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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...
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Made Long Before Humans Existed
65,000 years ago
pick one
The title is a trainwreck but, basically: the art predates Homo sapiens sapiens reaching those regions.
Thank you, indeed
Yeah, what a weird thing to state.
In fact, the paintings were evidently made long after modern humans existed, and very late in to the overall existence of humans (Homo) as a genus.
Garbage clickbait headline 😮💨.
"Some time before sapiens seems to have expanded into this particular area" is not at all the same as "long before humans existed".
Neanderthals are literally our ancestors, they have everything we think of as human.
There was a now debunked idea that symbolic thought emerged in europe ~40kya. The explosion of symbolic art we see then is in part because of preservation factors and how well studied europe is.
It's fairly well established that non-sapiens humans were capable of symbolic thought. No one is surprised that neanderthals made cool art.
Arguably every species in the Homo genus has "everything we think of as human," because otherwise they'd be in Australopithecus or Paranthropus instead.
Anatomically, for sure, but cognitively and behaviourally it's harder to prove.
For example did early homo have grammar? Many think the expansion of erectus, esp. over water, implies complex language but that's hardly certain and there's a lot of homo before erectus.
There must be a no homo joke in there somewhere.
I'll see myself out.
I'm just sayin', if they're not like us they don't belong in the "like us" genus.
Neanderthals are not our ancestors, they were a different branch from a common ancestor. Kind of like modern day Bonobos and Chimpansees.
All humans alive today carry neanderthal dna, meaning we all have neanderthal ancestors.
I believe the current understanding is that sapiens and neanderthals were like lions and tigers - we are able to produce viable offspring, but not always and maybe only with a neanderthal father, not mother.
We are a different branch from a common ancestor but they are also our ancestors.
Ancient humans possibly not wild monkey man savages whose sole purpose is to boost modern man's ego? SPOOKY!
Very cool
The narcissism of anthro-centrism is endless, isn't it?
They're still phrasing some of this stuff as-if it's doubtful, WHILE giving multi-millenia times between the artwork was created, vs when homo-sapiens appeared..
1 item they list is over 70-k years old..
There should be ZERO doubt.
There should have been zero doubt once radio-isotope dating put even ONE "black swan" on the map.
A woman pointed-out in New Scientis, decades ago, that the Neanderthals had 1 significant disadvantage, compared with us: worse brain-cooling.
Given 10s of millenia, that could well be a natural-selection force-to-be-recon'd-with..
Other than that, I don't think they were at any obvious-to-us-now disadvantage, given that the artwork seems equally-advanced, & that is something that takes mental capability
( work-through Betty Edwards' "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the 4th Definitive Edition", to experience for yourself what the sentience-shift feels-like, when one gets out from education-pushed language/reductionism mode into wholistic mode..
I'm autistic, so it didn't take a few days to reach that, it took 3 years, before my 1st experience of the sentience-shift.
It's real.
The horrid scrawlings in New Scientist Magazine were done by somebody who'd never experienced it in their entire adult-life.
Here's a before-that-book's-training / after-that-book's-training, with the book's author, in her "killer class", gallery, of some of her students: see the mind-healing in the expressions of these people: https://www.drawright.com/before-after )
The egotism of our view won't die, though: "God revolves around Man", "The universe of God revolves around the world of Man", "only we have souls", "only we ever had human-sentience", "only we inhabit the galaxy/universe", on & on & on..
( all of the "only OUR religion is valid, in God's eyes" narcissism by lots of different populations also goes in that same bin, obviously )
some day, some evidence is going to poke our racial-ego in the eye, with a "pointed stick" of evidence, and it may well spark global rioting, given the ideological distortion our ego maintains..
I wish that our habit of presuming that we are the center of validity, & that center is somehow "exclusive" of all other lives, had already been intentionally "put down", before I'd got to school.
How awesome it'd have been, to grow-up with schoolbooks which showed that we had equally-valid kin..
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That site seems highly suspect. Find a better source, I'm downvoting this.
This isn't a roadway; no need to signal your intentions.
Feel free to post some content too!
I'm telling everybody this is a non-credible source.