Children Helped Decorate Prehistoric Caves of France 72
sciencehabit writes "Among the prolific paintings and other art in the 8 kilometer-long Rouffignac cave system in southwestern France are a number of unusual markings known as finger flutings, which are made by people dragging their hands through the soft silt that lines the cave's walls. By analyzing the finger flutings of modern humans, researchers discovered that the ratio of the distance between the three middle fingers indicate that many of the cave artists were very young children, one as young as 2 or 3 years old. The researchers were also able to tell the children's genders from the shape of the fingers."
So like my oldest (Score:2)
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with me (43 (yeah, yeah, get off my yada, yada, yada...)), it's about textures. I just like touching things and the movement of going past walls and feeling the texture change quickly is pretty cool.
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It was glorious.
My grandpa used to regale me with stories of wattle.
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Wattle is great. It's the daub that can get a little objectionable to work with. Unless the shit is well rotted along with the mud and straw.
When my parents and I were re-wiring their house - back in the early 1970s - we had to remove and then repair substantial areas of lath-and-plaster walling We were replacing the existing strands of single-core wire with rubber and cloth insulation with new cables that used modern plastic insulation. But it used to fr
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No. He's marking the walls to get your attention because you spend too much time posting on Slashdot instead of raising your progeny. Now get back to your guilt trip!
Here's a little more info from the paywalled link (Score:5, Interesting)
"Most preschoolers get scolded for writing on walls, but kids living 13,000 years ago were encouraged to scribble, at least in caves. Among the prolific paintings and other art in the 8 kilometer-long Rouffignac cave system in southwestern France are a number of unusual markings known as finger flutings, which are made by people dragging their hands through the soft silt that lines the cave's walls. By analyzing the finger flutings of modern humans, researchers discovered that the ratio of the distance between the three middle fingers indicate that many of the cave artists were very young children, one as young as 2 or 3 years old. The researchers were also able to tell the children's genders from the shape of the fingers. Some of these flutings were too steady for a toddler, suggesting that an adult guided the child's hand while teaching him or her, the researchers will report this weekend at the archaeology of childhood conference in Cambridge, U.K. Since the children's drawings seemed to be concentrated in one chamber, the researchers believe that the alcove may have been a sort of art school. And some of the drawings were high on the walls and on the ceiling, suggesting that the children were lifted."
Very cool. I love how we can open windows onto our ancestors' lives through a bunch of boring measurements of finger tracks on a dusty cave wall.
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there's probably pre-historic boogers mixed in.
How long will *your* refrigerator door last? (Score:4, Interesting)
My mom still has one of those plaster castings of a handprint one of us did in kindergarten sitting in one of her cabinets. I'm not sure we know who, unless the teacher wrote our name on the back :-)
Meanwhile, if you ever get another chance to see the movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams [imdb.com] in 3D, absolutely go see it. Werner Herzog took a camera crew into the oldest known painted cave in France for a couple of days, and it really did need to be filmed in 3D.
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Unfortunately the only cinema within 300 miles that showed it ... doesn't have any 3D facilities. There's a possibility that it'll appear at the local Imax theatre one day (though the cave would not permit the entry of Imax cameras), which would be worth the 400-mile round trip to see it. I'd have to get the bus though - I doubt that I'd want to drive with the post-3D headache.
But, having seen the 2D version ... I th
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"Most preschoolers get scolded for writing on walls, but kids living 13,000 years ago were encouraged to scribble, at least in caves."
Uhm... How do they know that those children didn't get scolded for it too?
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Hmmm ... star wars ... or prehistoric humans ?
When will slashdot start supporting the philosoraptor in replies?
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"Most preschoolers get scolded for writing on walls, but kids living 13,000 years ago were encouraged to scribble, at least in caves."
Uhm... How do they know that those children didn't get scolded for it too?
