#people have always been people

[yeoldenews]

A selection of emojis from a love letter written in 1916.

The final one appears to have been the author's favorite as he wrote: "I'm particularly proud of this one - It looks so natural. Bless its 'ittle 'eart-"

[chaotic-archaeologist]

People have always been people, and we are closer to our ancestors than we think.

Im actually gonna cry

[marlynnofmany]

Has Tumblr met Buddo yet?

A little friend-shaped friend made of whale bone, from back in woolly mammoth times.

[qqueenofhades]

[c-is-for-circinate]

"Medieval people did this," "medieval people were like that" my dude there are people twenty miles away from me right now who would fight a man over regional differences in what we call water fountains, and we have the internet. You think a bunch of humans whose only contact with their neighbors three hundred miles up the road was some guy who took four weeks to get there on horseback plus also The Church (noted expert in all things that people do and like in every era, never argues with itself), all agree on how to take a bath or cook a turkey just because they happened to live in the same century? If my grandmother knew how some of my friends cook pasta she'd have a stroke. Please.

[arctic-hands]

I need to do a deeper dive bc MiniMinuteMan himself would be the first to tell you that you shouldn't blindly trust archeological and anthropological videos posted to youtube (or worse, tiktok), but his recent video on the "Green Sahara" period, where 8 thousand years ago the Kiffian culture lived in what was a lush savanah and they painted pictures in caves of people swimming in the lakes that had formed then and there were pictures and evidence of all the animals who also lived there at the time and they had a cemetery where they buried people with honors

And then when the Sahara dried out for a time and the Kiffian people left two thousand years later there was water in the desert again and the Tenerian culture came in and lived where the Kiffian people had lived and the Tenerian people had jewelery made from the bones of animals that had come back and they were also swimming in the lakes and they buried their people in the same Kiffian cemetery and they buried a mother and two children together so they were hugging each other eternal and they were buried with flowers that could only have come from the mountains so someone climbed those mountains so they could bury their people on a bed of flowers and

[Image Description: the meme of the doodle cat on its hind legs bracing itself against a wall, crying and saying "wait. Hold on a minute. I think I need a moment wait. Wait, wait. Hold on. I need a moment. I need to sit down I think wait. Wait. Old honh [sic], wait, please I am breaking down. Hold on wai" End I.D]

[ashintheairlikesnow]

In the ruins of Pompeii, there is a room inside a house where two men were painting on the day Mt. Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.

The master painter was at work on the fresco itself, twining vines in green, men and women looking out of the image to one side. His partner, probably an apprentice or lesser, younger painter, was laying down fresh plaster nearby. We know it was fresh because the pumice left significant pockmarks in it as it dried that we can still see today.

There are holes where a shelf stood holding the different colors of paint, in the wall just below the unfinished fresco. We found jars of paint on the floor - red green blue white yellow black. We found his tools, the brushes and the pot of lime that kept the paint wet.

He spilled lime on the painting.

We can tell that, too. It is caked clear as day over the unfinished work.

In a documentary I am watching, an Italian anthropologist discussing the moment of eruption looks to the cameraman and says, with real sincerity, "We found their tools, but we didn't find them. We hope that they ran away, that they survived."

Next door, a baker left his livestock behind when he fled. We found the skeletal remains of the animals who helped to move the millstone, but we did not find the baker.

Not that we are certain of, anyway.

I just wanted to take a moment to think about a modern Italian anthropologist looking at unfinished paintings and bread turned to stone by ash and time, hoping to himself that those people made it out in time.

We are separated by almost two thousand years, but we still have empathy for lives facing terror beyond their understanding. We still hope against hope that two painters ran out of town and made a new life somewhere else, that they escaped before the final pyroclastic flows descended.

We hope the baker moved to another town.

We recognize ourselves in what was left behind, and hope that these people - who could have been us, but for a trick of time and place - had a fighting chance to survive.

I just.

Sometimes, I love people.

I love us.

[natjennie]

just. the way that ghosts so thoroughly shows that people have always been people. they've always been a little bit messy and a little bit silly and they get mad and they laugh and they learn and they grow and they have forever and will continue to forever. and then when you consider the queer aspect of like. gay people have always been here. robin slept with anyone he wanted to and they raised children as a community. fanny's husband was gay in the 1800s. the captain was gay in 1945. sam and clare had their wedding at button house in the 2020s. people have always been here and sometimes they're gay and sometimes they fight and sometimes they grieve and sometimes they love and sometimes they're mean and sometimes they're kind and they apologize and they play games and they organize clubs and they play pretend and they cry and they live. they're dead but they live. they live.

