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I'd be a lot more excited about the US if there were giant loving elephants roaming the plains e: what a snipe
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May 9, 2021 12:53
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Buffalo are kind of like elephants
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May 9, 2021 13:48
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Gaius Marius posted:Buffalo are kind of like elephants Tape a vacuum hose to their snout and squint.
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May 9, 2021 13:49
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"Cherokee war elephants made short work of the colonists"
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May 9, 2021 13:56
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No wait, it says "War Mammoths" here
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May 9, 2021 14:02
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Gaius Marius posted:Buffalo are kind of like elephants They're like moose in that you really have to see one to realize how big they are. You stand near one and realize you only live because they don't give enough of a poo poo atm to trample you. But you know you live or die at their whim, and you couldn't do poo poo if they decided you must die.
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May 9, 2021 14:04
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Tunicate posted:there are a few places which require permits to collect vertebrate fossils (and often it's just MMA fighter Georges St. Pierre is a multimillionaire with a dinosaur fetish. He would probably pay tens of thousands of dollars for them.
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May 9, 2021 14:16
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), but there isn't like an ownership permit or anything. You can just go and buy a fossil turtle or a fossil fish or whatever, there are millions of 'em so the scientific value of any particular one is basically nil.
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If mastodons hadn't gone extinct before Europeans came to America, they sure would be extinct by now.Edgar Allen Ho posted:They're like moose in that you really have to see one to realize how big they are. Moose aren't herd animals though, so you'll likely only ever see one at a time, and it's hard to imagine how menacing a whole group moving in sync could be.
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May 9, 2021 15:14
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you'd think that, but a fossilized vertebra from some rando dinosaur goes for like, fifty dollars on ebay, including shipping Basically it's the well-preserved intact, articulatable dinos that are rare and expensive / museum stuff. If you just want a single reasonably intact fossil bone or a tooth or something and don't care what kind of dino, they're pretty common and cheap, and miscellaneous fragmentary bits of bone are even cheaper. I think someone mentioned roman coins and it's a pretty good comparison, you'd think that it's super hard to get a roman coin and that they're really expensive, but if you just want some random coin and aren't picky about condition it's like 
Tunicate fucked around with this message at 15:19 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 15:15
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The best thing about mastodons is that early paleontologists in America apparently had an inferiority complex about the cool predatory animal fossils being found in Europe vs boring stuff in the US like giant sloths. So they sort of decided that rather than being herivores mastodons were actually giant superpredators who feasted on meat, so there!
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May 9, 2021 20:33
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Scarodactyl posted:The best thing about mastodons is that early paleontologists in America apparently had an inferiority complex about the cool predatory animal fossils being found in Europe vs boring stuff in the US like giant sloths. So they sort of decided that rather than being herivores mastodons were actually giant superpredators who feasted on meat, so there! "Between the razor sharp tusks, the infernal beast had a long muscular protuberance, called the flamethrower."
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May 9, 2021 20:41
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Ola posted:"Between the razor sharp tusks, the infernal beast had a long muscular protuberance, called the flamethrower."
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May 10, 2021 16:14
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Telsa Cola posted:Lotta folks have a story of little peoples. Its not unique to the Flores. It is a little different in that the Ebu Gogo legend isn't that of a supernatural being or having particular abilities but more of an oddity that comes out of the jungle. As Richard Roberts, discoverer of the Hobbit described it: https://www.primates.com/ebu-gogo/index.html
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May 13, 2021 21:55
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Mr Havafap posted:It is a little different in that the Ebu Gogo legend isn't that of a supernatural being or having particular abilities but more of an oddity that comes out of the jungle. Other areas/islands nearby have similar stories about similar things that are fairly mundane and probably related to the fact that apes/monkeys are prevalent or have been historically in those regions. I mean just look at all the stuff around orangutans. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 22:15 on May 13, 2021 |
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May 13, 2021 22:06
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Also there are extant groups of people who, for whatever reason, are short.
