People slept on grass beds 200k years ago

In a sleeping bag. I just shook it out as usual before stuffing it.

I've napped on sand at the beach. Yes it gets everywhere. Then you shake it all off, or take a dip in the water.

Dude, you might be a lizard.

I have a ridiculously bad back (as does my father) and have developed a large variety of tricks to minimize pain. One is I sleep on a maximally firm futon. When I go on trips, if the bed I’m sleeping in is too soft, I lay a blanket on hard wood and sleep on it. I sleep very well this way. A slab of granite would be fine as a bed.

If I was ever put in a dungeon, at least I would sleep soundly on the concrete floor!

No! I love sleeping on hard flat surfaces!

Did you make your own bed?

I do not do it any more due to change in environment (my abode), but earlier once every few months, I would take a thin comforter below me, one thin comforter above me, and all that on the carpeted floor. Any time I had a back pain, I knew this was the way to fix it.

Also, my mattresses used to be firm. Somehow my last 2 mattresses have become saggy after just over a year. I dumped the first one, but now wondering what to do for the second one and with the covid situation and not everything open, I just have not had the time to chase things, and my mental estimate is that my body requires one hour less sleep (I am not pushing it, that's how it ends up) on a firm mattress.

My apologies for the following, but this is something I have never heard of. I have many questions

I tried googling but the beds seem to be stone but you then place a mattress on.

Doesn't it hurt your bones when you wake up in the morning? How long have you slept on it? Is it in a frame or straight on the floor? Is your floor specially supported or is it thin like a kitchen bench top?

Be sure to factor in the cost of a cat-proof fence or your sandbox will become disgusting place pretty quickly.

I would love to hear the story behind this.

Oh dear... I'm twitching

Welp, down I go the rabbit hole of looking for how one might guess the speed of a runner from foot prints

Or he was hunting, and something was really scared by him.

One idea put forth in Civilized to Death is that this sentiment is a mis-meme stemming from the common knowledge that average life spans have increased in modern times.

That while, sure, the average has gone up, this is primarily due to decreases in infant mortality rates. So there’s a plethora of zeros skewing down the average for “back then”.

That is, if you survived through childhood back then, you’d likely expect to live just about as long as everyone today.

Imagine a life where you had to strenuously hunt for 30 hours a week and then partied for the rest of the time. It’d result in both a high level of physical fitness and be pretty pleasant. I don’t know if that’s an accurate description of their life, but it shows that the two terms aren’t contradictory.

You are not at a high fitness level without a decent food supply.

That is thriving, not simply surviving.

It takes a village. Back in those days, humans lived in tribes and worked together to survive. Parents also had a lot of children, most of which died.

It took a village ;-)

They didn’t live in isolation like Western societies do today.

My oldest took a lot of care and I was fairly cash strapped. He was constantly on my hip or strapped to my chest while I did things all day.

You can get a lot of menial labor done with an infant in tow while giving them attention.

Living in groups, and having more babies (i.e. child birth rates always drop when conditions in a country improve)

Also, prior to the evolution of language it would make sense for the children to be born a little more battle (still useless, but relative to what they will develop into) ready whereas a modern child is born requires some form of education be that in hunting or surgery.

Are you trying to achieve things more complex than pick nuts and berries up off the ground and eat them?

I’d imagine spacing of prints, how the foot engaged with the ground, depth of print, etc...

I assume it’s mainly first year calculus since the defining characteristic of running is that it’s repeated launching. Since the downward vector of gravity is a constant I’d imagine a foot to same foot distance is sufficient to solve for speed.

And this is just my first thought as a semi-educated layman. I have no doubt the experts who study these things think of and solve for many other factors. I may not be able to reproduce their work but I can judge it plausible.

We bought our batting from Shepherd's Dream [1], which looks like it also sells actual beds.

The blankets are just queen sized wool blankets that you can find various places.

We made our bed in the winter of 2013/2014. We used 5 wool blankets with a layer of "2yd extra thick wool batting" between each pair of blankets.

It starts out very thick, but compresses down to probably 2-3 inches thick over time.

We just made a set of similar beds for our three kids, but we used 3 yards of wool and a single queen sized wool blanket folded in half for the exterior.

I will see if I can get some pictures.

Happy to answer questions either here or at the email in my profile if people are interested.

[1] https://shepherdsdream.com/

Edit:

The blankets might actually be twin sized.

Their dimensions are very close to the footprint of a standard queen bed. So I think that means they are a size down since usually blankets will overhang the mattress.

A lot of hybrids also (springs with a foam topper). There is also latex spring.

