#prehistory

[thesilicontribesman]

Clevedon Iron Age Gold Torc, Clevedon, Somerset 250-75BCE, The British Museum, London

Hollow, decorated torc terminal and twisted wires from a multi- strand torc. Found in the 19th century, these may be parts of the same torc.

The terminal is ornamented with raised crescents and pellets, defined by areas of basket-weave pattern, similar to the Sedgeford and Snettisham gold torcs.

[chestnutroan]

Homo Sapiens boy together again with his Neanderthal girl on the first warm day of Spring

[hambonous]

Too Early

I wonder if our ancestors ever had artistic doubts...

[river-taxbird]

The most common mistake people make when thinking about prehistory and how to avoid it.

In "The Dawn of Everything, A New History for Humanity" David Graeber gives what I think might be the best piece of advice I've ever heard for understanding deep human history, and that is to get your mind out of the Garden of Eden.

People speculating about prehistory before modern archeology were quick to frame early humanity as existing in a "state of nature", either with pure innocent tribal communism, or being brutish barbarous cavemen, then something happened to bring us from the state of nature into "society". Did we make a Faustian bargain by domesticating plants and animals? Why is evidence of intergroup violence in prehistory so rare? How did we fall from the innocent state of nature? This, of course, smacks of the biblical creation story, so even if people don't believe it literally, they seem to have a hard time letting go of it spiritually even in a secular context.

This is pretty much nonsense, of course. Humans have existed for over 2 million years. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 300 thousand years. Behaviourally modern humans (with symbolism, art, long distance trade, political awareness) have existed for at least 50 thousand years, from our best evidence, but possibly a lot longer. The time between the Sumerians inventing writing and urban living 5,000 years ago and now is only a narrow slice of human history.

If we want to understand human history properly, we shouldn't understand people of the past as fundamentally different from us. They were intelligent, politically aware people doing their best in the world they found themselves in, just like we are today. We didn't fall from innocence with the development of behavioral modernity, religion, farming, war, money, capitalism, computers, or anything else. The world has changed a lot, but people have been experimenting with different ways to live for as long as there have been people, like this example I've posted before about disabled people's role in late pleistocene Eurasian society.

People have been the same as we are now for at least the last 50 thousand years. We have lived in countless different ways and will continue to experiment. There was no fall, and we don't live at the end of history.

[prinnay]

field reporter

[wayward-delver]

Prehistoric Planet finally gives us the True Rival to the Tyrant Lizard King and it's NOT a Dinosaur.

[ouzel-time]

Just a reminder that while prehistoric fish are cool, there are plenty of neat babies still around!

[museum-of-artifacts]

The Utroba Cave, in Bulgaria, is a natural horizontal fissure in a rock that has been further cut and shaped by human hands more than 3000 years ago to resemble a womb. At midday, light seeps into the cave through an opening in the ceiling, projecting an image of a phallus on to the floor

More: https://thetravelbible.com/top-artifacts-from-the-stone-age/

[sapphicautistic]

In the 1980s in France, musicologists and archaeologists Iégor Reznikoff and Michel Dauvois used their voices to explore caves with notable Paleolithic wall paintings. By singing simple notes and whistling, they mapped their perceptions of the caves’ acoustics. They found that paintings were often located in places that were particularly resonant. Animal paintings were common in resonant chambers and in places along the walls that produced strong reverberation. As they crawled through narrow tunnels, they discovered painted red dots exactly located in the most resonant places. The entrances to these tunnels were also marked with paintings. Resonant recesses in walls were especially heavily ornamented.

In a 2017 study, a dozen acousticians, archaeologists, and musicians measured the sonic qualities of cave interiors in northern Spain. The team, led by acoustic scientist Bruno Fazenda, used speakers, computers, and microphone arrays to measure the behavior of precisely calibrated tones within the cave. The caves they studied contain wall art spanning much of the Paleolithic, dating from about forty thousand years to fifteen thousand years ago. The art includes handprints, abstract points and lines, and a bestiary of Paleolithic animals including birds, fish, horses, bovids, reindeer, bear, ibex, cetaceans, and humanlike figures. From hundreds of standardized measurements, the team found that painted red dots and lines, the oldest wall markings, are associated with parts of the cave where low frequencies resonate and sonic clarity is high due to modest reverberation. These would have been excellent places for speech and more complex forms of music, not muddied by excessive reverberation. Animal paintings and handprints were also likely to be in places where clarity is high and overall reverberation is low but with a good low-frequency response. These are the qualities that we seek now in modern performance spaces.

Sounds Wild and Broken, David George Haskell

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

I Love Prehistoric Ecosystems So Much

yeah individual taxa are cool and everything but no species is an island. What did it live with? What did it eat, what ate it? Did it have "friends" (term used loosely)? What was the environment like, where did they get water, what was the climate?

Tell me the whole story

Tell me how they lived

[bigsoggyballs]

VERGE OF THE WIDER SEA -

My Paleolithic character Nisse at the edge of the western ocean.

[old art]

[thesilicontribesman]

The Battersea Shield Found in the River Thames at Battersea Bridge, Around 350-50 BCE, The British Museum, London

The Battersea shield is one of the finest examples of La Tene, or Celtic art, from Britain. It was likely a votive offering to the Gods.

[teethands]

prehistoric tarot - the emperor / the empress

[knarme-art]

Another commission done, for Zapsalight on Twitter! My commissions are open.

[memories-of-ancients]

Quartz crystal clovis point found in the Ouachita Mountains, Arkansas, 14,000 - 10,000 years old

from The University of Arkansas

[knuppitalism-with-ue]

Oof, took some time to label these and touch up some rough spots. But here it is, the Mazon Creek #paleostream piece. This was, again, a piece that barely scratches the surface.

Mazon is a Carboniferous Lagerstätte and preserves hundreds of species, one could fill whole books with scenes like these. Biggest challenge was that we have two distinct faunas, the marine Essex biota and the terrestrial Braidwood biota. Some marine animals might be able to venture into freshwater but usually the two don't mix much so I had to find a way to transplant a piece of fauna into the other. We settled on a natural raft, the likes we still see today.

After storms or floods, mats of vegetation can drift out to sea and carry with them whole communities of organisms. On the other hand driftwood is often used by marine animals as shelter so from both sides we have reasons for animals to be here. As you can see in this size chart by Discord member JW, there is much more one could have added.

But I leave that part to YOU if you are inclined to pick up where I left off ;)