@earthmoonlotus / earthmoonlotus.tumblr.com
do you ever see paleolithic art and go “oh fuck that’s good” like they hadn’t developed agriculture or the wheel but god damn could they paint horses real good
look at this pretty accurate horse art. this is from chauvet cave and is between 31,000 to 28,000 years old.
I get emotional over the fact that humans have always had companion animals.
The ancient Greeks and Romans loved their dogs, and buried them in marked graves.
One such epitaph read:
"I am in tears, while carrying you to your last resting place as much as I rejoiced when bringing you home in my own hands fifteen years ago."
(And there are many more of these really sad epitaphs on these ancient dog graves)
The ancient Egyptians kept cats, dogs, and a myriad of wild animals as pets. Deceased pets were mummified with the same care that would go into a person. Even fish were mummified and placed in little wooden coffins:
Medieval monks kept pets, especially cats, in their monasteries. There are medieval manuscripts with cat paw prints on them.
The ancient world was full of textile masterpieces we can only imagine… but most of them have rotted away. So few of them have come down to us in these days that we think of metal and stone as the primary mediums for the oldest artworks. But there were tapestries and fabric work that would have rivaled the finest wrought gold and iron and the first cave paintings.
You ever think about how unified humanity is by just everyday experiences? Tudor peasants had hangnails, nobles in the Qin dynasty had favorite foods, workers in the 1700s liked seeing flowers growing in pavement cracks, a cook in medieval Iran teared up cutting onions, a mom in 1300 told her son not to get grass stains on his clothes, some girl in the past loved staying up late to see the sun rise.
there are scriptures all over the world painstakingly crafted hundreds of years ago with paw prints and spelling mistakes or drawings covering up mistakes. a bunch of teenage girls 2000 years ago gathered to walk around their hometown, getting fast food and laughing with their friends. two friends shared blankets before people lived in houses. a mother ran a fine comb through her child’s hair and told it to stop squirming sometime in the 1000s. there are covered up sewing mistakes in couture dresses from the 1800s, some poor roman burnt their food so well past recognition that they just buried the entire pot. there are broken dishes hidden in gardens of people no one even remembers anymore
children eleven thousand years ago enjoyed jumping around in puddles made from the footprints of a giant sloth. children loved muddy puddles so long ago there were still megafauna alive
can anyone find me that mesopotamian clay tablet telling you to marry a party girl because she'll bring you joy
It's from the "Maxims of Ptahhotep", purportedly written by a 96-year-old vizier to pass on his wisdom to his son:
If you marry a good-time girl
A joyful woman known to her town,
If she is wayward,
and revels in the moment,
do not reject her, but instead let her enjoy;
joyfulness is what marks calm water.
yay ty. Between the above and the links in the mentions we have 3 translations total
DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE NEANDERTHAL CHILD WITH DOWN'S SYNDROME? Because they're all I've been thinking about when I'm sad for the past few days. Their existence makes me less sad.
Did you know that this is not a rarity? We have found remains showing catastrophic injuries - permanently disabling ones. With fully remodeled, healed bones.
It is NOT the default, it is NOT human nature to exclude disabled people from society. By nature we look after each other, by nature disability is just a natural part of the human variety that's made us so successful as a species.
By nature, people love.
An extraordinary Acheulean handaxe knapped around a fossil shell circa 500,000-300,000 years ago.
The maker appears to have deliberately flaked around the shell to preserve and place it in a central position. As a result this handaxe has been described as an early example of artistic thought.
From West Tofts, Norfolk.
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, Courtesy Alison Fisk
Half a million years ago. Whoa
i saw this bad boy in person
It's incredible
It was made by HOMO ERECTUS you guys
Like. We were making art before we were "human" in the generally accepted sense
It was almost certainly sacred then. And when you are close to it, it feels super sacred now
the bottom of the museum of human history
#oh man. I am in love with this image.#the idea of a museum with this at the heart of it? the slope down to it?#that you have to unravel the past like a skein of thread as you travel deeper and and deeper backwards in time#to this. the first fire. the way it illuminated the painted walls; the way the aurochs leapt with the flames#ah. perfect. (via @notbecauseofvictories)
Some fanart of this ancient figurine! Also got commissioned to draw her hanging out with a friend!
Two weeks ago I went to my local museum and saw her and loved her so much I took a picture. Recognized her right away from the art!
Aw there she is! It's so cool to see more pictures!
