Four Questions needed to be answered in 2020 to solve the UFO mystery?
posted by RRRGroup at
Monday, January 06, 2020
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Monday, January 06, 2020
Early humans (not yet distorted by the Ancient Alien theorists)
Copyright 2020 InterAmerica
"The cave is in
Indonesia—the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong 4, on the island of
Sulawesi, to be precise—and it was occupied, according to recent findings, more
than forty thousand years ago, by early modern humans. Inside it for all that
time has been a fourteen-and-a-half-foot-wide image, painted in dark-red
pigment, depicting about eight tiny bipedal figures, bearing what look to be
spears and ropes, bravely hunting the local wild pigs and buffalo. The
discoverers of its antiquity, a team of archeologists at Griffith University,
in Australia, including Maxime Aubert, the chief author of an article about the
painting in Nature, call it “to our knowledge, currently the
oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in
the world.”
"The very first storytelling picture! The first narrative, and it tells one of the simplest and most resonant stories we have: a tale of the hunter and the hunted, of small and easily mocked pursuers trying to bring down a scary but vulnerable beast. What’s more, the hunters appear to be what people whose business it is to decipher cave paintings call therianthropes, humans with animal elements, like heads. These eight, then, are the earliest known examples of this mysteriously durable manner of mythical depic- tion, which runs forward to Egyptian wall paintings and, for that matter, to modern animation. Therianthropes, it seems, reflect the symbolic practice of giving to humans the powers of animals, a shamanistic rite that seems tied to the origins of religion, and here it is, for the first time, a startup.
"The detailed resolution of the images in the Nature article is at first disappointing. Though the buffalo, called anoa, are distinct enough, one of the human figures, we’re told, has 'a tapering profile that possibly merges into the base of a thick tail and with short, curved limbs splayed out to the side. In our opinion, this part of the body resembles the lower half of a lizard or croco- dile. It is thus possible that [the therianthrope] represents a composite of at least three different kinds of animals: a human, an anoa and a quadrupedal reptile.' "[Bold by me]
Cave art, a fascination of mine, as many of you know, allows for an assessment of how early humans thought and coped with their existence, something Mr. Gopnik touches upon.
But his aside about the human (therianthrope) portrayed as a combination of “a human, anoa [buffalo], and a quadupedal reptile” would surely cause, if they see his piece, Ancient Astronaut sillies to say that the “therianthrope” was a being from the stars, an ET visitor.
Read the whole Nature article, via the link above, to get a normal interpretation by way of true experts.
The painting and how it fits into human evolution of life and thinking is fascinating, because of its age and story-telling.
This is one reason why I keep recommending you snarks to seek, outside the internet or on it if necessary, articles that enlighten and pertain to our quest about the meaning of UFOs, or things outside our normal reality – although this New Yorker sojourn is right up our existential (in the current use of that term) reality.
RR
The [January 6, 2020] New Yorker
‘s Adam Gopnik opened the magazine’s Talk of the Town segment [Page 13] with a
piece (Good Old Days) about a cave painting that gives pause to our
concerns about life: “All times seem to those within them uniquely miserable.”
This prelude to Mr. Gopnik’s assessment of how things are
today, in the world, causes him to note a cave painting discovered recently and
presented in Nature magazine:
Mr. Gopnik puts a
spin on the discovery and its interpretive demeanor by the archaealogist(s) who
examined it:
"The very first storytelling picture! The first narrative, and it tells one of the simplest and most resonant stories we have: a tale of the hunter and the hunted, of small and easily mocked pursuers trying to bring down a scary but vulnerable beast. What’s more, the hunters appear to be what people whose business it is to decipher cave paintings call therianthropes, humans with animal elements, like heads. These eight, then, are the earliest known examples of this mysteriously durable manner of mythical depic- tion, which runs forward to Egyptian wall paintings and, for that matter, to modern animation. Therianthropes, it seems, reflect the symbolic practice of giving to humans the powers of animals, a shamanistic rite that seems tied to the origins of religion, and here it is, for the first time, a startup.
"The detailed resolution of the images in the Nature article is at first disappointing. Though the buffalo, called anoa, are distinct enough, one of the human figures, we’re told, has 'a tapering profile that possibly merges into the base of a thick tail and with short, curved limbs splayed out to the side. In our opinion, this part of the body resembles the lower half of a lizard or croco- dile. It is thus possible that [the therianthrope] represents a composite of at least three different kinds of animals: a human, an anoa and a quadrupedal reptile.' "[Bold by me]
Cave art, a fascination of mine, as many of you know, allows for an assessment of how early humans thought and coped with their existence, something Mr. Gopnik touches upon.
But his aside about the human (therianthrope) portrayed as a combination of “a human, anoa [buffalo], and a quadupedal reptile” would surely cause, if they see his piece, Ancient Astronaut sillies to say that the “therianthrope” was a being from the stars, an ET visitor.
Read the whole Nature article, via the link above, to get a normal interpretation by way of true experts.
The painting and how it fits into human evolution of life and thinking is fascinating, because of its age and story-telling.
This is one reason why I keep recommending you snarks to seek, outside the internet or on it if necessary, articles that enlighten and pertain to our quest about the meaning of UFOs, or things outside our normal reality – although this New Yorker sojourn is right up our existential (in the current use of that term) reality.
RR
posted by RRRGroup at
Monday, January 06, 2020
|
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