
Paleolithic French didn’t let their dead rest peacefully - diodorus
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/paleolithic-french-didnt-let-their-dead-rest-peacefully/
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netcan
Graves, I think, will be the the key to a lot of future paleolithic
discoveries.

They're basically intentional time capsules. A meaningful amount of
archeological knowledge about vikings (for example) comes from graves. Gobekli
Tepeh, the most significant evidence of early neolithic (and maybe late
paleolithic) "high civilization" only survived because the whole complex was
intentionally buried...

Not many gravesites dating to before the late paleolithic have been
discovered. I think they exist though.

Mesolithic Neanderthals made graves. More shockingly, Homo Naledi were found
in a gravesite. These humans were small brained & semi-arboreal. They were
contemporary to early Sapiens but are thought to have split from our ancestral
line at a very early stage. The site really seems like a grave, but
archeologists are still hedging bets.

Large brain humans like Sapiens and neanderthals were thought to have
"invented" mortuary practices pretty late-in-the-game. The oldest known sapien
grave is in Israel, dating to just 100kya^. Homo Naledi mortuary practice
seems far fetched. But, it's very hard to think of an alternative theory for
the naledi site. Everything about it says gravesite.

If such distant human relatives made graves, and I think they did, then other
humans probably did too. They're out their.

^The bones were also painted with ocre, like the French site.

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war1025
> They're basically intentional time capsules.

That's an interesting way of looking at it. When we buried my dad, we buried
him in his favorite suit, with his cowboy boots, plus his slippers because the
mortician said they wouldn't be able to get the boots on his feet. I think we
tossed several other knickknacks in there before they closed the casket up.
They gave us flowers off the burial wreath at the gravesite, and I know I
tossed one or two of them inside the vault before they closed that up.

There's sort of an overwhelming instinct to give the dead "the things they'd
like".

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orthecreedence
> The images engraved on the walls of Grotte de Cussac depict bison, horses,
> mammoths, and people—and, inexplicably, human genitalia.

So people have been drawing dicks on walls for 30,000 years.

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netcan
There's some theory that pornography is a primary driver of historical
progress. Art, technology etc. I can't remember what it's called.

It is hard to deny all the pioneering work done by pornography. Arguably, the
oldest known motif is "venus of willendorf" figurines, contemporary with this
site (and that dick pic). One is the oldest known ceramic artifacts. Others
represent pioneering examples of carving techniques.

Many narrations of the european renaissance think advancements in statuary and
painting techniques to have been the vanguard to renaissance science,
philosophy and such. Many were erotic, like michelangelo's david.

The first widespread commercial uses of photography and cinema were
pronographic. Some of the earliest ecommerce was porn. They pioneered large
scale streaming video.

Currently, porn is a driver of VR tech. I will grant that gaming is the
primary driver, another perennial pioneer of tech/media. But... If you want to
watch VR films... there aren't any. A handful of non-porn films exist, but
they're basically demos. There are a handful of music videos too, but very
few. Porn though... Porn already has a full VR inventory!

Without dick pics, we would have never had writing.

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orthecreedence
This is really interesting, thanks for the comment.

When I see things like drawings of genitalia on walls drawn 30,000 years ago,
I tend to not think of humanity as some juvenile species but rather feel very
connected to our proto-selves. It's fascinating to me that a lot of the things
we thought about or conceptualized then are the same things we do now.
Obviously our experience is much more expansive now, but like you mentioned, a
lot of the base motivations are the same.

I always wonder too if people 50,000 years ago laughed when someone farted
like we do...

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netcan
I am absolutely sure of it! Babies think farts are funny.

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qppo
> ... through commingling the bones of several individuals” might have been
> especially important to people burying their dead in the cave. That process
> might have helped remind the living, in some way, of the connection between
> the individual and the group.

It's interesting that the speculation gravitates towards some symbolic meaning
here. One could also make the point that maybe humans in the paleolithic era
were not so different from humans throughout history, who moved or commingled
remains of the dead for every reason from the veneration of saints to the fact
the remains were in the way and needed to be put somewhere else.

Perhaps the bones were put there in that way because it was the only thing
that made sense to the people of the time.

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leto_ii
I don't want to be nitpicky, but there is no such thing as the paleolithic
French.

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phonypc
Ya it's an odd phrase. It's obviously just indicating the location of the
find, but why does that need to be in the title?

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netcan
Because "Paleolithic people living in the place now known as France" is
longer, clunkier and conveys the same meaning.

It's also not really "inaccurate." We say "Irish prehistory," native
americans, etc.

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pnako
Paleolithic Europeans, or West-Europeans, would have been fine.

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netcan
How is that different, besides being less informative? _They_ didn't call it
europe.

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pnako
France is an administrative concept, Europe a geographic one.

