Overly Honest Methods in science.

ooh this version has some ones i haven’t seen before, priceless

  #we chose macrocystis because every other kelp was rotting at that time of year    #we kept the crabs 12 to a sea table because we were sharing the space and couldnt use more    #the crabs were subject to a non-natural light cycle because other researchers kept leaving the lights on overnight (via Dicrocoeliumdendriticum)

Archaeologist. We sometimes choose places to dig because our gut says “this is nice, I’d settle here”. I’ve had field directors say “this has paleo energy” about areas. Often we see big hill in our dig area, we dig on big hill. 

Most recently, I’ve found two sites because I was walking to my next hole and saw some petrified wood I wanted. Started picking up pieces and saw a half buried biface lmao. 

Other site, I was walking and imagined a little native girl running along the ridge. I had a gut feeling to dig like 5m from where the hole was. Found a utilized petrified wood flake. Could’ve written it off as a plow fact, but due to all the pet wood I’d been collecting throughout the area (I’m a greedy little thing who wants pretty rocks), I knew the was it was broken was inconsistent to how the pet wood naturally breaks. 

What sealed the deal for me was cleaning the mud off, and it cut me so, yup, definitely utilized. 

So glad you commented this because I was looking for the term for “people saw a pretty rock and took it with them” forEVER now and couldn’t find it. Fuckin love manuports

eternal human urges:

A Timeline

1850s: Some scientists notice the connection between dinosaurs & birds and think birds might have evolved from dinosaurs, given similarity between Archaeopteryx and many dinosaurs, as well as between dinosaurs and living birds  

1960s: Deinonychus is discovered. Scientists starting to realize birds did evolve from dinosaurs; other ideas become fringe hypotheses 

1970s: More dinosaurs are discovered that point to dinosaur behavior being more like birds than reptiles 

1980s: Scientists begin using evolutionary relationships (ie, cladistics) to classify life, rather than Linnean Taxonomy (Kingdom-Phylum-Class etc.), especially for extinct creatures, because it really doesn’t apply to extinct life like, at all. Coelophysis, an early dinosaur, is speculatively depicted with feathers. Some very bird-like dinosaurs are debated on whether they are birds or dinosaurs. 

1993: Birds are straight-up called dinosaurs in the famous film “Jurassic Park,” which is one of the first pieces of media to depict dinosaurs as extremely birdlike; changes public perception of dinosaurs dramatically  

1996: Sinosauropteryx, the first feathered non-avian dinosaur, is revealed to the public. Birds determined to have evolved from dinosaurs, full stop; BANDits (birds-are-not-dinosaurs scientists) now a backwards, on-par-with creationists group. Since we classify dinosaurs based on their evolutionary relationships, we start calling birds dinosaurs, because they evolved from dinosaurs. 

1999: Sinornithosaurus, the first raptor (ie, cousin of Velociraptor) dinosaur found with feathers, is described. Many other feathered dinosaurs are described as well, from all over the group closely related to birds. The Walking With Dinosaurs landmark documentary series calls birds dinosaurs. 

2000: Microraptor, a raptor dinosaur with full wings on its arms and legs, is described 

2001: Velociraptor is given… “feathers” in Jurassic Park III. Velociraptor also portrayed as more bird-like than ever. When Dinosaurs Roamed America, another groundbreaking dinosaur documentary, shows all members of the group closely related to birds (except T. rex) with feathers, including Deinonychus, all over their bodies. Also calls birds dinosaurs. 

2002: A specimen of Psittacosaurus, a dinosaur about as far away from birds as you can get, is described with quills on its tail very similar to feathers 

2004: Dilong, a small relative of T. rex, is found with feathers and display structures like modern birds 

2007: Many feathered dinosaurs are now known from the group most closely related to birds. A specimen of Velociraptor with feather attachment sites on the arms for wing feathers is now known. Velociraptor now known to be definitely, no question, feathered 

2009: Tianyulong, another dinosaur from a group very far from birds, is found with fluffy quills covering all over its back 

2012: Feathered dinosaurs now coming out many times a year. Yutyrannus, a large and closer relative to T. rex, found with shaggy feathers all over its body 

2014: Kulindadromeus, another dinosaur from the group very far from birds, is named. It has fluffy covering like that of Sinosauropteryx all over its body, rather than quills. Feathers determined to be mostly likely ancestral to all dinosaurs and lost secondarily in larger species (especially if fluff known on closest relatives, pterosaurs, is also feathers - see below). 

