Biomechanical Analysis of Mongolian Bronze and Iron Age Four‐Legged Walking Petroglyphs

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the works of Eadweard Muybridge in the 1880s, the characteristics of motion of four‐legged animals are well known for experts of animal locomotion, and the different gaits of many four‐legged species have been investigated in detail. The leg attitudes of four‐legged walking illustrations of natural history museums, animal anatomy text‐books and toy figurines have been studied from a biomechanical point of view. Many such illustrations have erroneous leg postures, not used by living four‐legged animals. The leg postures of walking four‐legged animals are also often erroneously illustrated in the fine arts. How correctly have people illustrated the walking of their four‐legged prey? Researchers analysed numerous prehistoric and modern artistic four‐legged walking depictions and concluded that prehistoric people were more aware of the motion of their four‐legged prey and depicted four‐legged walking more precisely than modern artists. In this work, we analyse 13 Mongolian four‐legged petroglyphs originating from the Bronze and Iron Ages. We asked whether they are erroneous or not in respect to their relative leg positions. We found that the 60.5% error rate of these Mongolian walking petroglyphs is smaller than the 73% error rate of mere chance but is larger than the 46% error rate of 39 other prehistoric walking depictions investigated earlier.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 0 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.