
Cavemen Were Better at Depicting Quadruped Walking Than Modern Artists (2012) - gwern
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0049786
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jMyles
I didn't read thoroughly, so I may have missed this, but it doesn't look like
there's any effort to control for the fact that some of the pieces are meant
to be artistic rather than an actual depiction.

For example, do memorial statues of horses have physics as their highest
priority? It seems like they're just supposed to look pretty, even if they are
less accurate in depicting the gait.

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derefr
My guess at a reasoning: cavemen had easy access to the animals themselves.
Modern people have easy access to videos of animals. (Though, as the 10
percentage-point difference might imply, they don't always use it.) For the
time in-between, artists might have thought themselves "above" actually going
out and looking at what they're going to depict, instead relying on others'
depictions and "common wisdom" to guide them.

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hugh4
"Modern" here seems to be pretty broad and consists largely of works made when
horse was the main mode of transport. And in fact, works after Muybridge in
the 1880s are more accurate than those before. So I don't know if lack of
access to quadrupeds would explain it.

On the other hand have we controlled for quadruped type? At a guess, later
artworks are largely of horses, and horses' legs are thin and move fast.
Mammoths' legs are huge and move slowly, making them easier to observe. Horses
also have multiple gaits, and the faster ones are very difficult to observe.

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Animats
I saw an exhibit of da Vinci's sketchbooks which had many sketches of a horse
rearing. The early sketches had the musculature of the horse's rump wrong; it
showed human musculature. The later ones got it right. Since horses don't rear
often, it probably took some time to see enough examples to get this right.

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SCAQTony
Know your animal targets really well comes to mind for a full months worth of
meals and/or viable shelter materials could disappear instantly due to a bad
throw or lousy trap.

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moanuhLeesuh
Modern, as in Leonardo Da Vinci.

Muybridgean, as in Eadweard Muybridge, and his animal locomotion studies
dated, circa 1877, after which artistic assumptions regarding animal behavior
had firmer reference material.

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chrismcb
I did a Google search for "house trotting" and one of the first images looked
almost like the da vinci image they claim is wrong.

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w-ll
OT: What is with that Zoom distorting the horizontal?

