The oldest known blueprints depict Stone Age ‘megastructures’ | Hacker News Reader

The oldest known blueprints depict Stone Age ‘megastructures’

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109 pointspseudolus61 comments

Figure 9 of the original paper shows some side-by-side comparisons of kite representations vs satellite imagery https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

The accuracy kind of blows my mind…

Note that "up" is consistently in the north west. I have a suspicion that the four 45 degrees rotated poles are reflected in the hieroglyph 𓊖 for the four city quarters (urbis & orbis). since they are not anchored on the pole star, they might just represent idealized points of sunrise / sunset yet being aware of the pole star or at least the symmetry.

I believe that 9,000 years ago there wasn’t as distinct a pole star due to axial procession. Celestial north would probably have been somewhere between Vega and Tau Hercluis with a fairly wide separation.

There would have been circumpolar stars though, and those would have been very noticeable.

Direct link to figure: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277927.g009

Whenever it's Homo Sapiens remember that's just ordinary modern man, no different than us now. Pre-Historic or not.

So naturally every generation or at least every hundred years or so there's always been an Einstein, Tesla, or DaVinci come along.

if you account for population density, and maybe surrounding of education, one would expect these geniuses to spread out exponentially though

I guess the problem nowadays is that most things got so complex and specialized that the impact a single person can make is rather limited. So we're simply not seeing these geniuses because incremental 'discoveries' ordinary people can't understand don't really make for good headlines.

Strange convergance: I always think of a Paul Graham essay on this[0]. He mentions Florence generating several geniuses, even though nearby Milan was the same size and same almost everything.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/cities.html

That should depend on population size. I can’t think of any geniuses 100 years after Imhotep. Galen is roughly a century after Heron. And in the 20th century, we had Einstein, Heisenberg, Curie, Lorenz, Planck, Schrödinger, and Feynman in physics alone.

The question should be in 4,000 year what names do we still have from the last 100 years.

The answer is: “those whose name was everywhere” which unfortunately will mean Louis Vuitton, Donald Trump, George Washington, and maybe Queen Elizabeth II?

4000 years is a long time, and our civilization will likely be gone, nothing but ruins.

100 years isn’t that long we still remember Henry Ford etc. But even 1,000 years is going to erase everyone on that list outside of serious history nerds.

Quick who was the first kind of England, and who started or ran the east India trading company?

My thought is more just the ubiquity of the names. If even a few objects are well preserved with those names on them, then the names will be remembered. What the people did may not be remembered, but the name may be. The ubiquity of Louis Vuitton and knock off products, Trump putting his name on… everything, etc.

If you just mean the actual names, I think most of our names will be recorded somewhere in 4,000 years. Genealogy doesn’t take up much space and people have been keeping widespread records for hundreds of years in many areas.

The extreme is the Lurie Family which can “trace” part of it’s lineage back 3,000 years and that was with paper records. (700 years of that is well documented, prior to that is less certain.)

There were some very famous names from the 1800s that are almost entirely forgotten now - the Brunswick bar, various patent medicines, etc. you can find some references in popular songs from the time, but they’re already fading from collective memory.

Things may fade even faster even if we have written record of it.

We'll never know about the people who made big breakthroughs in metallurgy and textiles and other areas, sources are scant and literary people largely didn't respect the people who worked on practical matters well into the modern era. For example, the existence of the Antikythera mechanism means that there must have been a community of people doing precision engineering back in classical times. None is mentioned in any surviving sources.

It's like Drake equation, there's multiple filters. Population size, access to education, access to tools and resources, demand for new ideas, probability of preserving the memory of a genius to modern day.

Sharing of accumulated knowledge is crucial to our advancement, though. Geniuses may have lived thousands of years ago, but their potential was mostly lost without access to knowledge of their ancestors, or other tribes. Which also happens today in places with poor education. We only hear about the Newtons and Einsteins because they were born at the right place and time.

People used to memorize stuff. They’d memorize a lot of stuff.

The geniuses of the Stone Age did little things, like finding better ways to make fire, flint knap, leather processing, weaving and looms, tent making, taming animals, inventing the wheel, food preservation, which plants were good for what ailments. You know, all the stuff you need without question.

Who is our century's Tesla? Fabrice? Solomon Hykes?

In terms of impact both are huge, Fabrice's works are a marvel and Hyke's repackaging of ELF with YAML is considered business genius - he could sell anything I'm sure.

Stephen Hawking.

> Who is our century's Tesla?

Some dude named "Bob" who lives in a trailer in the woods and never talks to anyone.

I hope Bob doesnt want to publicize its own finding trough planting bombs

I'd say Jo Zayner's the closest to Tesla due to the showpersonship and self-experimentation in public.

Under a whole bunch of assumptions.

