Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them.
“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”
“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”
It’s just.
50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.
i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok
One of my professors often tells us about a time he, as and Egyptian Archaeologist, came down upon a ring of bricks one brick high. In the middle of a house. He and his fellow researchers could not fpr the life of them figure out what tf it could possibly have been for. Until he decided to as a laborer, who doesnt even speak English, what it was. The guy gestures for my prof to follow him, and shows him the same ring of bricks in a nearby modern house. Said ring is filled with baby chicks, while momma hen is out in the yard having a snack. The chicks can’t get over the single brick, but mom can step right over. Over 2000 years and their still corraling chicks with brick circles. If it aint broke, dont fix it and always ask the locals.
I read something a while back about how pre-columbian Americans had obsidian blades they stored in the rafters of their houses. The archaeologists who discovered them came to the conclusion that the primitive civilizations believed keeping them closer to the sun would keep the blades sharper.
Then a mother looked at their findings and said “yeah, they stored their knives in the rafters to keep them out of reach of the children.”
Omg the ancient child proofing add on tho lol
I remember years ago on a forum (email list, that’s how old) a woman talking about going to a museum, and seeing among the women’s household objects a number of fired clay items referred to as “prayer objects”. (Apparently this sort of labeling is not uncommon when you have something that every house has and appears to be important, but no-one knows what it is.) She found a docent and said, “Excuse me, but I think those are drop spindles.” “Why would you think that, ma’am?” “Because they look just like the ones my husband makes for me. See?” They got all excited, took tons of pictures and video of her spinning with her spindle. When she was back in the area a few years later, they were still on display, but labeled as drop spindles.
So ancient Roman statues have some really weird hairstyles. Archaeologists just couldn’t figure them out. They didn’t have hairspray or modern hair bands, or elastic at all, but some of these things defied gravity better than Marge Simpson’s beehive.
Eventually they decided, wigs. Must be wigs. Or maybe hats. Definitely not real hair.
A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”
“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”
So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.
She now works as a hair archaeologist and I believe she has a YouTube channel now where she recreates forgotten hairstyles, using only what they had available at the time.
And the research she did got published in the Journal of Roman Studies (which is a big deal in the Classics world) “even though” she doesn’t have at least a Masters degree in the field.
[To give reference to the gate keeping in this field, she was, I think, only the second or so person without a PhD to be published in the history of the Journal]
But that’s the point, she knew hair and she knew her craft so well that when scholars had ridiculous theories and scoffed at her own, she went ahead and experimented and proved her theories right.
the only two ways i can categorize height is if i see something tall i go 'woah, big boy man' and if i see something short i go 'hah.. baby man' and idk what to blame for this. anyway wanna hear about the times ghosts have touched my ass
Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”
Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).
So unicorns are real
behold… a unicorn
I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED to find out this is, in fact, the case.
Questing Beast
- Neck of a snake
- body of a leopard
- haunches of a lion
- feet off a hart (deer)
So is it
Or….
don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?
these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.
In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?
And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!
Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another
It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.
And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!
By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?
Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called
شیردال (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:
This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.
Also many deagon legends are simply exaggerations of well-known living reptiles like snakes and crocodilians.a
It also explains why dragons can look so different in the myths of the various regions.
In asia, Dragons tend to look very long and snake like:
One of the most common dinosaurs that used to like in the asia region, so would have been the most common fossils found by people:
The Mamenchisaurus, this thing is just all neck and tail! You find just half a fossilised skeleton of this monster, you can easily end up thinking of a long snake-like beast.
South America also has legends snake-like dragons among some of its peoples:
What fossils from pre-historic south America could be found?
The Titanoboa, which can easily grow to be 40 feet long.
What fossils could have been found in that region:
Pterosaur, and Triceratops. Features of both sets of skeletons could have been merged into one legendary creature.
Then we get our European style dragon:
One of the most common fossils that could have been found was a
Cetiosaurus
which, despite being a herbivore, looked to have a mouth of sharp looking teeth, consistant with a dragons.
Dragons amongst the peoples of Africa are even more varied, but most revolve around some kind of giant snake-like creature. As a quick example, we’ll take Dan Ayido Hwedo commonly found in West African mythology.
Fossils in that area could have been included the Aegyptosaurus:
A quick google search tells me that most Sauropods: well known for being long necked and long tailed, are found in Africa.
