Rock art discovered in remote Amazon forest
Rock art is really weird because there are exactly same motifs using the same materials (usually red ochre) all over the world and separated by tens of thousands of years.<p>People act like it’s no big deal, but it sure looks like a pretty big deal that raises some interesting questions. We have a global view of information flows now, and I feel like I haven’t seen a lot of behaviors in humanity that explain how this has been working. What is happening here? Every few thousand years some small group of people in a new random spot on earth somehow magically decides to do that hand thing with red ochre on a rock face? By what mechanism? There doesn’t seem to be a lot of evidence that we are innately drawn to hand symbols in red ochre, aside from these examples separated by diameter of the earth and tens of thousands of years.<p>Given the time scale and given our current visibility into humanity, human information, and human creativity, it seems like whatever would cause that to happen should be something that’s still observable in the modern world.