Monday, September 12, 2011

traveling 17,000 years back in time- meeting the first artists on Earth


would you like to meet the first ever artists on Earth? see what they created and how amazingly it takes us back in time? would you like to imagine how they lived and behaved. may be you would like to travel seventeen thousand years back in time :)


File:Lascaux2.jpg

from the writer's almanac: "On September 12 in 1940, four teenage boys and a dog named Robot stumbled upon Paleolithic drawings in a cave in Lascaux, France. The main cave is approximately 66 feet wide and 16 feet high, and is connected to a number of smaller chambers. There are about 2,000 drawings and engravings, mostly of animals: horses, bison, red deer, stags, cats, and aurochs — large, black cattle-like animals that are now extinct. Horses and stags are the most common subjects; there are also human figures, various geometric shapes, and the outlines of human hands — possibly the signatures of the artists. The chambers have been given evocative names: the Great Hall of the Bulls; the Chamber of Felines; and the Shaft of the Dead Man. In addition to the figures, there also appears to be an Ice Age star chart: clusters of stars that resemble known constellations like Taurus the Bull, the Summer Triangle, and the Pleiades.
Assigning a precise date to the art has been difficult. Scientists used carbon dating to estimate the age of some charcoal found in the caves, and according to that method, the drawings are about 17,000 years old. What's less certain is whether they were produced over a relatively brief period of a hundred years or whether they span a much longer period."

know more about the lascaux cave paintings here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascaux

and if you are interested, i'll tell you about a book which took me through this journey a few months back. may be you would like to read it :)

-adee

2 comments:

Ire said...

Wow thanks for sharing. :) Do share the name of the book. Himanshu is really interested in all this.

Stephen said...

Interesting post! and it's good to read your blog after a long time! :)

dreamt before

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