Hawker News

Archaeologists Are Reconstructing the 'Invisible' Technologies of the Stone Age

smithsonianmag.com

150 pointsby Hooke58 comments

alexpotato[18 comments hidden]
There is a great quote:

"The Egyptians built using stone but wrote day to day on papyrus.

The Sumerians built with mud and wrote on clay tablets.

This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians."

literalAardvark[8 comments hidden]
Future archaeologists will be so confused when they find only glass and (maybe, if the wildlife doesn't finish eating it by then) plastic.
red75prime[7 comments hidden]
And lots of small rectangular silicon dioxide thingies.
IsTom[4 comments hidden]
These were a symbol of status and served a ritual purpose.
sophacles[2 comments hidden]
In some circles they are. You think all the fancy RGB stuff and fancy lights to call attention to the gamers' PCs are about functionality? Or maybe are they about status?

Tools or and goods often serve as both status symbols and functionality.

Do you think fancy cars are just about transport? Or maybe they also serve as status symbols?

Do you think the special sword for the king which he uses to knight people is just a tool of war? Seems to me that its all three tbh.

All sorts of things in our lives are both functional and status symbols and/or serve a ritual purpose.

Heck there are all sorts of things that are not really functional any more but were very functional at one point and still serve as status symbols and ritual purpose, for example - the traditional gift of a fancy fountain pen to a recent law school graduate.

kzrdude[hidden]
It would be way easier for us to beat overconsumption and promote sustainability of it wasn't for status, in fact. New iphones and fresh clothes are not necessary for life, but socially, people crave them.
Terr_[hidden]
For your amusement: https://smbc-comics.com/comic/rite-on
an0malous[2 comments hidden]
They won’t find anything because it’ll have rusted and disintegrated within a few hundred years
red75prime[hidden]
Monocrystalline silicon (silicon dioxide was my brain hiccup) seems to be sufficiently stable to last hundreds of thousands of years. [1] notices constant dissolution rate of monocrystalline silicon that will keep its rectangular shape recognizable for a long time.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5830089/ "The observation that hydrolysis of Si NMs proceeds by surface reactions only, in a predictable manner without diffusion through defects or pin-holes"

thaumasiotes[8 comments hidden]
> This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians.

Well, we have a lot of Mesopotamian writing. Nothing like the amount they wrote, but more than we want to deal with. Most of their writing sank into the water table and dissolved, like the buildings.

Papyrus isn't a reason for any lack of Egyptian writing; just like everything else, papyrus won't rot in Egypt because of the lack of water.

chrisco255[4 comments hidden]
UV and oxygen are plenty strong enough to deteriorate paper over time even without water. Never mind the occasional fire as what happened with the Library of Alexandria.
thaumasiotes[3 comments hidden]
> UV and oxygen are plenty strong enough to deteriorate paper over time even without water.

This just isn't an issue at all. You're not taking historical documents off the shelves of a modern building - and if you were, sunlight still wouldn't matter - you're digging them out of the ground. Water is what matters; that's why we have so many things from Egypt that could never have survived anywhere else.

Fire, yes, it's worse for paper than it is for clay. But like I just said, we're missing the majority of Mesopotamian documents because they were never fired. We still have a minority that were. What does the same logic applied to Egypt tell you?

chrisco255[2 comments hidden]
Well we have a minority of surviving documents from ancient Egypt as well. A tiny tiny subfraction of a percent of that was able to survive and many of them were entombed with mummies and come from higher quality papyrus in general as every precaution of preservation was inherently taken as part of the process.

And even what survives today much of it is fragments and are torn and incomplete and has to be carefully handled to avoid further deterioration.

Water is not the only thing that matters. UV is extremely damaging over time. Oxygen is damaging over time. Insects, too can chew apart papyrus.

You are only digging the ones out of the ground that happen to have been kept in careful containers or tombs. You're not going to uproot an old papyrus document that has been buried under 6 feet of earth for 3000 years like a fresh potato. Even the mechanical stress of being shifted and being under pressure around can easily tear it apart and disintegrate it over time.

ButlerianJihad[hidden]
I don't know who "we" is, again, but at any rate, there is a very famous archive, library if you will, of ancient papyrus, codices, scrolls, etc. and it perdures on Mount Sinai itself. This archive is in the care of Eastern Orthodox monks, who also purport to have the "Burning Bush" itself and often get mocked by millennials for keeping a fire extinguisher nearby.

Anyway I feel that the rumours of fire "destroying" the library of Alexandria are extremely exaggerated, because the monastery on Sinai is extraordinary in its breadth and depth, and nobody's really talking about how all that material got there, except for their patroness, whose name it bears, and who I feel has been essentially a personification/allegory of the Library itself.

Alexandria, as a nexus of documents brought far and wide across the Mediterranean, was clearly instrumental in solidifying and bolstering the doctrines and epistolary literature of the Early Great Church.

