Mythical Beings May Be Earliest Imaginative Cave Art by Humans

There was far more going on with humans - for a much longer time - than we're even close to being aware of. The only cultures we really know about are not more than about 3000 years old. Some theories say the Sphinx is over 10,000 years old. There have been many civilizations - and most knowledge about them is lost - so far. There's a lot to be discovered.

Art takes down time; proof positive that early humans had it made in the shade is art which takes time and effort which would be in short supply if life was "too" difficult. It is inspiring to think that people sat around making art so long ago and that we are still in the process of interpreting it. #humans are cool~

It is a thin line between the deliberate argument-bait of entertainment media and the failure to “look down the street” and perform investigative journalism. Perhaps the conclusions of this article are not either-or but both and more? So mythical beings or perhaps a perpetual mystery? That’s all you got? Try some out-of-the-box thinking like Graham Hancock and ASK THE INDIGENOUS LOCALS!! 40,000 years ago our ancestors all over the planet developed various methods of extracting and consuming powerful psychadelics such as DMT. In the Amazon it was the combination of a hallucinogenic vine and leaf that gives indigenous hunters the spirit of the jaguar to improve their hunting skills, a survival ritual used to this day. It took a pair of Swedish anthropologists to ask the locals for western science to finally accept common sense interpretation of cave paintings. The paintings aren’t just mythical or abstract; the Gods were real people who tripped out on some DMT and embodied the spirit of other hunting animals. Sometimes we dressed in the skin of our spirit animals, to improve the hunt and improve and explain our art through storytelling. It’s not that complicated, and far more practical than mythical, as the process is still spiritual and relevant the maintenance of a well balanced conscience. For Africans leading up to the cave of Moses it was the acacia tree, which when burned the smoke contains the DMT that allowed Moses to speak with God and Angels to speak to him.

Well, I'm not saying these therianthropes were aliens, but ( in the spirit of the History Channel's excellent series "Ancient Aliens") let's face it: It is clear these so-called therianthropes were probably aliens from another world.

After so much early promise. Mankind winds up with Trump and Boris as leaders of the world. Those early cave artists would be disappointed

Complete and utter speculation.

Why date the painting by sampling the "cave popcorn" deposits with the uranium-series dating technique. Wouldn't be more advantageous to date this cave painting by sampling the pigment itself? There is no reason to believe that this cave painting, while apparently very old, is at least 43,900 years old.

How do you know that the pictures of men with animal heads are not representative of humans using such devices as camouflage? Like wearing a sheep pelt to sneak up on prey.

Salutations from across the ages to these early artists. Much to their credit, they had the self-conviction and temerity to continue to make imagery even after their surrounding peers told them they couldn't draw and there's " no future in being an artist...". /s

I see only one human-like figure, the one at the top of the hunting scene. The rest appear to be animals walking on four legs, not humanoids. I fear this may be a case of people seeing something that isn’t there, for the sake of claiming a significant finding.

50,000 years from now the transhumanoids who survive the global climate extinctions around the corner, will discover mostly plastic waste. The perfect representation of our long lost culture! Like those stone monoliths on Easter Island we all looked at and ignored.

That "humanoid with a bird-like head" sure looks like a Komodo dragon or one of its (extinct) varanid cousins, all of which were widespread throughout Australia and East Asia in the Late Pleistocene.

I’m having a Sherpa moment. Where is the credit due to the Indonesian/s who found these caves and recognized their importance?

We suffer-I think from what I usually call contemporary conceit-we assume that whatever we have is the best and the greatest and therefore all else is primitive -and this in turn colors our perspective about everything else. Did the artists paint what they saw? probably. Were they that primitive 43,900 years ago? who came up with that date? that silly carbon dating system. And is however is this cave representative of the development of civilization at that time? maybe representative of primitive forms living outside of the more developed areas as possibly the Neanderthal and Cro-mag non were. Maybe more highly advanced beings developed races-bred those fr physical labor -just maybe and when the higher forms in their developed cities destroyed themselves by misuse of their abilities it was a somewhat complete destruction with little left as evidence but these primitive forms. And maybe the souls that we are today once had the ability to craetye other forms and take over or cretae animal type forms to experience them-hence the legends of the centaurs and satyrs and the remnants in these caves. All possibilities. And perhaps we have been here for hundreds of thousands of years not a few thousand? There are many more possibilities if we look further I think.