My old internally sprung mattress did me great for years but finally sprang a spring and that was that.

Got a modern foam mattress as they were all the thing, a very well reviewed one, and regretted it ever since. It rapidly developed a sag under my quite moderate weight, and it keeps in heat rather well so in summer you cook. My advice is, don't. My next mattress will be the old fashioned sprung ones again. IME, YMMV.

Waterbeds have also been popular at various times. (I had one for a number of years but got rid of it after I moved into an old house.)

> Does it ever get to high 70s or more where you live?

We live in Iowa. A quick look at the weather suggests that the high for this week is 86F.

90s aren't uncommon during the summer.

It usually cools off fairly significantly at night.

We don't use our AC except on the very hottest four or five days of the year, and always open the windows back up after supper if we did use the AC that day.

Wool is basically a miracle material in my opinion. The bed doesn't get hot. If you put a wool blanket on top of you, yes you will get too hot. But if you sleep either without a blanket or with a thin cotton on, it's really not bad.

Part of it might be that we are stubborn and counter-cultural, but also it's just a really comfortable bed and you can adjust to heat much easier than people accustomed to AC assume.

it isn't really considered a skills, it is kind of in the air surrounding you. For example i didn't take nor toothpaste nor toothbrush - it isn't an omission nor i'm anti-hygienic - instead i used small fir sticks to chew and to pick between and clean the teeth - the resin has mild anti-microbial properties and have that nice smell. Such possibility was mentioned to me once by a friend, one of the strongest mathematicians in our year, a city dweller, when we were taking a walk around campus (if memory serves me right it was in the context of discussing such a practice in some region(s) in India where a local plant is used for that purpose ).

It is somewhat puzzling and sad that despite large territory and amazingly rich Nature, there is such a profound separation from Nature in US. Almost all the land is private, and even if not it is still mostly fenced with limited access and permits for everything (and naturally the very few available places are overcrowded because of such a [pretty artificial] scarcity). Limited access to land also naturally affects access to water bodies. You can't just come to a body of water and say go for swim if water is clean, like you'd do say in Russia. From US land rights system POV even the Nordic private property system with "right to roam" looks like communism :)

i heard about them, never met :) They do exist in Russia, yet frequency of encounters seems to be low. An important factor is probably that weather there is colder (and usually wetter) than say here plus mosquitoes so going into the forest you usually have all your body covered.

Only works for extremely low density living (which is really only practical with the help of modern amenities). Doesn’t work that well for places like India.

Thumbs up for poop stools :)

Except I’m making considerations about fellow humans, not non-human entities. Anthropomorphism doesn’t apply here (unless you subscribe to Jaynes’ surprisingly compelling hypothesis set forth in The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind which is controversial, fringe, supported by strangely compelling but also very circumstantial evidence, and hard to justify neurologically, that is).

I suppose I could be accused of a bunch of other fallacies, and those would be fair game.

I’m pretty damned sure of it. Why would they do so otherwise when feet of the habitually-unshod are so perfectly adapted to walking on terrain? It’s not like (like in the case of clothes) they could see animals with warm furry coats and think “I want one of those”. You construct what you want to emulate. In the case of sandals, they wanted to emulate floors, not paws.

Even when the obvious thing is right, there's a difference between an obvious conclusion arrived at by guessing and an obvious thing arrived at by scientific inquiry. The former is highly subject to bias, and indistinguishable from the wrong and obvious guess that accompanied it; the latter is less subject to bias, and can be distinguished from its wrong variant.

(To put it maybe more pithily, someone who believes an obvious thing has given me no new information, but someone who proves an obvious thing has given me new information. There's a reason science places so much weight on reproducibility, even though, eventually, it's just giving the 'obvious' result!)

Fair enough, good points, but you’ll find that habitually unshod people have surprisingly thick (and yet still perfectly sensitive!) soles that are very resilient to puncture and yet do not experience pain when walking over terrain that makes us grimace. That doesn’t pertain to all of your hypotheses, and even those it does apply to are not ruled out by it, so I concede you could be correct, as could I. The real question is: which these(s) can be proven. That’s what’s interesting about this article: that they have found archeological evidence that supports an... I’m struggling not to use ‘obvious’ because I’ve been chided for using it... but a... very plausible hypothesis.

It's easy to say a technology should have been obvious in hindsight, but...grass beds? It would be more surprising to me if humans 200,000 years ago hadn't hit on that. Remember these are modern humans from an evolutionary point of view, as intelligent as us or close.

Birds make nests, after all. You could convince me bears or apes make beds of grass, too. It's cool to find evidence that humans did it, just not surprising.