It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand.
Our archival-based approach to history is a complete opposite, but I wonder if the relics of the past helped influence the future generations of ancient human.
> It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand.
As others have pointed out your position is a modern one; the "wonders of the ancients" is a several thousand year old perspective. And in fact for a good chunk of recent European history (last couple of millennia) the prevailing view was one of declinism when compared to the Romans of the late Republic and early empire.
But we don't know if the users of this cave had that jarring experience. 4500 years is a long time but it's quite possible -- likely even -- that there was continuous use, so it was "just part of the landscape" with knowledge accreting and being passed on.
The reason I say "likely" is that presumably the color technology evolved over some period of time, and if the users died off and the cave was later rediscovered after a gap, the new discoverers would have to re-invent a bunch of the tech somewhat from scratch (although results and possibly raw materials would be right there to provide hints).
It's interesting to speculate what kind of speech and culture they might have had.
Technology development was unbelievably slow back then, so re-inventing tech, which seems like a routine thing to do to us, was next to unimaginable back then. We see exactly the same artifices made exactly the same way over stretches of eover a million years (the Acheulian had axe). In that era lost technology was simply gone for all intents and purposes at a community level. This site lies in the Middle Palaeolithic era which lasted about 300 thousand years.
Even with good communication that remained true until very recently: read the debates on the constitutional roots of the US patent system and it was an explicit "bribe" that you received a government-guaranteed monopoly in exchange for explaining how to make your invention. Otherwise the information could easily be lost. Obviously that's not how the system works today
I've got Lichtheim's 3-volume Literature of Ancient Egypt. The time between the earliest and latest entries in that collection? Something like 2400-2500 years (IIRC). And (again IIRC) it stops a few hundred years shy of crossing the BC/AD boundary. It spans 4-5 related, but distinct, major civilizations living on roughly the same land, only the last couple of which are recent enough to squeeze onto the leading edge of where we usually start the narrative of recorded history.
A little off topic. Gobekli Tepe is a really fascinating find. The size of the pillars, the inscriptions, the intricate designs of the pottery and jewelry (with cleanly drilled holes in them) give a glimpse of a sophisticated civilization with architecture and farming at a time when humans are supposed to be hunter-gatherers. Graham Hancock has a few very interesting books on this. He seems to believe that humans basically go through periods of amnesia or better put get periodically wiped out, lose their bearings and start over again. We become just like that ancient human circa 5000 BC looking at the ruins of Gobekli Tepe. Or the modern human looking at the Pyramids all over the ancient world and trying to piece history together.
Gobekli Tepe is awesome, but Mr. Hancock is a hack. He may begin with facts, but takes them to unfounded conclusions which "challenge mainstream science" (read: contain no discernible falsifiable thesis, recede ever into knowledge gaps, and are defined primarily by being anti-establishment).
It must be jarring for a new cohort of humans to come across artifacts invented and developed by predecessor that they can't understand.
Our archival-based approach to history is a complete opposite, but I wonder if the relics of the past helped influence the future generations of ancient human.