This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
For most of humanity's span, painting has been dominated by the use of small pigment particles bound in a sticky transparent medium of some kind. In the last century, we've developed new ways of making images. But sometimes, though the tools change, the images are the same. Human experience is human experience after all.
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The beach. Palm trees. We could show any of these images to an ancestor from thousands of years ago, and they could understand them, even if not how they were created.