Hacker News Reader

Interesting! But the article is a good example of academic overthinking. A lot of theories mentioned in the article would not survive Occam's razor. There is the strong wish that everything ancient was meaningful, when a perfectly fine explanation is that it is a fun play with words. Maybe a very early and slow-traveling meme?

View on HN

Occam's razor is one tool in archeological history. But another is that things many people spend resources to reproduce often have value or meaning. It's also more likely when the practice is widespread across geography or time and especially both.

If you're going off of just heuristics there is at least as much pointing to significance than not.

That's the most facile explanation, but it's also the most boring one. It's always easier to say that something doesn't have meaning, function, or design, rather than to say that you don't know what it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com