Oldest cave art found | Hacker News Reader

Oldest cave art found

bbc.com

193 pointsrntn84 comments

"The discovery pushes back the time that modern humans first showed the capacity for creative thought."

Hmm. The very simplest model you could have of this would be the German Tank Problem [1]. If discoveries of X (e.g. art, hunting tools, whatever) are made at random, i.e. evidence of X is not more likely to be destroyed as time passes, then you are sampling times from a distribution with a maximum of the first invention of X, and the best estimator for this is (m-1)(k-1)/(k-2) where m is the oldest discovery and k is the number of discoveries.

In particular, a new record for oldest art will almost always push your estimate up (as long as k is large so (k-1)/(k-2) is about 1). But you should also be taking into account all the discoveries of art which aren't records. This matters especially when k is not yet big. This page only lists 30-40 pieces of paleolithic art [2].

A better model would take into account that older stuff is less likely to be discovered because e.g. rocks erode. I wonder if anyone has done this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Stone_Age_art

That's for uniform distributions. We don't know the distribution here, that's part of the problem, but I would expect early cave art to be more sparse and worse preserved.

What are your priors for that expectation?

Wouldn’t it make just as much sense that once a site reaches X age it will likely make it to 10X since the conditions that allowed it to get to X are slow to change?

It's commonly observed in anthropology that we keep pushing back the dates for all sorts of technologies as the methods improve and more cave sources are found.

I was listening to a podcast about Native American history once and it just hit me: of course we think all the early advanced civilizations were in Egypt, Greece, etc. It's because they built with stone in arid regions.

North American native civilizations had trade, roads, writing, libraries, complex systems of law and jurisprudence, etc., but they built with the materials that were most abundant to them: wood, animal hides, bone, etc. Wood is an amazingly versatile material so if you have a lot of it there's no incentive to develop advanced stone construction or even a lot of metallurgy. The only exception would be civilizations like the Maya and Aztec that appeared to have monument cults, but not all advanced civilizations have monument cults.

Wood degrades over time though, and things like writing don't last anywhere near as long in a wet humid climate.

There could easily have been incredible works of literature and philosophy in all kinds of places in ancient human history. They're just gone.

I worry sometimes about our own civilization making everything digital. One mega solar flare and our collective cultural memory is as gone as the Iroquois writings on animal hides. Future civilizations will know nothing of ceiling cat.

I think the large earth monuments were part of successful agricultural projects. The stone work was to keep the cultural organized and focused. The most successful left large stone constructions.

Dubai is far more architecturally impressive than London, New York, or Los Angeles. Now compare their city GDPs. That was kind of my point.

Some degree of excess wealth is clearly a necessary condition for large scale stone monument construction, but the inverse doesn't hold. A society could have a lot of excess wealth and lack any cult, state mandate, or other construct to drive stone monument building.

The problem with Dubai is that it won’t have the staying power that Egypt or even Rome boasts.

It’s definitely tied to economics. I think the big difference is that today our values are different and are monuments refl ct the difference.

> it would show humans at the time had the capacity for abstract thinking

This was 50,000 years ago, they were Homo Sapiens, we are 200,000 years old. We can see abstract thinking through the advancement of our early tools and through linguistic studies that trace lineage of abstract language patterns to points in time using archeological knowledge of migration periods. So this confirms it further I guess.

The "Upper Paleolithic Revolution" hypothesis proposes that around 50,000 years ago, there was some sort of a qualitative jump in human behavioral complexity, based on the fact that around that time we start seeing clear evidence of cultural and symbolic behavior such as rock art and burial rituals, and also of a period of rapid innovation in toolbuilding. Critics of the hypothesis counter that the apparent jump could just as well be merely a selection effect caused by the scarcity of evidence.

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

> This was 50,000 years ago, they were Homo Sapiens, we are 200,000 years old.

I don’t know enough about the migration of human species and subspecies. Was this concluded in the article that they were Home Sapiens and not Neanderthals or Denisovans (or interbred between these and Homo Sapiens)? The latter two were around 50,000 years ago.