If you found only a half complete skeleton of this thing; which is likely, because it’s rare to find a complete dinosaur skeleton, you could easily think of a giant snake monster.
IIRC, another possible explanation for long snake-like dragons/sea serpents in Africa could’ve been Basilosaurus, a whale from the Paleogene whose skeleton looked like this:
A lot of the most complete specimens have been found in Egypt.
you know usually i don’t bring up once upon a time as a positive comparison to something but remember how they had an episode of cruella backstory and we thought for the entire runtime they were trying to redeem and explain her actions and then at the end they pulled the carpet out from under us and said “PSYCH, ALL OF THIS WAS A LIE FROM AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR, SHE’S JUST A BITCH WHO DOES WHAT SHE WANTS” because they somehow understood that some villains don’t need tragic pasts sometimes they’re just rich people?
cruella 2021: she’s just a repressed girlboss we swear :(
Cruella does not exist in a grey area of morality. She’s literally designed in black and white. She’s a straight up villain and I think that’s just neat.
Also, Twisted had an entire musical number about how all Disney villains were misunderstood heroes of their own story…
…except they’re still all appalled at Cruella.
Reblogging this for the Twisted reference because not only is Twisted my fave Starkid musical, but that song is my favorite song, partly because of the the beautifully sung/acted emotions of the song, mostly because of the villains all hating on Cruella.
I was out hiking where the trail ran alongside this river that was moving pretty fast, but a couple miles in it just disappeared.
The river was gone. It just stopped, like someone had snipped it in half and taken away the rest.
So I stopped and stared at it a while, trying to figure out what the heck was going on, because the water was flowing very rapidly, but the river had abruptly ended.
Finally, this old man in a pair of worn overalls stopped next to me to watch as well, before leaning over and asking
“First time seein’ it?”
I responded “yes”, and he continued:
“It goes underground here, pops back up some three miles west. Not the best swimmin’ spot, for obvious reasons, though that don’t stop people from tryin’.”
So I asked him what he meant and he said,
“Lots of dumb folk with no regard for God’s nature die out here every year. Scientists, usually.”
We talked a little more and eventually went our separate ways, but when I got home I decided to look in to what happens to the river when it plunges underground like that.
It turns out it submerges and travels through a complex cave system for a few miles, and millions of gallons of pressurized water travels through there each day.
It gets cooler though!
Apparently, when water levels were low enough during a drought, researchers were able to send divers and probes through the cave system and found both animal and human remains, some of which included mastodons, dire wolves, saber-toothed cats and more. The human remains date back to about 7500 BC.
Anyway, Florida is weird and we have deadly underground rivers filled with cool prehistoric animals I guess.
Okay so the absolute uncanniness of this video instilled such a terror in me no piece of horror media has ever done before to the point where by the end of it I genuinely thought I might throw up, and the lack of context really made it extra terrifying because in my shock I really couldn’t tell if the footage was real or not (the candid amateur-esque shooting is impeccable)
So I went ahead and dug up some information and this is actually a complication of clips from of a short (like 6 minute) film called The Centrifuge Brain Project that’s actually quite a humourous piece of surreal horror(??? I’m not sure what to call it really) in the form of a mockumentary. I highly recommend it.
As a personal side note I never considered “scientist-engineer with a questionable level of sanity designing horrifyingly dangerous pushing-the-boundaries-of-physics amusement park rides” was gonna end up on my list of Dateable Types but here we are
It’s wilder than that. You feel the temperature drop around you. Animals start to freak out cause they think night has fallen. Even more crazy is shadow snakes. Where you see the shadows around you start to shimmer. Kind of like the shadows of atmospheric disturbances you see during really hot days or near a fire.
My unga bunga ancestors, absolutely surrounded by shadow snakes during an eclipse
Also, the overall tone of the light is wrong and it’s almost impossible to articulate why.
It’s not dark per se, but the light doesn’t just seem dimmed, it seems like it’s in a different spectrum.
It feels like when a movie puts a filter over the film to indicate that something very very bad is happening, like an eldritch horror has arrived offscreen, and the bad light is slowly sucking your soul out of your body, only it’s real life, and the bad light permeates everywhere.
Do y'all remember the eclipse in 2017?? It was the first one I’ve ever seen, or at least been old enough to really experience, and it was fucking wild
