#prehistory

[thesilicontribesman]

Birkrigg Prehistoric Stone Circle, Birkrigg Common, nr. Bardsea, South Lakes

[pansylair]

Wishing much love, kindness, and a happy Gregorian New Year to all as we go into 2025 along with some more slice of life Neanderthal art! 💛💛💛 :-)

[hambonous]

Too Early

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

[random-thought-depository]

A day in 399,999 BCE is probably basically a day in the wilderness. I can certainly believe a day in 399,999 BCE would be the scariest and most unpleasant day of my life, I'm more skeptical of the proposition that it would be the busiest day of my life, maybe more to the point I think "busy" would likely not capture the ways it might suck.

Various scenarios:

- I am dumped into 399,999 BCE in just my street clothes with no knowledge of what is happening to me, no context. I likely spend the day assuming I'm having an unusually vivid dream (if I have a bad time in 399,999 BCE I likely spend a lot of the day trying to will myself to wake up).

- I'm dumped into 399,999 BCE in just my street clothes and you tell me and make me believe that I am actually in 399,999 BCE and I know I'm going back to the 2020s CE after one day. I think I would likely be not busy at all in this scenario! If I'm only there for a day I probably don't need to try to engage in subsistence activities, and trying to engage in subsistence activities while having no idea what I'm doing would likely increase my risk of injury and death instead of decreasing it!

Plausibly my day in 399,999 BCE in this scenario looks like: first I find a large tree I can climb; this will be my refuge if I'm attacked by a large animal. Then I try to find a clean-ish looking stream, so if I start to feel seriously dehydrated I know where I can find water. Then, I mostly try to stay close to my refuge tree. I sing and talk to myself and maybe pick up a fallen branch and swing it around or something; I figure this will make it less likely I will surprise a dangerous animal (e.g. rattlesnake) and make local predators less likely to recognize me as safe to eat. Maybe I feel brave enough to indulge curiosity and do a little exploring: this is actually kind of cool, I'm in the Pleistocene, I might get to see some cool extinct Pleistocene megafauna!

Plausibly I would have a very terrifying and miserable day: I might be exposed to life-threatening inclement weather, I might be attacked by a dangerous animal, etc.. But, being completely unskilled in wilderness survival, in such a scenario I would have so little agency I would likely be miserable but not busy, e.g. I might spend the whole day basically curled up in a ball hoping I don't die of hypothermia before the day is up because I have only the vaguest idea of how to build and start a fire without matches or a lighter and very little confidence in my ability to do so. And if I get attacked by a lion or something like that, it's probably going to be over pretty quickly one way or another.

If I feel very cold I might try climbing to a high place and see if I can see any camps or smoke from campfires (if I'm somewhere cold and it's 399,999 BCE they're probably Neanderthals or Denisovans), and if I do I'd consider approaching them and hoping they take pity on me. Though I'd hesitate to do that cause for all I know they might react to me approaching their camp by killing me cause I'm a stranger intruding into their territory or something like that instead.

Maybe I spend most of the day hot and miserable and thirsty and trying to find water, or maybe I spend most of the day making futile attempts to make damp wood catch fire by rubbing the end of a stick against it. So in some scenarios I would spend the day busy, for a certain definition of "busy." It's probably a minority of plausible scenarios in which that happens though, and I'd be busy mostly cause I suck at living outside modern civilization; a 399,999 BCE human who lived in that area would probably be well-acquainted with where to find water, know how to start a fire with the materials available to them, etc..

- I'm dumped into 399,999 BCE in just my street clothes and you tell me and make me believe that I am actually in 399,999 BCE and give me the impression that I'll be there for a couple of years. This is a scenario better suited to get me to actually do some work during my day in the far past! I would want to get a good start on my pathetic attempts to figure out how to survive in 399,999 BCE! Given how I usually work I'd probably like, do basically the same thing I did in the previous scenario and feel kind of bad about not doing more but think "well, at least now I know where to find water and am in the process of finding out whether it's safe to drink by experiment, that's not bad for day one," but being driven into a higher level of activity by a combination of fear and boredom in that situation is also consistent with the way I usually work. If I was lucky enough to have my cell phone with me, I might smash it with a rock to make some crude glass knives out of its shattered screen. I might look for a long straight-ish branch of soft wood and try to fashion it into a crude stabbing spear. I might make a probably futile attempt to build a fire just to get a start on the probably long process of figuring out how to do it (I have a vague idea you can do it by taking a stick, putting one end of it against a piece of wood, and rubbing the stick between your hands to generate friction; I might waste like three or five hours doing that without accomplishing anything). If I succeed in making a serviceable spear, I might make a half-hearted attempt to hunt an animal with it, mostly just to get a feel for how hard it'd be and what the challenges are. I might spend a while seeing if I could find any edible-looking berries or anything like that (though I probably wouldn't actually eat them at this point cause I have no idea how to tell poisonous plants from safely edible plants).

So I guess I might be pretty busy, but I suspect if this went on for more than a day this would before very long turn into either being substantially less busy as I slowly die or being substantially less busy once I've figured the basic stuff out or being substantially less busy as I survive at a very miserable level (living on raw meat and being chronically cold cause I can't figure out how to make a fire, don't know which plants have edible tubers and don't even dare eat the occasional berries and mushrooms I find cause I don't know which ones are poisonous, etc.). Again, the first and last thing would probably be quite miserable experiences, but I suspect they'd be more experiences of miserable idleness than miserable toil. Maybe eventually some early human group would notice me and take pity on me and adopt me.