There's quite a bit of evidence that Homo sapiens, denisovans, and floresiensis might have coexisted in Sundaland (the land mass containing much of Indonesia before the oceans rose and created the SEA islands) at the time but the cave art is more consistent with Homo sapiens in the rest of the world than either of the other two. That's the default conclusion until more artwork conclusively belonging to other species is discovered.

denisovans, neanderthals, and their hybrids are not out of the picture for that time period and location

The distance between the known examples of early art also further pushes back the date when humans became capable of art. Unless you believe that people from Indonesia painted this art 51,000 years ago and then migrated to Europe, and thus brought art to Europe via migration, then instead you would have to believe that the artists who eventually arose in Europe and Indonesia had a common ancestor who was capable of art. If we have art in Indonesia at 51,000 years ago, and art in Europe about 35,000 years ago, and if the last common ancestor of those 2 populations lived 100,000 years ago (hypothetically) then you'd have to believe that humans have been capable of this kind of art for at least 100,000 years.

… or that the ability to create art arose independently in two separated populations. As for example writing did, many millennia later.

Writing arose independently. The cognitive ability necessary to invent writing may have existing for much longer

We call that anatomically modern human or early modern human, and we have fossils going back over 300,000 years.

An infant from 300k years ago, if brought to modern times, should grow up and be capable of everything modern humans are.

Behaviourally modern is thought to be a bit more recent, isn't it... partly because of evidence like art!

Yes exactly. Though I would expect that they may be more neurotypical on average than modern humans

Out of curiosity, why do you think that? My instinct is that the selection pressure against autism would not have been meaningfully stronger back then (and might actually have been weaker, due to people living in much smaller communities).

I think people who are eager and happy to do repetitive tasks are adapted towards agriculture as opposed to hunting.

There are a lot of highly repetitive tasks in a hunter and gatherer lifestyle (e.g. gathering, making tools and clothes, tracking, plus all of the memorizing that comes with a non-written cultural tradition). I'm sure someone with a deep special interest in horse behavior would have been extremely useful for groups that subsist on the wild horses of the European tundra. Same for people with ADHD, someone who is highly motivated by novelty and prone to risk-taking should be pretty useful for finding new hunting and gathering opportunities and adapting to changing environments. You won't find out there are plump tasty BBQ birds on that island in the distance if you don't brave the journey.

In any case this isn't exactly a testable hypothesis

Not without some simulations of proto human societies with resources scattered. We are far from that level of simulation such that we could place any weight on it.

This ignores any evolution that is not present in a skeleton. So, their brains could have been very different from ours, but we have no way of knowing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocast

The cranial vault is an open space surrounded by bone. Yes, some evolutionary brain changes would reflect themselves in the endocast, but would all major brain changes do that?

> . So, their brains could have been very different from ours, but we have no way of knowing.

Great point. I like to consider birds for questions like this one.

Bird brains come in a relatively set range of sizes, but in a wider range of skills[^1], and hominids living in earlier times may have definitely needed different skills. Birds have had many millions of years to evolve. To remain flying they needed to keep their bodies small, nimble and light and they can't grow larger heads, so evolution works within those constraints. Now, there are generalists among birds, and even tool users, but who knows how long it took them to evolve their "3 nanometer process."

On the other hand, hominid's brains are very plastic, which can be due to evolution saving on "design optimization time" (and we haven't been around for as many millions of years as birds). A figurative way to explain it is this: to fish at the local pond, it's more economical to buy two general purpose computers ("have more general-purpose thinking matter") and to pay for their upkeep than to design a new computer from scratch. Later, if you decide to live from honey-farming, your computing could be used for that as well. You may need an order of magnitude or two more fish or honey to pay for your higher mental elasticity running in a sub-optimal "300 nanometer process", but it's a small price to pay for not being hostage to a fixed ecological niche.

So, I bet that humans that had made it in a short period of time from Africa to a different continent where highly adaptable, and they could probably understand most things we do today.

[^1]: https://phys.org/news/2018-07-neuroscientists-uncover-secret...

You misread what I wrote. Art can be independently invented by different groups of Homo sapiens, but the ability to create art probably arose at a particular point in our evolution.

Wait, why couldn't the Indonesians migrate to Europe in a span of 20,000 years.

Google Maps says it takes about 5 months on foot from Borneo to Lascaux. So it could have been the same person who left at New Year's and was back home by Christmas.

Plus you'd need a boat. Borneo is about a hundred miles from the mainland.