That image shown does not look "humanoid" at all. It looks like a primitively drawn picture of a dog or horse. Perhaps these hunters were using the earliest domesticated dogs to assist them.

Why do archaeologist always assume these things are related to spirituality or “primitive“ religion? Isn’t it possible the people who drew these were artists? And that they were drawing something fun and interesting that just popped out of their imagination?

I see nothing odd or mythological about the human figures with tails or snouts. Many hunters disguised themselves wearing animal skins so they could approach the prey. Very clever and necessary.

Could have implications for understanding humanity’s “unique capacity to communicate using intricate language.” Talking of father son and holy ghost, the village belle endowed the most? If only we could privy be.... to rhymes and song of ancient Sulawesi !

Why are the workers and scientists not wearing moisture-absorbing facemasks all the time?

Doesn't it seem incredibly recent though? Am I the only one just blown away by how only 44K years ago we were still using crude stone tools? The elephant in the room is clearly the explosive change we've seen since then. Scientists generally say that for lasting evolutionary changes to occur in a species, it takes around a million years. So why the sudden transformation? So we were doing the same thing for a looooong time, then suddenly, over the last 50,000 years or so suddenly switched somehow, and started singing, telling stories, and communicating with spirits and stuff? The big change, I suppose, was the 'technology' of spoken language, which somehow popped out of us, and next thing you know, there's gene-splicing, space travel, and, alas, Donald Trump. I throw him in, because somehow it seems as though the ego was birthed through language. And here we are, increasingly trying to insulate ourselves from the planet and our bodies through technology so magical, that its repercussions spin far beyond our control. Is there a way back? I suppose the awareness, or consciousness that lies under all the language is still there. Perhaps that's the only possible path left, unless we are OK with our technology taking over for us, as we finally check out. Is human consciousness really just a stepping stone for the technology that will outlive us? Not lo

The set looks different, but the actors 50,000 years ago appear to be far more like us than they are different from us.

Why the automatic assumption that the paintings are the product of imagination? A more straightforward explanation is that they painted what they saw. Academic boxes are so confining.

In my own current set of adversities I'm immediately struck by only on thing that comes as a surprise....The art, it's age, locations and the people who do the work of discovering them is wonderful. What is a shock is the statement "A cornerstone of religious belief and experience." Good thoughts but....

Are there special acoustic properties to the cave, as there are in Lascaux? That would indicate a performative element to the art, another aspect of evolutionary neuro-cognition.

I think there are unlimited alternative interpretations of the smaller stick like animals. They look just like distant four legged animals to me, and the lines do not look like they belong to or emanate from these small figures. It would be good to see more images. Hope they are documenting it all, in case it fades forever. Other cave art has also been nearly lost after exposure to human investigation and breath/touch. No doubt this is another example - I hope it can be saved.

The article detailing this latest find, and also the many preceding articles fail to mention that the surviving cave art can only have been much less than 1/10th of 1% of the actual artistic activities of those peoples, it is merely the tiniest glimpse of their work, not even a representative sample, most of it involving ephemeral materials. More than 99.9% has been lost.

Interesting to think that early humans were already inventing mythologies, as if the real world was already inadequate to satisfy the imagination.

Whenever I see a historical development like this I ask myself, even though I don’t have an answer, where in the Bible this is reflected or alluded to.

This is such an important discovery taken literally, but considering that we know nothing about the people who inscribed these figures or their motives, why is it necessary to make guesses about its meaning? I might guess that the figures are just the result of idle doodling with the same evidence. It's important to keep in mind also that these paintings will remain the "earliest" so-called "imaginative" art only until something older is found. There are a lot of caves in the eastern hemisphere!

It is more likely that the images depict camouflage, not mythical beings. If you want to sneak up on skittish prey it pays to look like a harmless creature. Simple explanations are usually more accurate than complex ones.

This finding reminds me of Althusser’s famous quote, “there is no point of departure.” Meaning that from the moment we emerged as Homo Sapiens Sapiens art was always possible. I’m glad discoveries are being made outside of Europe because it helps to disrupt the erroneous notion that art is a European tradition, and that the cave paintings there (Chauvet, Lascaux etc.) represent the beginning of art history. I look forward to the time when we find even older examples of art in Africa, where it was surely created before our ancestors ever left the continent.

Where's the picture of the archaeologist who found the painting and presumably also understood its significance?