Archaeologists Are Reconstructing the 'Invisible' Technologies of the Stone Age
smithsonianmag.com88 points by Hooke a day ago
88 points by Hooke a day ago
There is a great quote:
"The Egyptians built using stone but wrote day to day on papyrus.
The Sumerians built with mud and wrote on clay tablets.
This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians."
Future archaeologists will be so confused when they find only glass and (maybe, if the wildlife doesn't finish eating it by then) plastic.
And lots of small rectangular silicon dioxide thingies.
They won’t find anything because it’ll have rusted and disintegrated within a few hundred years
These were a symbol of status and served a ritual purpose.
In some circles they are. You think all the fancy RGB stuff and fancy lights to call attention to the gamers' PCs are about functionality? Or maybe are they about status?
Tools or and goods often serve as both status symbols and functionality.
Do you think fancy cars are just about transport? Or maybe they also serve as status symbols?
Do you think the special sword for the king which he uses to knight people is just a tool of war? Seems to me that its all three tbh.
All sorts of things in our lives are both functional and status symbols and/or serve a ritual purpose.
Heck there are all sorts of things that are not really functional any more but were very functional at one point and still serve as status symbols and ritual purpose, for example - the traditional gift of a fancy fountain pen to a recent law school graduate.
> This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians.
Well, we have a lot of Mesopotamian writing. Nothing like the amount they wrote, but more than we want to deal with. Most of their writing sank into the water table and dissolved, like the buildings.
Papyrus isn't a reason for any lack of Egyptian writing; just like everything else, papyrus won't rot in Egypt because of the lack of water.
There is enough humidity around the Nile, that is, the places where people actually lived, to rot papyrus. We have some remaining papyrus archives, but those are exceptions, not the rule. There is absolutely nothing like the library of Ashurbanibal.
Papyrus was amazing material for the time, but it was also a curse on future archeologists. The Achaemenid Persians went from being illiterate, to writing on clay, to capturing Egypt and writing on Papyrus, in one human lifetime. We have more surviving Persian writing from the short time they wrote on clay than we have of the two hundred years of their history after that.
UV and oxygen are plenty strong enough to deteriorate paper over time even without water. Never mind the occasional fire as what happened with the Library of Alexandria.
I had one of the best sleeps of my life on a bed of soft sand, in the curve of a dry creek that I really should not have slept in due to flash flood risk. Since then I've wondered if ancient people might have made mattresses of sand, but they were so simple and evanescent that they left no trace.
Accounts by westerners enslaved by nomadic tribes (when they shipwrecked on the coast) often talk about looking for sand to sleep on, especially when in the rocky parts of the Sahara, so I’d wager humans have been sleeping on sand for a very long time.
Sand is a pretty good heat conductor. It’d probably be ok on hot nights, but not so much in winter.
it's a good thermal insulator! next time you are at the beach with hot sand, try digging down a few cm with your toes.
Good thing you can just cover it with a blanket or something in winter
You need more insulation than you'd expect. The coldest campsites I've ever had have all been on sand.
Since we're talking about stone age tech, would mammoth pelt offer good insulation?
Possibly - but if they transported the sand to where they slept very often, that would show up in archeological digs.
Related: "Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age (knowablemagazine.org)" 11.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662246 57 comments
It would be in fact quite amusing if the technology the Neolithians were actually most proud of had nothing to do with stone, just didn’t last. Better fabrics? Waterproof clothing? Elaborate wooden tools made using “dumb” stone ones?
Y’all might enjoy Virginia Postrel’s _The Fabric of Civilization_ , which mostly covers the last few thousand years.
Rope is one thing that I wonder how to make from scratch if you'd be dropped somewhere in nature. I know it's about weaving plant fibers, but, how can it get so long?
When I was 5 I watched my grandmother making yarn using a foot-powered castle wheel. The machine rotates a string of yarn along its long axis and it collects fibers from a piece of loose wool (roving) thus extending itself. I think I've seen a drop spindle too, but I'm less certain about that.
Same way you weave together yarn. The individual fibers bind together with weaving and friction and form a longer chain.
I've wondered the same thing. The fibers aren't that long.
The fibers don't need to be long. About 1 inch is enough for any purpose. The trick is to twist each fiber individually in one direction (fe. clockwise) while twisting them around each other in the opposite direction (fe. counter-clockwise). This creates internal tension that makes the fibers push against each other with substantial force, creating sufficient internal friction for them to bind against each other. And now you have string, and you again switch twist direction to bind multiple strings together to make thicker string, a switch again to bind multiple of those together, etc, until you get to proper rope thickness, which is basically always substantially thicker than the length of the fibers that make it.
It's a bit magical when you figure out how to do it, it doesn't seem to make any sense yet it works.
It’s the trick where people would take two phone books and if you interleave every page you can literally have two cars going each direction and can’t rip them apart. Ropes are this on a smaller scale.
You take short fibers, and twist and splice them together to get longer fibers. And you repeat until you get the desired length, or thickness...
Lots of videos of how to make it on the Internets using nettle, or some other plant (flax is still used to make clothes today though through industry methods).
We made rope in boy scouts. You just need to braid three strings and you can splice in broken bits pretty easily. You can also work out kinks with just regular straight sticks and it only takes two people. The theory that these batons were for rope seems unlikely in that regard. Apparently the leading hypothesis is for spear throwing.
They could have explained that the fancy word Lochstab just means hole rod in German
Typically called a "perforated baton" in English. The theory of rope twisting is also not widely accepted. It's possible but it's an overly complex device given that you can twist a rope with regular sticks. These guys have contributed to the debate but it's absolutely not settled. They've also discovered hundreds of these across Europe.
If you've never watched Clickspring's Youtube videos you're in for a treat.
He has a long-running series where he works to make a new Antikythera mechanism using ancient (bronze age) technologies. He's a master machinist, so he has fabulous insight into workholding, precision, etc. https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4...
His skeleton clock build is one of my favorite pieces of internet content ever, up there with Bartoz's gorgeous webpages: https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/
I'm a big fan of Clickspring. One really interesting aspect of his Antikythera mechanism videos is that, along with constructing the mechanism itself, he is using the physical details of the recovered artifact to make educated guesses about what sorts of workshop technology were available in the eastern Mediterranean world at that time. Including fairly in-the-weeds stuff like entire videos on what sorts of materials a craftsman of that era might have used to lay out marking lines on workpieces or how one might've soldered two metal pieces together.
omg, thank you SO much for the rec on clickspring's antikythera mechanism! i watched the first two episodes years ago and the algorithm never brought the channel back to my feed. now i'm subscribed and will have to watch this again.
i was also lucky enough to visit athens years ago and see the mechanism in person at the national archaeological museum... it's an amazing exhibit, and if you're ever in that neck of the woods i cannot recommend it any more. :)
My only complaint with Clickspring is that it takes so long. I feel like it has been 10 years at this point since he started the Antikythera mechanism build, but I could be wrong.
And when they say 'Stone Age' they mean 'for most of our time on earth'
The rope-making video clip is very cool. Sounds plausible.
Stefan Milo did a long one on these objects:
https://youtu.be/Q8X9l42ZgsU?is=hW5M_JXqsPtiuHVk
Rope making is possible but not really likely.
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Let me guess, it's the boring stuff.