Not sure that was the case 50ky ago. That was during a glacial period, sea level was probably 100+m below current level.

No, not in the general timeframe being discussed. Most is SEA was connected by land to continental Asia. Even North America and Asia were connected by Beringia. It’s possible you could have even walked to Australia from Asia, though I might be mistaken about that.

Sure with excellent roads and 99% of predators gone and most importantly, a reason to do it.

Predators including the human variety.

I’m not aware of studies involving radiocarbon dating of paved roads, so I can’t say conclusively, but I believe the leading hypothesis is that they didn’t exist 50,000 years ago.

some kind of exchange program for artists to residence in various places in the world, i like your hypothesis!

It's not impossible, but the mainstream theories such as 'Out of Africa' and most anthropological evidence suggests that the flow was from Africa to Indonesia and Africa to Europe, and not "back from Indonesia". But see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Indonesia and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesia#History and https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08/science/polynesian-ancest... as well as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiregional_origin_of_modern...

Europe is mostly believed to have been settled via Africa, the Middle East, and Western Asia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Europe

(I am absolutely amazed by all the various humanity and technology origins. It's almost as if there is a direct path from the first person who used teeth and fingernails to pry a rock and fiber to make a spear to kill an animal and use its bones to make high quality tools for knapping stone, all the way to the lathe, which was the tool that bootstrapped the industrial revolution).

I've never heard of the idea that the lathe bootstrapped the industrial revolution. Can you say more, and any pointers to read?

There's a great Machine Thinking video about the history of the lathe that makes this point: https://youtu.be/djB9oK6pkbA

I'm not sure there's any really good book that furthers this argument (possibly The Perfectionists or One Good Turn?) but it sort of becomes obvious when you read about Maudsley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Maudslay and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe) and Wilkinson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkinson_(industrialist) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wilkinson_(industrialist)...

the cannon boring machine was what enabled the efficient steam engines which unlocked large mechanical shops (along with high quality cannons), while the lathe enabled precision machine tool making. I am sure many things had to happen around the same time for the revolution but IMHO the lathe was the true linchpin

Based on a number of lines of evidence, I would suspect nearly everything related to early art (including abstraction) was done in africa first and radiated from there (from the Out of Africa hypothesis, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_African_origin_of_moder...)

The history of anthropology is full of pushing events back as we improve our methods.

There appears to be some more information here, also on the dating method used (which apparently is laser ablation U-series analysis):

https://news.griffith.edu.au/2024/07/04/cave-painting-in-ind...

I'm not entirely convinced about the human-like figures, though. Does anyone have more background knowledge on how one can jump to that conclusion?

Edit: found the publication in Nature. The picture circulating in the media is a tracing of the actual painting, which is nearly impossible to see on the actual rock. Enjoy! https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7

> I'm not entirely convinced about the human-like figures, though. Does anyone have more background knowledge on how one can jump to that conclusion?

I think they're basing it off another painting in South Sulawesi where the human forms are a little clearer [1]. It might be some kind of "protostyle" where they draw the animal much bigger than the humans hunting them.

[1] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1024/branded_news/2473/product...

Thanks for sharing. Note that that example is from the same research group, and also had its contrast artificially enhanced.

I find it a bit odd that the humans are so small and lack details, whereas the boar even has fur, two distinguishable toes, and seems to bend its legs correctly.

Then again, I have yet to publish something in Nature, so I'm probably a bit too skeptical for this game :)

You're not wrong to be skeptical. These papers are written for other archaeologists who have a lot more perspective on both the uncertainty inherent in the field and the games academics play thanks to publish or perish. They don't need the caveats repeated every paper like the rest of us.

The people might have been added later by a less skilled artist or even just a child doodling, they could have been drawn with more detail in another other material that didn't survive but sketched with the longer lasting stuff underneath, or they could be artifacts of the process they use to increase contrast, etc. There's a bunch of possibilities but authors will usually gravitate towards the interesting conclusion.

That said, animals drawn with higher detail than people is almost a trope in archaeology. They probably held a spiritual significance and the hunters would have spent a lot of time studying them.

Almost rorschach painting levels of ambiguity in that thing

"A pig? Looks like two bears high-fiving to me."

I'd say the pig is somewhat recognizable, with four legs and a tail. The humans on the other hand...