[drac-kool-aid]

Y'know what's striking about the Demeter section? The first mate.

Specifically, that his first and foremost reaction to the crew's fear is violence. He wants the crew to stop acting afraid, stop bringing up their fears, he assures the captain nothing is wrong and through out it all he threatens the crew with physical assault in effort to basically get them to shut up.

He threatens them with a handpike AFTER a crew member has disappeared, and the captain has shown he is willing to conduct a search for a stowaway.

Idk, it just gets me that we have someone who, when faced with mounting evidence that something is going very, very wrong, to the point of danger to the rest of the crew and himself, threatens disproportionate bodily harm for the mere mention that something is frightening people, and whose ultimate goal is to get everyone to ignore the problem and stop talking about it.

Anyway....bit of plague metaphor this ship...but of course, it's just a metaphor....

[variousqueerthings]

youknow, i think about trans people with supportive families when these concepts were framed differently

dr james barry's mother knew and supported him going to medical school, alongside various mentors

jackie shane's mother and grandmother supported her being openly femme and her initially more private womanhood

lou sullivan's family supported his transition and gifted him a suit and his grandfather's pocket watch

there's so many examples (both of well-known trans people and personal testimony) of non-conformity and transitioning being something that families got behind in the past, both before and during the coining of trans terminology (which often wasn't known by these family members regardless)

[chocoholicbec]

#I love it when people say exactly where they are and what they are seeing/hearing/feeling as they are writing#it really feels like the closest you can get to time travel - @yeoldenews' tags

"I am writing at the desk in Mr. Wheeler's den and I can see Guy mowing the lawn out in front. His mustache is wildly blowing about in the breeze, in the old familiar fashion - the dear man."

-Nell to Will, May 14, 1900.

[atasteforblood]

"The urge to reproduce, once inextricably linked to sex, may have a connection to a neurotic fantasy of cheating death by creating an enduring legacy.

You can test the primal strength of this culture idea by noting how no one questions the rationality of reproduction, even in a world of rapidly dwindling resources.

Meanwhile, people who choose not to have children often receive both religious and secular disdain as selfish, breakers of an unspoken social contract, or simply odd."

Quote from the book Wasteland by W. Scott Poole

[a-kind-of-merry-war]

Time to show off one of my favourite vintage postcards. This is from the early 1900s, and what I like about this one is the message. It says...

Dear Edith. “Ain't you well”. Swanky (?) I am. Thank goodness. Quite well. If I was a lady, you would not catch me napping, for I should want all the boys who ever came asnatching. And I should use them like little children when they have new toys. [Ah] dear, I wish I was a little girl instead of a little boy. Dear Edie, see on my last [postcard] there was something that you did not fulfil. I ain't greedy but like a lot “practice what you preach” in kisses, so there’s one here xxx, and one there xxx. Yours, Bob [surname]

I mean, it's pretty obvious why I'm so fond of this. I'd love to know what happened to Bob.

[qqueenofhades]

In the middle of the third millennium BCE, schools of writing known as edubba sprang up across Southern Mesopotamia. Aspiring government or temple scribes copied and memorized phrases and names of trees, animals, countries, cities, villages, stones, and minerals. They wrote essays describing their daily routine. "I recited my tablet, ate my lunch, prepared my new tablet," declared one fragment from about 2000 BCE, by which point the pictograms had assumed a distinctly wedge-like shape. "When school was dismissed, I went home... I told my father of my written work, then recited my tablet to him, and my father was delighted."

- The Mesopotamian Riddle by Joshua Hammer (x)

[carolinawrenn]

In medieval England, infants and young children were often buried in a particular part of the churchyard, so close to the church itself that the rain falling on the church roof would have dripped off onto their graves. As best anyone can figure, the idea is that after falling onto a consecrated building, the rain would have become holy water and blessed the souls of these babies. You'll sometimes come across the idea that because of high mortality rates, parents in the past didn't care about their children like we do. But you can't tell me that people who took the care to perform these eaves-drip burials didn't love their little ones.

[intothestacks]

Mesopotamian teen angst

Evidence that teenagers have always been teenagers: a letter from a teen complaining to his mom that she doesn't love him because she won't make him two new sets of clothes with good fabric like his friend's mom made for his friend.

Basically the Mesopotamian equivalent of "If you loved me you'd get me brand name clothes!"