Dolní Vĕstonice Portrait Head: The oldest known human portrait in the world

https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/dolni-vestonice-portrait-head-the-oldest-known-human-portrait-in-the-world

by bookofjoe • 1 year ago

112 43 1 year ago

livescience.com

josefrichter2• 1 year ago

Fascinating. I live just 100km from the site.

MezzoDelCammin• 1 year ago

Vzdušnou čarou, nebo Alfou? ; )

xero1• 1 year ago

Tady je ale více Čechů než jsem čekal teda :)

xqcgrek2• 1 year ago

Mammoth meat must have delicious, as that is what they must have largely eaten during the ice age 24k years ago.

Someone should seriously consider having a startup for lab-grown patties.

otabdeveloper4• 1 year ago

Mammoth must have been eaten much like whale meat today. I.e., fermented. (Or rather even a bit spoiled.) Definitely an acquired taste.

alkyon• 1 year ago

One of the oldest representations of human face.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Brassempouy

This Wikipedia article gives an example of a similar ivory figurine from Upper Paleolite, dated 26,000 - 24,000 BC.

jajko• 1 year ago

Yeah, 'one of the oldest' would be much more accurate title. Strong claims require strong evidence et al, maybe a bit of nationalism seeped in

butterknife• 1 year ago

You Slovakian? :)

metalman2• 1 year ago

That they have a skelatal reconstruction of a persons face with similarities to the sculptue from the same site, it then could pehaps also be the first evidence for a comisioned work, and any evidence for industry and common curency would support that.....the first sale

Insanity2• 1 year ago

The article doesn’t mention how old the found skeleton is, or I missed it. Would be a huge coincidence imo given the large timespan, and perhaps more so an artifact of humans looking for similarities.

metalman2• 1 year ago

Your observation, is of course, valid. Also valid is the fact that those people like STUFF!!!, lots of stuff,stuff that WE like, and that in many ways we can look.at there stuff, and know exaxtly how it was used, and we dont just give good stuff away, so it is reasonable to expect and look for the mechanisms by which they created, expressed,and honored, value. Given that "currency" is a mental construct , the known fact of things with immence value, now, litteraly bieng childs toys, to be lost in the dirt, and aluminum bieng the most valuable element, but now totaly dismissed as a possible currency, points to a need to see that distant time from the subtlest of clues. And yes its not pure science, but pure science can no longer be considered pure, and as long as we are not out on some wild truely impossible thoeretical precipice, then , hey, its a very cool possibility. The possible subject WAS wearing a fox tooth neclace, and 12000 years after this internment, they were honoring foxes and dressing in there pelts,.....as shown in statuary.... in the first know megalithic settlments not so far away,in Turkey, catyl hylueac or something its called.

gwervc• 1 year ago

One diacritic in the title is wrong, and it's annoying. They obviously tried, but still failed. One google search would have shown the issue.

inejge• 1 year ago

(Not related to the sculpture, just a bit of pedantry.) I appreciate the attempt to render the name of the locality in the present-day local alphabet (Czech), but the diacritic above the 'e' in "Vĕstonice" is wrong: the letter is "letter e with breve", but should be "letter e with caron", giving "Věstonice".

0_____0• 1 year ago

Here's those two characters together for comparison. It took me a while to figure out what you were talking about because the two render so closely in smaller text.

breve/carom

ĕ / ě

vanous2• 1 year ago

Interestingly enough, searching for ě on the page finds the ĕ as well, but so does search for e...

thih9• 1 year ago

It’s:

    ◡        ˅
    e   vs   e

pxmpxm• 1 year ago

Huh what language uses the curvey one? The czech háček is essentially upside down ^ over the letter

mc32• 1 year ago

Isn't this a sculpture rather than portrait. Maybe "bust" sculpture. Portrait to me means a more two dimensional representation.

Pretty cool that this didn't deteriorate over thousands of years even if it was done in bone.

jermaustin1• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portrait#:~:text=A%20portrait%...

Insanity2• 1 year ago

TIL!

To me the word “portrait” makes me think “painting” as well.. I never would have guessed it refers just to what is being depicted rather than “how”. Thanks for sharing.

ninalanyon• 1 year ago

The OED and Cambridge dictionaries disagree. All the examples in both are of two dimensional representations or even one dimensional (written).

Of course if enough people decide to agree with the Wikipedia article then the dictionaries will have to be updated but just now i suspect that if you were to ask people to describe what the word meant that very few would mention sculpure.

But I don't think that sculpture really captures it either, it's more like a cameo.

WaitWaitWha• 1 year ago

that is how I interpret the word "portrait" too, and the etyomology of it matches.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/portrait

mr_toad2• 1 year ago

Technically any artistic “portrayal” of a subject is a portrait, it’s basically a tautology.

flocciput2• 1 year ago

The lack of faces in most prehistoric art has always been fascinating to me, especially given the attention to detail paid to animals in cave paintings. Did people not give as much thought to individual identity before a certain milestone in our development as a species? Was it taboo or superstition to render someone's likeness? Were caves just not the place for portraiture? Why was this seemingly prevalent across cultures and geography? Etc etc; people with more to say than me have written about it at length I assume. This bust is from 24000BC, and the person depicted was 1) presumably already dead and 2) might have had a developmental deformity. Maybe that provides some clues about when, how, and why portraiture developed as an art form.

yread• 1 year ago

The reconstruction using modern methods

https://media.springernature.com/lw1200/springer-static/imag...

flocciput2• 1 year ago

Thanks for this! Seems they exaggerated her asymmetricality in the article; she looks pretty normal.

thecodeboy• 1 year ago

I find it wonderful that a human from around 1000 generations ago created art on a now extinct animals tusk. In a way they're able to communicate with us in such a distant future. Makes me wonder what we're leaving behind.

Mistletoe• 1 year ago

I think the beauty of women changed humanity. Inspired by these beings that were so beautiful they were almost gods, men strived to be more than club-wielding cavemen. To be kind and loving and worth a damn.

anothercoup• 1 year ago

I think the beauty of women changed humanity. Inspired by these beings that were so beautiful they were almost gods, men strived to be more than club-wielding cavemen.

Men did strive to be more than club-wielding cavement. We became spear, axe, arrow, gun, cannon, etc wielding cavemen.

To be kind and loving and worth a damn.

Or armed to the teeth? Armed to a level that the most brutish caveman could only dream.

History along with the lack of diversity in the Y-chromosome paint a far different picture than the one you are describing.

submeta• 1 year ago

I am wondering if the artist was a genius ahead of his times. Like an Einstein thinking about the nature of time. - Creating a sculpture of a human being when contemporary artists just depict animals at best, in a very abstract way. And even those artists were not common among their peers.

layer82• 1 year ago

I wonder what is the likelihood that this is just pareidolia. ;)

josefrichter2• 1 year ago

It's a portrait of famous Czech singer Helena Vondráčková, who was 30 at the time.

smcl• 1 year ago

Hah I was just in dolní věstonice a short while ago - there's a really nice walking route past an old castle and through the vineyards that ends up in Mikulov.

edit: also this thing is on display somewhere in Antropos!? I had no idea there was something interesting inside there, it's always been just the "nearly there" point from my walk from Kamenolom to Duck bar.

Dolní Vĕstonice Portrait Head: The oldest known human portrait in the world

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