From someone without a CERTIFICATE OF EXPERTISE IN THE FIELD OF PRE-HISTORIC ARCHEOLOGY - FROM THE FJORDIAN COUNCIL OF SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY, is this awesome article. It's like 8 internet pages long, and pretty dense...but there's some beautiful language in the piece...like this:
"Since recorded history began, around 3200 B.C., with the invention of writing in the Middle East, there have been some two hundred human generations (if one reckons a new one every twenty-five years). Future discoveries may alter the math, but, as it now stands, forty-five hundred generations separate the earliest Homo sapiens from the earliest cave artists, and between the artists and us another fifteen hundred generations have descended the birth canal, learned to walk upright, mastered speech and the use of tools, reached puberty, reproduced, and died."
Or this...
"What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for twenty-five millennia with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a “classical civilization.” For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been “deeply satisfying”—and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine."
Pretty rad, no? Anyhoo - just wanted to pass that along fer those intrested. For those who ain't - more cow and roo stupidity comparisons coming!!!
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2 comments:
Perhaps in 1.4 million years they'll find your blog - on some buried and yet preserved USB disk and wander why you aren't allowed to look at the milk carton bottom.
That would be so awesome Rhino! People trying to make sense of this with 1.4 million years of totally different context. I have the feeling it would be pretty incomprehensible...like Shakespeare is 400 years old, multiply that language mutation by 300,000...and what's left?
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