CLPEX Chat Board

http://handfacts.wordpress.com/2010/04/ ... -mountain/

According to an official with the Inner Mongolia Cultural Bureau:

the cave paintings in Araxan have been badly damaged by weathering and rain water erosion. Except for the fingerprints, no drawings can be made out (emphasis my own).

I gues we were wrong...fingerprints not only last after we die, but for at least 6000 years!!!!!

Yeah, but that is a site for:

palmistry and scientific palm reading (italics my own)

I can comfortably spit a rat further than I would trust that.

I googled the topic and found a number of references. It sounds like the "fingerprints" were painted designs in the fashion of friction ridges, not actual fingerprints left by the touch of the cavemen who lived there. But figure this -- if these were painted designs of friction ridges copied by a caveman looking at his own finger tip, that would make it the first application of image processing on fingerprints, wouldn't it?

Pat,

I forgot to put in the smiley face at the end of my post...I assumed that the fingerprints they were talking about were paintings.

Like you said, though, I think it would be the first FP image processing.

Another thing to think about: Were people considered caveman if they lived 6000 years ago or if they lived in caves? If it's the cave part and not the time part, would the Native Americans that lived in modified caves in your neck of the woods be considered cave men?

There being no images I can find, from the reference to the possible use of a paint blowpipe, I wonder if it's not just the same kind of negative image of the 32,000 year old sort found in France. I'm a little suspicious of the term "fingerprints" in a translation by the Mongolian cultural service where it might well have began as what in English was more properly "hand prints," which in the blown pigment negative are indeed prints of fingers. English doesn't have a single term "handprint," and I could imagine "fingerprint" being used as the closest single-term English word. The Chinese for "finger" appears to be an extension of a word for "hand" modified by a reference to pointing. The "point" element is the one that carries over into the term for "fingerprint." And Chinese does not differentiate common nouns as plural, so "a fingers print" or "prints of fingers" might easily come through in English as "fingerprint."

Oh. And i looking for an image, I ran across this guy, for those who collect fingerprint-like patterns in nature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelic_frogfish

A good example, I think, because while it seems to conform to high level patterns that look like they might allow a "frogfish examiner" to guess which part of the fish a portion represented, there's enough random variation to likely establish a quantity sufficient to identify in individual fish without tagging. It's quite easy to distinguish the different fish depicted in the article.

josher89 wrote:Were people considered caveman if they lived 6000 years ago or if they lived in caves? If it's the cave part and not the time part, would the Native Americans that lived in modified caves in your neck of the woods be considered cave men?

Our old mechanic here at DPS grew up during the Depression. His family moved into a Peppersauce Cave in the Santa Catalina Mountains just north of Tucson and lived there for a few years while prospecting for gold in the 1930s. I guess that makes him a cave man from a whole family of cave men. I always had my suspicions about old Bill. But he did have fingerprints!

Growing up my family raised golden retrievers so we always had a lot of dogs. Visitors always thought they looked the same and could not tell one dog from another, however, WE all knew who was who.

According to Mel Brooks the first cave painting brought about the first art critic....perhaps this is the reason no fingerprints were found in the caves???

Edit

Makes you think about what might have been the purpose of a lot of the cave painting and that maybe we aren't so different. Maybe it really wasn't anything exotic like sympathetic magic and such. Maybe it was just his "certificates" and other evidence of his successes. They couldn't have framed pieces of paper declaring, "Ogg - Biggest Mammoth - Fall Hunt 12,030 B.C." so they just painted his mammoth. And they didn't have group photographs, so they painted the "team" chasing bison.

"The guy being gored there, who's that?" "Oh, that's Unga. Remember him? Nice guy, but a little slow."