2015: Zhenyuanlong, a close relative of Velociraptor the same size as Velociraptor, is found with extremely large wings. Raptor dinosaurs inferred to have large wing feathers unless anatomy indicates otherwise (such as having short wings). Jurassic World comes out, making dinosaurs less bird-like than in the original Jurassic Park - with lizard-like tails and behavior, and no feathers at all. Essentially, a huge step backwards. 

2018: Branched fluffy covering very similar to feathers described now on multiple pterosaurs, the group most closely related to dinosaurs (think Pterodactyls). Fluffy covering considered ancestral to all members of the Pterosaur-Dinosaur group, if not all animals more closely related to birds than to crocodilians. 

We have known birds are dinosaurs since before many people reading this were born - since before I was born. We have known dinosaurs had feathers since the mid-1990s. We have known Velociraptor was fluffy and had wings since the mid-2000s. This isn’t news. This isn’t up for debate. Please grow up. Thank you! 

My question is, how do they find out that these dinosaurs had feathers? They only find fossils. What advanced technology are they using?

The fossils have feather imprints. 

always have been

thank you

White people at it again. The Flayed Lord’s name is Xipe Totec, he’s one of the main dieties in Aztec culture. He is primarily associated with fertility and agriculture, and is strongly connected to renewal and rebirth (the flayed aspect is supposed to symbolize how corn, a major crop, sheds it’s outer layers). Aside from that, we know *very* little about mesoamerican cultures. What we do know mainly comes from retellings and accounts from Spanish conquerors, who of course had a biased perspective. Finding a new temple is a huge deal, because when the Spanish were systematically wiping out our culture, they made a point to build churches over preexisting temples and shrines. A lot of the churches are still there, but the Mexican government considers them historical buildings, and as such no one is allowed to dig under the churches or excavate the area. There are countless temples we haven’t seen because they’re under these churches. Finding a temple we can actually study is such a big deal!

It really is a big deal! also, mesoamerican art history/anthropological research are actually very robust and rapidly growing fields of study. A big problem for what white people call “Aztec” research before the 90s was that, yes, a huge number of readable personal accounts were from the Spanish. The others were written in Maya Nahuatl which used two forms of glyphs, the iconographic type, and the logogram type. 

That was illegible up until a boy raised on Maya archaeological sites, David Stuart, was awarded a MacArthur genius grant (the youngest ever at 18) to study the glyphs. he was able to read them as well as his first language, solved several codes, and then other academics were able to easily translate codices and ruins. that was over 30 years ago, so now we are working with about 50 fully translated Nahua codices and hundreds of fragmented ones. there are many beautiful ruins and ancient sites like these all over South America, but the Spanish did make sure to build on top of many very important ones. restoring pyramids and temples that were plundered and destroyed by conquistadors and centries of war before them is crucial to ancient Mexicatl research, but the colonial churches above so many of these sites are also unfortunately historically important sites themselves. Mexico city is also an ancient city; it would be really difficult to excavate where families have built their homes for over 20 generations. 

If you need a quarantine binge one of my favorite professors at my alma mater has uploaded so many free fun lectures on Maya, Peruvian, Nahua art and visual culture here :-)

Mesoamerican deities are not the fictional “old gods” of Lovecraft that are only out to get you. They were seriously worshipped by serious people, and it’s bullshit that people reduce them to “Lovecraft but Mexico”. Like, have a ponder about why a culture would worship a god who has no skin. Real life is not fiction!

hi did you know that ancient mesopotamians buried their dead under the floors of their own houses to always be close to them? i can't write a poem about this but by god i will write a master's thesis

hey, remember this? i just successfully defended this master's thesis and i'm now officially an archaeologist

Listen if the study of ancient humans doesn’t make you at least a little bit emotional idk what to say.

I started crying today at the museum because they had reconstructed the shoes of Otzi the iceman.