Actually, that reminds me: one of the things I might do on the first day in this scenario: if the terrain looks familiar, I would want to know whether I have moved in location on Earth as well as time or put in the same location on Earth in a different time (presumably with a small adjustment so I don't fall five stories when my apartment building stops existing under my feet), so I might hike up what might be the Berkeley hills to see if I could recognize local landmarks that might plausibly have been there in 399,999 BCE. I'm too lazy to look up whether 399,999 BCE was during an ice age, if it was the sea level would be much lower so the bay might not be there, but I might be able to still e.g. recognize the profile of Mt. Tamalpais. This would matter if I expect to be in the Pleistocene long term, because if I'm in 399,999 BCE California I at least have some idea of what to expect in terms of the kind of weather I'll experience (though the climate was probably different back then) and 399,999 BCE is probably long before the arrival of humans in the Americas so if I'm in 399,999 BCE California I know I probably won't meet anyone else until/unless I get back to 2025 CE (unless I make a long and difficult journey to the Old World) and I'll probably be dealing with animals that have no habituation to humans.

- My mind trades places with a 399,999 BCE human's mind for a day, while I'm inhabiting the 399,999 BCE human's body I retain their knowledge of how to survive in the material conditions of 399,999 BCE, their knowledge of the language and social norms of their group, etc., I am given the impression I will be living like this for at least a few years to discourage me from just pretending to be sick for the day.

Well, what would be the normal daily tasks of a 399,999 BCE human?

- Foraging for food. I guess this might be time-consuming, but it seems likely kind of mostly low-intensity? Gathering is mostly kind of walking around while keeping an eye out for edible fruit, mushrooms, small animals to catch, etc., it'd be physically similar to the recreational walks I do for pleasure (though I expect having to do it all day as a survival activity might make it less pleasurable). Hunting is mostly looking for potential prey, tracking potential prey, etc., which seems kind of similar (though I guess having to be careful to avoid spooking the prey might be pretty stressful). I can fully believe that big game hunting in 399,999 BCE sucked; IIRC Neaderthal skeletons show a lot of what look like combat injuries from attacking big powerful megafauna with short-range weapons. That would suck in ways that are pretty orthogonal to drudgery though; it'd be a few minutes of terror every once in a while, not a long grind.

- Possibly keeping watch for and defending against predators - seems similar to early big game hunting in being a "long periods of low activity punctuated every once in a few by a few minutes of terror" thing.

- Maybe textile manufacture? There are popular posts on this site that talk about how time-consuming pre-industrial textile manufacture was! But 399,999 BCE is far enough in the past I don't think it's a foregone conclusion people back then even had textiles! This was before the out of Africa migration, so back then most of our ancestors were living in Africa, which is mostly warm enough that early humans there could probably have gotten by without clothing! I think the Neanderthals and Denisovans living in the colder parts of Eurasia would have needed at least crude furs though - how much labor do you need to make those?

- Stuff people in more-or-less every human society ever had to do; cooking/food preparation, child-care, etc.. This probably took a lot of time and energy, but then it takes a lot of time and energy in our society too.

- Manufacture of tools (spears, maybe baskets, bags, fishing nets, etc.). Don't really have any good sense of how much time this would take, but...

IIRC "hunter-gatherers are stuff-poor but liesure/play-rich" is a take that has actually been advanced by serious anthropologists. Yes, it's at least a controversial proposal and has been criticized and I don't know enough about the subject to have a firm opinion on it, but, like, this is not purely a take of random bloggers and is not obviously absurd on its face! And for what (little) it's worth it fits with how I think I might end up living (or slowly dying) if you put me in 399,999 BCE; I can easily imagine I'd have an awful time but I suspect it'd be largely an awful time of miserable relative idleness in which I'd have a very low (worst case scenario below subsistence) standard of living and lack the capability to improve it.

I find it quite plausible that "lived in miserable material poverty but didn't work very hard because they lacked the capability to escape their condition of poverty no matter how hard they worked so working hard was not worth it for them" was a very common condition in the past.

im just not convinced humans were ever meant to be this busy

[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.

[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/

[ouzel-time]

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

[ofruinsandmyth]

A 4,500-year-old highway network, lined with well-preserved ancient tombs, in Saudi Arabia .

[thesilicontribesman]

Yockenthwaite Bronze Age Kerbed Cairn, nr. Kettlewell, Yorkshire Dales

[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

[a-book-of-creatures]

Illustration of an ichthyosaur encountering a plesiosaur, from Figuier's La Terre Avant le Déluge (1865).

This image by Édouard Riou was impressive enough that it inspired the battle between the ichthyosaur and the plesiosaur in Jules Verne's Voyage Au Centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) (1867).

Better still, Édouard Riou did the art for that book.

And best of all, he drew the battle twice, once for the frontispiece and once for the actual part in the book.

They don't really do much in the book besides pop out of the water, startle our protagonists, and rip each other to shreds, but it's one of JTTCOTE's most iconic moments. Wouldn't you want to witness a battle to the death between antediluvian marine titans on a vast sea in the center of the earth?

[memories-of-ancients]

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

from The University of Arkansas

[dieletztepanzerhexe]

Nordiskt Amatörarkeologiskt Utgrävningsläger 2024 Åland, Geta 

Excavation of a stone-age dwelling site

[bigsoggyballs]

VERGE OF THE WIDER SEA -

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

[old art]