Paleolithic French didn’t let their dead rest peacefully | Hacker News Reader

Paleolithic French didn’t let their dead rest peacefully

arstechnica.com

37 pointsdiodorus14 comments

Graves, I think, will be the the key to a lot of future paleolithic discoveries.

They're basically intentional time capsules. A meaningful amount of archeological knowledge about vikings (for example) comes from graves. Gobekli Tepeh, the most significant evidence of early neolithic (and maybe late paleolithic) "high civilization" only survived because the whole complex was intentionally buried...

Not many gravesites dating to before the late paleolithic have been discovered. I think they exist though.

Mesolithic Neanderthals made graves. More shockingly, Homo Naledi were found in a gravesite. These humans were small brained & semi-arboreal. They were contemporary to early Sapiens but are thought to have split from our ancestral line at a very early stage. The site really seems like a grave, but archeologists are still hedging bets.

Large brain humans like Sapiens and neanderthals were thought to have "invented" mortuary practices pretty late-in-the-game. The oldest known sapien grave is in Israel, dating to just 100kya^. Homo Naledi mortuary practice seems far fetched. But, it's very hard to think of an alternative theory for the naledi site. Everything about it says gravesite.

If such distant human relatives made graves, and I think they did, then other humans probably did too. They're out their.

^The bones were also painted with ocre, like the French site.

> They're basically intentional time capsules.

That's an interesting way of looking at it. When we buried my dad, we buried him in his favorite suit, with his cowboy boots, plus his slippers because the mortician said they wouldn't be able to get the boots on his feet. I think we tossed several other knickknacks in there before they closed the casket up. They gave us flowers off the burial wreath at the gravesite, and I know I tossed one or two of them inside the vault before they closed that up.

There's sort of an overwhelming instinct to give the dead "the things they'd like".

I always tell my wife to bury me without a casket, wearing tanned animal skins, covered in shells and with a bunch of flint arrowheads scattered around. Just to give some archeologist 5,000 years from now a real cracking paper to publish and briefly overthrow the established timeline

> The images engraved on the walls of Grotte de Cussac depict bison, horses, mammoths, and people—and, inexplicably, human genitalia.

So people have been drawing dicks on walls for 30,000 years.

There's some theory that pornography is a primary driver of historical progress. Art, technology etc. I can't remember what it's called.

It is hard to deny all the pioneering work done by pornography. Arguably, the oldest known motif is "venus of willendorf" figurines, contemporary with this site (and that dick pic). One is the oldest known ceramic artifacts. Others represent pioneering examples of carving techniques.

Many narrations of the european renaissance think advancements in statuary and painting techniques to have been the vanguard to renaissance science, philosophy and such. Many were erotic, like michelangelo's david.

The first widespread commercial uses of photography and cinema were pronographic. Some of the earliest ecommerce was porn. They pioneered large scale streaming video.

Currently, porn is a driver of VR tech. I will grant that gaming is the primary driver, another perennial pioneer of tech/media. But... If you want to watch VR films... there aren't any. A handful of non-porn films exist, but they're basically demos. There are a handful of music videos too, but very few. Porn though... Porn already has a full VR inventory!

Without dick pics, we would have never had writing.

This is really interesting, thanks for the comment.

When I see things like drawings of genitalia on walls drawn 30,000 years ago, I tend to not think of humanity as some juvenile species but rather feel very connected to our proto-selves. It's fascinating to me that a lot of the things we thought about or conceptualized then are the same things we do now. Obviously our experience is much more expansive now, but like you mentioned, a lot of the base motivations are the same.

I always wonder too if people 50,000 years ago laughed when someone farted like we do...

I am absolutely sure of it! Babies think farts are funny.

> ... through commingling the bones of several individuals” might have been especially important to people burying their dead in the cave. That process might have helped remind the living, in some way, of the connection between the individual and the group.

It's interesting that the speculation gravitates towards some symbolic meaning here. One could also make the point that maybe humans in the paleolithic era were not so different from humans throughout history, who moved or commingled remains of the dead for every reason from the veneration of saints to the fact the remains were in the way and needed to be put somewhere else.

Perhaps the bones were put there in that way because it was the only thing that made sense to the people of the time.

I don't want to be nitpicky, but there is no such thing as the paleolithic French.

Ya it's an odd phrase. It's obviously just indicating the location of the find, but why does that need to be in the title?

Because "Paleolithic people living in the place now known as France" is longer, clunkier and conveys the same meaning.

It's also not really "inaccurate." We say "Irish prehistory," native americans, etc.

Paleolithic Europeans, or West-Europeans, would have been fine.

How is that different, besides being less informative? They didn't call it europe.

France is an administrative concept, Europe a geographic one.

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