Lion-man
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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This article is the first post, and if there is 48 hours with no posts, then one from the archives is posted.
https://www.mostdiscussed.com/
There is also a Mastodon bridge via Mastofeed:
Its easy to feel that everything is meaningless on long/large enough scale, even if we decide to annihilate Earth, or whole Solar system, or entire Milky way somehow. Universe will continue its dance from sub-quarks to largest filaments of galaxies unaffected and end state is as inevitable as the fact that tomorrow will happen.
My wife jokes that anthropologists think everything is about either sex or religion. It never occurs to them that these figurines might be toys for kids. After all, children 40,000 years ago were anatomically modern. They would have gotten bored and wanted to play, or missed their parents while the parents were out foraging or hunting.
> Wulf Hein and Kurt Wehrberger conducted an experimental replication with the kinds of stone tools available at the time. Removing the base of the tusk took ten hours. The body was carved with a steep-fronted scraper; the burins requiring regular resharpening. Several tools were needed to separate the torso from the insides of the arms while shaping the head and shoulders, which involved difficult cutting across the grain of the ivory, often requiring two hands on the tool. The basic shaping is estimated to have taken around 200 hours, and in total the recreation likely took more than 370 hours.[d] Jill Cook, Curator of Palaeolithic collections at the British Museum, suggests that "unless the sculpture was created slowly at odd moments over several months, someone as skilled as an artist may have been excused from other subsistence tasks to work specially on this piece."[23]
Nearly a year of "full time" work at 40hrs/week went into this, so I do not think it was simply a children's toy.
EDIT: Not a year, actually just over 2 months.
> Nearly a year of "full time" work at 40hrs/week went into this
Sorry, I think you may be mistaken? From the section you quote, it looks like it's about 370 hours, or 9 weeks of full time effort. That's still a lot, but certainly not nearly a year.
I also don't think it rules out it being something for a child. It's not so rare to do big projects for you kids even today, over many evenings and weekends. And when you don't have any books to read or screens to watch...
You uh, missed a decimal point there. A year at 40 hours/week would be 2000 hours, not 200. The quote "unless the sculpture was created slowly at odd moments over several months" seems accurate in light of that, but rather odd: why wouldn't it be created slowly at odd moments over several months, or even years? Was prehistoric man lacking in free time? The article eventually continues: "why would a community living on the edge of subsistence, whose primary concerns were finding food, keeping that fire going, protecting children from predators, allow someone to spend so much time away from those tasks?" Keeping a fire going or protecting from predators are tasks with rather a lot of down time. I can easily imagine a person doing either of those while also whittling on a piece of bone. It's also just ridiculous to assume that subsistence living meant being constantly on the verge of starvation. Sometimes times were bad, and many people died. Then later, times were good, food could be obtained easily, and plenty of time would be left over for leisure tasks.
Nobody says they couldn't find a time to do carving (existence of the artifact shows they could). The issue in question is comparative value of the time spent on it. Hunting, gathering and concomitant works were certainly both physically and mentally very demanding activities, and their way of life required thoughtful spending of energy. Consequently, whatever irregular pastime they had should have to be extremely valuable. It makes 'toy theory' somewhat unconvincing.
For instance, I heard Reich said in a podcast that genes linked to obesity, and diabetes, which in our times are, of course, seen as detrimental, were norm among Eurasian WHG population. And this suggests they weren't detrimental to them. Now, what would make quick fat in-body production beneficial? I guess, when your calories intake is uncertain and irregular. There are other researches on the same Kalahari Bushmen, Sahlins used to made the theory of HG affluence, which e.g. emphasize how food scarcity affects customs of food sharing. Similar observations made about "uncontacted" Amazonian tribes, where food theoretically is abundant, but the amount of time, and effort one needs to extract them with pre-metal era tools is still too high to go to rest without at least a slight feeling of hunger.
Reality is that Sahlins probably made observations in an unusually good year, and then romanticized them too much. And that's the only data point on which the theory rests to the best of my knowledge, with many points contradicting it.