You're not considering a lot of factors here. One of the most noncontroversial would be population size. Past human population sizes are little more than guesses, but the one thing that's for sure is that they were far lower, and probably in the low millions at some point. So modern humans would expect to have on the order of something like 8000x as many geniuses than ancient humans, based on population alone. Another noncontroversial one would be nutrition. Malnutrition results in impaired intellectual ability, and malnutrition was much more common in the past.

You definitely would expect to see a proportional number of outliers on a time scale.

Without a modern society around them, providing universities, technology, communication etc, these geniuses would just end up being the best farmer or handyman in the village.

Also, human population was very small in the old days: https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth#world-pop...

About 7% of all humans who have ever lived are currently alive.

Which would mean that also about 7% of all geniuses ever are currently alive, and thanks to modern agriculture most of them are not stuck farming.

This also means that, empirically, only 93% of all humans have died so far.

Which puts our confidence that everyone will die at less than 3-sigma. It could just be a coincidence so far

This is actually one of my favorite examples of cherry-picking statistics to support a false statement. "There's about a 7% chance I won't die because, of all humans who have ever lived, only about 93% have died." Of course, this ignores the entire concept of "life expectancy" but such is the nature of cherry-picking statistics to support a false statement.

And inventing ‘scratching a plan into something so people understand it’ is not an Einstein level invention. It’s immediately graspable by small children so it seems likely that it’s something humans have been doing for a veeeery long time.

These ‘blueprints’ are preserved because they were carved in rock. All the thousands of years of prior art of scratching lines in the dirt are lost to time.

at a gut level, and I have no expertise, it seems more likely that these are representations created after the fact of what was built, rather than plans for what would be built. I base that mostly on the irregular arrangement of arcs along the circumference, which irregular arrangement could easily come about during construction with materials at hand, and then be drawn to scale, rather than being planned and then constructed. But again, what do I know.

I would think some degree of carbon dating might answer this question?

not if the drawing was done shortly after the creation, because carbon dating lacks such high precision

My gut agrees and would add that the map diagram makes for a great training/planning tool on its own as a way to organize the multiple teams involved with corralling animals into their Kite. I think its an old school chalkboard and have just as much reason to believe it as I do any other explanation.

The original PowerPoint.

Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. -- popular expression within microsoft

Written down before or after initial construction aren't substantially different.

I don't have as much specific knowledge of kites in particular, but based on similar structures elsewhere they almost certainly weren't continuously used and maintained. They would likely be used for one or two seasons, then abandoned for potentially decades at a time as the migrations shifted. When herds eventually returned to the area, people would likely go out and do some restoration ahead of the herds. That would be things like re-excavating the pits, replacing any decayed brush/sticks in the terminal funnels, repairing pit walls, and so on. You can't skip parts or animals may escape and the structure may be covered in all manner of brush or sediment that makes identification difficult on the ground.

It's not necessary to have a plan for the kite, but it would still be pretty useful, especially if it's one that's rarely used so most of the people present might have never seen it.

This Vice article is a pretty bad sum up, nearly all questions/opinios asked/raised here are commented in this good NZZ article: https://www.nzz.ch/wissenschaft/desert-kites-archaeologen-da...

It's German, but shouldn't matter much in th days of AI.

ChatGPT anwsers to some questions brought up here based on the NZZ article:

1. The "Desert Kites" or stone structures were dated using two methods. The researchers used Carbon-14 (C14) dating on charcoal samples found near the structures. Carbon-14 dating can only be used on once-living material like wood or bone, hence its use on the charcoal. They also used a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL), which measures the last time sand grains were exposed to sunlight, based on the accumulation of electrons in their crystal structure. These two techniques revealed that the structures are between 7560 and 9000 years old.

2. Your instinct aligns with the interpretations of the researchers. The article suggests that the rock carvings depicting these structures may have been created after their construction rather than as blueprints. One reason for this is that the physical structures follow topography, incorporating or based on terrain features which are not reflected in the plans. The researchers propose that these drawings could have been used for hunting planning, demonstrating attributes of the structures that aren't noticeable from ground level. Also, they argue these drawings could serve as a demonstration of knowledge, the ability to depict spatial elements, and the act of transmitting this knowledge. The idea that these could be plans created before construction is less likely but not entirely dismissed.

Insert unnecessary comment about using chatGPT to refute sources

How earlier cultures built huge structures—including kites that can only be fully seen from the sky—has remained a mystery

This can only be fully seen from the sky struck me as somewhat odd, almost downplaying that all in all mammals and even simpler species are really good in basic navigation. I mean going from A to B and back among various lines if we've never done so before or even if we've done before but suddenly there are obstacles in between, is no problem for us. Unlike for, say, some of my chickens or simple AI models. Doesn't really matter if we can see the whole picture from the sky or not. In fact doing so without seeing the whole picture is exactly part of the skill? Or is this perhaps a comment about drawing such route? Ok that's a bit more specialist, but the accuracy in historic maps shows it's a skill we've had for a long time. And this dicovery might just be the earliest proof of it.