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May 13, 2021 23:30
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https://twitter.com/postclassics/status/1392921675197452294
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May 14, 2021 00:01
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I've been reading The Fate of Rome and I have to say, hearing the Fall of Rome narrative from the point of view of climate and disease is quite interesting, even if the author I think does kinda make some weird leaps of logic at times. I do particularly like the Fall of the Western Roman Empire framed more in the context of "The Romans could not have stemmed the tide of humanity fleeing the megadrought on the Eurasian steppe, and also sincerely hosed everything up at the Battle of Adrianople" than the more common context of a Roman system that was completely unresponsive and teetering at the end of the 4th century. EDIT: Also, if you'd be so kind, can somebody link me the effort post wherein the Athenians managed to totally gently caress up a war? A Festivus Miracle fucked around with this message at 04:27 on May 14, 2021 |
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May 14, 2021 04:20
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Tunicate posted:Also there are extant groups of people who, for whatever reason, are short. I wonder what neolithic crossfit looked like
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May 15, 2021 23:22
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I helped a friend remove some stumps from his property this weekend and it was a huge pain in the rear end, even with a chainsaw and a jack. How did pre industrialized people clear land for farms and roads? What tools did they use?
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May 18, 2021 00:16
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dokmo posted:I helped a friend remove some stumps from his property this weekend and it was a huge pain in the rear end, even with a chainsaw and a jack. How did pre industrialized people clear land for farms and roads? What tools did they use? slaves
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May 18, 2021 00:33
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fire? they didn't have dynamite or thermite but they had oils. drill some holes in, let something flammable soak in it and light er up? (total guess)
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May 18, 2021 00:34
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Slaves and/or animals and/or you fuckin did it yourself no matter how long it took. There's not really a fun answer, it was just a lot of lovely hard labor.
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May 18, 2021 00:36
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That's why you have a bunch of kids, they do the bullshit labor you don't want to deal with.
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May 18, 2021 00:40
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you use shovels pickaxes and muscle power if your wealthy it's someone's else's, either slaves or draft animals.
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May 18, 2021 00:46
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dokmo posted:I helped a friend remove some stumps from his property this weekend and it was a huge pain in the rear end, even with a chainsaw and a jack. How did pre industrialized people clear land for farms and roads? What tools did they use? You planned on simple things being really hard and taking a long time. It was a different pace of life. People worked from sunup to sundown getting very little accomplished, by our standards.
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May 18, 2021 00:47
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Also a non-trivial amount of "don't." If a rock or w/e in your field is too big, sometimes you just work around it. For the kind of work you're talking about - clearing crap out of fields - mattocks are old as hell and extremely versatile, and picks and shovels will cover a lot of the rest of the work. It'd be hard to say how the work would be organized because the exact people doing it are among the people least likely to appear in sources, and there's almost certainly going to be significant regional variation depending on how households and villages and so on are organized. The most hardcore form of this to my mind is paddy farming, and while I've mostly seen it more-or-less contemporary contexts, the labor involved tends to be very communal.
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May 18, 2021 00:50
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Fire can be used as a tool, you can burn out the tree stump, or burn out the whole drat tree. It also fertilizes the land. Good in the short term, could have some long term problems if you keep going and don't stop.
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May 18, 2021 00:54
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dokmo posted:I helped a friend remove some stumps from his property this weekend and it was a huge pain in the rear end, even with a chainsaw and a jack. How did pre industrialized people clear land for farms and roads? What tools did they use? I remember reading an awesome illustrated book that had Roman era tools, and I wish I could find it. The thing I took away was that a lot of them were pretty recognizable even today, since physics haven't changed. Traditional stump removal tools are cutter mattocks (a combination axe and adze), long bladed spades, rope and pulleys, and of course animals like mules, horses, or oxen. Like many handtools, they can be surprisingly effective when applied correctly. The difference between using a shovel and using a mattock can be night and day. Phobophilia posted:Fire can be used as a tool, you can burn out the tree stump, or burn out the whole drat tree. It also fertilizes the land. Good in the short term, could have some long term problems if you keep going and don't stop. Oh yeah, fire was super useful for this sort of thing. Kaal fucked around with this message at 01:08 on May 18, 2021 |
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May 18, 2021 00:54
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You can also rot out stumps if you're patient. Bore holes in it with an augur, regularly pour watered-down-manure into the holes.
