[HN Gopher] Amazon rainforest rock art 'depicts giant Ice Age cr...
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Amazon rainforest rock art 'depicts giant Ice Age creatures' (2020)
 
Author : Thevet
Score  : 50 points
Date   : 2021-02-27 14:18 UTC (8 hours ago)
 
web link (www.bbc.com)
w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
 
| QuizzicalCarbon wrote:
| It's interesting that they consider those figures to be "turtle-
| type" men rather than people wearing "clothes" (vegetation,
| animal skins).
 
  | consp wrote:
  | Looks like a shorthand for what they look like at first glance,
  | not what they represent, in the same sentence the researcher
  | hints to a far more probable "pregnant women" as the actual
  | representation. Though I agree with you it might be a bit
  | sensational and therefore probably included by the author.
 
| awinter-py wrote:
| > image captionJose Iriarte describes this painting as either
| pregnant women or "turtle-type" men holding hands
| 
| they predicted the ninja turtles
 
  | faitswulff wrote:
  | Wasn't there a story arc where the Ninja Turtles went back in
  | time...?
 
    | namenotrequired wrote:
    | To me, that picture looks like baby turtles going towards the
    | sea, probably a well-known phenomenon even back then
 
      | tyingq wrote:
      | Yes, like this: https://imgur.com/a/1XgKSMF
      | 
      | The squiggles in the rock art are the ocean.
 
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Are those magic mushrooms growing in the mastodon poop? Where is
| Andy Lechter when you need him :-)
| 
| http://andy-letcher.blogspot.com/2011/07/selva-pascuala-mush...
 
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Fun imagining the dimly lit caves being used as shelter. The
| drawings were probably important to show the children some of the
| risks to expect outside the safety of the walls.
 
  | namenotrequired wrote:
  | The article does not say the drawings are in caves, and as far
  | as I know, rock art in South America tends to be out in the
  | open.
 
    | mensetmanusman wrote:
    | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_shelter
    | 
    | The article describes these types of caves.
 
| jnsie wrote:
| This art shows a real lack of perspective
 
  | ddingus wrote:
  | It may be our lack.
  | 
  | When I read your comment, my mind mused about perspective and
  | context.
  | 
  | Maybe they were telling us, others in the future about how the
  | big animals were dying. People surviving.
 
  | briga wrote:
  | Perspective in art is a relatively recent invention--it didn't
  | really become widespread in the West until the Italian
  | Renaissance. But then the people who made these paintings
  | didn't have the same visual language that we use today. So I
  | don't really see it as a lack of talent from the artists,
  | rather they were just using a different set of visual tools to
  | make their art.
 
    | aksss wrote:
    | Generally true, though you do see it employed in Lascaux cave
    | paintings.
    | https://archeologie.culture.fr/lascaux/en/perspective
    | 
    | And linear perspective/DoF/foreshortening shows up in Ancient
    | Greek art and the Ajanta caves in India, amongst other
    | examples.
    | 
    | Understanding rules of perspective is an advanced skillset.
    | I'm not sure I'd equate it to raw talent as it's a learned
    | skill, and once learned may or may not be employed. I'm not
    | sure if the artists in the Amazon rainforest had the skillset
    | and were making a choice to not employ it. Art skills do
    | develop with leisure time and patronage, and in that sense
    | this art was less developed in a broad sense. That shouldn't
    | take away from it though - they communicated ideas in ways
    | that were recognizable - as you said, their visual language.
    | I find the choices they make in sizing elements of an animal
    | pretty interesting. More to their credit, they survived under
    | extremely harsh environmental challenges and found some time
    | to paint.
 
      | yesenadam wrote:
      | I was excited to see it, but..what that link shows,
      | strangely, isn't use of perspective.
      | 
      | "The reserve technique involves leaving an uncoloured space
      | between two anatomical segments that are normally joined or
      | superimposed. The idea is to optically dissociate two
      | planes that are found at two different depths."
      | 
      | Like, when painting two black animals and one is supposed
      | to be behind another, use a white outline to differentiate
      | their forms. Nothing to do with perspective, which is
      | characterized by foreshortening.
      | 
      | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_(graphical)
      | 
      | That page does mention one kind of perspective not using
      | foreshortening - _aerial perspective_ , "the technique of
      | creating an illusion of depth by depicting distant objects
      | as paler, less detailed, and usually bluer than near
      | objects." That does seem like a different thing though! Not
      | one word of the 5 paragraphs in the Overview applies to
      | "aerial perspective".
 
  | wombatmobile wrote:
  | Perspective is in the eye of the beholder.
 
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| I wonder how the archeologists came out with the fact that what
| is drawn is drawn at scale.
| 
| Proper relative scale in drawings is a (relatively new invention.
| When you look at ancient drawings, they are often out of scale
| for ego reasons (Egiptian art for instance), or just nobody cared
| (European Middle-Age).
| 
| We sure have other cases where the scale is more or less correct
| (Romans) but without more references than localized paintings I
| have doubts about teh ability to draw conclusions.
 
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(page generated 2021-02-27 23:00 UTC)