Not pertinent to anything in particular but I do think it's kinda weird that we keep depicting cavemen in media crawling around on all fours covered in dirt with tangled, matted hair, speaking in broken, cobbled-together toddler language when like.
They were us.
Like literally genetically they were US, just like. A while ago.
Like
Would you trust a TV caveman with a baby? Probably not
A real life caveman though??? I think they'd be at least okay at it
This is actually really important and comes up in Anthropology classes all. The. Time.
As long as homo sapiens have existed, we have had the same emotional and mental capacity as you and I do today. You nailed it. They were US. Even Neaderthals existed alongside and had offspring with Homo Sapiens for many thousands of years.
There's much evidence that cavemen would have had complex spoken language, culture (learned information passed down), symbolic interpretation, and I think they most certainly would have been able to handle holding a baby. In fact I have my suspicisions that an ancient homo sapiens mother may be a more present, attentive, and knowledgable mom than I could be today.
Do not let media trick you into believing we are the pinnacle of humanity. Unilinial evolution theory (google it quick I beg) is BUNK, GARBAGE, and the root of so much evil.
We've been human for a long, long time, and we are not inherently better than all those who came before.
One the most profound experiences of my life was visiting Font de Gaume, which has 12 thousand year old paintings. They use a technique where the horses appeared to run across the wall when seen in flickering firelight. There was a bison the wall staring at us with such attitude, I could practically hear him. I had the most profound feeling of those ancient artists reaching forward to lay their hands on my shoulders. To say, "This was my world." It was a profoundly moving experience.
Some years later, I went to the Orkney islands where we visited a tiny family run museum of artifacts from the chambered tomb at the other end of the farm. They handed me a pestle once held by some neolithci human.They'd worn groves where the thumb and forefinger would be for better grip.
One time, in a French history class, my teacher randomly at the end of the class had all of us draw a sketch of a horse. And we were all like ??? Okay???
At the beginning of the next class, my teacher showed us a cave painting of a horse. And then he showed all of our horses, which he had scanned and put into the presentation.
He then pointed out all the ways that our horses looked similar to the prehistoric horse. Same features, drawn from the same angle, etc.
And then he asked us, "Isn't it cool that you draw horses the same way as someone who lived 20,000 years ago?"
Yeah. That stuck with me for a while.
In Spain, there's a cave full of ancient, ice age era drawings of bison and reindeer and other animals of that period... And one small section of chaotic scribbles just a little away from everything else. These scribblesv were so incomprehensible, they were originally just called the 'Panel of Enigmatic Signs'... Until it occurred to someone that drawings only three feet off the ground probably weren't made by adults.
Scientists are now pretty sure the scribbles were made by kids ages 3-6, more or less on their own. The adult cave artists were probably doing what any modern parent might do when they want to keep small children out of their hair for awhile: they gave the kids some drawing tools of their own and a small section of wall to work on, out of the way but still close enough to keep an eye on them, and let them have at it.
What's most charming about the whole thing is the way the cave scribbles look exactly like what you'd find on the wall of a preschool today. Artistic styles vary widely across different times and cultures, but child development is as near to a universal human experience as it gets.
Wisher made detailed 3D scans of the drawings, which helped her understand the uneven pressure applied to the charcoal and the direction the lines were drawn. The team then compared the panel’s composition with age-appropriate artistic efforts by modern children. Kids across cultures go through the same developmental stages, which influence their physical ability to draw, until about the age of 6, Amir notes.
The team compared the ancient art with the developmental stages exhibited by modern children: the furiously scribbled circles and push-pull lines typical of 3-year-olds just learning to control their bodies, for example, or the wobbly, right-angled figures of slightly older kids beginning to master fine motor skills.
Both are apparent in the cave, superimposed on each other as though two or more kids were drawing at once. That’s a clue the Las Monedas marks were likely made by “siblings or a mixed-age play group within the sphere of safety around adults, but also within their own space,” says co-author Felix Riede, an Aarhus archaeologist.
...
Adults at Las Monedas would have been aware of what the kids were doing and presumably had lit fires or torches; without ample firelight the cave is pitch black.
adding the paleolithic child scribble pic & my favorite quotes from the same article linked above:
“They’re experimenting to get to know materials that are important in their world. They’re not trying to draw animals, they’re just trying to break the charcoal.” [...]
The authors say the same combination of developmental psychology and archaeological analysis could be applied to “enigmatic” symbols in other ancient caves. “I hope this makes it easier to identify children’s art in the past,” Wisher says. “Our attention is drawn to figurative art, and we tend to overlook these small scribbles—but I think they exist. And that’s probably thanks to children, bored while mom and dad are making stag drawings.”
