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@bioarkkie
the thing is when people say a specific fanfic trope comes from supernatural they usually mean "it was invented by the supernatural fandom in a fanfic". on the other hand, when people say a specific fanfic trope comes from star trek, they mean "it was the plot of at least one star trek episode"
Star Trek Tropes & Genres vs Supernatural Tropes & Genres on Fanlore
10000 YEAR OLD ROCK ART OF GIRAFFES FOUND IN LIBYA LET'S GO
YES!!!!!!! YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Two types of archaeologists
@dearearlyarchaeologists
Fixed it :)
Although none of us would ever be caught dead looking that much like Indiana Jones. A leather jacket for fieldwork? Please...
My favourite harmless prank I've heard of was done by this girl whose dad was a geologist, and they'd go on day hikes with his geologist friends/co-workers and when she got bored on them she'd habitually pick up a random rock and go ask him what it is, and one of them would explain what kind of a rock that is, how it probably got here, and usually some notions of the more unusual features the rock had, if any.
And she had a friend who had once gone on a tourist trip to Iceland and brought back a volcanic rock. So she borrowed the rock and took it with her on the hike, and after two randomly picked up "hey dad what rock is this", she presented the volcanic rock, in the same fashion as all the others.
3 minutes later there are five middle-aged and older men circled around this mysterious rock, all agreeing on what it is, but not why it is. They keep asking her questions, where did she find it? Were there any other rocks around there that looked like it? Was it like this on the ground? People walking past the group try to stretch their necks to see over the geologists' shoulders to see what's the source of such amazement.
And in the end she couldn't take it anymore, burst into laughter and confessed. The geologists agree that it was pretty clever.
Geologist enrichment
I have a piece of river smoothed obsidian I use for geologist enrichment. It has some great "tells" for what it is (Black w conchoidal fracturing) but it is matte and smooth, unlike most typical obsidian samples
First ape to go to the watering hole with a container and put some of the water in it so that they could drink more later without returning to the watering hole must have been lauded as a fucking genius.
Actually, as someone who used to study anthropology (albeit a very long time ago), I think it is generally accepted by now that the ability to Carry Containers Of Stuff is generally agreed to be one of the real tool-using leaps in human development, perhaps as important as fire. I mean, you'll get the impression that people studying early humans are basically spearhead experts, but that's just because spearheads don't decay. (And because for a long time people assumed that hunting was The Most Important Thing, which has a fascinating intersection with implicit bias and sexism and stuff, and yes I am still bitter at things like 2001 for popularizing the idea that the most important part of human evolution was the ability to bash the shit out of a thing/animal/person, but that's a whole other story.)
Carrying stuff is huge.
If you can put meat in a bag, you can carry more meat. If you can put something like nuts in a bag, then nuts abruptly become a food that you can bring back to the tribe or save for later and not a food that you're required to eat on the spot because they are tiresome and stupid to carry by hand. In both cases your ability to feed yourself and your tribe just got a whole fuck of a lot better.
If you can put your baby in a bag, you now have both your hands free to stick a spear into things, pick nuts, fish, dig tasty cicadas out of the ground, etc. Your ability to feed yourself and your tribe just got a whole fuck of a lot better, and so did your ability to defend yourself while you do it. (And let's face it, your babies were already getting downright ridiculous in terms of the time it takes them to be fully walking-ready, due to brain size and being essentially premature; inventing Multitasking With Baby is like, pure survival at this point, and your way to do that is to create a specialized bag.)
If you can put water in a bag (first water containers very well may have been animal bladders or stomachs, not pots) you can bring water to your sick tribe members and they have a much higher chance of recovering.
And then you have elaborations of the basic "thing that contains objects" idea. If you make an exceptionally loosely woven bag and put it in the water, you can on occasion finesse some fish into it. And then you have delicious fish. If you put yourself in a loose and flexible bag of animal skin, your tribe can operate in the cold better, which changes your entire migration pattern and opens up new environments to you. If you make a hard container and fill it with water and put it over your fire, you have invented a new type of cooking that unlocks whole new food types, such as vegetables that need softening in order for humans to eat them. (Of course at the same time your stomach is becoming steadily more dependent on being able to fuck with your food in this way, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing, because the less energy you spend on digestion, the more energy you have to spend on other things, like brains. And big brains are good for unlocking whole new levels of communication, allowing for fantastic new levels of foraging cooperation, passing knowledge through generations, mate selection, and even various sorts of mental recreation where you imagine something that you don't see, and then convey that to your fellow beings.)
