45,000 years ago, in an area that is now part of Ethiopia, humans found a roomy cave at the base of a limestone cliff and turned it into a special kind of workshop. Inside, they built up a cache of over 40 kilograms of reddish stones high in iron oxide. Using a variety of tools, they ground the stones into different colored powders: deep reds, glowing yellows, rose grays. Then they treated the powder by heating it or mixing it with other ingredients to create the world's first paint. For at least 4,500 years, people returned to this cave, known today as Porc-Epic, covering its walls in symbols and inking their bodies and clothes. Some anthropologists call it the first artist's workshop.
Now, a new study in PLoS One suggests that the cave offers us a new way to understand cultural continuity in the Middle Stone Age, when humans were first becoming sophisticated toolmakers and artisans. Paleoscientists Daniela Eugenia Rosso, Francesco d'Errico, and Alain Queffelec have sorted through the 4,213 pieces of ochre found in the cave, analyzing the layers of history they represent. They argue that Porc-Epic is a rare continuous record of how humans pass on knowledge and rituals across dozens of generations.
4,500 years is a long time for continuous use of a single site.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @07:56PM (6 children)
... is that it was just so damn stagnant.
In a museum, you can look at two pieces of Egyptian art that are virtually identical, but separated in time by 1500 years. It's ridiculous.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Saturday May 27 2017, @08:04PM (5 children)
When the culture is largely collective and won't let individuals try new things then it all stagnates. If people can't leave realistically either, it will be worse. A interpersonal culture and society that steals any benefit from progress will also stagnate. And if people have to struggle all the time to just feed themselves there will be little time to improve matters.
Dunno if the universe is infinite, but people sure are ;-)
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Saturday May 27 2017, @08:16PM (4 children)
I've always gotten the impression that the Pharaohs (and I guess their dynasties as a whole?) were like the example of the "inbred royals that do shit besides inbreed more". They produced some of the most beautiful monuments to human power ever like the pyramids. But one gets the impression it was the ancient version of a dictator getting a gold statue made. It's a shame too. Their society was pretty awesome. Imagine if the people who were responsible for some of the first original art spent more time on civilization instead of slaving for the dynasties while the dynasties promptly got all lumpy and misshapen.
Also, from what I understand the meddling of priests and other religious upsets did what they tend to do to society which greatly contributed to the cultural stagnation.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @08:21PM (3 children)
It was highly superstitious, and apparently involved the mutilation of boys' sexual organs. Their art was also fairly primitive, and their mathematics pretty darn banal.
What they were good at was bureaucracy and large-scale (but pointless) manpower.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Saturday May 27 2017, @08:58PM (2 children)
> and apparently involved the mutilation of boys' sexual organs.
To be fair, two out of three of the main monotheistic religions still practice that, without any major drive to suppress the practice (unlike say, female genital mutilation, which is trying to be stamped out atm).
Just because a culture mutilates parts of their body doesn't mean it is stagnant, whether you agree with what they do or not.
> Their art was also fairly primitive, and their mathematics pretty darn banal.
Compared to what exactly? My understanding is that the Egyptians were pretty ahead of their time. There was a lot of cross pollination of ideas with the Ancient Greeks, and generally they did well for themselves.
> What they were good at was bureaucracy and large-scale (but pointless) manpower.
They did impressive engineering feats, especially when it comes to water/flood management of the Nile. The geometric work, the pyramids themselves, and they were good at organisation (bureaucracy as you called it).
As for large-scale manpower, that is true .However there were no other large scale sources of energy back then. Heat engines hadn't been developed yet. Windmills and waterwheels they had, but were limited by geography and had low specific power output.
Masses of people is something they had, and always growing. When given bread and beer they could produce decent power output over time. The only reason we don't have large-scale manpower now is because we have cheap and plentiful energy sources, and have learned how to exploit them. If that ever changes and ew lose ability to exploit energy, back to work animals and humans we go.
As for the pointlessness of the things the manpower was applied to. Have you seen modern societies? 80% of the time spent working is on something pointless. Paper shuffling, creating problems so others can fix problems, adding road blocks so more people have to work to undo them, not to mention the financial system, which is mostly people trying to screw each other for virtual digits on a computer.
So not much has changed, all these millenia later, humans have stayed the same. Nice how there is some continuity in the world, eh? :-)
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Saturday May 27 2017, @09:13PM (1 child)
I find the passage of time interesting. So can't say much for rest of your wall of text (it's okay, I do it too). But will say that one thing that has changed is that we don't record shit on lasting material anymore. We're not going to have lasting monuments carved of stone. Castles that survive long enough to be part of the land, etc. Nevermind current issues like digital archival and its fragility. I think we'll be lucky to leave behind what these guys did - even if huego impractical picture language and things like that. Which I might add may survive past the point when we're erased from history.
If anything the current pointless burdens by the "normal" people will leave even less of an impression than the guy that left his initials on a pharaoh's casket. Still though, I fuckin' love code.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Unixnut on Saturday May 27 2017, @09:37PM
Well, the more interesting thing is what the Egyptians had done, that didn't stand the test of time?
For all we know the stone tablets of theirs we have was just for really rare/important things, or for really old stuff, and that an entire body of knowledge was lost because it was stored on a newer substrate that was cheaper, but didn't last as long (e.g. Papyrus scrolls). Ignoring deliberate attempts at destruction of culture and knowledge ( e.g. the Library of Alexandria that was burned down during the Muslim conquest of Egypt ), or the modern equivalent of ISIS destroying any monument or artifact that contradicts their faith or pre-dates it.
To take modern society for example. Some things we have done (like carve faces into cliffs, or those houses/churches that are carved in stone) are likely to last as long as the Pyramids in some form. Other things (paper, disposable items, computers, plastics, and all virtual patterns stored on them) would long be recycled by the earth.
However if everything else of modern society was reclaimed by nature, and 10,000+ years from then a new civilization unearths the remains, what would they think? Most likely, they would think we were a primitive culture that spent a lot of time living in cliff caves, worshiping deities, and carving faces into rocks. We don't paint artwork onto walls of caves, so they may assume we had little to no art, and as such were undeveloped.
Then taking into account our primitiveness, they would probably assume we didn't have sources of energy of technology to carve faces into cliffs easily, so they would postulate that we had masses of manpower to do it by hand. The result is they would think that those faces are of very very important people for us to dedicate that kind of effort. perhaps of our rulers? Or of our gods, which we worshipped in the little cliff cut outs.
Back to ancient Egypt, In actual fact, we are lucky at all that we managed to find the Rosetta stone [wikipedia.org], otherwise for all of history before that we had no clue what the Egyptians wrote down at all. They just looked like pictures. If it wasn't for that major discovery, which allowed us to decipher the Egyptian alphabet, we would even know 1/10th of we know about the Egyptians now.
However because modern humans don't really carve multiple translations of our languages into a stone for future reference, even if some of our writing survives our civilisation, future ones may never be able to decipher them, as no copies survived.
It is all very ephemeral, really. Could be that the only parts of Egyptian culture that survived the test of time was the most primitive, and other more advanced things were lost.
And by all means, code away! I would not dare impede your love of shuffling entropy around in the hope to give it meaning ;-) ( I code a lot too, although I admit I don't find it that enjoyable anymore, I see no physical result of my energy input, but each to his own :-) )
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @08:48PM (2 children)
Soylent"News" will be lucky to last 4.5 years.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 27 2017, @11:29PM (1 child)
Glory to Apophis! Pray for the destruction of SoylentNews!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 28 2017, @02:12AM
Every day I pray for the death of soylentnews.