When stone tools were considered lightning remnants – and weapons of the gods
www.theguardian.com
Neolithic stone axes were known as thunderstones and thought to have magical powers
      • Transporter Room 3@startrek.websiteEnglish
        552·
        8 months ago

        I love listening to researchers talk about places like Ur and Karahan Tepe and all the things we know about in between.

        What I don’t love is the very clear tendency to believe that people 10,000 years ago had the mental capacity of a frog.

        No, I don’t think the pit-like dwellings that don’t have roofs were proof they were savages who lived under the open sky, I think in the TEN THOUSAND YEARS SINCE THEN the roof disintegrated. It’s not a hard concept to put something over your head to stay out of the rain.

        It IS however, hard to make a roof out of mud unless you know where to get special mud and how to cook it. They would have to use branches, leaves and long grasses to keep rain off, which definitely wouldn’t survive 10 millennia.

        So DID they have roofs? No idea, but trying to point at lack of roofs as “proof” of anything is kind of dumb.

        Respect for the ones that straight up say “we don’t know but it’s speculated that…” though

        Also it’s disgusting to me how many times I’ve seen “because the people who found the artifact thought it was heretical/sacreligious/proves their religion wrong they destroyed most of it”

    • niktemadur@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      8 months ago

      On a cultural television channel from Mexico, there was a weekly recurring host panel of five or six academics in different fields, all with their PhDs in literature, linguistics, history, political science, etc. La Dichosa Palabra (The Blessed Word) was the name of the show.

      Anyway, one of the panelists always seemed to trace the etymology of every word to the name of such-and-such goddess from antiquity.

      One or two times, ok sure, you get dazzled by the erudition. But when it happens over and over and over again with any word no matter how seemingly trivial, it all acquires a strong whiff of confirmation bias bullshit with nobody to call him out on it.