Thursday, October 22, 2020

Signs of Human Cognition in an Indonesian Cave

 From Scientific American:

Imagining things that do not exist in nature and weaving them into narratives are unique signatures of the human psyche. These abilities are abundantly evident in the earliest example of narrative art, which was recently discovered in a cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. In these newly reported images, one or more Pleistocene-epoch humans on this Southeast Asian island depicted a scene containing several figures that seem to be people. But mysteriously, some of these “humans” have snouts, another has a tail and still another has a bird’s beak. The human-animal hybrids must have lived only in the imagination of their creators. Far from a literal copy of the natural world, they offer a window into the creative minds of the prehistoric artists. The images’ inventive mixing of forms reveals a surprisingly modern reasoning and a sophisticated narrative imagination. At 44,000 years of age, they are the oldest known cave paintings made by modern humans. (Read more.)


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