Bags are important, is what I'm saying.
Right, hard to be conclusive about the cause of death but, uh…Well, it’s going to be plague, isn’t it?
A bunch of plague pit ghosts invisibly playing Guess Who with their own skeletons while an archaeologist excavates them is honestly one of the funniest concepts I’ve ever seen.
I feel like pirating media that isn’t sold or offered anywhere legally anymore shouldn’t be called piracy. Girl thats archaeology
I understand that museums have to be dark because light can destroy fragile artifacts. That said, I’m always afraid to walk around the blind corners because what if there is a skeleton
Okay yes sometimes there’s a skeleton, I understand how museums work. But I mean what if it gets me
Fact: you can absolutely kick a skeleton's ass. You are a skeleton wearing biological power armor. Skeletons of adult humans typically weigh less than 30 pounds. You are in a superior weight class by orders of magnitude.
i wish someone had told me that when i was a kid and terrified of having to fight a skeleton
In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.
…
Last year, NBC News revealed in its “Lost Rites” investigation that coroners and medical examiners in Mississippi and nationally had repeatedly failed to notify families of their loved ones’ deaths before burying them in pauper’s graveyards. That investigation led reporters to North Texas, where officials had come to view the unclaimed dead not as a costly burden, but as a free resource.
Before its sudden shuttering last week, the Health Science Center’s body business flourished.
On paper, the arrangements with Dallas and Tarrant counties offered a pragmatic solution to an expensive problem: Local medical examiners and coroners nationwide bear the considerable costs of burying or cremating tens of thousands of unclaimed bodies each year. Disproportionately Black, male, mentally ill and homeless, these are individuals whose family members often cannot be easily reached, or whose relatives cannot or will not pay for cremation or burial.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center used some of these bodies to teach medical students. Others, like Honey’s, were parceled out to for-profit medical training and technology companies — including industry giants like Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and Medtronic — that rely on human remains to develop products and teach doctors how to use them. The Health Science Center advertised the bodies as being of “the highest quality found anywhere in the U.S.”
…
A half-century ago, it was common for U.S. medical schools to use unclaimed bodies, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. Many programs have halted the practice in recent years, though, and some states, including Hawaii, Minnesota and Vermont, have flatly prohibited it — part of an evolution of medical ethics that has called on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients.
The University of North Texas Health Science Center charged in the opposite direction.
Through public records requests, NBC News obtained thousands of pages of government records and data documenting the acquisition, dissection and distribution of unclaimed bodies by the center over a five-year period.
An analysis of the material reveals repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties — and by the center — to contact family members who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed. Reporters examined dozens of cases and identified 12 in which families learned weeks, months or years later that a relative had been provided to the medical school, leaving many survivors angry and traumatized.
Five of those families found out what happened from NBC News. Reporters used public records databases, ancestry websites and social media searches to locate and reach them within just a few days, even though county and center officials said they had been unable to find any survivors.
In one case, a man learned of his stepmother’s death and transfer to the center after a real estate agent called about selling her house. In another, Dallas County marked a man’s body as unclaimed and gave it to the Health Science Center, even as his loved ones filed a missing person report and actively searched for him.
…
“What they’re doing is uncomfortably close to grave-robbing,” [Bioethicist Eli Shupe] said.
Shupe was alluding to the dark history, long before voluntary body-donation programs, when U.S. medical schools turned to “resurrectionists,” or “body snatchers,” who dug up the graves of poor and formerly enslaved people. To curb this ghastly 19th-century practice, states adopted laws giving schools authority to use unclaimed bodies for student training and experiments.
Many of those laws remain on the books, but the medical community has largely moved beyond them. Last year, the American Association for Anatomy released guidelines for human body donation stating that “programs should not accept unclaimed or unidentified individuals into their programs as a matter of justice.”
…
After publishing a newspaper essay criticizing the practice, she brought her concerns directly to the Tarrant County Commissioners Court at a meeting last year, asking officials to consider the message being sent to marginalized residents and people of color.
