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Comment by AlotOfReading | Hacker News Reader

Oh boy, you're missing quite a lot here.

First let's breakdown what "modern social history of prehistoric handaxes" means, as virtually every word has a technical definition.

"Modern" - from the modern period, i.e. 1500s onwards

"Social history" - a specific type of historical analysis focusing on essentially what a common man would have thought and known about. This is a very rough reduction of what the term actually encompasses.

"Prehistoric" - old stuff

"Handaxes" - a specific category of lithic (i.e. stone) tools that are typically symmetrical bifaces, distinct from modern axes.

Also, most rocks can be confused for meteorites and vice versa. "Looking like a meteorite" means nothing. The rock shown does look quite a bit like a chert core though. I'd be surprised if it was actually a handaxe because they're almost always symmetric and tapering, which the painting doesn't show, but I don't care enough to read the paper.

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I know what words mean, what is your point?

The authors claim that modern 15th century people already knew the "pre-historic" narrative about rocks being axes. They are shoe-horning this theory into the painting by claiming the painter and 15th century people already thought these rocks were ancient handaxes, and thats why it features so importantly in the mysterious painting. That seems a rather hoaxy claim to me: The archeological narrative must be correct if people already knew it to be true!

The authors state in their abstract this is their goal, to push back the evidence of such a "social history", to a time before archeologists made up the narrative about hand-axes. The authors are literally attempting to incept the archeological claim to a prior age of modern history. Is that what you mean, because that is definitely and literally the motive of this research.

Edit, also the rock in the painting is not a "biface". That part of the painting has obvious depth and perspective (shadows, walls, angles). The rock in the painting is ROUND.

> The authors claim that modern 15th century people already knew the "pre-historic" narrative about rocks being axes.

You're mistaken, the article does not say that 15th century people knew the rock was a hand axe. The article claims (correctly I think) that the painting depicts a hand axe but doesn't say the painter intended to depict an axe. The painter would have understood the rock to be a thunderstone and painted it accurately enough that today we can see that it was actually a handaxe.

You are wrong. Maybe you did not read the paper which the article is reporting.

From the paper abstract: "Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the ‘modern’ social and cultural world." Indicating they think the painter and his contemporary society had a "culture" of appreciation for the objects as axes.

> The authors claim that modern 15th century people already knew the "pre-historic" narrative about rocks being axes.

I read the paper. I found no such claim - please cite.

> The authors state in their abstract this is their goal, to push back the evidence of such a "social history", to a time before archeologists made up the narrative about hand-axes. The authors are literally attempting to incept the archeological claim to a prior age of modern history. Is that what you mean, because that is definitely and literally the motive of this research.

They literally do not do so.

They claim that the stones we call handaxes were considered a separate type of rock. Then they discuss various conceptualizations of that rock at the time. They claim that one person thought it was interesting that category of stone including handaxes bore a resemblence to arrowheads from the new world, but his work wasn't published until 1717 (long after that person's death).

You seem mad at archaelogists for claiming things like "these handaxes are old" in general, and specifically at these guys for pointing out historical descriptions of things that sound like handaxes, and paintings that look a lot like handaxes. They literally (using a dictionary definition of the word - in this case the factual definition) state in their paper:

"In the knowledge that works of art are not exact transcripts of reality, it would be difficult, if not impossible, conclusively to identify whether a handaxe is represented in this fifteenth-century painting. We can, however, potentially strengthen the inference that a handaxe is depicted through three artefact-based routes of inquiry."

I'm not sure what you're going on about, your claims seem false upon reading the paper.

Read the last sentence of their abstract: "Identifying a fifteenth-century painting of a handaxe does not change what we know about Acheulean individuals, but it does push back the evidence for when handaxes became a prominent part of the ‘modern’ social and cultural world."

That clearly Indicates the authors believe the painter and his contemporary society of modern 15th century peoples already had a culture of appreciation for the objects as pre-historic axes, that their so-called finding "pushes back the date" for this appreciation. That is literally their thesis and conclusion.

That argument is reductive. They are saying that the painting is evidence that early modern people believed axe-theory because the authors have identified the rock in the painting as an axe from axe-theory. Everything else is speculation. It is complete garbage with a motive to push archeological axe-theory for academic crumbs. It is a desperate attempt to scrape empirical evidence for imaginary archeologies.

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