SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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 :-) )