The Illias gets older and older ?

Extraordinarily beautiful. Thanks

Fantastic!

Stunning

My first thought seeing this was that someone had made a mistake.

I tried to reduce the page size to get the image down to the inch and a half they mentioned. I could only get it down to about two inches, but even then it simply boggles my mind that somebody could have done such fine detail three and a half thousand years ago. And that's with my reading glasses.

Another reminder of how much we DON'T know about the past.

That is correct. We don't know.

An error that has often been made in the past was to consider the acquisition of knowledge as a continuous improvement from let's say the end of the ice ages till now. But it doesn't work like that. Often times Man has learned something, later to forget it again because of specific circumstances. It is not a linear flow. The acquisition of knowledge goes with starts and stops, losses and restarts.

It is difficult for people to accept that man, 120.000 years ago was as smart as we are today. Maybe even smarter, because knowledge was less specialized than now. They could devise solutions to issues that baffle us today.

I think that's an important distinction, Macumbeira, context. It's like the post about the Viking sailors and someone commenting they were brave. Not really; it's just what they did. The world and its risks were what they were and if anyone wanted to do anything they just had to accept them. It was normal and not that they didn't know some things were dangerous, they just worked with it because there was no other way.

Yes, no known brain differences between us and our forebears 100,000+ years ago. Differences in our abilities rest entirely in culture, including all our remarkable tools and the ways our memories and knowledge can now be preserved. Which is no protection from what may be forgotten as well.