Some Stuff. @someshoes - Tumblr Blog

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.

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.”

“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.

skelenabones

given that i know a couple of the people involved in the 2013 paper that introduced this idea, i need to get at a part of this post. it’s using that old tumblr favorite narrative where dumb “scientists” are absolutely baffled by something until a smart person with practical skills (i.e., not like that worthless egghead academic knowledge) comes along and sets them straight, story implies the tool or practice is identical to exactly what we do now, etc. there are a couple of cases where that totally happened and was awesome (like that history of roman hair-dressing thing), but as far as i can tell or have heard no traditional leatherworkers were involved in this project. tools for working with leather, bone and otherwise, have been a part of archaeological collections spanning large chunks of human history - they didn’t need to show this tool to a leatherworker to recognize that, because some of the scientists involved are archaeologists and part of their goddamn life’s work is being able to recognize tools and what they are used for.

more than that, a post like this actually misses the actually cool take-away message from the paper. namely, that neanderthals are a whole different species from us and there is a decent chance that this kind of leather-working tool (and how knows how much leather-working technique) may have actually been created by another species and then passed over to us in a process of cross-species cultural transmission. when you pair that with the growing evidence for interbreeding and us receiving part of our genome from neanderthals, it builds a cool picture of late neanderthals and early humans co-existing and integrating.

worthikids

I’LL TAKE A HAMMER AND FIX THE BABY

thankyu

a clownboy (half clown, half cowboy) says yeehonk

foxy-mulder-deactivated20190929

this is it. the worst post i’ve ever seen. my own two eyes are cursed

halloween-trash

He having a splosh

tundrakatiebean

[captions]

Person filming: There - there’s a bigger one there, mate. Don’t want to ruin your day or nothing.

haiderabd51

meme-theft

targuzzler-deactivated20180224

hey everyone look its me the yelly conspiracy man lmao

targuzzler-deactivated20180224

i am a genuinely terrible person that has genuinely terrible beliefs but no one takes them seriously because im always yelling and being all weird lmao

targuzzler-deactivated20180224

like remember how i’m always going on about goblins and its so funny yeah that was actually just poorly-disguised anti-semitism but thats ok lol because everyones just thinking about the fantasy creature and not my belief that the jews are running the world and we should fear and revile them haha look at me im so dang funny because im so WEIRD lmaoooooooo