> This animal figure is represented as a pictorial outline shown in side (profile) view with an infill pattern consisting of painted strokes or lines. It is therefore consistent in style with the visual convention used to represent pigs and other animals in the dated Late Pleistocene rock art of South Sulawesi, including at Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4 [1]

They base the interpretation off of other cave art in the area that's better preserved [2] and the fact that it's missing facial details of other animals found in the local cave art [3].

There's usually other context in archaeological speak, like buried bones and fossils that limit the possibilities.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07541-7

[2] https://www.bradshawfoundation.com/bfnews/uploads/sulawesi_p...

[3] https://cdn.sci.news/images/enlarge6/image_7902_1e-Leang-Bul...

"Something seems to have happened around 50,000 years ago, shortly after which all other species of human such as Neanderthals and the so-called Hobbit died out."

Isn't the current estimate, that Neanderhals and Danisovans died out around 45000 years ago? Or does he refer only to the region of the cave? And the Homo floresiensis died out 10000 years ago (or 100 years ago, or he still exists, if some Anthropologists are right).

And what I do not understand about the cave archeology: nobody who lives as a nomadic hunter & gatherer lives in a cave. The climate inside is near unbearable if you are accustomed to free air. Maybe one can stay a little time in the mouth of a cave. When the weather conditions outside are as ugly as they can get. Or if the population density got so bad, that an easy to defend place is necessary. The findings IMO are more probable a result of population dynamics than brain development.

Homo floriensis appears to have died out around 50k years ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35930979

And isn't 45k around 50k? That seems like a reasonable statement to me.

I heard that pigs, pre-selective-breeding, were pretty cute

https://www.leidenmedievalistsblog.nl/images/uploads/_fullla...

Wild piglets are very cute [1], adult wild pigs less so [2].

[1]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:20180429-155847_Fris... [2]: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ausgewachsenes_Wilds...

We used to have warthogs in Africa.

Def not-cute.

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

They have an unbelievably small brain case for a medium-sized quadruped mammal

The head of the pig in the cave is such a nice "friendly pink pig" cartoon of a modern breed that I do feel like it would be more appropriate to call it "drawing of a creature that happens to look deceptively like a drawing of a pig" instead of "drawing of a pig". Far more appropriate.

"These hand paintings in Sumpang Bita cave in South Sulawesi were once thought to be among the oldest paintings in the world at 39,000 years"

Why are these cave paintings with hands all over the world? It is kind of ominous to think of the reasons and conditions why they are found everywhere.

My understanding is that hand paintings like this fall out fairly naturally- after collecting and grinding the iron oxide for paint (there's a great but now unavailable Google+ post by Yonatan Zunger that explains why barns are red for the same reason: supernovas), you want to use some sort of mask or template, and a hand is pretty much the most available thing for early societies.

ah Google+, speaking of archeology..

Fortunately, Yonatan (who was in fact the main engineer working on Google+) reposted it to Medium: https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/how-the-price-of-paint-is-...

After he wrote it I pointed out most historical barns in many parts of the US are white, using whitewash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitewash) which doesn't really change the conclusion of the article, which itself is a masterclass in explaining the root cause of metallicity in the universe.

It seems like a fun way to make a little mark that represents yourself.

What are you thinking of? I thought those were by far the coolest, even if not oldest. (I haven't seen that before, didn't realise it was so common as you say.) Partly because they are absolutely identifiable in a way that the humans and pig.. really isn't to a layman, but also it's just so personal, much more of a 'connection', to me anyway, to the person who did it. The 'someone was actually there tens of thousands of years ago, painting around their hand, and now I'm looking at it' feeling hits a lot harder.

If you want to be immortal as an artist, paint your works on cave walls, for that deep time gallery.

It would be cool to have a history painting, of all that happened on earth as we know it today. Similar to the empires history painted in the foundation in a cave. All those discoveries, all those triumphs and failures. One huge picture.

It would also make sense to search for similar painted caves near caves where such paintings are discovered, expecting filled up cave entrances and collapsed entrances (erosion, ocean, etc.) . Goto outdo the Johnosons next door. Even back then.

Curiosity: in Brazil, Serra da Capivara National Park, there are painting form 30000 years ago and artifacts from 50000 years ago...which challenges the theory that man came to america 12000 years ago via bering strait.

