111–120 of 199 posts
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I don't get your joke
I think he's making fun of historians that have really dumb reasons for declaring human culture is one way or another because of event X but it doesn't pass a sniff test. In this example, mirrors don't need to exist because people can look at other people (or more simply feel their own face). It was a 40% funny joke.
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Any sort of tribal situation would result in forced labor, and cultures would have formalized notions of slavery, indentured service, arbitrary terms based on religious or traditional ideas. The tradeoff of survival for forced labor is an economic plight that happens frequently throughout history. Chattel slavery is inherently degrading, but it has ranged from ritualistic and formal to downright horrifically maliciou…
You had me until you said electricity. That implies metal, and we certainly have the tools to find metal that old, but have found nothing crafted by homo anything, afaik. Would it all be too buried? One would imagine that somewhere some evidence would have surfaced. But iirc oldest metalworking is from ~11kya
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just to nitpick: the Tepe sites definitely did not have forced labor. they had no social hierarchy at all. hunter-gatherers were fairly egalitarian. definitely sedentary neolithic people had forced labor. all the Sumerian legal texts that were some of the first writings ever included legal definitions of slaves, for example. but the pre-neolithic Anatolian people were nomadic animistic people with no social hierarchy…
How are we so certain that they had no social hierarchy at all? I thought that that was the main theory but that very little is certain at this point.
There is even a small amount of hierarchy at our 15 person Thanksgiving family dinner.
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You had me until you said electricity. That implies metal, and we certainly have the tools to find metal that old, but have found nothing crafted by homo anything, afaik. Would it all be too buried? One would imagine that somewhere some evidence would have surfaced. But iirc oldest metalworking is from ~11kya
you can make a tiny battery with ancient-style materials. It’s essentially a vinegar (or lemon juice) galvanic cell using copper and iron inside a porous clay jar. People often call this the “Baghdad battery"
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The Crystal Palace was built and designed in 11 months, 1850-1851. I'm not sure what the key factors making this possible were, but I suspect low wages and complete disregard for worker safety figured.
Sure that's part of it. A lot of the delays in modern construction are due to labor cost optimization and supplier delays. A lot of the time parts of construction sites are idle because some specialized group of skilled workers is at another site or they're waiting for a delivery. I saw a video where as a stunt a residential construction crew went from a vacant lot to a complete single-family house ready to occupy in…
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> Colonial New England barely exists outside of active preservation attempts. As someone who grew up there, this isn't really true. It's more that buildings have been upgraded/replaced over time by choice, resulting in a sparse patchwork of old buildings rather than large old cities. Places like the Wayside Inn[0] predate the country by a century, and have been "preserved" only because they have more-or-less continuo…
Some years back an aunt and uncle owned a cottage in Devon (near Exeter) with 1649 carved into the wall by the front door. Cottages like that had a simple timber frame and cob walls, which is only a slight improvement on wattle and daub! Cob is mud and straw and a few binding agents and traditionally: horse piss to act as an accelerant to aid setting or something. Floors are joist and boards. The roof is thatched, of…
I think you meant "compression".
These Tepe sites give credence to advanced civilization existing before the last ice age. One example is the mostly dismissed theory of water erosion at the base of the Sphinx, suggesting older civilizations leading up to ancient Egypt. To my understanding, it is mostly dismissed because archaeologists found the idea of something older than the Sphinx to be not possible. Tepe sites challenge this. Wild stuff.
Before the last glacial period == 100,000 year ago. This is 12,000 years ago. If we assume (big big assumption here) that there's only really a single unbroken line of civilization, and also assume (big big assumption) roughly exponential growth till now, then no, 100kya would be too long ago.
But those two assumptions are not really safe to make. It's just that we _can't_ know yet.
I suspect that the Sphinx water erosion thing is real and correct, and the Sphinx much older than ancient Egypt.
These Tepe sites give credence to advanced civilization existing before the last ice age. One example is the mostly dismissed theory of water erosion at the base of the Sphinx, suggesting older civilizations leading up to ancient Egypt. To my understanding, it is mostly dismissed because archaeologists found the idea of something older than the Sphinx to be not possible. Tepe sites challenge this. Wild stuff.
Or a more boring theory about the sphinx is that it was constructed at the orthodox time, around 2550 BC, and then later on it rained sometimes. This would be mildly surprising, as opposed to very surprising.