I love listening to researchers talk about places like Ur and Karahan Tepe and all the things we know about in between.
What I don’t love is the very clear tendency to believe that people 10,000 years ago had the mental capacity of a frog.
No, I don’t think the pit-like dwellings that don’t have roofs were proof they were savages who lived under the open sky, I think in the TEN THOUSAND YEARS SINCE THEN the roof disintegrated. It’s not a hard concept to put something over your head to stay out of the rain.
It IS however, hard to make a roof out of mud unless you know where to get special mud and how to cook it. They would have to use branches, leaves and long grasses to keep rain off, which definitely wouldn’t survive 10 millennia.
So DID they have roofs? No idea, but trying to point at lack of roofs as “proof” of anything is kind of dumb.
Respect for the ones that straight up say “we don’t know but it’s speculated that…” though
Also it’s disgusting to me how many times I’ve seen “because the people who found the artifact thought it was heretical/sacreligious/proves their religion wrong they destroyed most of it”
On the last part, you can see Jesuit exorcism markings on Tiwanaku and Inka statues. They tried to tear down temples too, but couldn’t figure out how to dismantle the foundations and first meter and a half off walls. So they used those to build European style dwellings on top of it.
The smallest of the three pyramids at Giza has a giant gash down the side because some Muslims tried to tear it down because it was from another religion and Islam is founded primarily on hatred and violence.
On a cultural television channel from Mexico, there was a weekly recurring host panel of five or six academics in different fields, all with their PhDs in literature, linguistics, history, political science, etc. La Dichosa Palabra (The Blessed Word) was the name of the show.
Anyway, one of the panelists always seemed to trace the etymology of every word to the name of such-and-such goddess from antiquity.
One or two times, ok sure, you get dazzled by the erudition. But when it happens over and over and over again with any word no matter how seemingly trivial, it all acquires a strong whiff of confirmation bias bullshit with nobody to call him out on it.
A lot of these hand axes may have had some kind of not-strictly-functional purpose during their heydey in the stone ages as well. Heaps of them show no evidence of wear or use and are noticably gorgeous - just really pleasingly shaped.
It’s amazing to put into perspective how long both bronze and stone ages really took, especially compared to modernity. Human brains are not good at imagining large quantities or intervals, so it was all kinda smushed up into a folder labeled “past” in my head
To give some numbers, the last period of the stone age (Neolithic) lasted around 2000 years and the bronze age around 1600 years. No wonder they “forgot” what the stone age tools were.
Kurzgesagt did this video where they crammed all of Earth's history in an hour. Basically you look at a barren wasteland for most of the time until life finally goes macroscopic and then all of humanity happens in less than a second
I sat through the whole thing and it's still incomprehensible
It’s gotten so fast that we now see significant changes in our lifetimes - cultural, technology, climate. For most of human history, it took many generations for any real change to occur.
Japan might be the record holder for fastest significant change, though. Feudalism to a modern industrial economy in a few decades.
Please. The USSR industrialization speed run is unsurpassed. Peasants to the first artificial satellite in 40 years. Also, parts of Russia are still completely undeveloped today!
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