Source: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parque_nacional_de_la_Sierra_d...

How did humans cross these oceans and seas 50 thousand years ago? To land on the Indonesian islands, South Pacific islands, Australia, New Zealand... Did they have massive ships that we'll never know about? Did they learn how to sail? Was it just small rafts and canoes?

Oh, the sea-faring stories these people must have told.

The way they keep pushing things back such neat round numbers makes it feel like when tech evangelists say "Oh yeah we'll have everyone in self driving cars / BTC at $1M / safe AGI in 5 years / 10 years / 20 years / etc."

I know there's science behind the dating of these artifacts, but it just feels that way to me.

The tidy round numbers come from the uncertainty of the datation method. It makes no sense to say, e.g. that they are 32049 years old when the dates are accurate to, say, 2000 years. The fact that uncertainty is usually not properly reported is a tragedy in the scientific literature, and unfortunate in vulgarisation.

radiocarbon is mostly just guess and most of the headlines are just there for clicks. radiocarbon dating is shows a range like 2000 to 50000 years. headlines takes 50K. radiocarbon date is also acknowledged to be the age of the material, not the date of the manufacture of an item. if item is a rock, mostly they don't know when the art is manufactured.

probably they asked how old is the art and somebody said "it could bew oldest ever found" hence the headline.

This is exactly what everyone must keep in mind when reading any pop-science article ever.

Forget the cave art, that place is just gorgeous!

Sulawesi: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Sulawesi&iax=images&ia=images

pictures from internet mostly don't represent an accurate reality (in Indonesia is even more true than everywhere else). The other thing about Sulawesi is that the trasportation there is horrible and very time consuming. It's also not really touristic so better to bring your local friend with you.

The human body and the human mind are perfectly fitted to one another. They co-evolved.

Any fundamental change in the human brain would imply a fundamental change in the human form, to enable acting on the enhanced understanding. Otherwise, the enhanced understanding would be useless for survival.

The contrapositive would mean that for as long as the human form has been about the same, human ingenuity and creativity have also remained about the same.

If you want to locate when human creativity and ingenuity began, it will have been at or before the basic structure of the hands, larynx, feet, eyes, etc. came to be.

I'd like to see generative AI try to reconstruct the full image

Give it to that lady who ‘restored’ the painting of Jesus, let’s see what she comes up with.

That's not how AI works. It would distort it to match the examples it's been trained on.

Exactly. The AI shows an abstraction of an abstraction (to the AI its all just bits and patterns) but the thing that's immediately fascinating about the painting is that it is echoing someones experience in the flesh of a wild pig so long ago. The stuff about "humans ability to express abstraction" is very much in second place for me.

the replies to this comment are some of the least brain-intensive pieces of information you could ever come up with. do you think generative AI has not been trained on images of pigs?

which would be precisely the idea.

I think you may be struggling with the word "works". and "exampled". and perhaps even "trained"

vague image + entire corpus of human imagery = ?

Or perhaps they are not struggling with the word "reconstruct"

it sounds to me like people don't like/are sceptical about generative AI, not that they're so expert in the area that they can give a valid opinion on whether this is possible or useful.

part of the technique that diffusion models use is literally to take a vague image of something and then use training data to build it into something more clear. this whole comment chain is so confidently wrong it's unbelievable

Something more clear is totally different than reconstructing.

If an artists rendition of what it might have looked like would be useful, then genAI may be cheaper for that task. But we wouldn't call an artist's rendition of what it might have looked like "reconstructing".

And you couldn't be much more wrong about how much I like and use generative AI.

I speculate your comment has been downvoted because you haven’t explained why you’d “like to see generative AI try to reconstruct the full image”.

What would be the purpose of that reconstruction? To help visualize the most likely original scene using a contemporary-biased lens? Why would we want that?

Imagine you found a box of macaron sandwich cookie fragments, and your model only knows about Oreos. Would such a reconstruction have value? Could it also apply inappropriate bias?

On the other hand, the right models can be critical. Look at how researchers created an image of black holes. [0] This is a reconstruction, and it is an average, and it relies on physics models; but those assumptions are in some ways more transparent than generative AI.

[0]: https://youtu.be/Ol_SB5Zfv-Y?si=O6CL-kjDcgBB0bWm , 4-minute overview

Reply on news.ycombinator.com