[there_the_and]

Rock art is really weird because there are exactly same motifs using the same materials (usually red ochre) all over the world and separated by tens of thousands of years.

People act like it’s no big deal, but it sure looks like a pretty big deal that raises some interesting questions. We have a global view of information flows now, and I feel like I haven’t seen a lot of behaviors in humanity that explain how this has been working. What is happening here? Every few thousand years some small group of people in a new random spot on earth somehow magically decides to do that hand thing with red ochre on a rock face? By what mechanism? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence that we are innately drawn to hand symbols in red ochre, aside from these examples separated by diameter of the earth and tens of thousands of years.

Given the time scale and given our current visibility into humanity, human information, and human creativity, it seems like whatever would cause that to happen should be something that’s still observable in the modern world.

[TrainedMonkey]

Here is a theory - survivorship bias. Humans made all kinds of things, but only small amount of it survived. Red ochre on rock faces just happened to be something that lasts a long time.

To expand on that I think there was a lot of self expression covering all possible surfaces. So the statement shifts from many human groups picked same thing to express themselves to multiple self expressive groups discovered ochre techniques and produced artwork that survived to this day. There were probably plenty of groups that did not discover that and none of their art survived.

[yholio]

To elaborate on this, the white marble statues decorating the Parthenon and Acropolis are believed to have been painted very bright colors in their day. Not a single one of those dazzling pigments survived exposed to the elements after a mere 2500 years.

[mathieuh]

I think it's past belief at this point, archaeologists have found traces of pigment on the statues.

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/12/22/ancient-statues-in...

Know nothing about this source but I googled and couldn't find a better one, I'm sure I've read about before though.

[dan-robertson]

The white marble statues were usually copies of more highly regarded bronze statues. But you can’t melt the marble down to make weapons so those statues survived

[handmodel]

It is a good theory.

Even things like arrowheads which are used to mark progress or reach of Native American populations in the US are useful because they survive and are dug up all the time while digging. I'm sure there would be more interesting cultural finds if baskets or clothes from the time survived at the same rate.

[chrisco255]

Yeah I bet there were hundreds of thousands of works of art painted on animal canvas or pottery, but due to deterioration did not survive.

[Cthulhu_]

Pottery is one of those things that is still found regularly in archeological finds; it doesn't really deteriorate if it's sealed / buried.

[chrisco255]

I'm sure the later stuff lasted, once we had perfected the technique of producing ceramic (still probably a lot is buried under earth somewhere and over time will be crushed with pressure). But I'm talking about the early to late-stone age period (10K YA and earlier), when we probably still produced containers, but they were probably made from less durable materials or techniques.

[qwertox]

For those who haven't heard about survivorship bias, the following section in the Wikipedia illustrates it interestingly:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias#In_the_milit...

[markdown]

Do you, by chance, watch the History channel?

Spend some time around kids. Rock art is completely obvious.

After a few thousand nights in a cave with nothing to do, drawing on the walls with some charcoal from your fire is what every human probably did, and would do even today.

Switching to red ochre is just one step away from that.

Even chimps are known to scratch figures in the dirt.

[there_the_and]

What I find interesting about this explanation is that it suggests a much more limited scope of decision-making than is often attributed to humans. A practical example of why this could matter is that instead of spreading an idea through viral mechanisms where an information is transmitted between individuals, this would provide an illustration of how an idea could be spread by replicating conditions and causing the idea to essentially regenerate in a predictable manner among disconnected individuals, while from each individual’s perspective they are doing something novel.

[polishdude20]

It could be that there's tonnes of people doing hand things with lots of different materials. Then, because of the composition of that red ochre material, only the drawings that were made with that stuff stick around for long enough for us to see them.

[divbzero]

Yes, and “long enough for us to see them” actually comprises two independent factors: (1) survivorship bias, in that red ochre on rock can last a long time, and (2) “discoverability” bias, in that red ochre on rock is relatively easy to spot.

[throwaway894345]

Additionally perhaps people (would-be discoverers) ignore art in remote places that is not a hand print or otherwise pictographic as probably a natural anomaly and not human-made?

[colechristensen]

Basically humans have an instinct for graffiti, a few standard interests (hands, sexual anatomy, prey animals), and there are a few material combinations that survive the ages particularly well.

It’s probably not a coincidence that two millennia ago you find the same crude jokes and drawings of dicks scrawled on the walls of Pompeii that you find in any high school bathroom.

[saalweachter]

Yeah, but how many high school ruffians today speak and write fluent Latin?

[JackFr]

My favorite graffiti is in the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY (transported from Egypt). British soldiers in Egypt to fight Napoleon, acting like naughty teenagers and carving their names.

[pengaru]

Hands are the universally present and usable drawing implements, what you're questioning seems incredibly obvious.

[tootie]

Hand prints and basic shapes is the first thing every toddler with fingerpaints will draw. Followed by people and animals.

[romseb]

As a solution to this problem, Rupert Sheldrake proposes his hypothesis of "Morphic Resonance" [1]. While it's a far-out idea and rejected by the scientific community, I found it an interesting read nonetheless.

[1] https://www.sheldrake.org/research/morphic-resonance/introdu...

[JackFr]

> While it's a far-out idea and rejected by the scientific community

Those are fun reads, but they always disappoint in the end.

[ncmncm]

The examples cited always turn out to be entirely made up.

[mikem170]

Maybe rock art is a secondary effect of whatever evolutionary leap brought about language in the human species. Whatever brain mechanisms facilitated that also facilitated cave paintings. The rest can be explained by many independent inventors over tens of thousands of years. Maybe even call these paintings a first attempt at writing, a precursor to hieroglyphics.

[there_the_and]

Indeed. It seems possible that there’s something about the red ochre hand motif is hardwired into human brain and is related to language development. But on a time scale of tens of thousands of years, even if we somehow outgrew it as a species, it seems there would still be residual evidence.

[BrissyCoder]

Here you go: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a2/e4/cb/a2e4cb366c802776412e...

[michaelsbradley]

The mystery is already solved for more than a decade now, though more research remains to be done and understanding deepened:

Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current, Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity

https://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/PerattTPSv31-2003...

Part 2:

https://plasmauniverse.info/downloadsCosmo/Peratt,et,al,TPSv...

Related publications:

https://plasmauniverse.info/NearEarth.html

[beambot]

When our daughter was one year old, we gave her some child-safe finger paints. Finger prints and hand prints were some of the first "drawings" she made without any parental instruction. She does not have any inherent access to global information flows or other esoteric explanations that would bind her to her ancient relatives -- beyond a bunch of shared DNA and common physiology & brain development.

She also prefers bright colors, and red pigments are probably some of the most accessible in nature that might be more robust to the sands of time (i.e. survivorship bias).

[there_the_and]

It seems like a likely explanation is that these are primarily done by children and that this is a human universal / instinctual behavior during child development. Looking at google scholar there are at least a couple studies of hand print sizes estimating that in a few regions they were almost exclusively done by young people. That would seem to suggest a biological basis for this specific behavior.

[gbrown]

Red is the one of the most common and easily accessible pigments, and as others have pointed out what we see is durable. As far as the “same motifs” goes, is that really so unexpected? It’s not a particularly precise claim, but I’d certainly expect to see expressive similarities from groups of biologically indistinct humans living similar technological lifestyles despite their geographic or temporal separation.