Dr. Genevieve von Petzinger

Right.

Like you don't get points for making the trees look extra nice.

It's functionality or like, do you see what I'm saying?

So there's different properties of what makes things valuable.

So there you go.

I'm now stepping off the soapbox, but I just think we need to frame it that way so that we're not thinking of Neanderthals as being lesser than because they did not make shiny, recognizable picture art.

What they seem to have been doing seem to have been working... Like, what is success, right?

Whatever it was they were doing seemed to be working very well for them.

And so at that point, it is a success.

And so maybe they just didn't need figurative art.

I know we're talking about Neanderthals today, but just for fun, I got to drop this, which is...

One of the craziest things about humans, and so again, we've got Neanderthals are making lines and other simple things on bones and stones.

Back to the bones and stones.

As of about 400,000 or 500,000 years ago, we start to see simple zigzags, lines on things.

We're starting to see these first actual making graphic marks.

And so we've got all that going on.

Our own ancestors are doing similar things.

So we've got

multiple continents around the world are all doing very similar stuff, which is also where you're like, gee, I wonder where this comes from since nobody else has ever decided to do this.

And knowing they all come from the common ancestor, it seems like an interesting route to explore.