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.
“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.
why does no one ever talk about how lewis and clark met why isn’t that taught in history classes it’s like some rom-com meet-funny trope and i’ve literally never heard it brought up. literally the start of one of the most famous friendships in america and no one talks about it.
Wasn’t Clark just Lewis’ commanding officer? I guess I don’t know this story either. Can you tell it?
yes!! oh my god!!
so at twenty-one years of age, stupid stubborn hotheaded ensign meriwether lewis decides to get hella drunk and crash the party of one of his superior officers, starting an argument over politics (namely, defending thomas jefferson, his neighbor and veritable father figure) and insulting his host and basically being an embarrassment. so, he’s arrested and leveled with a court martial!! because this ridiculous boy can’t mind his fucking manners when he’s tipsy apparently!!
but instead of having to explain to his poor mother why he got booted out of the continental army, he’s acquitted (”with honor” bc apparently i’m not the only one who plays favorites when it comes to meriwether lewis), but he has to be reassigned so he doesn’t piss off his commanding officer again (awk). and whose brand new sharp-shooting rifle unit does he get transferred to?? take a wild guess!!!! that’s right, william clark’s!!!! and over the next six months meri falls deepfuck in totally platonic bro-love with him until clark resigns his commission for family reasons. then, roughly eight years later, lewis writes him to ask if maybe he’d like to travel to the ends of the earth by his side and, well, the rest is history.
But how do you know it was platonic
i hope you guys understand that when i say “platonic” i say it in the patronizing sarcastic tone of voice i always use when i talk about meriwether lewis’s big ol’ crush on his bff. maybe i can’t prove totally that he was v gay and probably at least a little bit madly in love with clark, but damn i wanna believe love exists ok.
lewis’s obvious sexual repulsion of women, his inability to find a wife, his desire to live with clark after the expedition, that last letter he wrote to clark before his violent death that we don’t have because clark burned it – we can read a lot into all of this if we want to, but even besides all of that the point remains that meriwether lewis was intensely fond of clark, and that they cared deeply for one another, and that their personalities complemented and completed one another in a way that makes you think twice about soulmates.
actually, sacagawea was a sixteen-year-old kidnapped shoshone girl sold into sexual slavery to a french trader named toussaint charbonneau, who pissed power couple lewis and clark off to no end due to generally just being who he was as a person.
whereas lewis had no real interest in women from what we can tell from his writings, he actually wrote about how much he admired sacagawea’s extreme fortitude and numerous skills that helped them throughout their journey. lewis also actually delivered sacagawea’s child!! she had a very difficult birth (probably because she was a child), which sent lewis into multiple kinds of panic. clark, however, really doted on sacagawea and her son; he gave them both nicknames, looked out for their safety during the trip, and was very close to them even after the expedition and ended up adopting sacagawea’s son. he was also a notoriously bad speller and i don’t think he ever spelt charbonneau’s name correctly ever not even once (which makes me think of the blenderdick cucumberpatch meme tbh).
i mean yeah there’s also a lot of angst here too because after the expedition their lives went in very different directions.
clark comes home and immediately acclimates to a hero’s life. he gets married and has a son who he names meriwether lewis clark after his best friend. he has a respectable government position and lives a long and happy life.
meanwhile lewis struggles to get accustomed to civilized life again. he misses the freedom of the expedition. he still sleeps on buffalo skins spread out on his bedroom floor. he writes that he is determined to find himself a wife but no woman can seem to stand him; one even flees town in the middle of the night to avoid seeing him again the next day. with his lifelong history of depression (which comes in bursts which, to me, seem a lot like manic depression), lewis spirals downward. he’s hated and conspired against in his political career, he starts to drink heavily, he stops talking to all of the people who had been closest to him.
he finally works himself up to taking a trip to dc to deliver his journals to jefferson and on the boat trip up he attempts to kill himself multiple times. he’s described as appearing frantic and afraid, and tries to calm himself down by repeatedly telling himself that clark is on his way, that clark will be coming to save him. we know that at this time he wrote clark a letter, but clark burned it so we don’t know what it said. i’m ashamed of the things i’d do to get my hands on that letter.
lewis dies in an inn on the natchez trace of two bullet wounds, and it’s still debated whether it was suicide or murder; everyone close to him seemed to accept it was suicide, including clark, who wrote, “oh, i fear the weight of his mind has overcome him”.