Historians say that the "Library" was more of a clearinghouse where every ship in port was raided for its documents and papers, all copied laboriously, and sometimes returned to the captains: sometimes originals, sometimes the copies only. They also took other measures to seek out manuscripts and add them to the local archives. So, Alexandria essentially built its archives the same way that OpenAI has done it today. And I don't personally believe that they were dumb enough to permanently store all that stuff next to the famous lighthouse. Those monks on Sinai have been very, very wise men, (shall we say "super intelligent"?), unchallenged for two thousand years.

Tuna-Fish[3 comments hidden]
There is enough humidity around the Nile, that is, the places where people actually lived, to rot papyrus. We have some remaining papyrus archives, but those are exceptions, not the rule. There is absolutely nothing like the library of Ashurbanibal.

Papyrus was amazing material for the time, but it was also a curse on future archeologists. The Achaemenid Persians went from being illiterate, to writing on clay, to capturing Egypt and writing on Papyrus, in one human lifetime. We have more surviving Persian writing from the short time they wrote on clay than we have of the two hundred years of their history after that.

pseudohadamard[2 comments hidden]
> We have more surviving Persian writing from the short time they wrote on clay than we have of the two hundred years of their history after that.

The Medes turning up to fire the clay tablets probably contributed a lot to their longevity.

cwnyth[hidden]
That would be the Assyrians, not the Persians, whose archive the Medes "fired".
redwood[hidden]
And the fact that we believe most early civilizations were in the desert is of course that it's much easier to excavate lands that no longer have large populations living on them
delichon[12 comments hidden]
I had one of the best sleeps of my life on a bed of soft sand, in the curve of a dry creek that I really should not have slept in due to flash flood risk. Since then I've wondered if ancient people might have made mattresses of sand, but they were so simple and evanescent that they left no trace.
mr_toad[6 comments hidden]
Sand is a pretty good heat conductor. It’d probably be ok on hot nights, but not so much in winter.
gchamonlive[4 comments hidden]
Good thing you can just cover it with a blanket or something in winter
AlotOfReading[3 comments hidden]
You need more insulation than you'd expect. The coldest campsites I've ever had have all been on sand.
gchamonlive[2 comments hidden]
Since we're talking about stone age tech, would mammoth pelt offer good insulation?
AlotOfReading[hidden]
Can't say I have a lot of experience sleeping on mammoth pelt.

A slightly more modern way to deal with cold sand is to bury some coals beneath the pelt, after using them to cook your dinner or whatever.

L_226[hidden]
it's a good thermal insulator! next time you are at the beach with hot sand, try digging down a few cm with your toes.
bell-cot[hidden]
Possibly - but if they transported the sand to where they slept very often, that would show up in archeological digs.
throwup238[2 comments hidden]
Accounts by westerners enslaved by nomadic tribes (when they shipwrecked on the coast) often talk about looking for sand to sleep on, especially when in the rocky parts of the Sahara, so I’d wager humans have been sleeping on sand for a very long time.
doitLP[hidden]
The kalahari bushman had a trick to stay cool on a hot day: dig a sand pit in the shade, put in the fibrous bits of inedible plant material, pee on them, lay down in the pit and cover up with sand and wait until the evening cooled things down.
tejohnso[2 comments hidden]
Were you in a tent? I'd be too worried about sand critters to do that otherwise.
delichon[hidden]
Not even a ground cloth, just a sleeping bag. Under an astonishingly clear night sky with galaxies for nightlights. This was the territory of the red diamond rattlesnake and the Arizona giant hairy scorpion. If they visited me that night I was too sound asleep to notice.
rich_sasha[hidden]
It would be in fact quite amusing if the technology the Neolithians were actually most proud of had nothing to do with stone, just didn’t last. Better fabrics? Waterproof clothing? Elaborate wooden tools made using “dumb” stone ones?
HelloUsername[hidden]
Related: "Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age (knowablemagazine.org)" 11.sep.2026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662246 57 comments
tengwar2[hidden]
Something I am interested in is the most ephemeral of technology: maintenance customs. As an example, in my country we have a small number of chalk figures. These are large figures cut in to the landscape, then packed with white chalk to stand out against the grass. Probably the most famous is the White Horse of Uffington (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uffington_White_Horse), but there are a small number of others such as the Cerne Abbas Giant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerne_Abbas_Giant). Dating them is difficult. The only technique I know of that can be used is optically stimulated luminescence, which was used to put the White Horse at 1380 BC and 550 BC, but by its nature this should be interpreted as "no later than", since it relies on finding material which was exposed to sunlight when the figure was cut and has not been exposed since then. (I worked on the early development of OSL dating, so this is a professional opinion).

The interesting part is that these figures are transitory. If they are not maintained, they disappear - which almost happened to the Long Man of Wilmington (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Man_of_Wilmington). Hence at least for the White Horse, we know that there has been at least an intermittent custom of scouring out the figure and replacing the chalk since prehistoric times up to the present. It's not as neat as a village gathering every seven years to do the job, but there is still a continuity of custom.

MengerSponge[7 comments hidden]
If you've never watched Clickspring's Youtube videos you're in for a treat.

He has a long-running series where he works to make a new Antikythera mechanism using ancient (bronze age) technologies. He's a master machinist, so he has fabulous insight into workholding, precision, etc. https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4...

