
Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art - gabzuka
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-29415716
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tjradcliffe
It's worth remembering in the case of discoveries like this that the oldest
instance of the practice is almost certainly far older than the oldest
preserved instance of the practice.

Unfortunately, there has been relatively little statistical work done to use
distributions of preserved ages to infer the age of origin, and although I
recall reading an article in Nature on the problem in the '80's or early '90's
it would seem that most of the people working in the field have not really
focused on this problem, and instead continue to apply a mixture of "The
practice began around the time of the earliest preserved instance of it" and
"The practice began earlier by some amount that I will estimate from my gut".

Neither of these is approaches is methodologically sound, and both tend to
underestimate the ultimate age of a given practice (or species, in the case of
fossils) and tend to underestimate the error bars as well.

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grifpete
A good point. I would just quibble with your affirmative statement that '...
the oldest instance of the practice is almost certainly far older than the
oldest preserved instance of the practice.'

It seems to me that whilst it is highly likely the first instance is earlier
than the first discovered instance and that this is a perfectly valid
conjecture I don't think we have any convincing grounds to state that it is
'almost certainly far older.'

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mturmon
I am reminded of Steely Dan's "The Caves of Altamira"
([http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt9VCuAbRxc](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt9VCuAbRxc)),
a meditation on cave paintings, and other artifacts of the human drive to
create visual art, such as movies, that are shown on the walls of a darkened
chamber, for our delight.

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MrJagil
As always, Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams is topical:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams)

I showed it to a couple of my friends and every one of them fell asleep. I
liked it though, and it gives you an interesting look into the modern day
behind-the-scenes work these immensely valuable discoveries bring forth.

~~~
jolhoeft
A good movie, and the only movie I've seen in 3D that benefited from 3D. You
can see how the painters used the shape of the walls in their painting.

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pan69
The "Interactive Video" on this page is hilariously ill conceived. Once you
click a link to start another video you can't jump back to the original video
and you end up playing two videos at the same time. The presenter says "Click
here" but the "link" is already gone before you can even move your mouse.

~~~
vincentmac
Did you notice that the volume in the player goes to 11?

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sramsay
Can you imagine standing next to "one of the oldest figurative depictions in
the world, if not the oldest one?"

The philosopher Walter Benjamin spoke of certain artworks having "aura." That
one practically glows.