But what happened to Sacagawea and her son?
ok, more on sacagawea, because she deserves any and all the credit she gets plus a whole lot more honestly:
when sacagawea was about 12 years old, she was kidnapped by the hidatsa tribe and sold alongside another shoshone woman to charbonneau as his “wives”. charbonneau was officially hired by lewis and clark not just because he was a french fur trader who knew the pacific northwest territory as well as the hidatsa language, but because sacagawea’s knowledge of the shoshone language and people would benefit them as they traveled through their lands. sacagawea was not just some inconvenient extra, she was a purposeful and valued addition to the corps.
sacagawea had her son, jean-baptiste, while l&c and co. ™ were still wintering at fort mandan, so she was literally carrying this child on her back for the entire journey. she was also the only woman travelling in the corps! and she was given duties! strong and capable and literally perfect i love her so much!
while travelling on a riverway, the boat sacagawea was travelling on capsized, and along with saving her son she also rescued valuable supplies and papers; both the captains were blown away with how well she acted under that sort of duress (and how badly her husband did lmao). travelling through native lands, tribes were more likely to think these men were not dangerous purely because sacagawea was with them, so she literally saved their white asses through association. she was a necessary and important figure in council meetings between the corps and tribal chiefs. clark called her “janey” and called her son “pompy”. (cute.) when they do get to the ocean, sacagawea literally demands clark (which she would have to do through like three layers of translators) to let her go to the shore with them, because damn it she worked just as hard as anyone else and she wants to see the fucking whales man.
perhaps most remarkably, when the corps finally did encounter the shoshone tribe, among the very first group of people they encountered was sacagawea’s brother, who she hadn’t seen for five years. that’s. so incredible. like, that’s one of the most amazing things to me. this survivor of child sexual abuse bravely treks across huge stretches of territory with a military expedition and is reunited with her family, however briefly, and. god. i’m crying.
sacagawea was not paid for her contributions to the expedition, because the contract was with her husband. she gave birth to a daughter, lisette, six years after the expedition. she died at 25 years old of a sickness she apparently had throughout her adulthood (which may have been further complicated from her early abuse and pregnancies). after her death, clark adopted both of her children.
i love this beautiful brave bird woman just as much if not more than i love my adventurous southern sons.
i’ve seen a lot of comments about the really sorry state of spelling and grammar in the expedition journals, and just wanted to let everyone know that, since no one had a dictionary with them on the expedition, they had to spell out words phonetically, and for the most part everyone wrote how they talked. by that logic, linguists have determined that by reading the journals of expedition members aloud you can actually start to mimic their accents! lewis was a virginian with some book learning, so his passages tend to have more eloquent language and less visible accent. however, clark was kentucky born and bred, and manages to misspell “mosquito”more than sixteen different ways.
Also, there’s a national memorial in Montana that Clark carved his name into, called Pompey’s Pillar. Clark named it after Sacajawea’s son.
This week we turn our attention to La Maupin, Julie d’Aubigny: sword-slinger, opera singer, and larger-than-life bisexual celebrity of 17th century France. Her life was a whirlwind of duels, seduction, graverobbing, and convent-burning so intense that she had to be pardoned by the king of France TWICE. Read on for more.
