Wooden tablets found on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the 19th century, thought to display writing or proto-writing. Never deciphered, since the native Rapa Nui said they couldn't read them when asked by the 19th century Europeans.
The first European to notice them was Eugène Eyraud in 1864, a friar stationed on Rapa Nui to proselytize. He reported seeing hundreds of tablets, but 4 years later, a French priest tried to recover as many as possible, and could only find a few.
Their disappearance might be explained by reports of the native Rapa Nui's apparent disinterest in their survival. This is perhaps connected to European-introduced diseases to the island and the brutal Peruvian slave trade. These might have killed all the literate Rapa Nui.
Rapa Nui also has tons of petroglyphs, the most in Polynesia. "Nearly every suitable surface has been carved." However, there seems to be limited connections between the petroglyphs and the tablets; the petroglyphs aren't "text-like."
Only about 2 dozen of the tablets remain, none on the island, all scattered through museums and private collections.
Also, shoutout to this dude on Rapa Nui whose job is pretty much roasting Jared Diamond
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[Japanese viewers] "would experience the shock of coming suddenly across European perspective–the violent funnelling of space toward a single vanishing point, the panicky squeezing of a world that had reposed for all those centuries in the unhurried expanse of tranquil parallels"
"To arouse in ourselves some of the anguish experienced by the artists who bravely accepted and imitated the imported nightmares of distortion is the best way I can think of to cure us of this bit of Western provincialism."
"From the standpoint of splendid scenery, painting cannot equal [real] landscape. But from the standpoint of the sheer marvels of brush and ink, [real] landscape is not at all the equal of painting."
In Portugal's Côa Valley, a Paleolithic artist painted a deer-like figure on a rock wall. Several thousand years later, another artist engraved a rider atop the animal, "a horseman with typical Iron Age weapons".
It's modern/global discovery occurred in the 1990s during a dam building project. But the most recent art was from just a century prior!
Humans had been making images here repeatedly for around 24,000 years
I love encountering "steelman" explanations for "unrealistic" nonmodern art. For eg, many cultures prefer "split-type" images over naturalistic ones. Instead of assuming lack of ability, Jan B. Deregowski points out split-type images give more information than perspective images
I do think many techniques for realism require a lot of invention that these cultures may indeed have lacked...but adding points like this changes realism's development from a straight upwards line of progress into something more interesting.
Mass literacy destroyed many complex systems of dactylonomy (finger counting/finger math) used in the ancient world.
There were methods for approximately calculating square roots and counting to 9,999 on two hands.
"The earliest reference to this method of using the hands to refer to the natural numbers may have been in some Prophetic traditions going back to the early days of Islam during the early 600s."
"In Arabic, dactylonomy is known as 'Number reckoning by finger folding'"
"The gesture for 50 was used by some poets (for example Ibn Al-Moutaz) to describe the beak of the goshawk."
The Iñupiat of Alaska traditionally use a base-20 number system. In 1994, students at Kaktovik middle school worked with their teacher to invent a way to write this, since they found our base-10 unfamiliar. After the invention of Kaktovik numerals, test scores rose significantly
The differences between the standard Arabic number system and theirs is more complicated than just a different base number - they also have a sub-base of 5