“How does it look,” she said, “when a Black body is dissected with nobody’s permission at all, simply because they died poor?”
“who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed”
they didn’t even fucking GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO CLAIM THEIR DEAD
It is absolutely equivalent to grave robbing. As bad as grave robbing. Just without the "middleman" bit of burying them first, because they want to dodge the expense, that's the point.
It's especially disgusting because these people would overwhelmingly have been disadvantaged in terms of getting health care while they were alive. To then be used as a teaching aid and have the very effects of that lack of care turned into an educational opportunity for a profession that, itself, is rife with discrimination against the poor, POC, the unhoused, the unhealthy, the disabled, the mentally ill, those with substance use problems, perpetuating the cycle that might have failed the person in the first place and contributed to their demise.... Yeah. Also, a lot of people are victims of medical abuse and probably would be upset, like me, at the idea of this happening to them. I'm already a walking crime scene, ffs, don't make that worse.
Also, this? If I wanted to donate my body for education or research (I don't and my paperwork reflects this) this would make me reluctant because even though I might be willing, I wouldn't want to have anything to do with a place that does this, even if I were dead. I literally would not be caught dead supporting them.
And while *I* know how the organ donation process works for transplants and am not worried about coming to harm because I am a donor (please please learn about it and become a donor, please), a lot of people don't trust the process and are misinformed, and you can't tell me this sort of shit is not going to affect those fears. It's the same sort of callousness.
It also gives HUGE motive for those same companies to lobby *against* social assistance programs.
If it's more expensive to ethically source voluntarily donated remains than it is to buy a congressman who can shut down mental health access and homeless shelters so they can scoop up society's most vulnerable as they fall by the wayside, I don't think we'd be surprised to see things go that way.
Protectibe the sanctity of human bodies isn't *just* a matter of practicality and efficiency. It's also a foundational step in ensuring the sanctity of the *living*.
My god.
so. um. the good news is we found your boyfriend. the bad news is that, well, we sort of…dug him up…in the middle of a car park. in leicester (buckley et al. 2013). leicester, yeah. sorry. they demolished the friary he was hastily interred in when henry viii dissolved all the monasteries. you know how it is. and as it turns out, well, shakespeare was…sort of right about him. scoliosis, yeah, sorry (appleby et al. 2014). if it makes you feel any better we analysed his bones and it turns out he had a pretty high-protein diet before he died (lamb et al. 2014). and he drank so much wine that it changed their chemical composition, which we didn't know could actually happen before we analysed him (lamb et al. 2014), so he was having a good time, at least.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Appleby, J., Mitchell, P.D., Robinson, C., Brough, A., Rutty, G., and Morgan, B. (2014). The scoliosis of Richard III, last Plantagenet King of England: diagnosis and clinical significance. Lancet 383, 1944.
Buckley, R., Morris, M., Appleby, J., King, T., O’Sullivan, D., and Foxhall, L. (2013). ‘The king in the car park’: new light on the death and burial of Richard III in the Grey Friars church, Leicester, in 1485. Antiquity 87, pp. 519-538.
Lamb, A.L., Evans, J.E., Buckley, R., and Appleby, J. (2014). Multi-isotope analysis demonstrates significant lifestyle changes in King Richard III. Journal of Archaeological Science 50, pp. 559-565.
This is amazing. If I'm reading this correctly, his consumption of wine increased so much that it changed his isotope signatures to the point that, normally, archaeologists would assume that he had changed his place of residence. Except that we know from historical records that he didn't.
That's got some interesting implications for the use of isotope analysis to show geographical movement during life.
this icon
I hate to disrespect the dead but I looked this up and
Fuckin mood
Furniture conservator Ben Bacon spent hours of his own time decoding cave paintings.
Fascinating.
A Snake Sculpture (6th-11th Century AD), from U Thong District in Thailand.
📸 Bangkok National Museum.
Pompeii, last excavations, May 2024, in Region IX. Sanctuary with blue walls. Photos by Pompeii Parco-Archeologico
all the photos of him are like this, I love that this guy understood he had been born with the face of a wizard or axe murderer and just leaned fully into it
he knew EXACTLY what he was doing
he got what he wanted
Also