Either he or someone he knew who cared about him made these shoes out of grass and bear skin and twine and he was wearing them when he died over five thousand years ago.

And a Czech researcher and his students did reconstructions of these shoes and wore them to the same place where he died to test them out and they were like yep! These shoes are really cozy and comfy and didn’t give us blisters while hiking!

Is that not just the coolest shit ever????

(Quietly, with love) We will remember your bread, we will remember your dog, we will remember your shoes

(Quietly, with anger) We will remember your copper

god forbid 5000 year old girls do anything

Another #paleostream sketch

Tupuxuara, resting in a tree, awakening from the flashlight of an inconsiderate time traveler.

How rude

Thanks! I think azhdarchoids are very much underutilized for their potential horror aspects

Below the poll is a series of animal images labeled A through J. A is the least close to the birds we have today; J is the closest. If you encountered these animals in the wild, which would you call birds? If you pick a higher up option, then that means you consider all the below ones birds as well - so if you pick A, then BCDEFGHIJ are all birds. If you pick J, only J is a bird.

A:

B:

C:

D:

E:

F:

G:

H:

I:

J:

PLEASE REBLOG THIS SO IT CAN LEAVE PALAEOBLR. I NEED PEOPLE WHO DON'T RECOGNIZE THESE ANIMALS ON SIGHT TO VOTE.

I apologize to all of y'all with vision impairments for whom this poll is inaccessible. Alas, this is an experiment, and I cannot name the taxa. Thank you.

All alt text includes artist attribution; I did not make these pictures myself.

The real question is what nation, regardless of time period, would consider and be contempt with the idea of having their objects and even loved ones' BONES/REMNANTS dug up, moved to a space outside their originary place and used in the guise of "research" as a means of profit for people who have opressed their descendants?

I’ll let the Egyptians know they shouldn’t display their own heritage in their museums and I can definitely assure you we’re doing Research not “research”. Making museums out to be a Big Evil isn’t helping anyone. No one is disrespecting remains. I’m so fucking tired of people like this I swear to god.

Ah yes, how nefarious of archaeologists to make sure that the medieval people get carefully moved and respected rather than having a concrete and rebar foundation put through their skull.

Also, it’s not just diseases like leprosy and cancer. Getting ancient DNA samples of medieval plague victims and from people who survived it has just provided a major breakthrough in the understanding of how autoimmune diseases develop. This followed on from the discovery, again through ancient DNA, that the Yersinia pestis (Plague/Black Death) that caused the most fatal pandemic in history with an estimated 75,000,000-200,000,000 deaths (about 30-50% of the total population at the time) is genetically very, very similar to the same bug that still exists today. The reason it no longer causes widespread fatal outbreaks is that it killed everyone that was particularly susceptible to it 700 years ago. Thanks to archaeology we now know the exact gene variants that were protective by creating a more aggressive immune system, which are the same gene variants implicated in autoimmune problems now. This is a major finding and it’s fucking fascinating and we would not have any of the data required for this discovery if archaeologists hadn’t come along and excavated those skeletons instead of leaving the new Royal Mint building in London to put foundations through their skulls.

I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.

I was trying to talk about the game PlateUp! and why I don't like baked beans when I checked a number on Wikipedia and found this lovely lady.

This is the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, and it's 27,000-31,000 years old. It was found in Czechia.

And that age is breaking my brain. It was twenty millenia before we domesticated cats. We wouldn't be able to write about this figure for 24,000 years, since writing didn't exist.

Stonehenge and the Pyramids were built closer to today than they were to this figure, and it's not even close. It's closer to now by a LOT.

It's called a "Venus" because of the trend of Paleolithic art showing women with exaggerated features, named after a Roman God from, you know, 26 thousand years later.

BTW one theory for why these figure look like this is that they are self-portraits by women who were looking down at their own bodies. This makes sense because mirrors are only 8000 years old and this figure predates them by a couple decade-milleniums.

This figure is so old that if we're currently on the night of December 31st and it was made on January 1st, Jesus was born on December 7th. The moon landing was earlier today. We didn't invent writing until late October.

Humans have been humans, just humaning along, for so fucking long.

