A doff of the hat here to @GKH who posted the following link at the bottom of another thread, almost as a postscript to an article on Gobeklitepe.
I’ve garbled the article’s title in the thread Topic above because I find the word “Art” a bit problematic in this context. Will return to this shortly.
I do like how the artefacts defy the White Guy theory of Capital H History, most originating in Asia/Africa.
I have real trouble with cup marks as “art” though, and would be interested to explore this further.
http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/earliest-art.htm
…gives an interesting overview but doesn’t seem to substantiate why the artefacts are considered non utilitarian. Maybe I’m too immersed in nuts and bolts materialism but couldn’t these have been an artefact of fire making via a drill?
Number two on the list of ten looks very dodgy, apologies for linking to WiCIApedia
The archaeological interpretation that the object can’t have been worked with a tool for a utilitarian reason to produce, for example a pigment, because there are more efficient ways of doing so (and contemporaneous artefacts to prove it). Uh. Ok. How do you work out the most efficient way of doing anything without experimentation?
I’ll end here, hopefully leaving plenty of room for more discussion, but I will admit that I still fancy the Blombos artefacts as my favourite “true” number one oldest art.
Oh and another Charles Fort quote:
Almost all people are hypnotics. The proper authority saw to it that the proper belief should be induced, and the people believed properly.