When stone tools were considered lightning remnants – and weapons of the gods
www.theguardian.com
Neolithic stone axes were known as thunderstones and thought to have magical powers
  • rockerface 🇺🇦@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    6 months ago

    It’s amazing to put into perspective how long both bronze and stone ages really took, especially compared to modernity. Human brains are not good at imagining large quantities or intervals, so it was all kinda smushed up into a folder labeled “past” in my head

    • ConfusedPossum@kbin.social
      0·
      6 months ago

      Kurzgesagt did this video where they crammed all of Earth’s history in an hour. Basically you look at a barren wasteland for most of the time until life finally goes macroscopic and then all of humanity happens in less than a second

      I sat through the whole thing and it’s still incomprehensible

      • samus12345@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        It’s gotten so fast that we now see significant changes in our lifetimes - cultural, technology, climate. For most of human history, it took many generations for any real change to occur.

        Japan might be the record holder for fastest significant change, though. Feudalism to a modern industrial economy in a few decades.

    • ogeist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 months ago

      To give some numbers, the last period of the stone age (Neolithic) lasted around 2000 years and the bronze age around 1600 years. No wonder they “forgot” what the stone age tools were.

      • Transporter Room 3@startrek.websiteEnglish
        0·
        6 months ago

        I love listening to researchers talk about places like Ur and Karahan Tepe and all the things we know about in between.

        What I don’t love is the very clear tendency to believe that people 10,000 years ago had the mental capacity of a frog.

        No, I don’t think the pit-like dwellings that don’t have roofs were proof they were savages who lived under the open sky, I think in the TEN THOUSAND YEARS SINCE THEN the roof disintegrated. It’s not a hard concept to put something over your head to stay out of the rain.

        It IS however, hard to make a roof out of mud unless you know where to get special mud and how to cook it. They would have to use branches, leaves and long grasses to keep rain off, which definitely wouldn’t survive 10 millennia.

        So DID they have roofs? No idea, but trying to point at lack of roofs as “proof” of anything is kind of dumb.

        Respect for the ones that straight up say “we don’t know but it’s speculated that…” though

        Also it’s disgusting to me how many times I’ve seen “because the people who found the artifact thought it was heretical/sacreligious/proves their religion wrong they destroyed most of it”