Okay, I've got a bone to pick with this stupid article I read. I'm an artist and I really like looking at ancient cave paintings. So I found this article: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/44/e2117561118 In it is a paragraph that annoyed me: "But these would turn out to be hasty conclusions. “That’s a problematic concept,” Stout says, noting that brain size hasn’t changed much for Homo sapiens in the last 500,000 years. Also, plenty of modern cultures make both figurative and abstract art. So there’s no good reason to assume that European figurative artworks are evidence of a cognitive leap that enabled art-making, as opposed to simply heralding the arrival of new groups in Europe that showed up with representational artistic skills."
So, ignoring the fact that this Adam Brumm guy used the word "problematic" (and therefore I should know he's a soi boy already), my beef is this: why are these archaeologists trying to make it sound like ancient European cave paintings weren't any better than other cave paintings? And straining to point out that "plenty of modern cultures make both figurative and abstract art" just sounds like a shitty way of saying "Well other cultures may not have been great at drawing faces but they made abstract art." I know Indian tribes made petroglyph art up until the 1700s but they didn't get any better. Picrel shows how ancient Europeans studied animals, their faces especially, and kept learning more and more. Why the fuck are archaeologists deciding what's art and what isn't?