David J Prokopetz

Everybody thinks my neighbour is doing some sort of Nightmare Before Christmas thing every year, but really they just don't feel like doing two separate front yard displays for Hallowe'en and Christmas, so come November 1st they stick a Santa hat on the skeleton and call it a day.

I sometimes wonder how often archaeologists trying to make sense of the traces of some ancient ritual end up completely wrong-footed because the only surviving example we have to work with was performed by somebody going "fuck it – good enough".

I'm firmly convinced that there are certain archaeological artifacts we'll never fully understand because what sparked their creation was some prehistoric craftsperson thinking to themselves "hey, you know what would be fucked up?"

Now, I hear you object: any complex prehistoric artifact that's survived to the present day would almost certainly be made of stone worked without the benefit of modern tools, representing hundreds of hours of labour. Surely no-one living in a subsistence hunter-gatherer society had that kind of time and energy to spend on indulging a bizarre whim. To this I ask: have you ever spoken to an artist in your life?

Giant stone ax lmao

Paleolithic guillotine

A pick for the world's largest ever guitar. Unfortunately, being made of wood and animal hides, the instrument did not survive in the archeological record.

I'm firmly convinced that there are certain archaeological artifacts we'll never fully understand because what sparked their creation was some prehistoric craftsperson thinking to themselves "hey, you know what would be fucked up?"

Now, I hear you object: any complex prehistoric artifact that's survived to the present day would almost certainly be made of stone worked without the benefit of modern tools, representing hundreds of hours of labour. Surely no-one living in a subsistence hunter-gatherer society had that kind of time and energy to spend on indulging a bizarre whim. To this I ask: have you ever spoken to an artist in your life?

Giant stone ax lmao

I'm firmly convinced that there are certain archaeological artifacts we'll never fully understand because what sparked their creation was some prehistoric craftsperson thinking to themselves "hey, you know what would be fucked up?"

Now, I hear you object: any complex prehistoric artifact that's survived to the present day would almost certainly be made of stone worked without the benefit of modern tools, representing hundreds of hours of labour. Surely no-one living in a subsistence hunter-gatherer society had that kind of time and energy to spend on indulging a bizarre whim. To this I ask: have you ever spoken to an artist in your life?

Given how frequently evolution adapts body parts that do things to do different, entirely unrelated things, somewhere in the depths of geological time there may well be some lost branch of the evolutionary tree that adapted its dick for powered flight, and the fact that we’ll probably never know, well, that’s kind of sad.

@not-a-support-soraka replied:

Believe me, a locomotive appendage is definitely not the dumbest thing that (formerly) reproductive anatomy has ever been evolutionarily adapted as. The biologists reading this post can back me up on this one.

@james-brafin replied:

To be 100% clear, which part of the horse are you claiming is an evolutionarily repurposed penis?

Okay, I definitely and seriously misread this post but

how DARE you hide this in the tags

Oh my god I’m crying

Given how frequently evolution adapts body parts that do things to do different, entirely unrelated things, somewhere in the depths of geological time there may well be some lost branch of the evolutionary tree that adapted its dick for powered flight, and the fact that we’ll probably never know, well, that’s kind of sad.

@not-a-support-soraka replied:

Believe me, a locomotive appendage is definitely not the dumbest thing that (formerly) reproductive anatomy has ever been evolutionarily adapted as. The biologists reading this post can back me up on this one.

@james-brafin replied:

To be 100% clear, which part of the horse are you claiming is an evolutionarily repurposed penis?

Given how frequently evolution adapts body parts that do things to do different, entirely unrelated things, somewhere in the depths of geological time there may well be some lost branch of the evolutionary tree that adapted its dick for powered flight, and the fact that we’ll probably never know, well, that’s kind of sad.

@not-a-support-soraka replied:

Believe me, a locomotive appendage is definitely not the dumbest thing that (formerly) reproductive anatomy has ever been evolutionarily adapted as. The biologists reading this post can back me up on this one.

I mean, given the Way Humans Are, we can never completely rule out the possibility that some of those hard-to-decipher inscriptions were made for the explicit purpose of annoying and confusing future generations. Spending dozens of hours bashing glyphs into solid rock for no other purpose than to troll hypothetical future observers is absolutely a thing some people would do.

#this object had a ritual purpose #the ritual purpose of 'it's fun to cause problems on purpose' (via @the-spice-must-woah)

The “ritual purposes” meme is fun and all, but it’s actually kind of infuriating when you’re trying to do research on the religious practices of pre-modern civilisations, and when you look at the alleged beliefs surrounding a particular practice and ask “okay, but what’s our actual source for this?”, it turns out the source is that we honestly have no idea why they did that, so some random social scientist literally just made up a religious belief on the basis of zero evidence in order to explain it, then everybody else cited that one guy.

(For bonus points, sometimes author A is by their own admission engaging in idle speculation, but authors B, C and D all cite A as though that speculation were settled fact, and later on, A in turn cites B, C and D as a body of evidence that their original speculation was correct, even though they themselves are the source of the information they’re citing in support of their own conclusion!)