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Now if you can't understand what a picture is unless you've seen one before. How on earth do you come up with the idea of creating one in the first place?
So how did our ancient ancestors come to realize that a collection of lines, dots and colors could represent something? How did the penny drop all those thousands of years ago? This is one of the great mysteries of human creativity. It's one that experts have long tried and failed to solve. But then a few years ago, a revolutionary idea appeared. It was an idea that might solve this very problem. And it originated not in Europe but a place thousands of miles away. It came from South Africa. Hidden among high crags of these mountains, the Drakensberg are images on rock walls uncannily like European cave paintings. They, too, feature large animals and they also seem to show hunting scenes. But unlike the European paintings, these pictures aren't thousands of years old. They were painted just a couple of hundred years ago, almost within living memory. They were painted by people called the San --the Bushman. For a long time, these paintings were largely ignored. But one man became fascinated by them. His name was David Lewis Williams.
When I first started looking at the paintings, the general opinion was that they were scenes from daily life and because they were San people, they thought they were hunting scenes. Take this one as an example. Here we have an eland and a man who appears to be holding the eland's tail. (Yeah, yep). People thought well maybe when eland were hunted by Bushman, they pulled its tail as a demonstration of being very brave, or something like that. But when you begin to look more closely at the painting, you begin to find point after point that just doesn't add up. For example this man, here you see, has got hoofs and not feet. "Yeah. Yeah."
So, had no one noticed that these were hoofs before?
I didn't get anybody stuck the head under there to notice it. No. Er, and then of course there're things about the man himself. His legs are crossed and the eland's legs are crossed. And then you notice other things, like that one, higher up there, that has a very clear antelope head. (Yeah.) And then you realize that he's also got hairs standing on end all over its body. And the eland has got hairs standing all over its body.
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words:
on end: (stand) erectly, relentless 竖直地，连续的
hairs stand on end毛发竖起
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