this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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Wouldn't say completely unsupported. Oldest tools, instruments, and cave paintings, are all older than 30 000 years old
Those cave paintings were likely just to entertain children. You look at modern drawings a grown-up will do of animals while drawing with kids, and they're not far off. These are people with brains exactly like yours and mine - if cave paintings were the apogee of artistic endeavour at the time, I'll eat my hat.
Is this based upon an expert's understanding of the topic, or is it just you speculating, though?
I do not intend to be hostile if it comes across that way, but it kinda feels to me a bit like you're saying things were like this or that so it fits your conclusion instead of basing it upon any literature
But regarding the art, have you ever tried drawing? That shit is so much more difficult than it might seem at first. Converting a 3D world into a 2D image is not easy. Drawing is a technology, and not just that, but it's culture, it's subjective. People back then might not have cared about replicating reality in art, but instead cared about other aspects of it, and the brain is good enough to fill in the blanks as needed anyway
To further the point, perspective drawing was an invention. It's not just something that humans intuitively know how to do. You look at old art humans made in the medieval times and so on, and they also look primitive compared to what human artists could make today (not me, however).
The technology of art needed time to develop, just like other forms of technology, and there was no such technology during those times. They had nothing to go off on, just like in other areas.
So, yes, it is not unreasonable to say that cave paintings probably were among the best drawings humans could make at the time, just like searing something over a fireplace might have been the best way of cooking food back then.
It's also not unreasonable to say that cave paintings likely were important parts of culture and artistic expression as well. Doubly so when some cave paintings were deep inside dark caves. That's not a place where you'd find people playing around with kids.
Saying that it was just to entertain children is very dismissive of the likely time and effort those art pieces, and the creation of their pigments, took