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May 18, 2021 01:36
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Tulip posted:The most hardcore form of this to my mind is paddy farming, and while I've mostly seen it more-or-less contemporary contexts, the labor involved tends to be very communal. Despite us modern capitalist-living folks tending to treat humans as inherently cruel, I figure we're mostly a lot more communal by nature than that assumption. I'm thinking about this in particular right now because we have a tornado warning here (we're fine) and within about two minutes of the emergency siren the neighbours texted that the ground-floor folks left the door unlocked and pets were welcome if things got bad. These are people I haven't said more than "hi" to in months. I can imagine, even if you're beating each other in the streets for this or that patron as your day job, you know who needs to have who's back when the lovely insula you all live in catches fire and Crassus runs the fire service. That's not as directly communal as agriculture, but I do think it's a closer model to how people operate by nature than the "everything will devolve into murder and rape" thing we modern western sort of assume.
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May 18, 2021 02:38
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Despite us modern capitalist-living folks tending to treat humans as inherently cruel, I figure we're mostly a lot more communal by nature than that assumption. I'm thinking about this in particular right now because we have a tornado warning here (we're fine) and within about two minutes of the emergency siren the neighbours texted that the ground-floor folks left the door unlocked and pets were welcome if things got bad. These are people I haven't said more than "hi" to in months. It's fairly well understood that in disasters, at least in the short term people tend to pull together exceptionally well and the stuff you see on TV or in books is really about as far from reality as possible ...with one GLARING exception: elite panic. High-status individuals, when confronted with a disaster, tend to go Mad Max and gently caress it up for everyone else. So when a movie has an apocalypse where everybody goes "every man for himself," that isn't accurate for most of us but may be accurate for the people who produce shows and such.
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May 18, 2021 03:33
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dokmo posted:I helped a friend remove some stumps from his property this weekend and it was a huge pain in the rear end, even with a chainsaw and a jack. How did pre industrialized people clear land for farms and roads? What tools did they use? Pulleys aren't exactly a new invention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xX8I1KUpdCg
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May 18, 2021 03:33
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:Despite us modern capitalist-living folks tending to treat humans as inherently cruel, I figure we're mostly a lot more communal by nature than that assumption. Well, yes. As just one example see the link: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/08/human-altruism-traces-back-origins-humanity
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May 18, 2021 03:37
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There's a novel, probably Russian, that uses the removal of a tree stump heavily as metaphor for the discord between two of the characters. I can't remember what it is and it's driving me nuts now.
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May 18, 2021 03:40
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CoolCab posted:fire? they didn't have dynamite or thermite but they had oils. drill some holes in, let something flammable soak in it and light er up? (total guess) You don't need fuel, it's literally made of fuel. You'd need an oxidizer?
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May 18, 2021 07:51
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The orthodox method is to build a bonfire on top and let it burn down to coals. Done right everything above the ground will burn away and the coals will smoulder down into the below-ground portion and burn it away over the next couple of days. You need a nice hot fire to start the process though.
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May 18, 2021 08:13
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The Lone Badger posted:The orthodox method is to build a bonfire on top and let it burn down to coals. Done right everything above the ground will burn away and the coals will smoulder down into the below-ground portion and burn it away over the next couple of days. You need a nice hot fire to start the process though. There's even lots of YouTube videos showing people doing this.
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May 18, 2021 11:22
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Thanks for all the replies. Next time I go stumping I want to try some of these methods out, just to see how long it takes before I give up.
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May 18, 2021 14:54
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Progress in deciphering Linear A : https://greekreporter.com/2021/05/13/minoan-language-linear-a-linked-to-linear-b-in-groundbreaking-new-research/
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May 18, 2021 15:20
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Deteriorata posted:It was a different pace of life. People worked from sunup to sundown getting very little accomplished, by our standards. Speak for yourself, I have never accomplished anything.
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May 18, 2021 15:38
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