A skeleton made from the bones of at least eight people thousands of years apart | Hacker News Reader

A skeleton made from the bones of at least eight people thousands of years apart

smithsonianmag.com

111 pointsmhb43 comments

Maybe we should add some bones, bury the skeleton again and wipe all records of what we did.

Maybe that’s what happened already.

the very nature of our current record keeping, guarantees that a very great deal of anything bieng done now will vanish papyrus will survive long after the inevitable neglect and bit rot destroy our digital archives The massive physical remains of our times ,accompanied by those most enduring of our written records, labels and logos, wont tax future investigators imaginations in figuring out what happened to us. I personaly, have access to many bones, and have toyed with creating chimera skeletons, history is too deep, and people are too wierd to draw any conclusions, much of the time.

People always say this like it's somehow unique to bit rot, but only ancient Egypt really managed to preserve a substantial portion of their original records, and that's just because they won the geographic lottery in that regard. Pretty much every other field of history relies on copies that were made of the most popular works.

> papyrus will survive long after the inevitable neglect

This isn't inherently true of papyrus. Taken into a climate wetter than Egypt (in other words, pretty much any other climate where people actually live) it begins to disintegrate very quickly and needs constant maintenance.

A large portion of our records will be lost, such is the nature of things, but I'm going to bet that we leave a greater percentage of our works than any other civilization. We'll probably beat ancient Egypt, but we'll certainly beat everyone else. People are keenly aware of how ephemeral records are (digital or paper) and make concerted efforts to archive them in permanent storage.

A huge portion of Assyrian cuneiform was preserved due to the fact that fires ravaged their cities, baking their clay tablets, if I understand correctly. Most of it hasn't even been translated yet. The Assyrian Empire was in the early iron age though, and Egyptian records go much further back than that I think.

Was Egypt able to keep their culture for so long, and build many structures and temples - simply because they could transmit ideas through time? Other cultures would be stuck relearning the same building techniques and religious ceremonies every generation and relying on faulty oral histories.

Papyrus as a communication method through time.

Probably not, at least not significantly. AFAIK most people couldn't read, it was mainly the clergy and nobility as in most ancient civilizations.

Egyptian culture persisted because Egypt persisted. The Nile provided immense prosperity and sustained the country for millenia. Once we get to modern antiquity, they had a massive trade operation with Rome which sustained them for a thousand years.

Culture can persist and be transmitted without written record. Most cultures operated this way, at least initially.

Remember that universal literacy did not exist until just a few hundred years ago. Most people throughout history were not taught to read. Their stories were recorded by the clergy in writing for posterity, but on a day to day basis, they were passed down by word of mouth.

I might be wrong about this one but AFAIK the heiroglyph script we associate with Egypt was a lost language for a long time. It was a ceremonial language known only by the priests and it was forgotten after the last dynasty. Until the Rosetta stone was discovered, all of that writing was effectively lost, unreadable until modern times.

From what I understand ancient civilizations rarely kept records of things that could be easily transmitted by speech. It seems to me that most practical skills are better taught this way anyway.

They didn’t have manuals and grimoires of building techniques, flora and fauna. Most of the texts were either religious or for bookkeeping. This was true of Egypt as well. Almost everything on display today is about death rites.

Of course it might be that these records were just fewer and eventually lost.

I'm skeptical of the idea that they could be thought to have kept their culture. Even through records we see massive changes over time.

Anyway, oral transmission can be extremely durable over time.

You've never played the "telephone game" in school? Passing information verbally from one person to another (whether standing next to you or to the next generation) is famously inaccurate, even when everyone is trying to ensure correctness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_game

> even when everyone is trying to ensure correctness.

...I am, uh, skeptical of that with regard to the telephone game.

There's always one secret troublemaker.

> Taken into a climate wetter than Egypt (in other words, pretty much any other climate where people actually live) it begins to disintegrate very quickly and needs constant maintenance.

For example papyrus was massively used in the roman empire and all those records have disappeared, only what had been copied and re-copied since then reached us.

The main difference is the sheer scale at which it is happening.

Paper records are relatively easy to store, and created as part of day-to-day operations. If something is written down on paper, they just have to put it in a box rather than throw it away. Is it already archived because the law says you need to keep it 10 year or something? Then it has a pretty decent chance of surviving as long as nobody takes the effort to clean out old records. Sure, paper can get damaged by fire, water, mold, insects, and a lot of other stuff, but in general if you leave it alone it'll be perfectly readable 100-200 years down the line without anyone actively trying to. Some yellowing and a smudge on the paper? No big deal, still perfectly readable.

Digital records are different. The physical mediums commonly used rapidly degrade, so survival past a few decades is doubtful. Even if it does survive, are you still going to have the equipment to read it? And if you have the equipment, are you even able to connect it to a modern machine? And don't expect to just reconstruct it: the specifications are even harder to find! In other words, for a digital record to survive in an easily-accessible format someone has to copy it to a new physical medium every few years.

Assuming you can read the disk, how are you going to interpret it? Most records aren't stored in ascii. You're going to need software which is able to parse whatever complicated format is being used - which is now horribly outdated. And that format and software wasn't designed for fault tolerance either: a single bit flip can prevent a file from being opened, or completely corrupt its content. It's going to require expert-level knowledge to retrieve it.