Romantic opium binges and fainting couches are all well and good but kids these days just don’t appreciate the late 19th century occultism aesthetic. Get some ceremonial robes, take up pipe-smoking and radical political views, wave some hyssop branches around and claim to have received revelation from mysterious higher beings. Transliterate your name into a Semitic language or sign all your letters with a mysterious Latin abbreviations; schism from your secret society to form a new, even more secret society! Paint a circle on your wealthy parent’s library floor and summon up spirits of indeterminate origin!
Listen my dudes Ancient Egypt existed for a really fuckass long time. Literally just Pharaonic civilization lasted 3,000 years. That’s not even including predynastic civilization and Roman rule. If you lump that in you’re looking at more like… 5,000 years.
Like. If you want a comparison of how long that is: THE YEAR IS CURRENTLY 2018. TWO THOUSAND. TWO-THIRDS OF ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PHARAONIC CIVILIZATION HAVE HAPPENED SINCE THE ‘BIRTH OF JESUS CHRIST’
We comparatively just entered the Third Intermediate Period. The Greeks will not take over for another 700~ years. Cleopatra will not be born until the year 2931.
It’s a really long time guys.
Anyway look. Listen. I sat my ass down and wrote out a timeline of “when shit happened if you started at 1AD” because I know backwards numbers are hard to process but here’s an abridged version.
If the first Egyptian Pharaoh came to power in 1AD then…
300: step pyramid built
450: Great Pyramid at Giza built
815: Pepi II dies and civil war breaks out
950: Egypt re-unified
1350: Middle Kingdom ends
1450: New Kingdom begins
1520: Hatshepsut is on the throne
1650: Ahkenaten switches to monotheistic religion and builds a new city
1680: Tutankhamun dies
1720: Ramesses II ‘the great’ ascends to the throne
1740: World’s first peace treaty signed 1790: Ramesses II dies leaving way too many children
1920: Egypt breaks into 2 states again
And now we get to ~~~~the future~~~~. If we started at 1AD all of this stuff hasn’t happened yet
2050: Briefly re-united as a single state
2180: Civil war 2250: Nubian kings take over
2335: Assyrian conquest
2665: Alexander the Great conquers Egypt
2930: Cleopatra VII born
2970: Cleopatra VII dies. Egypt falls to Rome. Fin.
And that’s just starting with the Pharaohs. If you wanted to start with Predynastic Egypt, you can go ahead and ADD ONE THOUSAND YEARS to all of those dates
I hate that this is still getting notes but that it’s getting notes *without the timeline addition* like c’mon, man. I had to do MATHS for this. I DID MATHS FOR YOU PEOPLE AND ALL I GOT WAS A BUNCH OF RACISTS
The Sphynx is aligned to where the constellation of Leo was 13,000 years ago.
13,000 years ago, the Earth was in the middle of an ice age.
The previous time the Sphynx would have been aligned to Leo would have been 39,000 years ago.
Also, the pyramids were build way earlier than experts claim they were. They were refurbished three thousand years ago.
Shut the fuck up the Egyptians gave exactly 0 fucks about the stars (except the sun) you tinfoil hatted embarrassment
Whenever you say “EXPERTS are WRONG” somewhere an Egyptologist screeches before throwing a rusty cactus at your face at high velocity
Wow, it’s almost like being refurbished 3000 years ago (3800 years ago to be precise) was done by Ramesses II who proclaimed on his restoration stele that he had repaired the work of ‘Dual King, Lord of the Two Lands, Khufu lph’ and that it was done from ‘good Egyptian limestone in perfect order’
Egyptian officials buried at Giza also have titles like ‘Overseer of the Pyramid Complex of Khufu’ (or Khafre or Menkaure) and examining their teeth means we can tell where they were, what they ate as children, and when they lived up until they died. You think we can’t date the Pyramids from that?
These officials also have tomb biographies, which have fucking Regnal years listed and the King they worked for listed in them. Regnal years that the Egyptians kept records of in their King Lists all the way up until fucking Cleopatra.
But let’s not let a little thing like contemporaneous proclamations by the Ancient Egyptiansthemselves get in the way of your racist fucknut conspiracy theories.
