Also mistaken for fulgurite by the more naturalistically minded, apparently. Maybe most common in the Nordics, based on viking references?
Additional links:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/100810-thor-thors-hammer-viking-graves-thunderstones-science
https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukonvaaja [Finnish]
It’s amazing to put into perspective how long both bronze and stone ages really took, especially compared to modernity. Human brains are not good at imagining large quantities or intervals, so it was all kinda smushed up into a folder labeled “past” in my head
Kurzgesagt did this video where they crammed all of Earth’s history in an hour. Basically you look at a barren wasteland for most of the time until life finally goes macroscopic and then all of humanity happens in less than a second
I sat through the whole thing and it’s still incomprehensible
Not surprised, oral history…
Being able to write things down has to be one of the more important inventions.
I seriously suspect if dolphins and whales, ways of storing information they might be more intelligent than us.
Agreed fish and climbing trees and what not
Looks suspiciously phallic? Ritual of fertility it is
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”
Pretty sure they had roofs some 10k years ago.
The oldest evidence of structures is from 476 000 years ago.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/zambia-worlds-oldest-wooden-structure-2367672
Everyone should read Motel of the Mysteries.
A lot of these hand axes may have had some kind of not-strictly-functional purpose during their heydey in the stone ages as well. Heaps of them show no evidence of wear or use and are noticably gorgeous - just really pleasingly shaped.
Kind of like modern pickup trucks? Some get actual use, many more are just pretty and for the illusion of usefulness.
Kind of like modern pickup trucks
Except nice to look at, yep!
Pick ups seem like a great example because they are so often a status/identify token.
I also don’t find them particularly good looking, but their owners sure do!
I like identity token for trucks that never see truck use.
