71–80 of 93 posts
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Given that humans must have "always" known that carving a hole in something is easier if you use your wrist to reciprocally rotate the tool, I'd be inclined to suspect that both hole-making and firestarting with a bow drill were invented more or less contemporaneously.
Yes, but didn’t our wrists evolve because of all the fire-starting?
Conspiracy theorists have long pointed out the obviously drilled holes in stonework that was >5000 years old. Of course they want to attribute it to lost advanced technology, but the more believable answer is that ancient Egyptians had really refined mundane tools like a bow drill. I still want to know how the scoop marks were made in the ancient quarries. What tool could do that?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AlternativeHistory/comments/u33lbj/...
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Quantify the belief that humans are biased toward sensationalism? No, I have no idea how to do that. Actually you could make an argument that it's a bit circular, that "sensationalism" is defined as the kind of ideas that humans are biased towards and which are therefore more able to cause a "sensation". But if you don't see how people yearn to believe in big dramatic things like conspiracies, aliens, bigfoot, or eve…
Unfortunately, you also sometimes throw out explanations like "they did X in substantially the same way as their descents were doing X up until the late 1800s" or "they used it for Y, just at it was used at other sites throughout the world." At least in the case of things like migrations, we're starting to get overwhelming genetic evidence.
I think archaeology requires a multidisciplinary approach that has only recently begun to emerge. For too long, especially in past centuries, archaeologists focused on history and languages while neglecting engineering, chemistry and the practical techniques that enabled survival and innovation. That's why the general public views our ancestors as 'primitive,' when in reality they possessed techniques many of which w…
Well stated. We often forget that people in the past had the same exact minds and abilities as the people of today and were in no way inferior or "primitive". I think this accounts for a lot of presentism that leaks into our understanding of history.
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But what does the negative space indicate? It says something is missing - which few will dispute - but there are many possible answers in a sort of superposition. Speculation about this answer or that one isn't reliable. It resolves to one answer (or a few) when you have actual evidence.
Sure, you can’t always make a definitive statement, but you can at least determine classes of things. Same way we can determine a murder occurred without recovering a weapon or sometimes even without finding a body. Maybe we can’t be very specific about the how, but IME it is also OK to draw comparisons to modern tools so long as those comparisons are helpful.
> you can’t always make a definitive statement
It's far short of that. Human speculation is wildly unreliable and we seem to always overestimate it, perhaps because it's emotionally satisfying: What other speculative answer would we choose but something that satisfies our emotions? Lacking evidence, nothing compels us to face the unpleasant or unexpected. Look what our understanding of nature and the world was before we required evidence (before science).
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> The Kamitakamori tools? Piltdown fossils? The pattern roughly seems to be "if you have physical artifacts that support a theory / fit a pattern they will be accepted (even if bogus) Two examples from over a century is not evidence of unreliability. > if you have a theory that explains facts (e.g. drilled holes) but no physical artifacts (in this case drills) it will be rejected". Evidence is a requirement in all sc…
They didn't say things should be accepted without evidence. That's a laughably bad-faith reading. They proposed a different standard of evidence that they think is less infeasibly high while still not accepting nonsense. I don't totally agree but it's a reasonable direction to argue. As for the examples, when they start with "swings over the years" they're clearly taking a long-term perspective, and not trying to cla…
Ridicule is the refuge of those without an argument. Maybe try standup or Twitter.
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Balance would be nice, yes, but I think the conservative approach is closer to correct, especially given the natural human bias toward believing sensational theories.
What is more sensational: a, you can drill a hole and cut a 100 ton stone block with a chisel b, you create a hole with a drill, you use some for of stone cutting technology that supports cutting 100 ton stone blocks?
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They didn't say things should be accepted without evidence. That's a laughably bad-faith reading. They proposed a different standard of evidence that they think is less infeasibly high while still not accepting nonsense. I don't totally agree but it's a reasonable direction to argue. As for the examples, when they start with "swings over the years" they're clearly taking a long-term perspective, and not trying to cla…
> laughably Ridicule is the refuge of those without an argument. Maybe try standup or Twitter.
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Balance would be nice, yes, but I think the conservative approach is closer to correct, especially given the natural human bias toward believing sensational theories.
The problem is that you get a vastly distorted picture because of different survivorship rates of artifacts. In the Stone Age people used mostly wood tools but stone tools didn’t rot away.
> Balance would be nice, yes