Tag: prehistoric mysteries

Enigmas of Cave Art

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Cave art history | Resource | RSC Education

Why would any artist, or group of artists, climb through long, twisting underground passages to find a rock wall to decorate with their paintings? How much light could their lamps and torches provide? How many members of the community ever got to see those paintings?

And why are these pictures–from tens of thousands of years ago–every bit as well-executed as current modern paintings.? Bulls, mammoths, horses, reindeer, lions: the unknown artists’ mastery is astounding.

Thousands of self-portraits of… hands. What was that about–“Kilroy was here”?

510+ Cave Painting Hand Stock Photos, Pictures & Royalty ...

Why are animals depicted so realistically, while human figures, if we see them at all, are mostly faceless stick figures? There’s nothing here that’s even close to a portrait.

Why are all the animals shown in profile? We don’t have one frontal image.

Were the paintings tied in with religious rituals? Were they expected to ensure good hunting for the people who’d produced them?

We don’t have the answers to any of these questions. I doubt we ever will.

One last question: Why were these “cave men” so much better artists than people who lived thousands of years later?

Dino… Blood… Found?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

This 23-minute video is chock-full of numbing technical language–it’s here if you want it–but let me boil it down for you.

At stake here is a claim that actual dinosaur blood cells have been found. Scientists are divided between “Oh, that has to be wrong!” and “Um, er, excuse me, the phone is ringing!”

The problem is, we have some reputable scientists making this claim; and although just laughing them off or even punishing them has worked well in the past, it doesn’t work anymore.

Dreadnoughtus , named after a historic battleship, was a super-big dinosaur that lived in Argentina. What if we really had intact blood cells? Could we use it to grow a Dreadnoughtus, a la Jurassic Park? A lot of scientists are retreating to the sidelines until such time, they say, as technology catches up to our needs.

Can blood–or collagen, or other soft tissue–really survive for millions and millions of years, in the bones of long-vanished animals? Or is there something deeply wrong with that question? If it can’t, and yet there it is, maybe there’s something wrong with the imagined time scale.

God does like to challenge our minds, doesn’t He?

Lizards or Leprechauns?

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

One of the more popular pastimes during the Ice Age was to paint on the walls of caves. Cave paintings of assorted animals are justly famous for their high artistic quality.

Folks back then also liked to make stencils of their hands. Thousands of ’em. Maybe it was a kind of signature.

A Prehistoric Mystery

Which brings us to the little tiny hands, smaller than a baby’s, stenciled on the walls of several caves in the Sahara Desert–which wasn’t a desert then, and the Ice Age didn’t reach that far south.

Scientists are puzzled. Whose hands could those be? Why take any trouble to stencil lizard-hands?

Gnomes, leprechauns, brownies–take your choice. You might be right.