I like the self-portrait theory, but like... I work at a pool and I've seen people who look like that, or almost like that. So it could also well be a pretty accurate, if stylized portrait.

Also, I remember when I was little and made figurines, I sometimes used my nails to make the eyes, and they looked just like that. People really were always people...

Actually, ancient glass, having been rather neglected by archaeology for decades, is a pretty exciting topic in scholarship right now. The main thing is that glass persists–it’s very stable. After fabric rots and metal turns to a scrap of rust, there will lie a necklace, still scattered across a chest that itself has turned mostly to earth. 

Bead typologies, for example (that is, the classification of different styles/shapes/decorative motifs/colors) can allow scholars to trace trade routes, as they study the distributions of different bead types over time and geography. Glass production is kinda industrial in nature, not like spinning or beer that make good cottage industries. It was often produced in one place, and then sold on to artisans elsewhere, and then the beads themselves were traded across entire continents. 

Chemical analysis of the glass can do even more to trace routes, since different compositions and incidence of different mineral contaminants can allow archaeologists to trace glass production to individual sites, thousands of years after the fact. It’s dizzying, really.

The downside is that for a long time, archaeologists regarded beads as unimportant trinkets, and antiquities dealers understood that they were easy to take and easy to move. So an awful lot of the most exceptional beads we have from the distant past spent time in private collections or uncategorized drawers somewhere in a museum back room, so they’ve lost much of what we could have learned from their original provenance. Maybe we’ll be able to turn new analytical tools on some of these to reconstruct more of their past.

This is one of the nerdiest posts I’ve made on this site; why does it have notes? I love you. What the fuck.

History? Archeology? Beads? Of course Tumblr is eating this up!

In 1963, while doing renovations on his home, a man broke through an exterior bedroom wall in his home and discovered a tunnel entrance. What he found behind that wall stunned historians, archeologists and the world. The lost ancient underground city of Derinkuyu had been discovered. A multilevel series of rooms, carved from the soft volcanic rock in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, Derinkuyu extends to a depth of over 200ft. Believed to have been constructed by the Phrygians, an Indo-European people originally from the Balkan region, it dates back to the 8th Century BCE. Capable of holding up to 20,000 people, Derinkuyu had rooms for food stores, livestock, schools, kitchens, living and sleeping quarters and sanitary facilities. Small tunnels carved up to the surface allowed ventilation throughout the city. Entrance tunnels were carefully hidden in the hills surrounding Derinkuyu and connected to the city. One of these tunnels were discovered in 1963 when workers removed the bedroom wall. It is believed the city was originally carved as an escape from marauding Arab armies in 9th Century BCE and continued over the next several hundred years. The city was used often as a refuge during the Byzantine Era of the 5th through the 10 Century CE.

This is legit a human ant colony. Absolutely amazing.

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we'd never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn't know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn't know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don't know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they'd been all around us the whole time.

XKCD

So that people don’t need to go through the notes:

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)

If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it's colors, and it's tail rings (which one would argue would be it's "iconic feature."

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We've found pigmentation in scales and skin. We've completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We've figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by "accident" by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it's life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from "rocks" than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is "We can't possibly know anything about these animals," then you don't understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They're only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as "proof" that paleontologists don't know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)

Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of "thanks i hate it" and "stop ruining dinosaurs!"

Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health

I dont usually reblog stuff to this account, but this is very important stuff.

When naysayers get angry about how science ruins your favourite dinosaurs, and that they're just making shit up, fossils don't tell us everything.... they need to look at the facts.

Fossilisation is on a spectrum, and the information we get will vary between specimens. Sometimes all we get are single teeth, sometimes we get a mummy with taut skin still attached! Palaeontology is not a new science, they've been doing this for centuries now, and scientists have really refined and perfected their methods. And they continue to get better at it!

Palaeontologists are not intentionally ruining anything. We just have more pieces of the puzzle now, we put on a stronger correction lens, so the picture is clearer and closer to what the animals really looked like.

I still can't get over that we know Sinosauropteryx had an orange and brown striped tail, or that Tyrannosaurus growled in infrasound, but sometimes, when you have enough fossils, and you know how to study them, we find out things!