There are three celestial bodies the Egyptians gave a fuck about:
The Sun
The heliacal rising of the Dog Star Sirius (aka Sothis) for the changing of phyles of Priests and determining the New Year – which is really fucking accurate and therefore we can actually date things according to this…like the reigns of Pharaohs.
The Moon
And just as a final screw in your already well buried coffin: The Step Pyramid at Saqqara (also restored by Ramesses II in his great pilgrimage to the (already) ancient sites of his predecessors). This one predates the Giza Pyramids by at least 100 years, but none of you escapees from the reject Alex Jones bin seem to think of the Pyramids that came before the Pyramids at Giza. Y’know, all the test pyramids like the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid. The Pyramids at Meidum that are former sun temples but converted into Pyramids that are built from mud brick but have since crumbled and just look like hills.
Somehow you imbecilic wankstains have managed to miss that we’ve actually got a fucking timeline of how the Egyptians developed the art of Pyramid building; going from the Step Pyramid to the True Pyramid in about 150 years. They fucked up along the way pretty hard, but they did give it a go.
I mean we even have the Red Sea log book which has the goddamn date in it (this is something the Egyptians never faltered on in their history. The only times it looks odd to us are the erasure of Hatshepsut and Akhenaten and the wHm mswt (Repeating of Births) for Ramesses XI who had his reign restarted for reasons still unknown – he was possibly autistic) which tells us when the Egyptians were moving the stones for the Pyramids from the Limestone quarries on the Red sea.
This is how we know they’re not 13,000 or even 39,000 years old. Unless you want to somehow convince me that 39,000 years ago the Egyptians had a fully fledged Hieroglyphic writing system and wrote the Red Sea log book about the quarries, and then 34,000 years after that somehow regressed to basic hieroglyphs again only to build right back up to the same level of writing they were at before??
This is what that discredited Geologist failed to take into account in his dumb theory about the age of the Sphinx
This is why Egyptologists and other Geologists laugh at that dumb theory
You want me to believe that the Egyptians were somehow constructing mega monuments 39,000 years ago when all other humans on the planet were still small nomadic hunter gatherer groups, and that all the evidence I’ve listed from the words and deeds left by the Egyptians themselves is somehow wrong?
How on earth would you feed a city of over 200,000 people when the land around you was a swampy lake? Seems like an impossible task, but the Aztec managed it by creating floating gardens known as chinampas, then they farmed them intensively.
These ingenious creations were built up from the lake bed by piling layers of mud, decaying vegetation and reeds. This was a great way of recycling waste from the capital city Tenochtitlan. Each garden was framed and held together by wooden poles bound by reeds and then anchored to the lake floor with finely pruned willow trees. The Aztecs also dredged mud from the base of the canals which both kept the waterways clear and rejuvenate the nutrient levels in the gardens.
A variety of crops were grown, most commonly maize or corn, beans, chillies, squash, tomatoes, edible greens such as quelite and amaranth. Colourful flowers were also grown, essential produce for religious festivals and ceremonies. Each plot was systematically planned, the effective use of seedbeds allowed continuous planting and harvesting of crops.
Between each garden was a canal which enabled canoe transport. Fish and birds populated the water and were an additional source of food. [x]
This is literally so cool. Not only does it contribute to spacial efficiency, but the canals would easily keep pests, weeds, and possibly even diseases out of the respective plots. Companion planting and bio-intensive planting would be so much easier. Water-wise systems would be inherently present. Plus it looks so super neat aesthetically. I am just all about this.
Indigenous civilizations invented sustainable development way before there was a term for it.
I fell down a rabbit hole of research about inventions circa the 40s and was surprised by a bunch of things that have been around way longer than I thought and some that are strangely reccent, and compiled them into a list. Aka, a resource for fic writers.