Last line of the linked article reads, " And some of the drawings were high on the walls and on the ceiling, suggesting that the children were lifted." I'm reasonably sure that's how they know. I suppose an argument could be made that it was their teenage siblings holding them up but back then by that age the teens would have been the parents of other 2 or 3 year olds.
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Re:paywalled link (Score:2)
You call that art? My great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother could do that!
Art? (Score:3)
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How are we sure it's not just people dragging their fingers along the wall to navigate in the dark?
Or people trying desperately to find something to grab onto as some unspeakable horror dragged them into the depths of the cave by their ankles?
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> GET LAMP
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Look, if he were dying, he wouldn't bother to paint 'Aaagh', he'd just say it.
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My dear sir, I am a geek; not a nerd. I have spoken to a girl and everything!
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Life was definitely rough before the invention of towels.
Re:Art? (Score:4, Informative)
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Some of the drawings were very high up so children had to have been lifted by adults to reach them. Moreover, there are clear designs in the patterns, and swirls and the like. [...] the children's work was mainly confined largely to a single room.
Pretty obvious. It must have been Mrs. Oogh's kindergarden art project
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*golf clap*
Boys and girls (Score:2)
I remember a story about the famous pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. When told that a child's gender could be determined by the shape of the skull at birth, he replied "I prefer the traditional methods..."
At a conference, paper details not online (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the presentation in question doesn't seem to be online. There was a presentation on this subject at a conference at Cambridge http://www.sscip.org.uk/files/SSCIP%20Annual%20Conference%202011/Programme%20Autumn%202011a.pdf [sscip.org.uk] which apparently includes a lot of other examples of artifacts made by children in cultures throughout human history. Can someone find the relevant papers online? The author of the work is Jess Cooney from Cambridge. There's a page http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/features/prehistoric-pre-school/ [cam.ac.uk] with more details but I can't find actual preprints or the like.
But there's one thing that this sort of thing really shows: science rocks. We can use clever tests and careful measurements to figure out details about the age of children painting on caves. This is exactly why science is awesome. And we're always learning more and more, developing more clever techniques, and finding out more about the universe and ourselves. We are on a long, slow, possibly never-ending journey. But that journey leads closer and closer to truth. And those children and adults long ago who struggled to survive and experimented with different ways to paint are part of that same journey that we are.
(Sorry, something about this story just gets me a bit emotional.)
Kid's scrawl (Score:2)
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stand up very well as art, even by modern standards.
Art in the sense of 'a happening' then? As I understand it, in this cave they couldn't see what they were drawing and they couldn't see what they had drawn.
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I always wondered (Score:1)
Ironic? (Score:2)
I recall some article about some kids getting in trouble for putting graffitti into a cave like this (searches fail me at the moment...) with pre-historic grafitti...
I found it somewhat ironic.
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1992... a few years ago... fuck, we're getting old.
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Either That (Score:2)
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Or, the caveman was a paedophile serial killer with a side interest in modern representational art...
Oh, so you mean just like a modern-day avant-garde artist?
Duh (Score:1)
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Some of these flutings were too steady for a toddler, suggesting that an adult guided the child's hand while teaching him or her, (...)
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How do you know it was their parents and not their big brother, or some random weirdo playing with the kid.
Stupid modern laws (Score:3)
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The marks left behind by the girls did not include stains reminiscent of a Monica Lewinski outfit.
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The marks left behind by the girls did not include stains reminiscent of a Monica Lewinski outfit.
Okay, first of all we're talking about 3 year olds. Second, that reference is 13 years old.
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So after the "Dark Ages", the "Renaissance" and the "Industrial Age" we will be known as the "Stupid Age"? ;-)
Kids from Yorkshire (Score:2)
When I were a lad during the ice age we had to walk all the way to southwest France to go to school
And it was uphill both ways
Archeologist who specialises in children (Score:2)
Concludes that children produced this archaeology.
The first rule of science is to question the obvious, appealing hypothesis.
sneaky critters (Score:1)
Yeah. My two year old girl "helps" me decorate my house once in a while, too.