One may argue that hunting with its short feedback loop, and camaraderie of a tight group relying on each other's help are healthier psychologically compared to office politics and closing boring tasks, or even farming work - not without merit. But uncertainty of survival, calorie deficit, and amount of both mental, and physical effort HG-ing required is definitely underappreciated among followers of "Original affluent society" theory. HG didn't have easy lifestyle with long creative rests. It's just something we'd love to believe, because of how cool it sounds.
There are a number of plausible explanations including just someone DID have the time and wasn't all that busy. That's even more likely but I wanted to call out the perspective that it might not have been the most typical situation that led to this.
They actually do as anyone who actually reads or go to museums knows.
One possibility that occurs to me is the carving was done by the elderly, the injured, or possibility the young, who would not have such duties. A carving by a shaman is another possibility.
Probably most of us would not want to trade places with a substance hunter/gatherer, but their lives had downtime, right? I would expect their lives to be punctuated by good downtime (got enough food to eat and a good supply of tools, time to relax) as well as bad downtime (wasn’t successful at hunting or gathering, ran out of resources to process).
Are you better off because you can play video games and doom scroll while stuffing yourself with people shop chemicals and then take lizard toxin to control your diabetes and lose weight without doing anything while you have approaching zero authentic human connection, let alone culture not astroturfed by some corporate profit maximizing creative studio?
At least if you’re doing light farming and harvesting and’s spending all your day with your people practicing your cultural traditions passed down through the eons, you’re actually human, not whatever this is in the west today that is having its humanity destroyed by a parasite with every passing day.
Wild Niels Bohr sounds pretty dangerous.
This statue is around 35,000 years old.
Hinduism is fairly young by contrast and is only around 4000 years old.
"Sanatana" in Sanatana Dharma means Eternal. The 4 cyclic yugas are well documented in every Sanskrit literature. We are currently in year 5127 of Kali Yug i.e. it started in 3102 BC with the departure of Bhagavan Krishna from earth after Kurukshetra war, which marked the end of previous yuga (Dwapara).
Kali Yug lasts 432,000 years. After which the next cycle begins.
Eventually after Brahma's lifetime is over, Pralaya occurs. Then the universe goes quiet for a long time, until Lord creates again. And this cycle of creation and destruction goes on forever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Forgotten_Dreams
It was filmed in 3D as was the hype at the time, but the 2D version is completely watchable and is the most commonly distributed format.
From Wikipedia on the Lion-man (English):
> It was not until archaeologist Joachim Hahn started an inventory and assembly of more than 200 fragments that a figurine with animal and human features began to emerge.[5]
We have seen countless examples before, from the Brontosaur skull mixup mess to the heavy-handed "restoration" of the Knossos Palace, including an essential made up King-Priest frieze from real fragments by Sir Arthur Evans.
For some reason the Wikipedia pages don't contain this information on Brontosaur or Evans' pages for example...
so the fragment-recombining future looks like robot archaeology: fragment collection done by careful robots documenting and keeping statistics on each grain of sand or potential fragment, those datasets will constantly be repuzzled with gradient descent and better and better loss functions, and humans go to the museum or dataset download page of reconstructed artifacts, or at least watch the funniest ones among an unlikely large cloud in likelihood space...
At Hohle Fels, they also found a similar lion man — 2 meters from a harmonically tuned flute!
The Madjedbebe rock shelter in the Australian Northern Territory show that people lived in Australia at least 65,000 years ago where stone tools, ground ochre for paint, and food remains were found.
Apparently the oldest stone tools found that can be attributed to hominids, are around 3 million years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan.
When only counting Homo sapiens, they have found tools that are around 315.000 years old: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jebel_Irhoud.
And that's just what we have actually found :)
Manuports are natural rocks in "funny" shapes, like faces or falluses, which are found back (far) out of place and often in the neighbourhood of other human remnants.
Which is Zeus.
(The timing is right at least and the lead author is from the Smithsonian)
She probably shouldn't have but she let me hold them in my hands. You could see that they were made by stuffing a skull with grass then putting the clay over the skull - you could see the grass imprints on the inside. I think they were from 9000 BC, Syria region. Pretty much brand new compared to this lion.