• AlfredEinstein@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      This is actually a good point. Cave paintings were the memes of our ancestors.

      And they obviously worked, because we’re here today to look at them and agree “lol, yeah, fuck that bison!”

    • RedOPM
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      5 months ago

      But if that 10000 yo building is a shack, on the side of a rock face, does it make it a cave?

      • Bonehead@kbin.social
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        5 months ago

        Not if construction was required. Anyone can just go live in a cave, even today. But building walls to keep out the elements and adding some decorative pieces can turn a cave into a home.

  • DavidGarcia@feddit.nl
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    5 months ago

    That’s what I’m saying. Homo sapiens has existed for at least 300k years, 125k years out of Africa. Homo erectus has been out of Africa for at least 1.7 million years. Homo antecessor in Europe 800k years ago. 500k years ago Neanderthals and Denisovans ancestors are firmly established in Europe and Asia.

    Then we kill/bang all the other ones in a grand battle royale lasting 100k years. Then suddenly the sea levels rise 120 meters 20k-10k years ago and cave men on every continent independently develop farming, civilization etc. It’s bs.

    They must have all learned it before Eurasians and Native Americans split ~20k-15k years ago. There really is only one ancient people group that spread to every continent after that at exactly the right time. Interestingly enough they lived right next to the last known Denisovans and Neanderthals 50-30k years ago.

    These technologies must have all existed in some rudimentary form at least before the Last Glacial Maximum 26k-20k years ago.

    Personally, I think it developed somewhere between Sundland and the Amur river valley. So Southeast Asia to East Asia. And there is a good chance we learned a lot of it from the Denisovans whose ancestors lived there for more than 1 million year.

    It’s just that those areas are mostly warm and humid, the most interesting sites are under up to 120m of water (like most of Sundaland or what is now the Yellow Sea) or covered with jungle. Finding evidence from 10k+ years is hard enough already and even harder under those conditions.

    So I think there still is a lot of interesting archeology to be done.