{"id":718,"date":"2009-12-31T16:21:57","date_gmt":"2009-12-31T23:21:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/?p=718"},"modified":"2010-01-28T01:05:11","modified_gmt":"2010-01-28T08:05:11","slug":"unimaginable-stability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2009\/12\/31\/unimaginable-stability\/","title":{"rendered":"Unimaginable stability"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From an <a title=\"Thurman on cave painting\" href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/reporting\/2008\/06\/23\/080623fa_fact_thurman\">article<\/a> in <em>The New Yorker<\/em> article:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A new age in the science of prehistory had begun in 1949, when radiocarbon dating was invented by Willard Libby, a chemist from Chicago. One of Libby\u2019s first experiments was on a piece of charcoal from Lascaux. Breuil had, incorrectly, it turns out, classified the cave as Perigordian. (It is Magdalenian.) He had also made the Darwinian assumption that the most ancient art was the most primitive, and Leroi-Gourhan worked on the same premise. In that respect, Chauvet was a bombshell.<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->It is Aurignacian, and its earliest paintings are at least thirty-two thousand years old, yet they are just as sophisticated as much later compositions. What emerged with that revelation was an image of Paleolithic artists transmitting their techniques from generation to generation for<em><strong> twenty-five millennia<\/strong><\/em> with almost no innovation or revolt. A profound conservatism in art, Curtis notes, is one of the hallmarks of a \u201cclassical civilization.\u201d For the conventions of cave painting to have endured four times as long as recorded history, the culture it served, he concludes, must have been \u201cdeeply satisfying\u201d\u2014and stable to a degree it is hard for modern humans to imagine.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The specific example is of a trinity, horse+auroch+stag, a grouping of unknown but presumably spiritual significance that appears consistently and repeatedly across 25,000 years.<\/p>\n<p>I find myself thinking about this stability with some longing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From an article in The New Yorker article: A new age in the science of prehistory had begun in 1949, when radiocarbon dating was invented by Willard Libby, a chemist from Chicago. One of Libby\u2019s first experiments was on a &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/2009\/12\/31\/unimaginable-stability\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1116,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1426],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-visualization"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8jQA6-bA","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1116"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":772,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions\/772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cqtwo\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}