Mysterious rock depicted in 15th century painting is likely a Stone Age tool
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
So many of these paintings portray human faces in near-photorealistic detail... and then the woman's chest looks like a piece of stretched-out vellum with two hemispheres glued onto it.
Which means the rock is round and proves the authors incorrect because they overlook this obvious perspective to claim the rock is flat and axe-like to make their comparison. Their theory rests entirely on the rock in the painting being flat, which could only be true if the perspective was flat. The painter made sure we can see that is not the case.
The painter is telling us there is a narrative and a reality. They baby appears unconvinced and suspicious, as if he knows there is an alternate truth to the story. He appears to be pointing at rock. The baby is telling us he is not the subject, the rock is.
You’d think that adding them in the armpit region would be obviously wrong, but at the same time, it’s better than any painting I’ll ever attempt in my lifetime.
The babies have all got much more natural looking chests.
It’s got a surreal feel with the colour palette and plastic feel.
Kings and people in power often hoarded curious artifacts in special cabinets of "natural marvels". Painters included pets and personal objects in the pictures to please his powerful clients. Is possible that exactly the same stone could be found still lying somewhere in some palace or museum.
I know the obvious answer is "the stratas and context".
The rock does not look like the flat head of any axe, nor does a "prehistoric stone tool" bear any meaning whatsoever in the context of the image. In fact the rock resembles fragments of meteorite. Perhaps all the supposed "ancient handaxes" are really from a more recent meteoric event. That would be quite a thrust against prehistorical man narratives made up by archeologists.
Oh, people really called these supposed axes "thunderstones" before the advent of modern archeology claimed they are tools of prehistoric man. Yet these "researchers" claim a painting proves that 15th century people already thought the rocks were ancient handaxes despite contrary evidence, in other words that what archeologists made up was already well know; so it must be true after all, how convenient. But that is tautological: provide a theory based on a painting and claim the painting is evidence the theory is correct.
First let's breakdown what "modern social history of prehistoric handaxes" means, as virtually every word has a technical definition.
"Modern" - from the modern period, i.e. 1500s onwards
"Social history" - a specific type of historical analysis focusing on essentially what a common man would have thought and known about. This is a very rough reduction of what the term actually encompasses.
"Prehistoric" - old stuff
"Handaxes" - a specific category of lithic (i.e. stone) tools that are typically symmetrical bifaces, distinct from modern axes.
Also, most rocks can be confused for meteorites and vice versa. "Looking like a meteorite" means nothing. The rock shown does look quite a bit like a chert core though. I'd be surprised if it was actually a handaxe because they're almost always symmetric and tapering, which the painting doesn't show, but I don't care enough to read the paper.
The authors claim that modern 15th century people already knew the "pre-historic" narrative about rocks being axes. They are shoe-horning this theory into the painting by claiming the painter and 15th century people already thought these rocks were ancient handaxes, and thats why it features so importantly in the mysterious painting. That seems a rather hoaxy claim to me: The archeological narrative must be correct if people already knew it to be true!
The authors state in their abstract this is their goal, to push back the evidence of such a "social history", to a time before archeologists made up the narrative about hand-axes. The authors are literally attempting to incept the archeological claim to a prior age of modern history. Is that what you mean, because that is definitely and literally the motive of this research.
Edit, also the rock in the painting is not a "biface". That part of the painting has obvious depth and perspective (shadows, walls, angles). The rock in the painting is ROUND.
You're mistaken, the article does not say that 15th century people knew the rock was a hand axe. The article claims (correctly I think) that the painting depicts a hand axe but doesn't say the painter intended to depict an axe. The painter would have understood the rock to be a thunderstone and painted it accurately enough that today we can see that it was actually a handaxe.
From the paper abstract: "Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the ‘modern’ social and cultural world." Indicating they think the painter and his contemporary society had a "culture" of appreciation for the objects as axes.
I read the paper. I found no such claim - please cite.
> The authors state in their abstract this is their goal, to push back the evidence of such a "social history", to a time before archeologists made up the narrative about hand-axes. The authors are literally attempting to incept the archeological claim to a prior age of modern history. Is that what you mean, because that is definitely and literally the motive of this research.
They literally do not do so.
They claim that the stones we call handaxes were considered a separate type of rock. Then they discuss various conceptualizations of that rock at the time. They claim that one person thought it was interesting that category of stone including handaxes bore a resemblence to arrowheads from the new world, but his work wasn't published until 1717 (long after that person's death).
You seem mad at archaelogists for claiming things like "these handaxes are old" in general, and specifically at these guys for pointing out historical descriptions of things that sound like handaxes, and paintings that look a lot like handaxes. They literally (using a dictionary definition of the word - in this case the factual definition) state in their paper:
"In the knowledge that works of art are not exact transcripts of reality, it would be difficult, if not impossible, conclusively to identify whether a handaxe is represented in this fifteenth-century painting. We can, however, potentially strengthen the inference that a handaxe is depicted through three artefact-based routes of inquiry."
I'm not sure what you're going on about, your claims seem false upon reading the paper.
That clearly Indicates the authors believe the painter and his contemporary society of modern 15th century peoples already had a culture of appreciation for the objects as pre-historic axes, that their so-called finding "pushes back the date" for this appreciation. That is literally their thesis and conclusion.
That argument is reductive. They are saying that the painting is evidence that early modern people believed axe-theory because the authors have identified the rock in the painting as an axe from axe-theory. Everything else is speculation. It is complete garbage with a motive to push archeological axe-theory for academic crumbs. It is a desperate attempt to scrape empirical evidence for imaginary archeologies.