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sean Profile picture
sean
@DilettanteryPod
Cenozoic //𓃭\\ For I was once already boy and girl,/ Thicket and bird, and mute fish in the waves./ And then we came unto a roofèd cave...
4 subscribers
Dec 17, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
[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" The reception of perspective in the non-West has been a contested body of evidence for this question. The conclusions of authors who have studied the reception of western perspectival art by non-European peoples is mixed. An eighteenth-century Chinese artist and writer stated that: "The Westerners are skilled in geometry. . .When they paint houses on a wall people are tempted to walk into them. . .But these painters have no brush-manner whatsoever; although they possess skill, they are simply artisans." Arnheim suggests reading of history of painting in Japan: "they would e... "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."
Oct 28, 2024 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
Woah!

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". "Iron Age warrior image superimposed above a cervid figure of Paleolithic typology at the Coa Valley site of Vermelhosa" https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Paleolithic-open-air-rock-art-sites-of-the-C-oa-Valley-1-Vale-da-Casa-2-Vale-de-Cabr_fig18_225545384 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 Image
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Oct 24, 2024 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
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 Image
Image (eg. we see the elephant's legs too).
May 31, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
is this real

Two Tibetans who concluded WWII was the netherworld Image Original here! Rt this one.

(Seems like the mystery isn’t solved yet)
Apr 17, 2024 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
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. Image "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." Image
Apr 17, 2024 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
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

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Image 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
Apr 6, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
China invented papermaking, the compass, gunpowder, printing, and DreamWorks Face Meanwhile, in the Amazon



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Apr 4, 2024 • 17 tweets • 7 min read
"One of the mysterious boats painted in an Australian cave several hundred years ago"

Awunbarna, Arnhem Land, Northern coast of Australia 🧵 Image "The researchers were stunned by the level of detail captured in the paintings."

The drawings predate European contact, and "based on certain features, such as the oars and pennants, researchers concluded that these boats likely weren't fishing vessels." Image
Feb 26, 2024 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
East Pacific Gray whale cultural evolution:

When hunted, they were called "devilfish" due to how fiercely the mothers would defend their young. But as whale hunting turned into whale watching, the mothers started encouraging their young to interact with the now-peaceful humans! They may be friendly today, but grays once earned a very different nickname—the ‘devilfish’—since mother whales would aggressively defend their calves by thrashing against the whalers’ boats. This hostile reputation lingered for years and wary fishermen continued to steer clear until the 1970s when a curious gray whale approached a boat. The fishermen moved away but the whale continued to come closer, sticking its head out of the water. Finally, one brave soul decided to cross a tremendous divide—he reached out a gentle hand and touched the whale. This peace treaty has blossomed into a seem... They even lift up their children to show them off and get their heads patted 🥹

Their nickname has gone from "devilfish" to "the friendliest whales in the world"

expeditions.com/expedition-sto…The friendliest whales in the world Each winter in calving lagoons like San Ignacio and Magdalena Bay, you can find genuinely curious and playful mother whales approaching small boats, even lifting up their calves for a welcome pat on the head. It seems especially puzzling since gray whale mothers are known to be fierce protectors of their young, yet this behavior only seems to happen in these birthing lagoons.
Feb 16, 2024 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
guy who invents a new technological epoch just so we'll have a new cosmological metaphor
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Jan 12, 2024 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
2,500 year-old city found in eastern Ecuador

"It reveals a large, complex society that appears to be even bigger than the well-known Mayan societies in Mexico and Central America."

bbc.com/news/science-e…


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Jan 8, 2024 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
people usually judge things from their own context, not our own



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Dec 10, 2023 • 24 tweets • 10 min read
Since the photos of stripped Palestinians reminded me of these photos from British camps in Kenya during the anticolonial Mau Mau Uprising (1952–1960), I was curious how the NYT covered it. Really depressing how similar it is.

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Image The nyt, December 7, 1952:

Right off the bat, contradictory. They say the British admit to not knowing "what they are fighting, not even what the name means." But then launches into a diatribe about how the rebels want to kill all white people and Christians, and how Russia
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Dec 8, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
quite the jump! Rarely has a single find changed scholars’ views of the capabilities of people of the past as radically as the discovery of the world’s earliest known wooden architecture, which dates to nearly half a million years ago. The pair of interlocking logs joined by an intentionally cut notch was unearthed beneath a bank of Zambia’s Kalambo River by a team led by University of Liverpool archaeologist Larry Barham. Researchers believe the logs may have formed part of a walkway or the foundation of a platform built over wetlands. Prior to this discovery, the oldest known surviving wooden structures ... archaeology.org/issues/537-fea…
The 476,000-year-old log structure predates the appearance of the first modern humans by some 150,000 years and was likely the handiwork of the archaic human species Homo heidelbergensis. Paleoanthropologists believe H. heidelbergensis was highly mobile. Thus, it is surprising that the hominins would have invested labor in building a semipermanent structure. “We haven’t seen archaic humans manipulating their environment on such a large scale before,” says Barham. “It suggests an attachment to a single point on the landscape.” At the same site, the team unearthed stone axes as well as fo...
Oct 23, 2023 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
"The coastal Thaua people, part of the Yuin nation, would sing to the beowas (orcas) as they hunted baleen whales together for generations in the bay of Turembulerrer (Twofold) off eastern Australia."
livescience.com/animals/orcas-…Image "orcas would slap the waters in front of the whaling station to alert the whaling teams to the presence of whales. The orcas are said to have led the whalers to the whales, sometimes by towing them on a rope, and manipulated the harpoon line to slow a snagged whale down and help Image
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Sep 29, 2023 • 13 tweets • 6 min read
Richard Bradley, dressed as a Union soldier, ripping down the Confederate flag that San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein insisted on flying, 1984. It was ripped down 3 times and replaced 3 times by Feinstein. She made sure Bradley was prosecuted and made to pay for the damages.
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Image "The flag was burned by a member of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 6 as 'a crowd of Black people, trade unionists and socialists broke into jubilant cheers, and a chorus of ‘John Brown’s Body’ rang out.'"

sfbayview.com/2019/04/its-tr…
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Sep 21, 2023 • 36 tweets • 18 min read
Thread about one of the coolest papers I've ever read, "Shamanic Microscopy: Cellular Souls, Microbial Spirits" by César E. Giraldo Herrera.

Herrera argues the shamanism, at least in the Amazon, was much more scientific than most assume.

Are some shamans also microbiologists? Image Herrera points out that Western medicine has adopted many treatments from South American shamanism, but neglected the theories underlying it, what the shamans themselves say. Despite material successes like this, shamanic epistemologies are considered simply incorrect and naive.
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Aug 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
A missionary in South Papua.....lol Image This is probably the best way to respond to missionaries
Jul 28, 2023 • 62 tweets • 18 min read
Cave Bear, thirty-thousand years older than Jesus Image The painter would have to wait the amount of time that separates ourselves from Jesus *15 times* to meet him
Jul 9, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Nature created representational images of scenes well before humans. This moth (Macrocilix maia) has a mural of two red-eyed flies eating bird guano on their back.

(I assume this moth has existed before 44 000 years ago?)
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Image Many art traditions with visual representation lacked "scenes" with multiple representational figures meaningfully interacting (as on the moth). In Mesopotamia, this didn't occur until after the influence of writing.

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Jul 5, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
...the masses need light propaganda pamphlets...
-Dziga Vertov
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