Re: Cave sculptures go on display for first time in 15,000 years

On Mar 21, 12:20 pm, David <pchristain...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Mar 21, 12:37 pm, Day Brown <daybr...@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:



First painting, and now sculpture; is it any wonder white people think
their race is superior?

Its not as if realism was impossible for Africans.http://www.africadirect.com/productsdesc.php?ID=18425andhttp://www.fl...us some of the 12th
century Yoruba work from Ife. In the middle ages, Ife in Benin was
doing portraiture better than anyone in Europe at the time.

But then, the power structure collapsed, and they all went back to the
usual 'primitive' art. And in France we see modern realism going on in
the paleolithic.... which then disappears, only to re-emerge later,
fall with Rome, and then arise yet again in the Rennaisance.

The ongoing work of Ramachandran on the occipital lobes suggests there
are neurological reasons for this that are written in the DNA. Whether
this is "superior" is a matter of your artistic sensibilies. i've
raised cattle, and was struck by the powers of observation shown in
the last image. Those are not the legs of cows or bulls, but yearlings
whose feet do not yet have to support the massive weight, and so
because of the tendons, tend to walk on "tippy toes".

This attention to detail led to a host of innovations.

Why play the race card? It seems out of place.
Trying to ignore it leaves it to the zealots to define. Trying to
understand what the diffs are would help to explain why the marvelous
artistry of the 12th century Ife heads did not then lead on to further
development rather than back to the tribalism which still plagues
Africa.

Pretending there are no diffs does not lead to a search for solutions.
"Guns, Germs, & Steel" by Diamond has some racist elements, but it
also goes a long ways twards explaining why what we think of as
'progress' happened in some regions, but not others.

Diamond mentions how the Zulu moved to higher lattitudes, a more
temperate zone, with cattle and agarian techniques after abandoning
the primitive hunter tribalism still seen in so much of Africa. He
also notes how the Zulu were far more able to organize to resist
colonialism. The Zulu regard themselves as a race, which they
understandably feel is superior to the other African tribes.

There's a good case to be made that their success was due, in part, to
instinctive behavior patterns that are not that different from what
evolved in the temperate zones of Europe and China.

In his latest, "Collapse" he devotes a lotta space to the New Guinea
Highlanders- who he says have practiced agriculture since the stone
age. But they were entirely surrounded by low land jungle and hunter
tribes, so got no innovative input from anyone else until the white
man showed up.

Without the importation of new crops, their population maxed out the
ecosystem, prolly back in the stone age, and from then on engaged in
the "Constant Battles" LeBlanc outlines that keeps knocking
organization back down to lower levels.

But in stone age Europe, the ice kept coming down, wiping out the
megafauna and hominids that depended on them. The warm periods were
never long enuf for the populations to expand to the point where they
were competing for a limited resource base. Warriors were just not
that useful; Old Man Winter was the real enemy. This made more room in
the gene pool for the gifted artists and geeky innovators. There are
DNA markers for this sort of thing.
.

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