Neil Gaiman: Was the Stone Age Actually the Wood Age? www.nytimes.com/2024/05/04/s...

Was the Stone Age Actually the Wood Age? www.nytimes.com/2024/05/04/s...

Was the Stone Age Actually the Wood Age?www.nytimes.com Neanderthals were even better craftsmen than thought, a new analysis of 300,000-year-old wooden tools has revealed.

Love the interdisciplinary approach.

The real question is how good the javelin throwers were at archaeology...

This is like Bend It like Beckham, where they decided it was easier to teach footie players how to act than to teach actors to play a sport.

“Intellectual integrity is being able to admit the flaws in your earlier approach to interpreting the evidence - specifically, being bad at throwing pointy things.”

💯

tod cutler also did this with a roman pilum on his youtube channel as part of a series where he reconstructs various weapons of old you can discover so many interesting things this way, it's really weird that it isn't more common

Those videos are extremely interesting. Have you seen the 'fire arrows' one?

yes, it's a great exercise in mapping out the possibilities

Being a psychologist who is also an archer makes me wonder if I'll ever get to use my martial skills in my research. "To verify my hypothesis on stressors, I personally shot arrows from a 70# Scandinavian Longbow at the subjects in what is colloquially referred to as a "William Tell" Paradigm."

Please please please!

I always figured that the best paleolithic hunters would have been able to do parkour, throw rocks like a major league pitcher, and sneak up on deer like Wolverine.

@berriesofthunder.bsky.social 😂🤣

I did have a colleague who was a theologian who was a javelin thrower at the University of Oregon in the 60s/70s.(Steve Prefontaine's roommate on road trips) He lucked out by just missing qualifying for the 1972 Olympic Team. He was touring Africa with a goodwill sports delegation instead of Munich

When there is now a proven incident in which a wild orangutan used a non-food plant to heal a wound, we need to stop being so precious about early technology. There’s a much richer continuum between our forebears and us, and I wish our cousin species were still around to prove it.

This is an obvious logical conclusion one must draw from the theory of evolution, yet human exceptionalists have continued to insist that there's some meaningful difference between us and other animals.

Damn right. We're primates. No bright line between us and "animals." We're animals too.

we should probably stop eating and exploiting animals as well.

👏👏👏

We're all so connected.

I think the orangutan might be as smart as if not smarter than many people. We're not the only ones with problem-solving skills. And sometimes we aren't even the best.

Call me when they’re published and cited. And not in some publish-everything vanity journal like Jungle Studies.

inherently speculative but i feel like this principle about survivor bias of wood vs stone goes doubly for structures as it does for tools, especially given the very common tendency for wooden structures to burn down before the end of their useful life

I think about the xkcd Spider Paleontology comic at least once a week. xkcd.com/1747

Spider Paleontologyxkcd.com

When I was learning about survivorship bias one of the examples was "When I say middle age castle, what do you imagine? The majority of castles were wood, not stone"

Part of what makes Japan’s ancient wooden structures* so cool! *RIP Kinkaku-ji

Who knows what ephemeral wonders were produced in Africa and N.America 9000 years ago solely in wood?

@patrickwyman.bsky.social had some good material on this in the Tides of (Pre)History season

Okay, but this is wildly infuriating: "as tall as an NBA centre", "half the length of a pool cue" - just state the size of the things! I'll even cope if it's expressed in feet or inches, the NYT being American and all. These comparisons are daft for such easily comprehensible length measurements.

Each day the @nytimes.com fills two Olympic sized swimming pools with size and measurement analogies.

Jerusalem Post hot on its heels, though

that was my birthday, in itself a reminder of mortality

I have just irritated all my neighbours by cackling loudly at this one!

If they complain, tell them it was just the sound of two ducks.

I'd follow an account that just quoted these on a daily basis.

Being a New Zealander, I can only visualise Commonwealth Games-sized swimming pools.

I prefer “how many filled Klein bottles”.

Just the one I guess.

And nary a banana measurement to be seen!

NYT generates half the examples for KYM all by themselves knowyourmeme.com/memes/americ...

Americans Will Use Anything Except The Metric Systemknowyourmeme.com Americans Will Use Anything Except The Metric System is a catchphrase commonly used whenever an example of a measurement is given for an object that isn't

Here in Australia things are often compared to the Sydney Harbour. Not the bridge, the water in the harbour. How ludicrous 🤦🏻‍♀️

One Sydharb is an official Australian unit of measurement. It is used to measure volume and is equivalent to 500 gigalitres, the volume of water in Sydney Harbour. www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09...

11 things you should know about Sydney Harbourwww.abc.net.au It is one of the most recognisable and picturesque bodies of water in the world, but what makes up the Sydney Harbour?

Because everyone in the country (a) lives *really* close to Sydney harbour and (b) knows exactly what the bottom of the thing looks like 😒

A veritable turducken of ignorance, nepotism, and elitism.

I wish more people would use Dr. Grordbort-style measurements, i.e. 3/7ths of a rhinoceros.

I had a textbook in high school that said 180 liters was as much as 90 2-liter bottles.

😳 I can only imagine how relieved you must have felt to read that.

Anything, anything at all to avoid using metric.

A useful diet app some years ago used hand portions to estimate servings: Thumb for smallest, then two fingers, palm, and fist. Then the app was updated to use sport balls (golf, tennis, baseball, softball) instead. Could never remember if baseball or softball was larger. Less effective, somehow.

I can't help feeling that it would have been an even *more* useful diet app if it just used measurements... which were invented specifically because of the wild inconsistency of hand / body sizes.