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Meet Ancient Peru's own Grumpy Cat
Boing Boing ^ | Jul 31, 2013 | Madeleine Johnson

Posted on 08/17/2013 10:32:56 AM PDT by Slings and Arrows

Grumpy Cat, Shocked Cat, Lil Bub – their images are the currency of the web, passed between friends, family, and co-workers. When they go viral, funny cat pictures heal daily drudgery with a dose of furry, cuddly cheer. But, in terms of the reverence they receive, these cats are hardly the first of their kind. Ancient cultures had cat memes too, and archaeologists have their own term for them: feline motifs.

The word meme, itself a meme, feels ultra-modern, but was coined in the 1970s by Richard Dawkins to refer to any non-genetic unit of replicated information. And it would be chronocentric to presume this term applied only to the proverbial Caturdays following its contemporary articulation. Some archaeologists, known as evolutionary archaeologists, incorporate memetics into their explanations of cultural transmission and change. In their view, cultural evolution, or the speciation of different cultures, happens by selective forces acting on cultural memes, motifs and styles.

We can look back about two thousand years and see cat memes on objects made in the Americas before Columbus set boot here. In fact, the feline motif is a powerful point of acccess to Pre-Columbian cultures, as it was a common from the Mississippi to the tip of South America.

(Excerpt) Read more at boingboing.net ...


TOPICS: History; Pets/Animals
KEYWORDS: godsgravesglyphs; kittyping
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To: Lazamataz

I witnessed the ascension of Man once.

It was awful.


21 posted on 08/17/2013 8:18:01 PM PDT by Slings and Arrows (You can't have Ingsoc without an Emmanuel Goldstein.)
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To: Slings and Arrows

Wonder what the NSA makes of this thread?


22 posted on 08/18/2013 2:08:58 AM PDT by LadyDoc (liberals only love politically correct poor people)
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To: LadyDoc

It doesn’t matter - they’ll still say we’re racists.


23 posted on 08/18/2013 2:57:36 AM PDT by Slings and Arrows (You can't have Ingsoc without an Emmanuel Goldstein.)
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