Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest | Hacker News Reader

Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest

theguardian.com

174 pointsmv958 comments

"The site is so remote that, after a two-hour drive from San José del Guaviare, a team of archaeologists and film-makers trekked on foot for around four hours."

So...not remote at all? This is less remote than the typical national park over there.

The snake danger is overstated as always, for extra sensationalism. Snakes don't hunt people. Unlikely attacks are defensive, when provoked, and virtually always happen domestically. The death rate after an unlikely bite of the top 3 most dangerous snakes in Colombia is in the range of 1-3%. Not 80%. And surely when you see it, it's easy to avoid.

"The territory where the paintings have been discovered was completely off limits until recently and still involves careful negotiation to enter safely."

Given the nonsense in the rest of the article, likely another exaggeration. Even in areas of Colombia declared red (= do not travel to in any case), you can just go. They are giant areas, where locals know exactly the 95% of the area safe to visit. Where nothing has happened for many years, with zero rebel presence. Just avoid that 5%.

FARC is gone and ELN focuses on sabotaging infrastructure. There's no interest in visitors or tourists. The latter has been true for about 2 decades now.

A true and real risk over there is running into somebody in a forest doing something illegal (narco, logging, gold mining). Then you de-escalate, pay, and wish them a good day.

None of this dismisses the beauty and importance of the discovery, just triggered at these constant falsehoods about Colombia and sensationalist writing.

You forget, the goal of this article is to get those precious clicks, and the chance that Michael Bay reads it and likely uses it as the script for his next action thriller.

I was sort of expecting the art to be in a cave - but out in the open as it is, I expect that local folks had known about it for a long long time and it just hadn't been properly documented / published.

I wonder how many more there are like that. Maybe getting remote communities more connected to the internet would help them publicize some of their local artifacts and sites.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CHg0lcLjebp/?igshid=1tpomcztoh3g...

True. "Discover" is a very inappropriate term to use in this case, it's "first to document". And possibly not even that.

Furthermore, film crews don't get in unless there's somewhat of a path, so even more likely it was locally known.

Rock 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.

Here is a theory - survivorship bias. Humans made all kinds of things, but only small amount of it survived. Red ochre on rock faces just happened to be something that lasts a long time.

To expand on that I think there was a lot of self expression covering all possible surfaces. So the statement shifts from many human groups picked same thing to express themselves to multiple self expressive groups discovered ochre techniques and produced artwork that survived to this day. There were probably plenty of groups that did not discover that and none of their art survived.

To elaborate on this, the white marble statues decorating the Parthenon and Acropolis are believed to have been painted very bright colors in their day. Not a single one of those dazzling pigments survived exposed to the elements after a mere 2500 years.

I think it's past belief at this point, archaeologists have found traces of pigment on the statues.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/12/22/ancient-statues-in...

Know nothing about this source but I googled and couldn't find a better one, I'm sure I've read about before though.

The white marble statues were usually copies of more highly regarded bronze statues. But you can’t melt the marble down to make weapons so those statues survived

It is a good theory.

Even things like arrowheads which are used to mark progress or reach of Native American populations in the US are useful because they survive and are dug up all the time while digging. I'm sure there would be more interesting cultural finds if baskets or clothes from the time survived at the same rate.

Yeah I bet there were hundreds of thousands of works of art painted on animal canvas or pottery, but due to deterioration did not survive.

Pottery is one of those things that is still found regularly in archeological finds; it doesn't really deteriorate if it's sealed / buried.

I'm sure the later stuff lasted, once we had perfected the technique of producing ceramic (still probably a lot is buried under earth somewhere and over time will be crushed with pressure). But I'm talking about the early to late-stone age period (10K YA and earlier), when we probably still produced containers, but they were probably made from less durable materials or techniques.

For those who haven't heard about survivorship bias, the following section in the Wikipedia illustrates it interestingly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_milit...

Do you, by chance, watch the History channel?

Spend some time around kids. Rock art is completely obvious.

After a few thousand nights in a cave with nothing to do, drawing on the walls with some charcoal from your fire is what every human probably did, and would do even today.

Switching to red ochre is just one step away from that.

Even chimps are known to scratch figures in the dirt.

What I find interesting about this explanation is that it suggests a much more limited scope of decision-making than is often attributed to humans. A practical example of why this could matter is that instead of spreading an idea through viral mechanisms where an information is transmitted between individuals, this would provide an illustration of how an idea could be spread by replicating conditions and causing the idea to essentially regenerate in a predictable manner among disconnected individuals, while from each individual’s perspective they are doing something novel.

It could be that there's tonnes of people doing hand things with lots of different materials. Then, because of the composition of that red ochre material, only the drawings that were made with that stuff stick around for long enough for us to see them.

Yes, and “long enough for us to see them” actually comprises two independent factors: (1) survivorship bias, in that red ochre on rock can last a long time, and (2) “discoverability” bias, in that red ochre on rock is relatively easy to spot.

Additionally perhaps people (would-be discoverers) ignore art in remote places that is not a hand print or otherwise pictographic as probably a natural anomaly and not human-made?

Basically humans have an instinct for graffiti, a few standard interests (hands, sexual anatomy, prey animals), and there are a few material combinations that survive the ages particularly well.

It’s probably not a coincidence that two millennia ago you find the same crude jokes and drawings of dicks scrawled on the walls of Pompeii that you find in any high school bathroom.

Yeah, but how many high school ruffians today speak and write fluent Latin?

My favorite graffiti is in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY (transported from Egypt). British soldiers in Egypt to fight Napoleon, acting like naughty teenagers and carving their names.

Hands are the universally present and usable drawing implements, what you're questioning seems incredibly obvious.

