That’s just a frozen hunk of poopy. You see airplanes dump their toilets at 36000 feet and it freezes and falls down to earth. With call those Boeing bombs.
“Ayyye, I cast me evil eyyyye upon me neighbour, Garbbeus Vardicus Melatonus, I ken. Saba-ka-boo, a meta-ga-doo, a bibbiti, bobbiti-GYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!!! BE THAT A SMALL PENIS DANGLING FROM YOND WINDCHIME?!?”
“Yes,” her black cat whispers from her mounded shoulders, “A tiny penis.”
"Scandalous Effectus Mandellus, neighbour of me neighour, I cast upon you me evil eyyyye…"
The sneaky scrawlings start at the end of a cultic ritual text written in Hittite – the oldest known Indo-European tongue – after an introduction that essentially translates to: “From now on, read in the language of the country of Kalašma”. Kalašma is referencing an organized society from the Bronze Age, which probably sat on the northwest fringe of the much larger Hittite Empire in ancient Anatolia – some distance from the capital city of Hattusa, where this clay tablet was later unearthed.
The article goes on to describe the Hittite culture and why they preserved foreign rituals in their original tongue.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone considering they gave Grahan Hancock a whole fuckin series of bullshit. Netflix’s “documentaries” have been jokes for a few years now.
The topographical features of the cave walls could also have inspired the artists’ imagination. Cave dwellers may have experienced pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon of seeing unintentional forms in nature, like seeing shapes in clouds. If a bulge of rock looks a little like a horse’s head, the artist might imagine the complete form, filling in the rest of the details.
For example, one newly discovered horse image measures around 460 x 300mm and is painted in red using variably spaced dots. It depicts the head with the corner of the mouth, an eye, an ear, and the beginning of the cervico-dorsal line. The figure makes use of natural features of the cave wall, with cracks in the rock incorporated into the outlines of the head and chest. The cervical-dorsal line adapts to a concave area of the wall.
I guess previously scientists were looking at the art like how you or I might look at a horse drawn on a piece of paper, but some of the art was more like going up to a funny rock sort of shaped like a horse, and adding onto it/altering it in order to show others how much like a horse (or whatever) the funny looking rock is.
Which kind of crossing between artistic mediums, from 2D painting to something more like sculpture.
Anyway, this is cool. I didn’t really consider that someone might do that with their art before reading this article.
I’ve visited several caves with Neolithic art in France and the way they used natural cave forms to accentuate the art was always called out. Holding a flickering torch at various angles would make the animals appear to move and dance.
I geuss the US response would be the usual we’re the big guys here, what you gonna do about it ? and fuck you.
They did it when the whole mass surveillance thing was unveiled so I don’t think some poor archeologists can do much about this, can they ? I even think that the US archeologists that were tasked to analyze the authenticity are more than likely forced to comply and lie or risk being fired
I think you’ve misunderstood the article. What happened was a district attorney in the united states caught someone smuggling antiquities into the country. So the district attorney who caught them had everything sent back to the country of origin, exactly what they should do with smuggled antiquities. It turned out the guy was trafficking in mostly forgeries of pieces that are in other known locations and were never brought to the united states. The experts the district attorney used thought they were authentic. What on earth do you think the new york DA did wrong here? I guess they could hire better experts. But if they have what they think to be authentic artifacts that were smuggled out of countries, they did the right thing and sent them back to the country of origin. They’re saying this is just embarrassing for the DA because they billed this guy as a smuggler in their court case, but actually he’s a forger. I don’t see any reason for anyone to be outraged though, except maybe at the forger.
It was a loaded headline meant to trick people into clicking. If you just read the headline you’d think the United States government was stealing artifacts, forging them, and sending the forgeries back or something. Which has like nothing in common with the actual story in the article. Always pretty easy in the comments to tell who actually read the article and who made up an imaginary article in their head based on the headline.
I know titles are fake as shit. I read the post summary and the autotldr summary both didn’t contain anything explaining about any of what you said. Both actually renforce the idea that the antiques where sent as knowingly as fake.
Those auto tldr summaries can be super random and misleading too regardless. The auto tldr summary doesn’t imply anything like this either. It’s just a section of the article with an expert making fun of whatever expert the DA hired who missed that it was a forgery and thought it was authentic. So it’s embarrassing because they told this country, he we recovered your priceless artifact and threw the guy in jail who smuggled it. And the country is like, oh well that’s nice but the artifact was never missing in the first place. If you want to comment on something at least read the article first, or you’ll just be spreading misleading clickbait headlines even more.
I reckon I made a mistake here. I usually read the article but since what feels like almost 1 of 3 of shared articles here are locked behind paywalls I don’t bother anymore.
I sympathize. I’ve been caught out a couple of times by depending on autotldr as a substitute for reading the actual article. My own casual comparisons between autotldr and source articles suggest that autotldr is probably about 80% faithful to its source, on average.
I don’t know if it’s real or in my own mind, but it also seems to me that autotldr is faithful to the article inversely proportional to the quality of its source material. That is, the better and more complete the article, the more likely it is that autotldr trashes it.
Now that I’ve written it down, it strikes me that that may be an insurmountable problem. If we think of good articles as being “high information” and garbage articles as “low information”, summarizing will always be more likely to cause important “damage” the higher the information content. Thus, hitting 95% on a good article might trash it, while hitting 60% on a trash article is just fine. This might be especially true if you consider that the best articles might already be as compact as is reasonable.
Not only are good and compact articles few and far between. The problem is that nowadays, a lot of the article you click on will have a paywall so reading them is impossible ( unless using barley functioning services that claim to remove it) After a while, you expect the article to be paywalled and either move on or comment based on the provided info.
That, too! I’ve taken to using any autotldr as a substitute for a “proper” title and author summary. If the autotldr looks like there might be based on something I find interesting, I’ll go read the article.
It only happened with me once in lemmy and it contained the same amount of info but in a wordier version. I usually read the autotldr bot summary and if it’s not there I check the article but even then there’s a 50/50 chance it’s locked.
I gave an exemple above of why it’s actually plausible for the US to do so. Heck, if you want a real reason why " USA is always bad" just look at the map of USA backed coup.
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