Tuesday, June 24, 2008

My Impression of First Impressions


Absolutely amazing article in the New Yorker this week on the cave paintings of Chauvet. Here are a couple sample pics. The pictures are between 25k to 34k old. Think about that for a second. If you assume a human generation is about 25 years long, those paintings were done about 1,200 generations ago. Just remarkable.

The pictures show artist techniques like depth that had to be re-learned at another time in human history. I can't recommend this article enough. Unfortunately the New Yorker only posted it as an Abstract, so you have to buy the whole magazine to read the article, but it's well worth it.