Every suggested meaning of prehistoric art is always either spiritual, proto-scientific, or socially meaningful.
How do we know they weren’t just some random graffitis from random people back then, similar to the tons of shitty wall-arts we see in our cities?
I guess we find them in isolated caves because that’s the only ones that were able to “survive” this long.
In: Culture
We don’t really. There’s a lot of evidence that suggests that ancient art found was literally no different from how we’d make it today. Even if you want to ascribe it some reverence a step above above “graffiti”, it’s equally likely that someone made a kind of mural and everyone was like “woah sick art Brad!”
Everything we find has to be interpreted through our modern viewpoints, our modern culture, our own way of thinking. Most stuff gets filtered through the lens of archeologists first, some of which maybe take their job super seriously and don’t have much sense of humor about their finds. That’s kind of changing though, it’s becoming pretty common knowledge that things like penis drawings found in Pompeii are obviously not religious virility tokens and are the same thing as bathroom stall graffiti. Take scientific interpretation with a grain of salt.
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