Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

Right?

So we don't want to, just because they weren't making pretty mammoths and prancing ponies like the humans were, doesn't mean that they weren't doing meaningful work.

mark-making, which was absolutely what they needed.

I think that's the important thing.

It's almost to say, it's not like there's a pinnacle of awesomeness in art and that you need things like that lovely painting behind me or the picture behind you.

Those are not the best.

They're just one version of art.

And so I think that as an archaeologist, that's what we want to be really careful of is not accidentally privileging the pretty stuff, which has basically been my entire career.

And again, no shade to anybody in the past, but in a way it's easier to study the animals because you know where to start.

And I've read some really interesting stuff from some of the early French archaeologists

You know, archaeologists and paleo people who studied the art in France and who were sort of like, I don't know what to say about these abstract marks.

But the beautiful thing is, if it looks like a bison, at least you know it's a bison.

You have a start point.

Yeah, or Altamira in Spain, right?

Like the big ones that everybody, they call them show caves.

That's what they're called is the show caves.

And that is one particular outlet for graphic mark making.

But again, it's only relevant or important in a certain context, right?

It's not necessarily terribly useful if you're trying to count the number of days in a lunar cycle.

Or if you're wanting to make some, I don't even know, leave some sort of useful, like you're trying to make a map of your landscape.