Does anyone else get minecraft vibes from this? I find it amusing that kids playing minecraft came up with similar structures (in spirit). Of course the specifics are different because the animals are different. Also I think the neolithic people who came up with this might be teenagers, right? Did minecraft wake up some kind of neolithic dormant program in our brains? I only half joke about this.

Extending terrain to create a sizable animal pen. ~9000 years ago, around Jordan/Saudi Arabia.

How were these structures dated? Did they have some wooden parts, or were there animal remains that could be carbon dated found with them? Something else?

> How were these structures dated?

The study [0] mentions that they dated charcoal that they have reason to believe was contemporaneous.

[0] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

These are incredibly clever. They chased an animal into a space with some areas that look like escapes but are actually pitfalls.

That requires such high level thinking. They’re really putting themselves in the mind of the scared animal in designing something like this.

I’m fully aware that people of this era did not have the mentality of toddlers, but there’s still something to be said for the level of social development and communication that must be present to convince a large group of folks to build out one of these things.

These features might have arisen through "natural evolution" of traps but I doubt not that people of that era where capable of comprehending the architecture once it was there.

I understand that this comment probably wasn’t meant in this way but it comes off as condescending of people from only a few thousand years ago and it feels like my friends were being spoken about (personally!)

We have to remember that it’s humans we're talking about here, and that this wasn’t exactly that long ago. They would have had the same cognitive potential as us, if not more simply because we’re lazy ungrateful creatures living in a level of comfort that royalty of old could not even imagine. The cost of a mistake in their “real world” was often death, and they _had_ to get it right so that their family didn’t die.

People can spontaneously self organise and achieve all sorts of things “on the spot”, kids in the playground do this daily- making up fun games without any parental input. I don’t believe you need a whole level of social development beyond “I won’t kill you, let’s be friends” to achieve great things. This becomes complicated as groups grow of course, but I would imagine most of us have experienced this on some level.

Necessity is the mother of innovation. Doing something the hard/impossible way a few times will force you to be creative, especially when you need to feed your family/group.

They were probably very skilled at this kind of thinking, more than and I.

You have to emphasize with an animal to track it, for example. Even non human hunters have such intuitions. A wildcat knows when a squirrel is likely to head for the nearest tree.

By the time such structures were being built, coralling using simpler or natural terrain features was probably an important hunting method.

Imo the notable part here is the scale and it's implications. Large groups. Long term projects. Long lived assets. A progressive mindset, where the "economy" and roles within it change. That's not, seemingly, the default.

Such high level thinking: "Damn, that animal got away through this path. Put a trap there." x10

1. I thought Vice declared bankruptcy? 2. This appears to be a wall. Why do we think this is an animal pen? Usually, you would build walls to keep out other people.

I suspect the Neolithic people were more than capable of hunting and catching game without these structures.

They filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and will be/were sold to creditors.

Looks like it's going to exist in some form and not be liquidated.

It's not thought to be an animal pen, it's a killing funnel for wild game. They certainly would have been capable of hunting without these and even done so regularly. These were for large scale killings of herds when the conditions were right. Similar structures called buffalo jumps and buffalo pounds are known from the Great Plains.

As for how we know they're not walls, that's easy: they're not tall enough. As someone who's excavated enough stone walls, it takes a much bigger pile than that to build human-scale walls, and far more if you want them to have any sort of defensive capability.

While correct, it is an interesting thought of whether pens might have arisen through (earlier) kites by omitting or postponing the kill step in these traps.

Kites are much more sophisticated than pens and they're not relying on the same principles to work. A pen is just a physical obstacle to prevent animals from getting out. These rely on the animal's herd-following and avoidance instincts, as well as how poor eyesight, panic and misdirection. They wouldn't work very well at containing leisurely grazing animals, but they're also much cheaper to build.

Also worth noting that you don't actually need to pen animals to domesticate them. It has a lot of advantages (e.g. separating them from predators), but it's not required and may even be disadvantageous if you're a (semi-)nomadic pastoralist.

This is true. I suspect that they also had people stand on the walls at key points to deter wall jumping escapes.

That said... given appropriate materials (eg flexible wooden rods for hurdles and fences)... Pens within the kite seems pretty possible. Idk if they had a reason to pen animals... but even giving yourself more time to process meat might be reason enough.

Some US "buffalo jump" sites and accounts suggest a lot of waste. Processing a bison is a lot of work.

If you want 20 people to turn 50 camels into dried/salted/processed meat efficiently... you need a few days.

Meanwhile... a handful of kids standing on walls could probably contain a herd in of these kites for a few days, even if it couldn't contain the herd without supervision.

Also... They had ropes and such.

“What if kill … later?”

Well... Look into it. A headline and a single photo aren't really enough to base a theory on. These have been studied a lot recently. Go see why researchers came to these conclusions.

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