Scythian Tattoos Appreciation. I
Kurgan II of Pazyryk, Altai. Right upper arm of a Scythian men with tattoos showing animals and hybrid creatures. 5th century BCE.
Original skin (left) and outline (right).
Source: Under the Sign of the Golden Griffin. Royal Tombs of the Scythians (2007).
helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!
I think I found the article!
Read it if you have the time, it's very interesting.
Reading the article I see why TERFs are mad about it; it explicitly makes the distinction between gender as a social entity and sex as a biological category, and defines biological sex having multiple factors, both of which are anathema to TERF philosophy.
It also includes these fascinating paragraphs about the role of estrogen in different types of physical activity, directly debunking the widespread notion that estrogen is the weak human's hormone and only does weak human things:
Given the fitness world's persistent touting of the hormone testosterone for athletic success, you'd be forgiven for not knowing that estrogen, which females typically produce more of than males, plays an incredibly important role in athletic performance… The estrogen receptor—the protein that estrogen binds to in order to do its work—is deeply ancient. Joseph Thornton of the University of Chicago and his colleagues have estimated that it is around 1.2 billion to 600 million years old—roughly twice as old as the testosterone receptor. In addition to helping regulate the reproductive system, estrogen influences fine-motor control and memory, enhances the growth and development of neurons, and helps to prevent hardening of the arteries. Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles… which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues… Linda Lamont of the University of Rhode Island and her colleagues, as well as Michael Riddell of York University in Canada and his colleagues, found that females experienced less muscle breakdown than males after the same bouts of exercise. Tellingly, in a separate study, Mazen J. Hamadeh of York University and his colleagues found that males supplemented with estrogen suffered less muscle breakdown during cycling than those who didn't receive estrogen supplements.
The article also talks about sexual dimorphism in different species, concluding that "Modern humans have low sexual dimorphism compared with the other great apes," and that overemphasis on averages obscures the wide dispersal of individual traits, which is what I keep saying.
In "The Dawn of Everything, A New History for Humanity" David Graeber gives what I think might be the best piece of advice I've ever heard for understanding deep human history, and that is to get your mind out of the Garden of Eden.
People speculating about prehistory before modern archeology were quick to frame early humanity as existing in a "state of nature", either with pure innocent tribal communism, or being brutish barbarous cavemen, then something happened to bring us from the state of nature into "society". Did we make a Faustian bargain by domesticating plants and animals? Why is evidence of intergroup violence in prehistory so rare? How did we fall from the innocent state of nature? This, of course, smacks of the biblical creation story, so even if people don't believe it literally, they seem to have a hard time letting go of it spiritually even in a secular context.
This is pretty much nonsense, of course. Humans have existed for over 2 million years. Anatomically modern humans have existed for at least 300 thousand years. Behaviourally modern humans (with symbolism, art, long distance trade, political awareness) have existed for at least 50 thousand years, from our best evidence, but possibly a lot longer. The time between the Sumerians inventing writing and urban living 5,000 years ago and now is only a narrow slice of human history.
If we want to understand human history properly, we shouldn't understand people of the past as fundamentally different from us. They were intelligent, politically aware people doing their best in the world they found themselves in, just like we are today. We didn't fall from innocence with the development of behavioral modernity, religion, farming, war, money, capitalism, computers, or anything else. The world has changed a lot, but people have been experimenting with different ways to live for as long as there have been people, like this example I've posted before about disabled people's role in late pleistocene Eurasian society.
People have been the same as we are now for at least the last 50 thousand years. We have lived in countless different ways and will continue to experiment. There was no fall, and we don't live at the end of history.
neolithic people were like these rocks need spirals. and they were right.
Kilmarten Glen, Scotland
Algeria, Sahara, North Africa
Nine Mile Canyon, Utah, USA
South Goa, India
“sex/romance/empathy makes us human,” they say. awful. pathetic. what makes us human is the urge to set things on fire
you’re actually correct!
Cooking is the one thing that only humans do and can be directly linked to the increase in our brain size
Burning the mammoth flank just a lirtle instead of eating it raw gives grug more calorie to think. Grug thinking about color symbolism in silence of the lambs
The Kolyma (Russia) Woolly rhino (Coelodonta antiquitatis), the only complete permafrost preserved adult woolly rhino known. It lived around 39,000 years ago. © Vladimir Filipov 2012
and here’s Coelodonta antiquitatis as depicted by the people who lived alongside it:
