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I just spent my afternoon reading about the neolothic. Apparently in Jerico, the oldest still-occupied city on the planet, they would cut the head off important people after they died, cover it in clay to resemble him or her, and mount it on the wall of the house to give advice.
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Oct 24, 2017 21:05
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Blue Star posted:Someone earlier mentioned giant snakes. There actually were giant snakes and lizards in prehistoric times, like the titanoboa and megalania. Also terrestrial crocodiles in Australia. They were all too ancient to coexist with Neolithic or Bronze Age humans, but man, just think if they did. That scene in Conan the Barbarian where they steal the jewel from the temple could have really happened. It's gonna suck poo poo in a couple years when people are saying this about tigers and bears and moose
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Oct 24, 2017 21:06
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Speleothing posted:I just spent my afternoon reading about the neolothic. Apparently in Jerico, the oldest still-occupied city on the planet, they would cut the head off important people after they died, cover it in clay to resemble him or her, and mount it on the wall of the house to give advice. Holy gently caress do this to me so I can still shitpost in GBS
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Oct 24, 2017 21:07
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SniperWoreConverse posted:how were these made, seriously. They're beautiful. You use a really, really sharp chisel to make a sort of dovetailed cutaway in the steel in the shape you want, lay a sheet of silver (or brass or whatever) cut in that shape over the outline, and hammer the poo poo out of it until it swages in. then polish. it takes for loving ever https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaTwmcuCqtg if you value your time more than you value it looking amazing for thousands of years you can also just paint on a resist and electroplate it, because you live in the 21st century. not recommended for your battle sword A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 21:20
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SniperWoreConverse posted:I wonder is somebody accidentally left the gate open, would giraffes and elephants walk out of zoos and be able to survive in the south? As long as nobody shot them of c. There's a 2700 acre elephant sanctuary in Tennessee https://www.elephants.com/
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Oct 24, 2017 21:27
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Both the metalworking and elephants are badass
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Oct 24, 2017 21:59
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Prettz posted:And how did the people in the eastern Mediterranean regions and Mesopotamia get so much more advanced than everyone else early on? Does it just boil down to "trade hub"? The Nile, Tigris and Euphrates rivers all flood every year like clockwork, dumping silt (swamp muck) everywhere which is perfect fertilizer. You can just run around giggling manically throwing handfuls of wheat everywhere and it's like boom instant bread. With a stable food source you can start melting rocks in a fire and drawing pictures for words all day while everyone else on earth is chasing animals around with a pointed stick trying not to starve. Imagine having a year or two of grain stored up, you can have as many kids as you want, and if strangers hassle you you put on your tin pot helmet and wave metal pointy things at them in a big group until they go away
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Oct 24, 2017 22:00
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naem posted:The Nile, Tigris and Euphrates rivers all flood every year like clockwork, dumping silt (swamp muck) everywhere which is perfect fertilizer. You can just run around giggling manically throwing handfuls of wheat everywhere and it's like boom instant bread. Eh, H/G societies actually end up having more leisure time if you actually look at the data available. Agriculture is insanely work heavy and if you are just starting out you need a food source for the first couple months before your crop comes in, not counting weeding, field maintenance and other poo poo. Then the grains need to be harvested, processed and stored before more processing for cooking. This is ignoring the other issues that come about from being sedentary. One argument for societal complexity is that with a large food source from agriculture you need a way to distribute it or oversee its general storage which means you implement or develop new systems to do this. Also you maybe need a system to keep track of when the crops will grow best and for how long and that just adds more layers. Several early writing systems were basically just record keeping systems likely because of this. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 22:35
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Telsa Cola posted:Eh, H/G societies actually end up having more leisure time if you actually look at the data available. Agriculture is insanely work heavy and if you are just starting out you need a food source for the first couple months before your crop comes in, not counting weeding, field maintenance and other poo poo. Then the grains need to be harvested, processed and stored before more processing for cooking. This is ignoring the other issues that come about from being sedentary. Maybe the average h/g has more leisure time than the average farmer, but the average farmer wasn’t the one writing or designing cool pyramids. Also there’s the whole offseason where you’re just eating from your stores that h/g didn’t really have did they?
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Oct 24, 2017 22:43
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Oct 24, 2017 22:43
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Grevling posted:Yeah, they were extinct at 1700 BC, which means that there were still mammoths around when people started building pyramids in Egypt. Wasn't it the dwarf mammoth that was still hanging out on some islands?
