#prehistory

[cat-appreciator]

Does anyone know where this Neolithic hedgehog is from?

[thesilicontribesman]

Tealing Iron Age Earth House, nr. Dundee, Angus, Scotland

[siliconpoems]

One of the most interesting finds found at the Star Carr Mesolithic site is that of the completely intact digging stick. A complete tool for unearthing edible roots and tubers; they are still used in parts of the world today.

'Digging Stick' Poem by The Silicon Tribesman. All Rights Reserved, 2025. Repost only with credits.

Part of the forthcoming 'Star Carr: Selected Poems' chapbook release in April 2025.

[amogii]

First time I draw in a while. So here, have this

[contremineur]

Clovis point (chert, 12th century BC or later) from southern Illinois

from here

[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...

[chestnutroan]

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

[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.

[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

[prinnay]

field reporter

[wayward-delver]

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

[thesilicontribesman]

Tomnaverie Neolithic Recumbent Stone Circle, nr. Tarland, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

[siliconpoems]

At Star Carr Mesolithic site, several lakeside wooden platforms were constructed for an unknown purpose; potentially for the launching of boats or to gain access to the water as the site changed and silted up slowly with mud over time. The platforms required the felling of a large number of trees and extensive construction.

'Water's Edge' Poem by The Silicon Tribesman. All Rights Reserved, 2025. Repost only with credits.

Part of the forthcoming 'Star Carr: Selected Poems' chapbook release in April 2025.

[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!