Who's primitive? Cave dwellers beat many of their highly trained latter-day successors at drawing animals. (click below to read more)
Hungarian researchers analyzed 1,000 images of four-legged animals and found that the cave artists were far more accurate at portraying the animals' much misunderstood gait. Before the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who published his classic "Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements" in 1887, modern artists got the gait wrong 83.5% of the time, the scientists found. Post-Muybridge, the error rate fell to 58%.
But prehistoric artists got the gait wrong just 46% of the time. That's quite an accomplishment, given that an artist choosing a gait by mere chance would have an error rate of 73%, the researchers wrote.
"Cavemen Were Better at Depicting Quadruped Walking than Modern Artists: Erroneous Walking Illustrations in the Fine Arts from Prehistory to Today," Gabor Horvath, Etelka Farkas, Ildiko Boncz, Miklos Blaho, Gyorgy Kriska, PLoS ONE (Dec. 5)
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