Prehistoric Horses: Exploring the meaning of Lascaux’s galloping herds | Hacker News Reader

Prehistoric Horses: Exploring the meaning of Lascaux’s galloping herds

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18 pointsThevet12 comments

I recently watched the werner herzog documentary about the lascaux cave paintings. Highly recommend it if you want to add some stunning visuals to the interpretations in the article

"Cave of Forgotten Dreams"? Thats about the Chauvet Cave, but indeed very interesting as well.

Ah damn yes my mistake. Ty for the correction! :)

A tangential comment. Any good casual reading books about world prehistory? Google doesn't seem to give any interesting results.

Guns, Germs and Steel. A modern classic, since followed up with many other works. The author's perspective is notable both because of his academic credentials and his predisposition for anthropology in Papua New Guinea (a still surviving geography of many traditional tribes) where he was resident for many years.

The Sea Craft of Prehistory. Still an authoritative tome with respect to the overall nature of watercraft in global prehistory and their fantastic capacity to transport our ancestors vast distances. In some ways I would place more faith in the contents of this book than conventional prehistoric narratives.

Ancient Religions of the Austronesian World: From Australasia to Taiwan. A syncretic prehistoric prespective on one of the more interesting groups of prehistory.

Guns, Germs and Steel is considered hogwash by pretty much all archaeologists. It's basically environmental determinism in the extreme. Don't let his Pulitzer prize fool you, Jared Diamond certainly is not an anthropologist, he is an ornithologist, and his application of ecological models to cultural phenomena really oversteps the boundaries of acceptable anthropological scholarship. See this article for a solid critique: http://www.columbia.edu/~saw2156/HunterBlatherer.pdf

Instead, if you're interested in reading more about ice age art, particularly in the Swabian Jura region, you'll definitely enjoy this upcoming book written by the leading archaeologists who work on that material: [Ice Age Archaeology: The Record from the Ach and Lone Valleys of Southwest Germany](https://books.google.ca/books/about/Ice_Age_Archaeology.html...) In 2018 I had the unique opportunity to visit Hohle Fels, which is where some of the oldest portable art was recovered, as well as the oldest musical instrument, a bone flute. The tour was led by Nicholas Conrad, the director of this project, and Ewa Dutkiewicz, who excavated and subsequently devoted a large chunk of her career towards studying the bone flute. Their enthusiasm during the tour was really captivating :)

I also highly recommend adding the forthcoming book The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity to your reading list. It is co-authored by David Graeber, a fantastic anthropologist who sadly died this year. Check out [this article](https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/) by the authors published in 2018 for a prelude regarding the main objectives of this book

Well, archaeology and anthropology have never been in agreement. Further, the data and accepted method is always changing. I believe living in proximity to multiple traditional societies grants perspective quite apart from the ivory tower of universities. I personally believe Diamond raises some good points for a general audience. FYI I grew up two doors down from an internationally celebrated anthropologist, have PhD anthropologist friends, and my father studied anthropology, so I am not unaccustomed to the winds of academic change in this space.

Also a fan of David Graeber but didn't recommend his books due to the degree of repetition I found in them (I basically grew up in Zomia).

In short it seems we read similarly but our opinions differ.

‘After the Ice: A Global Human History, 20,000–5000 BC’ by Steven Mithen was excellent when I read it ~10 years ago.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674019997

Maybe the first few chapters of “Sapiens”?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Hu...

I read about sapiens. People with credentials in field seem to dismiss it as overly sensational, though.

Light reading (as was requested by the parent poster) often gets dismissed by people with in-depth expertise - especially if it’s also somewhat entertaining.

I get both sides of the argument by the way, and adjust my expectations of lighter reading accordingly.

It's been a while since I read it, but I remember enjoying Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade.

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