His skeleton clock build is one of my favorite pieces of internet content ever, up there with Bartoz's gorgeous webpages: https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/

incomplete[hidden]
omg, thank you SO much for the rec on clickspring's antikythera mechanism! i watched the first two episodes years ago and the algorithm never brought the channel back to my feed. now i'm subscribed and will have to watch this again.

i was also lucky enough to visit athens years ago and see the mechanism in person at the national archaeological museum... it's an amazing exhibit, and if you're ever in that neck of the woods i cannot recommend it any more. :)

JuniperMesos[2 comments hidden]
I'm a big fan of Clickspring. One really interesting aspect of his Antikythera mechanism videos is that, along with constructing the mechanism itself, he is using the physical details of the recovered artifact to make educated guesses about what sorts of workshop technology were available in the eastern Mediterranean world at that time. Including fairly in-the-weeds stuff like entire videos on what sorts of materials a craftsman of that era might have used to lay out marking lines on workpieces or how one might've soldered two metal pieces together.
MengerSponge[hidden]
Yes, that's exactly why I mentioned Clickspring's project in this thread about Stone Age archaeology :)
dyauspitr[3 comments hidden]
My only complaint with Clickspring is that it takes so long. I feel like it has been 10 years at this point since he started the Antikythera mechanism build, but I could be wrong.
anitil[hidden]
I think he took some time off to write up some academic contributions that he discovered as a result of working on the mechanism
AnthonBerg[hidden]
Suddenly I am struck blind and unable to distinguish any difference between Clickspring's Antikythera mechanism and Project Binky.

Spoiler warning: Starting in 2013, two mechanics graft a Celica GT-Four drivetrain into an Austin Mini. Now thirteen years later, Episode 43 came 12 days ago and they drove it. Project Binky drives!! it drives!!! In our lifetime!!

https://youtu.be/6WaPEUnV0ts

Aardwolf[11 comments hidden]
Rope is one thing that I wonder how to make from scratch if you'd be dropped somewhere in nature. I know it's about weaving plant fibers, but, how can it get so long?
WalterBright[5 comments hidden]
I've wondered the same thing. The fibers aren't that long.
amszmidt[hidden]
You take short fibers, and twist and splice them together to get longer fibers. And you repeat until you get the desired length, or thickness...

Lots of videos of how to make it on the Internets using nettle, or some other plant (flax is still used to make clothes today though through industry methods).

wincy[hidden]
It’s the trick where people would take two phone books and if you interleave every page you can literally have two cars going each direction and can’t rip them apart. Ropes are this on a smaller scale.
Tuna-Fish[hidden]
The fibers don't need to be long. About 1 inch is enough for any purpose. The trick is to twist each fiber individually in one direction (fe. clockwise) while twisting them around each other in the opposite direction (fe. counter-clockwise). This creates internal tension that makes the fibers push against each other with substantial force, creating sufficient internal friction for them to bind against each other. And now you have string, and you again switch twist direction to bind multiple strings together to make thicker string, a switch again to bind multiple of those together, etc, until you get to proper rope thickness, which is basically always substantially thicker than the length of the fibers that make it.

It's a bit magical when you figure out how to do it, it doesn't seem to make any sense yet it works.

WalterBright[hidden]
Thanks everyone for the explanation!
MSFT_Edging[hidden]
Same way you weave together yarn. The individual fibers bind together with weaving and friction and form a longer chain.
tiborsaas[hidden]
Here's how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfaLUi-qtnA
red75prime[hidden]
When I was 5 I watched my grandmother making yarn using a foot-powered castle wheel. The machine rotates a string of yarn along its long axis and it collects fibers from a piece of loose wool (roving) thus extending itself. I think I've seen a drop spindle too, but I'm less certain about that.
tootie[hidden]
We made rope in boy scouts. You just need to braid three strings and you can splice in broken bits pretty easily. You can also work out kinks with just regular straight sticks and it only takes two people. The theory that these batons were for rope seems unlikely in that regard. Apparently the leading hypothesis is for spear throwing.
nkrisc[hidden]
In simple terms: short fibers overlap to make longer ones.
spenrose[hidden]
Y’all might enjoy Virginia Postrel’s _The Fabric of Civilization_ , which mostly covers the last few thousand years.
4ndrewl[hidden]
And when they say 'Stone Age' they mean 'for most of our time on earth'
legulere[2 comments hidden]
They could have explained that the fancy word Lochstab just means hole rod in German
tootie[hidden]
Typically called a "perforated baton" in English. The theory of rope twisting is also not widely accepted. It's possible but it's an overly complex device given that you can twist a rope with regular sticks. These guys have contributed to the debate but it's absolutely not settled. They've also discovered hundreds of these across Europe.

https://youtu.be/Q8X9l42ZgsU?is=hW5M_JXqsPtiuHVk

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

jakzurr[hidden]
The rope-making video clip is very cool. Sounds plausible.
tootie[hidden]
Stefan Milo did a long one on these objects:

https://youtu.be/Q8X9l42ZgsU?is=hW5M_JXqsPtiuHVk

Rope making is possible but not really likely.

ajoski9[hidden]
Let me guess, it's the boring stuff.