<story><title>Oldest known cave painting found in Indonesia</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2021-01-world-oldest-cave-indonesia.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zaroth</author><text>45,000 years is relatively such a blink of an eye. At the same time it’s pretty impressive to have found this painting, it’s also pretty amazing that the vast majority of human history is almost entirely unknown to us.&lt;p&gt;For scale, this reaches back in time roughly 10-15% of the way to when Homo Sapiens first emerged.&lt;p&gt;Then again, it took us 66 years to go from the first human flight to landing a person on the moon, and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI.&lt;p&gt;It’s just too bad we are unable to intellectually or socially progress at anywhere near the same rate as we scientifically progress.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>libraryofbabel</author><text>&amp;gt; For scale, this reaches back in time roughly 10-15% of the way to when Homo Sapiens first emerged.&lt;p&gt;Ah! But only if we&amp;#x27;re talking about &lt;i&gt;anatomically&lt;/i&gt; modern homo sapiens. &lt;i&gt;Behaviorally modern&lt;/i&gt; humans emerged much later, and in fact one of the most definitive signs of behaviorally modern humans &lt;i&gt;is the existence of cave paintings&lt;/i&gt;!&lt;p&gt;Defining behavioral modernity is an endless debate, but a key part of it is symbolic thought - the ability to think with abstractions and manipulate concepts. Representing a group of pigs on a wall in pigment (or even considering doing so a meaningful activity) demands powers of abstraction that humans acquired only recently, in the last 50,000 years, most likely via the development of language. This is ultimately why finding the earliest cave painting is such a big deal. It shows that in this place there were people who had crossed that behavioral chasm and in some sense were &lt;i&gt;more like us&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;For more on this subject, &lt;i&gt;Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins&lt;/i&gt; by Ian Tattersall (2012) is a wonderful read.</text></comment>
<story><title>Oldest known cave painting found in Indonesia</title><url>https://phys.org/news/2021-01-world-oldest-cave-indonesia.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>zaroth</author><text>45,000 years is relatively such a blink of an eye. At the same time it’s pretty impressive to have found this painting, it’s also pretty amazing that the vast majority of human history is almost entirely unknown to us.&lt;p&gt;For scale, this reaches back in time roughly 10-15% of the way to when Homo Sapiens first emerged.&lt;p&gt;Then again, it took us 66 years to go from the first human flight to landing a person on the moon, and 60 years hence we’ll have settled Mars, solved worldwide energy generation and storage, and invented AGI.&lt;p&gt;It’s just too bad we are unable to intellectually or socially progress at anywhere near the same rate as we scientifically progress.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tsimionescu</author><text>It is absolutely obvious that in 60 years we will have neither AGI nor a colony on Mars.&lt;p&gt;For AGI, we are so far from even having a clear idea how to even approach this problem (no, deep learning and backpropagation are not promising avenues).&lt;p&gt;For Mars, there are no real incentives, and the problem of a self sustaining colony underground in an irradiated environment with little oxygen and grabity is absurdly difficult. We might at best have essentially a space station on Mars in 60 years, but a self sustaining colony that wouldn&amp;#x27;t die off 2 years after something catastrophic happening to the Earth is far beyond our current engineering, much farther than any advance in the last 60 years.&lt;p&gt;Not to mention, for any plausible catastrophe happening to the Earth apart from a gamma ray burst, the Earth will still be much, much more habitable than Mars. So even if you are motivated by survival of the species, trying to build a colony on Mars before having a huge array of self-sustaining underground habitats on Earth is putting the cart way ahead of the horse. You&amp;#x27;d even get the first-hand experience needed to actually have any hope of building something like this on Mars.</text></comment>