Everyone, his name is ‘Cheddar Man’ (and yet he was lactose intolerant because he predates agriculture!). I love him and support him and all the ‘but in the good old days before all those bad immigrants came, Britain was a proud white nation!!!’ assholes can go suck it.
Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them.
“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”
“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”
It’s just.
50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.
i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok
That was part of the ambition of Diderot’s Encyclopedia project: to unite the theoretical sciences with the mechanical/applied arts and elevate the standing and importance of the latter. Of course, specialization of knowledge has become even more extreme since then.
honey is the only food product that never spoils. there are pots of honey that are over five thousand years old and still completely edible
i also want to point out we know it tastes the same even after thousands of years b/c archaeologists who discovered two thousand year old honey tasted it. presumably right after they looked at each other and went “what the hell here goes nothing”
I’m pretty sure they also identify human remains by taste. Archaeologists are straight up freaks.
No, no no… you identify bone from rock or other substances by touching it to your tongue. If it sticks, it’s bone. The taste itself has nothing to do with it. And most archaeologists won’t lick human bones if they know they’re human.
…and I realize that doesn’t actually do much to prove archaeologists aren’t freaks.
mai nam is jane and wen i dig i fynde some roks both smol and big i put my tung upon the stone for science yes i lik the bone
everything about this is fucking hilarious. i’m sorry, random pompeii man, but your death was some looney tunes bullshit and the framing of this photograph isn’t helping.
Archaeologists in Denmark have found evidence of a 3,000 year-old cooking mistake that casts some light into the everyday life of Scandinavian Bronze Age people.
Clear evidence for one of the most common mistakes in the kitchen – burning food – lay in a clay pot that was excavated in central Jutland, Denmark.
The clay vessel was found, upturned and in near mint condition, at the bottom of what was once a waste pit.
“The pot is typical for cooking vessels in this region of Denmark. It was accompanied by several other objects fitting the dating,” archaeologist Kaj F. Rasmussen from Museum Silkeborg, Denmark, told Discovery News. Read more.
[fucks up dinner and just straight-up buries the evidence] We’re Getting Ancient Pizza Tonight, Girls
one time when i was 13 i burned pudding and couldn’t get it out of the pot and i was so ashamed i buried it in the backyard so no one would know
i see we’ve changed very little as a species
imagine your minor fucked-ups being exposed for the whole world to see by archeologists 3000 years in the future
Loki is the Philosopher King 