 2 years | someweirdperson wrote: | It's the fault of modern regulation, requiring it to never | cause health issues or problems for the environment. | mistercheph wrote: | Yes, 20,000 years ago, people used cancer-causing chemicals | to dye rocks that have been regulated out of existence, no | small part of the improvements in mortality since that | primitive time. | trompetenaccoun wrote: | It seems to be an overhang, but still... I've also never seen | that anywhere in the tropics. Are there others? All the rock | paintings I know are either in caves or very different | climates. | roger_ wrote: | Where could one find high resolution photos of these? | seaknoll wrote: | I've been here and to a few other, equally spectacular sites in | this general part of Colombia. They're well-known among local | people, but some are VERY hard to get to (freight or chartered | plane to a community completely unattached to the rest of the | country by road + hours-long boat journey + hours of hiking). | | They can be quite sad though, e.g. the relatively newer images | depict colonization encroaching upon the region - horses | (introduced by the colonists), swords, and scenes that appear to | show imprisonment of people. | cardamomo wrote: | The "relatively newer" images you refer to seem to be nearly | 12,000 years newer than the images mentioned in this article. | They're likely from a different culture entirely. | | EDIT: Changed "older" to "newer." | seaknoll wrote: | The images are of various ages. This article describes the | subset that are the oldest, but there are newer ones mixed | in. In some places you get layers of them, where you can see | that the older ones were drawn over. They can estimate how | much later they were added based on the presence of animals | and objects that did not exist there 12,000 years ago. | | It's true that there's a huge gap in time between the | earliest paintings and the newer ones and so some aspects of | the culture probably did change. But the area has been | continuously populated for millennia. | olddustytrail wrote: | You mean 12k years newer, not older. | freedomben wrote: | I'm not positive what GP meant either, but if they were | talking about horses, that is mentioned in the article as | being there about 12,000 years ago, which is significantly | before colonization that first GP mentioned as having | brought horses to the area: | | > _the rock art shows how the earliest human inhabitants of | the area would have coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with | pictures showing what appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, | camelids, horses and three-toed ungulates with trunks._ | amatic wrote: | Apparently, there were horses in the Americas, but they | went extinct about 12k years ago, along with the other | megafauna. What I understand is that different images | could have been made in multiple time periods, from the | first inhabitants up to today. | gort52467 wrote: | s/went extinct/were hunted to extinction by man | atlantic wrote: | Blaming megafauna extinction on humans aligns with | current misanthropic fashions, but rapid global warming | at the end of the last ice age is a far more likely | culprit. | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21201-8 | mc32 wrote: | Horses are not extinct. | cardamomo wrote: | Yes, that's what I meant! | AndrewKemendo wrote: | I wonder if it's possible that these were documenting something | that they were losing, or had lost, as opposed to simply just a | document to how they were living currently. Like a historical | record of sorts. | | That specific period 18000 years ago, was the middle-end of the | quaternary megafauna extinction [1] and the earth was | transitioning from plenty of mega fauna to none - leading to the | birth of property and modernity. | | [1] https://kemendo.com/Myth.pdf | LouisSayers wrote: | In the paintings there are many cosine / sine wave type patterns, | as well as www type patterns as well. | | Any ideas what these are referring to? It seems like they're | documenting something? | bpodgursky wrote: | > coexisted with Ice Age megafauna, with pictures showing what | appear to be giant sloths, mastodons, camelids, horses and three- | toed ungulates with trunks | | "Coexisted" is a loaded term given that the coexistence lasted | for maybe a couple hundred years before every single one of those | was hunted to extinction. | trompetenaccoun wrote: | That's a theory but not proven. Could have been climate change | too, or another cause. | abeppu wrote: | Is it surprising that a mere overhang in the rock has been | sufficient to preserve art for that long? It sounds like they | really are just pigment on cleaned rock, and I would have thought | that water dripping, wind, lichens, animals or _something_ over | the millennia would have ruined it. | ChatGTP wrote: | Same with Australian Aboriginal paintings, some very ancient, | some had been repainted yes but even the fact the images last | 100 years is pretty amazing. | crazygringo wrote: | I too was baffled by this, in my experience modern _paint_ isn | 't going to last that long. But I looked it up and supposedly: | | > _Because ochre is a mineral, it doesn 't wash away or decay, | allowing it to persist through the ages._ [1] | | > _...the ancient artisans of Babine Lake in British Columbia | harvested ochre sediment... Then, MacDonald says, they | carefully heated it to around 750 to 850 degrees Celsius over | open-hearth fires to achieve the colour they desired... Not | only would the process yield the vivid red, the ancient | artisans must have known, but it would "improve colourfastness, | stability and resistance to degradation", the scientists' | article says... The iron in the material bonds easily to | surfaces that are high in silica, like the rock faces, ensuring | their durability._ [2] | | So it seems it's due to actual chemical bonding. | | Which makes me wonder -- if you applied ochre to rock today, | how hard would it be to then remove? Would it be impossible | with regular washing, would you need power washing, or | sandblasting even? | | [1] https://www.livescience.com/64138-ochre.html | | [2] https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2019/11/21/scientists- | uncove... | flybrand wrote: | > how hard would it be to then remove? | | Permanent graffiti through science! | jvm___ wrote: | City workers hate that teenagers learned this one trick... | soligern wrote: | [dead] | dudinax wrote: | +1 for the theory that humans wiped out the megafauna in America. | hrpnk wrote: | "(2020)" missing in the title? Story was published 1:51 PM EST, | Wed December 2, 2020. | [deleted] | RagnarD wrote: | Every square millimeter of this work needs to be digitized in | high color resolution with 3D scans, ASAP. | [deleted] | wumms wrote: | Covered eight years ago (2015): | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/20/colombia-wilde... | | Edit: Channel 4 (UK) documentary from 2020 [0,1] as teased here | [2] | | [0] https://youtu.be/aDmKC_h9Www | | [1] Show me the paintings! https://youtu.be/aDmKC_h9Www?t=3073 | | [2] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/nov/29/sistine- | chap... | wswope wrote: | Just to add-on: Channel 4 has also put out related "Lost | Kingdoms of Africa/South America/Central America" series, all | of which are well-done and showcase offbeat archaeological | sites in the same vein as this frieze. | | https://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=lost+kingdoms&d=programmes_ps ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-06-25 23:00 UTC)