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Oct 24, 2017 22:44
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Senor Dog posted:Maybe the average h/g has more leisure time than the average farmer, but the average farmer wasn’t the one writing or designing cool pyramids. Also there’s the whole offseason where you’re just eating from your stores that h/g didn’t really have did they? True but the same argument could be said for non-egalitarian H/G societies were the elites get tribute or labor done for them. H/G groups definitely had food storage methods and caches so they totally could have, especially if its something relatively east to store like acorns or smoked meats. I havent done the math for it yet I would bet in a hypothetical situation where you still need to hunt and gather food in the winter you would still have in total more leisure time year round then an agricultural society Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 22:50
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Telsa Cola posted:True but the same argument could be said for non-egalitarian H/G societies were the elites get tribute or labor done for them. We could argue that an organized agrarian society isn't better/worse than a hunter gatherer society, and they definitely existed on a spectrum with farming/hunting/gathering/specialized crafts happening in varying degrees as needed. I just illustrated how farming in particular was much easier along those areas which is why we sometimes call the Nile and Tigris/ Euphrates rivers the cradle of civilization.
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Oct 24, 2017 23:08
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Telsa Cola posted:True but the same argument could be said for non-egalitarian H/G societies were the elites get tribute or labor done for them. I don't think it's "leisure time vs leisure time" as much as the amount of food being produced means people can dedicate themselves to a craft or whatever and just trade for food.
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Oct 24, 2017 23:21
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Radical 90s Wizard posted:I don't think it's "leisure time vs leisure time" as much as the amount of food being produced means people can dedicate themselves to a craft or whatever and just trade for food. But there is nothing to prevent someone from doing so in a H/G society, people weren't just going out and bringing back exactly x amount for x people, surplus got brought back which could be stored and traded. The average "work" week for a H/G just to get food is often put at around 20ish hours which is little more then 3 hours a day which means you could gently caress off and do crafts for the rest of your time if you wanted too. Basically food production was not a bar to specialization. Basically to answer the original question we dont actually know why societies got more complex and there are a poo poo ton of possible answers ranging from economic to political reasons. naem posted:We could argue that an organized agrarian society isn't better/worse than a hunter gatherer society, and they definitely existed on a spectrum with farming/hunting/gathering/specialized crafts happening in varying degrees as needed. Ah fair enough.
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Oct 24, 2017 23:33
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fishing is a leisure activity. checkmate, hunterfarmers
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Oct 24, 2017 23:34
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SniperWoreConverse posted:how were these made, seriously. They're beautiful. bronze melts down nice and easy, its actually not that hard. they melt a bunch of bronze and cast the entire sword/hilt in a sand/clay mix. it would look like a jagged mess when its first cast, so they then clip off the extra bits of bronze and polish it by rubbing it down with fine sand. its a lot more work to make a steel sword Telsa Cola posted:But there is nothing to prevent someone from sure you have lots of leisure time as a hunter gatherer, but you also have to carry everything you own on your back. that doesn't leave a lot of room for elaborate art or heavy tools that are not absolutely essential. people began to specialize and create different objects (like pottery) once they were settled and didn't have to carry all of their poo poo around everywhere. Edit: Though it just occurred to me, some hunter gatherers did use their vast leisure time to build monuments. They didn't carry it around though, they left them behind for large portions of the year. They were quite elaborate though, for people using stone tools who haven't even figured out agriculture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHG9URGDt6s Rutibex fucked around with this message at 23:47 on Oct 24, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 23:37
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Telsa Cola posted:But there is nothing to prevent someone from Farming gives you higher population density and trade networks which is the cultural equivalent of bigger brains.
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Oct 24, 2017 23:51
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Rutibex posted:sure you have lots of leisure time as a hunter gatherer, but you also have to carry everything you own on your back. that doesn't leave a lot of room for elaborate art or heavy tools that are not absolutely essential. people began to specialize and create different objects (like pottery) once they were settled and didn't have to carry all of their poo poo around everywhere. Yeah you do but only during the times you are moving locations, and what do you define as elaborate art and heavy tools? Lots of art in the North Americas and Mesoamericas for instance got "focused" towards light movable objects like bowls, vases, and clothing. Not to mention weavings and what not. Pottery isnt some agricultural exclusive technology and even if it was various H/G societies have things that function in the same way. Ratios and Tendency posted:Farming gives you higher population density and trade networks which is the cultural equivalent of bigger brains. Again, not something that is exclusive to agricultural societies. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 02:13 on Oct 25, 2017 |
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Oct 24, 2017 23:57
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Ratios and Tendency posted:Farming gives you higher population density and trade networks which is the cultural equivalent of bigger brains. I have a dumb hypothesis that in addition to this, raw population gives you more exceptional outliers, too. So your tribe of a couple dozen hunter gatherers is scratching off fewer lotto tickets than your city state of 100,000 to win the Einstein who helps you figure out a better pulley or the germ theory of disease or how to determine the area of a triangle or what the heck ever.
