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Comment by nkingsy | Hacker News Reader

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”.

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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.

Petra is another one that comes to mind

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?

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”.

Yes. The argument is over whether one frame of reference is valid and another is not, and why.

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.

You're right but I think the problem is that we just day "discovered" instead of qualifying it with the frame of reference. It's an assumption of a eurocentric perspective.

Nobody says Europe discovered Australia. They talk about how Australia was discovered, in passive voice. And everybody knows what frame of reference you're supposed to be reading from.

Is that problematic? I'm guessing it was written in a European language, by someone with a European name, from a European perspective, as a starting point.

When I was a kid we would say "Columbus discovered America" and it definitely gave me the impression that no one knew it existed before him. It erases the fact that lost of people knew about it because they lived there for generations.

I don't think it erases anything. Most places that have been discovered by explorers have been populated. I've never in my life heard of somebody who thought America wasn't populated upon its discovery. The label used for the next group of Spanish visitors is literally "Conquistadors" which could not be more clear as to what it involved.

s/European/American

And you start to see the problem here...

What exactly is an American name?

There isn't one. That's actually my point. America is a cultural melting pot, and I would argue that presuming supremacy of the European culture is problematic.

I trust this is because in currently ethical standards we should trust the concept that everyone belonging modern human civilization. so talking about discovery but didn't contain local residents is not proper anymore.

At different times by different people. Humans were not the first hominids out of Africa.

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…

I feel like the term "discoverers" discounts the existing human residents of the Americas who also had written histories: e.g. the Mayans, whose written histories were largely destroyed by Europeans. I get what you mean though: how else are we to know now about what happened then without written records? It is just sad how much has been destroyed.

The potential of lost written history is fascinating to me. The Phoenicians of Carthage had boats which were capable of crossing the Atlantic and were known to take journeys well past the straights of Gibraltar, but a lot of their written history has been lost thanks to the Punic wars of Ancient Rome. It would be a fascinating lost episode of history if the Phoenicians "discovered" the Americas well before Vikings or other Europeans did. For all we know, this could have happened but accounts were simply lost to time.

The context has an implicit silent inclusion:

Discovered (for the first time by the "Old World"/Known Written Records)

It's implicit.

Not unlike how we don't discount the extant aboriginals of the Americas being here "first" just because they (generally) aren't actually the descendants of the first human populations that came here (but rather seem to have committed genocide on those people).

It's implicit through context.

Exactly. I've never really noticed or really understood until very recently in life after having been to New Zealand and Canada.

Correction:

> Exactly. I've never really noticed or really understood until very recently in life after having personally discovered New Zealand and Canada.

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