Archaeologists discover ancient drawings in a Spanish cave | Hacker News Reader

Archaeologists discover ancient drawings in a Spanish cave

smithsonianmag.com

130 pointsHooke38 comments

I looked at the pics in the articles, and I do not see any of the things they say are painted.

I think the first is quite clear. I mande a version in https://imgur.com/a/y1i3Tzv IANAA [1] I'm not sure if the nose is painted or is just a dark spot in the rock that I'm over interpreting.

[1] You can interpret is as "I am not an Archeologist" or "I am not an Artist". Both are correct.

I have never seen a more cute deer.

I wish all ancient drawings had such a version so we can easily interpret what they are talking about in the article. Early cave drawings are very hard to decipher.

It's an auroch, not a deer (actually the correct term seems to be "aurochs", but it's not what the article uses): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

I saw a few of examples in biology. Here I got a random image from Google https://bmcecolevol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-... It shows a fossil of an insect in a stone, A and B are photos, C and D are hand drawings that show the important features. I'm not sure if it's common to superimpose the drawings, but in my case I thought it was better.

clearly a cow, yep. You missed the posterior ear

Thank you for making this. It was hard to see anything before.

After seeing your drawing, I see another way of interpreting this image. What if the bull is facing right and not left. The dark spot is his upper back. Can you see it that way too?

I can "see" a full bull facing right, the front legs are the neck in my drawing, but the rear legs are missing. Is that what you see? Anyway, the caption of the image says

> The painted head of an auroch, an extinct wild bull, was the first painting archaeologists discovered in the cave.

so I think it's only the head.

The other drawings are also only the head, so it may be a local style/preference (???).

It’s exactly how you describe it. I also see it both ways. The gazelle is more visible, but the bull seems more like the auroch.

Thank You.

Looking at these makes me wonder if I've just walked by ancient paintings and not even realized it.

Yeah, a red circle would have helped :|

Since most readers will be archaeological lay-people, would it have been so difficult for the article to have at least outlined some of these (supposed) drawings?

There is such a thing as pareidolia, the tendency to want to see meaningful imagery in what are just random patterns... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia)

Highly recommend visiting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pech_Merle if you are interested in cave paintings. Easy to access if you stay in Cahors the night before.

I am endlessly fascinated by these finds. The more of these sorts of sites we find, the more we learn. They were documenting not just the animals around them, but their breeding seasons, their migrations if any, and probably a dozen other things we haven't even considered.

And if the dates are correct it's pre-civilization, pre-agriculture, and during the ice age. It's incredible to me that the need to create is this old.

Wengrow/Graeber challenge the pre-civ/pre-ag timeline

Yes. I recommend the Dawn of Everything

It might still be too early to know the age of the drawings (the article estimates "at least 24,000 years old"), but I couldn't help noticing that these drawings are much simpler than much older art in the Chauvet cave (dated to around 30-35 thousand years old) [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave

If I were to draw animals in a cave wall today, they would be even more crude.

These paintings were made by individual people and each had different artistic ability. How long ago they were painted may not correlate directly with how intricate they are.

Seems like there's very little of the drawings left, it might have lost some detail over time.

I wonder if anything can be done to sense what they used to look like, maybe by scanning for places where residue of clay fell off or was covered over like they mentioned.

There is a huge overlap between the later Paleolithic stone industries on the order of tens of thousands of years so it’s safe to assume there was also a significant variation in artistic ability between tribes.

It makes sense to me because the article says that they used fingers and clay to make the drawings. The Chauvet cave is regarded as fairly unique in that outlines were scratched out and the cave wall itself was cleared out before starting the artwork.

Not always - many paintings were probably made with fingers using a very advanced technique (shading), see for example, the bear [0].

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/fate-of-the-cave-bear...

I wonder if they will find more evidence of the lunar dot motif

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cave+painting+lunar+dots+animal+fe...

fun rabbit hole

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_painting

“Two years ago, when a team of archaeologists spotted a painting of an extinct wild bull called an auroch”

The correct singular form of the word is aurochs. Little surprising Smithsonian magazine got this wrong

I've looked at the picture but well, I can't see anything. IANAArcheologist :-(

It takes a bit of an eye to see them, you have to look for major features first.

1. Look for a triangluar shape that is slightly darker and redder than the rest of the background, in the middle of the frame, the right hand side is not drawn. Congrats, you found the muzzle.

2. Follow the outlines of the darker areas with your eyes.

3. Or just use this https://imgur.com/a/dDpVtDa

Thank you for ‘this’. My first reaction was, wow, look at that vivid red! I wonder what kind of material they found to make that — so I’m off to get some more coffee.

I skimmed the article and I'm definitely not well-versed in archaeological techniques, so I may just be uneducated here, but I'm wondering: how do they know that is a painting? And not just pareidolia?

Maybe the pictures in the article are just poor quality, but I can't really see what they are claiming to see. Even with the outline you gave. It just looks like a few lines that could kind of possibly sort of look like a deer head.

Its a real problem, and often practitioners do see many examples of false faces etc, but the art is usually emblematic and repeated for tens of thousands of years and so dating some of the pieces can even be (hand wavingly) done by including it in a certain time period.

Honestly, as soon as I saw the picture (having been to a few of the caves that are dated 30k+) it really is just immediately obvious that it would be included, there's a ton of examples that look almost exactly like it.

It's usually easier in person where you can move your head and see the natural color variation of the rock. Plus they'll have sketched this out, looking closely at different areas, and some will be more obvious than others.

But yes, it's sometimes difficult and you have to have an eye for it.

I'm not sure what they used for painting this, but a few years ago there was a project in the university where high school students came to work in simple projects for a while.

One of the projects was to make reproductions of the crayolas used for cave painting. They mixed fat of ñandú (rhea, a local bird similar to ostrich) and iron oxide. The project was to use a spectrometer to measure how different fat, impurities and treatments changed the spectrum, probably to try to discover the original recipe and locals variations. (I don't have more details. Someone told me about this in a hallway conversation.)

Oh thanks, now I see it (and was miles away of guessing it myself :-))

Felt like I needed to escape that site the second I landed on it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com