9:07am October 10, 2014

➸ World’s oldest art found in Indonesian cave

bankuei:

The findings challenge the assumption that creativity has European roots

So… I mean, we don’t assume that humans had no spoken language before written language, right? Like, we don’t imagine we need to have physical evidence that there was a language to reasonably assume there was a spoken language, right?

But we’re going to assume baseline human creativity was originated in Europe?

Because even if you’re going to just assume physical evidence is the only sign… wouldn’t tool use be a sign of creativity? The creativity to make shit and make it work?

I… the levels of white supremacy and narcissism.

(Tagged: who needs history when you have white supremacy?, white narcissism, I’m going to go play Temple Rub where I rub my temples real hard.)

Who could have possibly concluded from cave art that creativity has its roots where the earliest art can be found, anyway?

I mean… there’s lots of ways to be creative, and very few of them are going to last throughout time like that. Storytelling, singing, music, dancing, loads of temporary forms of painting/drawing/sculpture/rock stacking/etc., I mean seriously? None of those things count, because cave paintings.

Eurocentric ideals about culture are just as weird as human-centric ideals about intelligence, language, communication, etc: They don’t actually stack up against any evidence, scientific or otherwise. Even squinting at them funny makes their lack of reality so obvious that they go scurrying under the nearest rock to hide and await someone more gullible to jump out at.

But seriously this ultra-narrow definition of creativity reminds me of the way that “tool use” as a definition got narrower the more animals we found doing it.

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