Bananas (or rather, the ones we have today. The ones he’d be accustomed to, the Gros Michel, a sweeter, creamier species, went extinct in the 50s and was replaced with the bland Cavendish banana.)
High-fives (the low-five was actually invented first, around WW2, and he may have been familiar with that)
Buffalo Wings (invented in the 60s)
CPR (not really used until the late 40s, not widely known until the 50s)
Tiramisu (invented in the 80s)
Big Macs & McNuggets (while McDonald’s was founded in 1940, the former wasn’t introduced until the 60s, and the latter, the 80s)
Seat belts (the first car to have one was in the late 40s, and only became mandatory to wear them in the 80s. holy shit.)
Walmart (invented in 1962. Or really, the large-scale supermarkets as we know them today really)
Yellow tennis balls (prior to the 70s they were usually black or white)
Panadol (first sold in the US in the 50s)
The smiley face aka 🙂 (popularised in the 60s)
Now alternatively, here’s a list of things Steve WOULD (or possibly would) be familiar with:
I’m not sure why some of these surprised me.
Modern Sunglasses (have been around a lot longer than I thought, and were mass produced in the 20s)
Nokia (was first founded in 1865. I’m not kidding. They began as a pulp mill and moved into making rubber respirators for military from the 30s onwards)
Nintendo (been around since 1889 as a toy company, during the 40s they made playing cards. Wouldn’t be implausible that he knew about Nintendo, perhaps from Morita)
Krispy Kreme (opened in 1937, didn’t spread widely until the 50s however)
Kool-Aid (introduced in the 30s)
Oreos (introduced in 1912)
Printed/graphic tees (didn’t become a trend until the 60s-70s, but they certainly existed in the 40s)
Hoodies (originated in the 30s, worn by workers in cold New York warehouses. Meaning, it’s entirely plausible Bucky could’ve been wearing hoodies in the 40s)
Malls (they weren’t called that back then, but they certainly had shopping centres or plazas since the 1800s)
Converse sneakers (invented in 1908 and have barely changed since!)
I didn’t expect anyone to really reblog this wow! Here’s a couple more things to add to the list:
Would not have known about:
Velcro (patented in 1951)
Modern Sunscreen (in 1944 they had ‘Red Vet Pet’, used by soldiers it was described as a “disagreeable red, sticky substance similar to petroleum jelly”)
Bubble Wrap (1957)
Slinkies (Not sold until 1947)
Microwave oven (invented just a year after he went under)
Frisbees (invented in 1948)
Acrylic paint (not sold commercially until the 50s)
Roller blades (1979)
Would have likely known about:
Reeses’s Peanut Butter Cups (introduced in 1928)
Mountain Dew (introduced in 1940)
Twinkies (1930)
M&M’s (1941)
Lay’s Potato Chips (1932)
Tootsie Pops (1931)
Levi’s Jeans (been around since the 1850s!)
Duct Tape (been around since the early 1900′s, at this time it was called duck tape)
3-D movies (the first 3-D movie with the red/blue glasses was in 1922!)
Monopoly (1935)
Nescafe coffee (1938)
Coming back to this because I found out a few more!
More things he would likely not be familiar with:
Butter chicken (1950s)
Wireless TV remote (invented 1955)
Superglue (not sold until 1958)
Saran wrap (1949. ok and cool fact, the name Saran comes from the combined names of the creators cat and dog, Sarah and Ann!)
Colour TV (invented in his time, but not broadcasted until the 50s)
Things he would possibly/likely be familiar with:
Electric guitars (invented 1931)
Electric washing machines (as early as 1904. They look nothing like they do now though and I doubt he owned one.)
Laundromats (since the 30s or earlier)
Electric razors (produced in 1937)
Air conditioner (invented in 1902)
Pop up toaster (1919)
Robots (in 1928 the humanoid robot Eric was created. Funnily enough during Steve’s time the word ‘robot’ was pronounced as ‘row-boat’)
ImagineCreateDevour 