Some Zip-drive from 2000 containing a WordPerfect file? Probably doable 25 years later if you really want to, but it's going to be a challenge. Another 25, 50, or 75 years? Forget it.

And that's the best-case scenario. These days everything is stored in The Cloud, which means it'll just randomly disappear one day because they don't feel like keeping it. Mass deletion is trivial and happens without anyone noticing. If you're very lucky your records will last until a few years after your death, but even that is far from guaranteed. 200-year-old records retrieved from the cloud by archivists? Not going to happen.

Why....do you have access to 'many bones'

I have access to at least 206.

I would throw in an iPhone for good measure.

Imagine you're just fucking around with something because you're bored and then leave it there and forget about it and 2000 years later archaeologists find it and wonder "how odd, I wonder what the deep significance of this might be"

I felt this was potentially true with Picasso’s work. It was considered groundbreaking and is currently revered. When actually the faces he painted were really mimicking the phenomenon of staring into someone else’s eyes too closely, like when your forehead’s touch. The eyes tend to merge into one or appear displaced. It’s a Simple thing that nobody seemed to have done before.

My understanding was that it was generally agreed to be related to concurrent mathematical breakthroughs in higher-dimensional space:

_"Picasso was particularly struck by Poincaré's advice on how to view the fourth dimension, which artists considered another spatial dimension. If you could transport yourself into it, you would see every perspective of a scene at once. But how to project these perspectives on to canvas? Poincaré's suggestion in Science and Hypothesis was to do so one at a time, showing each in succession. Picasso disagreed. He wanted to depict them all at once."_

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/jul/17/henri-p...

That's an extremely fascinating angle I've never seen before. Thanks!

Picasso was deliberately playing with perspective. One theory goes that he was doing a pisstake of classical artists faking perspective by painting half the face from the front and half the face from the side. Another says that he was attempting to capture more of an object than an accurate rendering from a single perspective could convey, sort of a painter's equivalent of those animated GIFs that show an object from different camera angles, yielding a 3D effect.

I gained a lot of respect for Picasso when I saw the works of others in the movement. You can walk into a room full of notionally similar paintings and immediately pick out the Picasso because it looks better than the others. I still don't particularly like his work, but he was evidently doing something that's harder than it looks.

My story about it is that in Roman times, someone deeply revered or loved a person whose head or skull they possessed, perhaps of a family member, a mentor, or a romantic partner. The individual sought to restore dignity and completeness to the deceased. They turned to a collector of old bones, perhaps an anatomist, who helped them reconstruct a body and bury it, along with the head. This was a personal, unique act of grief or honor, since a whole, intact body was not necessary in Roman funeral rites.

Honestly this makes more sense to me in human terms than the possibilities suggested in the article.

“Whether the assembly of the bones occurred in the late Neolithic or in the Roman period, the presence of the ‘individual’ was clearly intentional,” write the researchers.”

I would like the researchers to explain to me what hypotheses they consider to suggest that in the Neolithic they had bones from the Roman period.

From the abstract: "The burial is explained as a composite Neolithic burial that was reworked 2500 years later with the addition of a new cranium and grave goods."

The hypothesis here would be that the assembly was originally created in the Neolithic period, but that it was later modified with new bones in the Roman period.

So the assembly of the bones wasn’t during the late Neolithic? Go figure!

The source article[1] suggests that (in my own words) it may have to do with several kins that were brought together and tried to seal their bond by assembling a fictive individual from several deceased relatives. Or that an original important burial site was disturbed and they tried to restore the body.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/as...

I saw something recently that the Vikings practiced similar bone replacement for their guys who lost limbs in battle. One poor guy was emasculated with an axe and had to be buried with a replacement boar's tusk 'down there'.

Maybe it was used for educational purposes, someone collected bones from different places until they had a whole skeleton?

And then when they died, nobody wanted to keep it and it was buried as it was human remains after all.

possibly but finding a 2000 year old human remain is a big deal today and was probably a big deal back then. If the skeleton was assembled for some purpose you'd expect the bones to be at the most several centuries apart.

I guess there are burial mounds used for long periods - like the mount of olives in Israel. But even then it would take quite a bit of effort to find the 2000 year old remain over a more recent one

Would they know that it's a set of 2,000 year old remains? Or would they just go, "huh, another dead body."

I love how we create stories of bones we find whose original tale is long gone. I have no idea where this thread of human exploration will take us but I look forward to hearing the story’s evolution.

> “They knew what they were doing”

Maybe it was ancient anatomists doing research

A lost ancient technology that allowed you to replace your missing or damaged limbs with spare parts built from revivified millennial old remains? Haha

My first hypothesis would be that the original discovery was a fraud, like Piltdown man.

I would describe it as savage more than unusual.

I cant stop imagining the grin of an old roman historian troll doing this and imagining how confused it would make people in the future.

Isn't this explained by Gormogon?

Indeed, a Bones reference is hard to not make here.

It's kinda interesting tho

so.. mix and match?

alien

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