Hand prints and basic shapes is the first thing every toddler with fingerpaints will draw. Followed by people and animals.

As a solution to this problem, Rupert Sheldrake proposes his hypothesis of "Morphic Resonance" [1]. While it's a far-out idea and rejected by the scientific community, I found it an interesting read nonetheless.

[1] https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance/introdu...

> While it's a far-out idea and rejected by the scientific community

Those are fun reads, but they always disappoint in the end.

The examples cited always turn out to be entirely made up.

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.

Indeed. It seems possible that there’s something about the red ochre hand motif is hardwired into human brain and is related to language development. But on a time scale of tens of thousands of years, even if we somehow outgrew it as a species, it seems there would still be residual evidence.

Here you go: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a2/e4/cb/a2e4cb366c802776412e...

The mystery is already solved for more than a decade now, though more research remains to be done and understanding deepened:

Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current, Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity

https://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/PerattTPSv31-2003...

Part 2:

https://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/Peratt,et,al,TPSv...

Related publications:

https://plasmauniverse.info/NearEarth.html

When our daughter was one year old, we gave her some child-safe finger paints. Finger prints and hand prints were some of the first "drawings" she made without any parental instruction. She does not have any inherent access to global information flows or other esoteric explanations that would bind her to her ancient relatives -- beyond a bunch of shared DNA and common physiology & brain development.

She also prefers bright colors, and red pigments are probably some of the most accessible in nature that might be more robust to the sands of time (i.e. survivorship bias).

It seems like a likely explanation is that these are primarily done by children and that this is a human universal / instinctual behavior during child development. Looking at google scholar there are at least a couple studies of hand print sizes estimating that in a few regions they were almost exclusively done by young people. That would seem to suggest a biological basis for this specific behavior.

Red is the one of the most common and easily accessible pigments, and as others have pointed out what we see is durable. As far as the “same motifs” goes, is that really so unexpected? It’s not a particularly precise claim, but I’d certainly expect to see expressive similarities from groups of biologically indistinct humans living similar technological lifestyles despite their geographic or temporal separation.

This 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.

Easy there, before you start foaming. In case you blacked out after the first paragraph, they mentioned that site.

> The site is in the Serranía de la Lindosa where, along with the Chiribiquete national park, other rock art had been found. The documentary’s presenter, Ella Al-Shamahi, an archaeologist and explorer, told the Observer: “The new site is so new, they haven’t even given it a name yet.”

To be honest the title is a bit sensationalist (Sistine chapel ..ya that's a journalist), its from the twitter of a TV show host not a scientist.

The whole area is famous for rock art and has been documented since the pre 1940's. Tens of thousands of district rock art has been found here for decades, this exact area has been under excavation since 2015, but was previously excavated in 1989. Some of the site names are Angosturas II, Limoncillos, and Cerro Montoya.

Oh and the very photo's published in the link are not new , there are articles from before 2018 showing the exact same image..

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.

There's even a documentary from 2015 called Colombia Wild Magic available on Netflix and Amazon Prime: https://youtu.be/qY-lL8GscUo?t=167

Yep, at least part of the site is already on google maps: https://goo.gl/maps/MYLB2SEmnoyHmvUGA

Really remote, like 500m away from a farm/main road. Maybe they discovered a few more remote sites, but the general presence of ancient rock paintings in that area must have been known for a long time

I like this part the most: "The discovery was made last year, but has been kept secret until now as it was filmed for a major Channel 4 series to be screened in December: Jungle Mystery: Lost Kingdoms of the Amazon."

different place, apparently.

> Their date is based partly on their depictions of now-extinct ice age animals, such as the mastodon, a prehistoric relative of the elephant that hasn’t roamed South America for at least 12,000 years. There are also images of the palaeolama, an extinct camelid, as well as giant sloths and ice age horses.

The article doesn't describe what other means were used, but this is important.

It's also a little disappointing that there are no close-up, high-resolution images of the extinct megafauna being depicted. I imagine the interpretation of what constitutes a Giant Sloth, for example, could be quite subjective.

https://twitter.com/bendormiki/status/1330826184746278917?s=...

for some photos including the sloth

>It's also a little disappointing that there are no close-up, high-resolution images of the extinct megafauna being depicted.

I got the impression that this announcement was more or less a teaser for their upcoming show, which is due to premiere in a few days. Perhaps that's why they didn't reveal too much. They've certainly aroused my interest enough to tune in.

Colonisation 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.

> One figure wears a mask resembling a bird with a beak.

Tinfoil time: that one's a fairly common image in petroglyphs on several continents. See also the "Squatter Man".

Theory one: People retained certain cultural traits during the spread of humans across the world, like the squatter man, and these cultural figures were forgotten or replaced at a much slower rate than they have been in the past 5-10K years.

Theory two: The figures were independently reinvented multiple times over. I mean birds appear pretty much everywhere. Same with e.g pyramid shapes appearing all over the world; it's the most simple, most stable shape to build something tall ish, yet a bit prettier than just a mound.

I’m a bit disappointed it isn’t shaped like a monolith.

There seems to be an organization to this. I'd almost think it's guide, almanac, or calendar.

Maybe the wiggly lines mean something, 12 days after planting some seeds or something. It really looks like an information writing system

does anyone have digital scans of the rock face? would love to see the paintings.

Might consider as the first social media wall

One 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.

Lascaux has human figures. It's pretty common.

There's only one, and it's a human-animal hybrid with a bird head

https://archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en/themes-0

I don’t know ratio if humanoid vs. non-humanoid life forms, but I recall from visiting archaeological sites in South Africa as a youngster a pretty high incidence of humanoid depiction.

You can see some of it here: https://www.google.com/search?q=south+african+cave+drawings&...

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