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Oct 24, 2017 23:57
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Grevling posted:He was a Neolithic man. He had a copper axe though. I wonder if he had the Gorilla Mindset (tm)
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Oct 24, 2017 23:58
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Pac-Manioc Root posted:I have a dumb hypothesis that in addition to this, raw population gives you more exceptional outliers, too. So your tribe of a couple dozen hunter gatherers is scratching off fewer lotto tickets than your city state of 100,000 to win the Einstein who helps you figure out a better pulley or the germ theory of disease or how to determine the area of a triangle or what the heck ever. I actually kinda like this but the "Brilliant Man" hypothesis get shut down a lot in anthropological work. My favorite analogue to it is the theory that certain people got really greedy and started gathering resources and materials and people to themselves to show off and the competition between them leads to more gathering and boom you have a centralized power figure in a society with specialized goods and people. Telsa Cola fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Oct 25, 2017 |
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Oct 25, 2017 00:01
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Randaconda posted:I wish at least a few of the North American megafauna had survived. i'm still hoping against hope that there are still extant flores island hobbits existing somewhere in the region but really i know there arent 
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Oct 25, 2017 00:14
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Randaconda posted:I wish at least a few of the North American megafauna had survived. Grizzlies and Bison did.
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Oct 25, 2017 00:22
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First came the temple, then came the city. People started farming instead of following the herds because they wanted to stay put and build big.
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Oct 25, 2017 00:46
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There is this insane mysterious temple in Turkey that came way way before even farming villages and nobody gets it and nobody ever will.
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Oct 25, 2017 01:54
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Also Cornish tin was crazy important in the ancient world and the Carthaginians kept the Strait of Gibraltar under a very strict lockdown so that nobody else could get their hands on it. They didn't actually travel to Cornwall but they had an idea of where it was and they bought the stuff through middlemen.
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Oct 25, 2017 01:57
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So if you were a time traveller in that time period and you built some awesome ship and decided to go discover America you'd get murdered by Carthaginians who didn't want anyone messing with their racket.
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Oct 25, 2017 01:58
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:There is this insane mysterious temple in Turkey that came way way before even farming villages and nobody gets it and nobody ever will. We've been posting about that already
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Oct 25, 2017 03:07
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Speleothing posted:We've been posting about that already I'm sorry I'll go die in a mysterious battle in Northern Germany for my sins.
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Oct 25, 2017 03:33
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Randaconda posted:Wasn't it the dwarf mammoth that was still hanging out on some islands? Yes, they were smaller and lived on Wrangel island. Russians still collect mammoth tusks there for ivory.
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Oct 25, 2017 07:29
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:Also Cornish tin was crazy important in the ancient world and the Carthaginians kept the Strait of Gibraltar under a very strict lockdown so that nobody else could get their hands on it. They didn't actually travel to Cornwall but they had an idea of where it was and they bought the stuff through middlemen. Yes I saw that episode of Ancient Aliens, too. They all sat around and ate cereal big whoop.
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Oct 25, 2017 21:59
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https://youtu.be/u7wAJTGl2gc turn on captions
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Oct 28, 2017 04:47
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https://youtu.be/a0NU4dEtKWE
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Nov 16, 2017 06:33
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Teriyaki Hairpiece posted:There is this insane mysterious temple in Turkey that came way way before even farming villages and nobody gets it and nobody ever will. Clearly its the work of the old ones.
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Nov 16, 2017 07:37
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morally adept posted:Clearly its the work of the old ones. "The surviving structures, then, not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel, but were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, i.e., the beginning of agriculture and animal husbandry around 9000 BCE. But the construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organization of an advanced order not hitherto associated with Paleolithic, PPNA, or PPNB societies. ... But the complex was not simply abandoned and forgotten to be gradually destroyed by the elements. Instead, each enclosure was deliberately buried under as much as 300 to 500 cubic meters (390 to 650 cu yd) of refuse consisting mainly of small limestone fragments, stone vessels, and stone tools. Many animal, even human, bones have also been identified in the fill.[33] Why the enclosures were buried is unknown, but it preserved them for posterity." I seen enough horror movies to know where this is going. Good job digging up a deliberately buried yog sothoth temple idiots.
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Nov 16, 2017 08:52
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This guy's channel is a goddamn pro-click. Also recommend the book 1177 BC, it's a blast to read.
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Nov 16, 2017 15:12
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Grevling posted:This guy's channel is a goddamn pro-click. This is a true statement. Also, definitely check out Lindybeige's channel. He has tons of awesome videos about lots of ancient weapons and stuff.
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Nov 16, 2017 22:45
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Pennywise the Frown posted:This is a true statement. Also, definitely check out Lindybeige's channel. He has tons of awesome videos about lots of ancient weapons and stuff. He's kinda interesting but he pulls most of his "history" from "my larp group does it this way so clearly that's how the ancients did it!"
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Nov 16, 2017 22:53
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Have Blue posted:He's kinda interesting but he pulls most of his "history" from "my larp group does it this way so clearly that's how the ancients did it!" Eh, I don't think he says "this is clearly how they did it." What he does is play around with the stuff and try to figure out on his own how it may have been used. I'm sure he has the historical information but when he has the stuff in his hands he comes up with other ideas. Nothing is set in stone, they're just ideas that he throws out. Plus he's extremely charismatic.
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Nov 16, 2017 23:40
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