A 41,500 year-old decorated ivory pendant from Stajnia Cave (Poland) | Hacker News Reader

A 41,500 year-old decorated ivory pendant from Stajnia Cave (Poland)

nature.com

97 pointsHooke33 comments

>26 November 2021 Editor's Note: Readers are alerted that concerns have been raised about this Article and are being considered by the Editors. A further editorial response will follow after all parties have had an opportunity to respond in full.

Does anyone know the source of the controversy? Are people concerned about the implications this may have on the current historical narrative of human development?

It’s probably around whether the pendant aspect was a liberal interpretation. This still fits within the current hypothesis on human development.

It's so hard to know if it was used as jewellery, or if it had some practical application as well, and was also decorated. We'll likely never know. I agree that calling it a pendant just because it has two holes, is a bit of a leap.

For all we know, it was a fishing line (or net) float.

When reading this I like to imagine the caveperson who made this pendant and how they would react to seeing entire teams of humans 40,000 years later using vast swathes of incredible space-age technology to analyze every microscopic detail of its creation.

I'm pretty sure it would just seem like actual magic to them

They wouldn't be able to comprehend what was happening - alien abduction, cosmic horror kind of experience.

But at the same time, they would be like "Why do they care so much about something I just whittled together in an hour?"

Then again, there's still a lot about today that they would find familiar. If you took them camping and did some drumming around a campfire, they'd be pretty much at home. If you took them to a wedding or to a funeral they would have some cultural recognition of the reasons for the ceremony, even if the ceremony itself was unfamiliar.

Reminds me a scene from "The man from earth", when asked for some kind of proof or artifact from the era, he asked if you would keep a pen if you lived a thousand years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAX2RuZm-Fk&t=1275s

That is one of my all time favourite movies/plays. It makes a good point though. I've lost all of my possessions twice in my life so far and I'm only in my forties. How many objects owned by your great-grandparents still remain in your family?

Honestly, many that I’m aware of, and likely many more that I’m not.

I have my great-grandfather’s .32 revolver, which he acquired in 1895. It came with the original holster, a couple of boxes of ammunition from ~1920, and a cased cleaning kit that he got with it.

I have two of my great-granmother’s cast iron skillets - a #3 and a #9 Griswold.

My wife has a quilt that her grandmother made by hand when she was a girl. It includes pieces made from the wedding dresses of at least five generations, going back to my wife’s grandmother’s grandmother.

I have a tool chest that’s been passed down at least twice that I know of. My grandfather called it “Grandpa Metcalf’s toolbox”… it’s safe to say that the box itself is at least 150 years old, and many of the tools are likely older still.

I’d expect that this sort of thing is much more common for rural families, who tend to live in one place for generations.

A related thought: what will humans and culture be like in another 41,500 years? What will those humans analyze from our time?

Way we're going, about like when they made the pendant, except with guns and distilled alcohol.

If a human from 41,500 years ago asked how humans look like nowadays, I guess the answer would be that we still like food, sex and power, but have developed to acquire all of those things more efficiently.

Ultimately practically everything we do has been to serve those ends.

I like the idea that this wasn't even a finished, elaborate object. This was just someone doodling around on a piece of ivory, seeing what interesting shapes they could make. And we're treating it as the highest possible artistic output of their entire culture and analysing it with our incredible space-age tech.

I like to think their reaction would be embarrassment, like "please, I was just experimenting with that, I didn't even know how to do the drilling properly back then, there's so many better pieces being done by other people. Find one of them and analyse that, please. This is so embarrassing"

41.5K years is VERY EARLY for such a fancy piece of jewelry. Most objects of the Aurignacian period[0] are usually plainer and more basic. But there are a few non-tool objects, like a flute and a figurine. So this clearly shows the search from humans for "pretty" things beyond simply utilitarian objects (tools). Exciting!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurignacian

This is especially surprising because the common idea is that civilization arrived later into northern, colder Europe. Bushcraft like on the wonderful Primitive Technology youtube channel is harder when you don't have a year-round growing period. You need not just warmer clothes, but ways to stockpile and preserve food. Traditional Polish cuisine has many ways - preserves in glass jars, salt, pickling... Actually the cuisine is the aspect that positively surprises visitors the most. So many peoples and empires were present in the region, so many culinary influences. It's only lacking in saltwater fish because historically there was limited sea access.

Maybe the climate was different?

I vouched for this comment because it was dead, and I don't understand what is controversial about it?

> the common idea is that civilization arrived later into northern, colder Europe

Some people interpret the notion of "civilized" people vs not-civilized people as racist. I don't agree with that - but that is why that word gives people negative emotions. I subscribe to the literal definition of "civilized" to mean the use of written civil laws (civil society) - which would make its use in this context meaningless since a piece of jewellery does not the codification of laws.

It's nothing to do with this particular comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=b0rsuk

B0rsuk, you may want to email dang.

Account was (shadow?) banned for this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28596635

EDIT: that said, not everything is dead, I'm not sure how this works - so maybe they are also being trolled by someone too..

Probably individual comments being vouched for like the one here.

Arguably in colder climates technology is even more important, due to having to survive in the harsher environment. You need better clothing, better shelter and are more reliant on tools and food preservation techniques.

Cave location in OpenStreetMap: https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/4963549898

Wikipedia article about cave (in Polish): https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stajnia_(jaskinia)

In mid-2000 this exact cave was also used for some LARP (Live Action RPG) games. One of bigger polish LARPs events called Orkon, was organised nearby. I did actually play Alien vs. Predator themed game there, in the middle of the night, where Stajnia cave was the Alien-Egg base. I remember it as a respawn point, after getting killed by Marines, Spec-Naz or Predator.

Cool but not exactly the earliest jewelry on earth… not by a long shot.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abi8620

oldest known human-modified punctate ornament ≠ earliest jewelry on earth

It's really impressive the amount of information we can extract from anything with modern technologies.

looks like part of an analemma

From the link: "although the resemblance with the lunar analemma is striking"

Not a tool? I wonder how you could distinguish

It's quite a thin piece of ivory so wouldn't be very strong, and doesn't seem to have any wear marks from a functional use. The pattern of punctures indicates it was used for decoration, or perhaps to keep tally marks.

Or perhaps to drill holes in leather etc, and the ivory was just a backstop? It might look very much the same?

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