No we will never have a 100% accurate reconstruction of animals and plants that have been extinct for millions of years. But we will certainly get ridiculously close.

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job. 

i also like that this is a “ask craftspeople” thing, it reminds me of when art historians were all “the fuck” about someone’s ear “deformity” in a portrait and couldn’t work out what the symbolism was until someone who’d also worked as a piercer was like “uhm, he’s fucked up a piercing there”. interdisciplinary shit also needs to include non-academic approaches because crafts & trades people know shit ok

One of my professors often tells us about a time he, as and Egyptian Archaeologist, came down upon a ring of bricks one brick high. In the middle of a house. He and his fellow researchers could not fpr the life of them figure out what tf it could possibly have been for. Until he decided to as a laborer, who doesnt even speak English, what it was. The guy gestures for my prof to follow him, and shows him the same ring of bricks in a nearby modern house. Said ring is filled with baby chicks, while momma hen is out in the yard having a snack. The chicks can’t get over the single brick, but mom can step right over. Over 2000 years and their still corraling chicks with brick circles. If it aint broke, dont fix it and always ask the locals.

I read something a while back about how pre-columbian Americans had obsidian blades they stored in the rafters of their houses. The archaeologists who discovered them came to the conclusion that the primitive civilizations believed keeping them closer to the sun would keep the blades sharper.

Then a mother looked at their findings and said “yeah, they stored their knives in the rafters to keep them out of reach of the children.”

Omg the ancient child proofing add on tho lol

I remember years ago on a forum (email list, that’s how old) a woman talking about going to a museum, and seeing among the women’s household objects a number of fired clay items referred to as “prayer objects”.  (Apparently this sort of labeling is not uncommon when you have something that every house has and appears to be important, but no-one knows what it is.)  She found a docent and said, “Excuse me, but I think those are drop spindles.”  “Why would you think that, ma’am?”  “Because they look just like the ones my husband makes for me.  See?”  They got all excited, took tons of pictures and video of her spinning with her spindle.  When she was back in the area a few years later, they were still on display, but labeled as drop spindles.

So ancient Roman statues have some really weird hairstyles. Archaeologists just couldn’t figure them out. They didn’t have hairspray or modern hair bands, or elastic at all, but some of these things defied gravity better than Marge Simpson’s beehive.

Eventually they decided, wigs. Must be wigs. Or maybe hats. Definitely not real hair.

A hairdresser comes a long, looks at a few and is like, “Yeah, they’re sewn.”

“Don’t be silly!” the archaeologists cry. “How foolish, sewn hair indeed! LOL!”

So she went away and recreated them on real people using a needle and thread and the mystery of Roman hairstyles was solved.

She now works as a hair archaeologist and I believe she has a YouTube channel now where she recreates forgotten hairstyles, using only what they had available at the time.

^^ THE PERSON MENTIONED HERE IS JANET STEPHENS!!

Here’s her YouTube channel with the recreated hair-styles

And the research she did got published in the Journal of Roman Studies (which is a big deal in the Classics world) “even though” she doesn’t have at least a Masters degree in the field.

[To give reference to the gate keeping in this field, she was, I think, only the second or so person without a PhD to be published in the history of the Journal]

But that’s the point, she knew hair and she knew her craft so well that when scholars had ridiculous theories and scoffed at her own, she went ahead and experimented and proved her theories right.

"religious artifact" in archeologist means "we have no fucking idea what it is, but we can't just tell people that".

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).

So unicorns are real

behold… a unicorn

I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED  to find out this is, in fact, the case.

Questing Beast

- Neck of a snake

- body of a leopard

- haunches of a lion

- feet off a hart (deer)

So is it

Or….

don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?

these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.

In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant  who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?

And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!

Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another 

It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.

And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!

By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?

Well-

- the big nasal opening kinda looks like an eye if you have no idea what kind of animal had this kind of skull (you can read more about this theory in this old National Geographic article if you like).

Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called شیردال‌ (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:

Check the “origin” part of the wikipedia page for “griffin” if you want to find more sources for this theory and for the arguments against it! Again, it’s just a theory, but I think it’s super cool.

This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.

So cool...