# Some interesting videos about Human Development(cave paintings)

**URL:** <https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/t/some-interesting-videos-about-human-development-cave-paintings/4682>\
**Category:** Humanism\
**Created:** [December 23, 2015, 2:48pm UTC](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/t/some-interesting-videos-about-human-development-cave-paintings/4682 "2015-12-23T14:48:03Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![vyazma](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/d9b06d/32.png) [@vyazma](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/u/vyazma)\
**Post date:** [December 23, 2015, 2:48pm UTC](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/t/some-interesting-videos-about-human-development-cave-paintings/4682/1 "2015-12-23T14:48:03Z")

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2 come to mind right now. Many of you may have seen them already…if not check them out.  
TedTalks…about the similarity in cave paintings found around the world. [Why are these 32 symbols found in caves all over Europe | Genevieve von Petzinger - YouTube](http://youtu.be/hJnEQCMA5Sg)  
And Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”. Very good. Long. Good interviews with researchers etc…

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**Author:** ![write4u](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.centerforinquiry.org/write4u/32/23410_2.png) [@write4u](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/u/write4u)\
**Post date:** [December 25, 2015, 10:53am UTC](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/t/some-interesting-videos-about-human-development-cave-paintings/4682/2 "2015-12-25T10:53:12Z")

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> 2 come to mind right now. Many of you may have seen them already..if not check them out. TedTalks...about the similarity in cave paintings found around the world. http://youtu.be/hJnEQCMA5Sg And Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". Very good. Long. Good interviews with researchers etc...

Good stuff! I like the TedTalks site a lot.

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**Author:** ![vyazma](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/d9b06d/32.png) [@vyazma](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/u/vyazma)\
**Post date:** [December 25, 2015, 2:47pm UTC](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/t/some-interesting-videos-about-human-development-cave-paintings/4682/3 "2015-12-25T14:47:05Z")

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I went to this big lake on the Texas.Mexican border. It was real awesome. The lake was about 70 feet down in this huge sandstone carved out depression.  
There were some “caves”. They weren’t deep, just depressions in the cliffs.  
There were very old cave paintings on the walls there. I believe 2000-4000 years old.  
There was about 3-4 of these caves that we knew about.  
They weren’t protected or nothing. Just wide open to the public.  
The coolest one was the biggest one with the most paintings/pictographs.  
It also had graffiti right alongside the pictographs that went back at least to 1850 or so.  
The graffiti was just as cool to see as the pictographs.  
The pictographs were various arrow symbols, and pictures of people. stick people and insect people.  
Other symbols too…I can’t remember.

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**Author:** ![write4u](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forum.centerforinquiry.org/write4u/32/23410_2.png) [@write4u](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/u/write4u)\
**Post date:** [December 25, 2015, 9:17pm UTC](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/t/some-interesting-videos-about-human-development-cave-paintings/4682/4 "2015-12-25T21:17:11Z")

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I did some poking around in New Mexico. It has a very long history of early civilizations come and gone.

> **[History of New Mexico](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_Mexico)**
>
> The history of New Mexico is based on archaeological evidence, attesting to the varying cultures of humans occupying the area of New Mexico since approximately 9200 BCE, and written records. The earliest peoples had migrated from northern areas of North America after leaving Siberia via the Bering Land Bridge. Artifacts and architecture demonstrate ancient complex cultures in this region.
> The first written records of the region were made by the Spanish conquistadors, who encountered Native Ame...

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**Author:** ![timb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3e96dc/32.png) [@timb](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/u/timb)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 1:18am UTC](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/t/some-interesting-videos-about-human-development-cave-paintings/4682/5 "2016-01-07T01:18:42Z")

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> 2 come to mind right now. Many of you may have seen them already..if not check them out. TedTalks...about the similarity in cave paintings found around the world. http://youtu.be/hJnEQCMA5Sg And Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams". Very good. Long. Good interviews with researchers etc...

I just got around to watching the video. It is an interesting thought that certain simple graphics may have represented something to people who lived 40,000 or more years ago. And that these might have meant something to people separated by time and geographical distance. So these rudiments of writing (i.e., what eventually lead to more sophisticated textual behavior) may have emerged even further back. The lady doing the talk, eluded to possible even earlier representations in Africa.

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**Author:** ![timb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/3e96dc/32.png) [@timb](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/u/timb)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 2:21am UTC](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/t/some-interesting-videos-about-human-development-cave-paintings/4682/6 "2016-01-07T02:21:04Z")

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Did some internet digging and came up with this:

> **[Blombos Cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blombos_Cave)**
>
> Blombos Cave is an archaeological site located in Blombos Private Nature Reserve, about 300 km east of Cape Town on the Southern Cape coastline, South Africa. The cave contains Middle Stone Age (MSA) deposits currently dated at between c. 100,000 and 70,000 years Before Present (BP), and a Late Stone Age sequence dated at between 2000 and 300 years BP. The cave site was first excavated in 1991 and field work has been conducted there on a regular basis since 1997, and is ongoing.
> The excavatio...

Ochre processing tools were found that may date to 100,000 years ago. Perhaps the “paint” was not used for representational art, but if it were made for some other uses, it still, I think, could represent a contribution to the eventual use for symbolic “artistic” representation.  
The time frames are difficult to imagine. In light of how quickly our current extraordinary abilities to share information have developed over just the past few thousand years, I wonder how many times humans may have come close to breakthroughs in the development of textual behavior, and then lost the emerging technology, only to lose it and then, perhaps, for it to begin to emerge again, and then lose it, and so on, until finally we come up with IPhone 6 (or is it 7, now?).

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**Author:** ![vyazma](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/d9b06d/32.png) [@vyazma](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/u/vyazma)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 4:44pm UTC](https://forum.centerforinquiry.org/t/some-interesting-videos-about-human-development-cave-paintings/4682/7 "2016-01-07T16:44:24Z")

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Yes and even without paint, when did people become cognizant of animal tracks in the dirt? Or their own tracks?  
And then when did they “realize” that they could make artificial tracks in the dirt?  
I mean the jump from seeing an incidental graphic representation(a paw print) to conceiving of an intended graphical representation.(a scribble or making footprints in the dirt just for the “heck of it”)
