New World capuchin monkeys are well-known by their ability to solve problems using stone tools that have the characteristics and morphology of some human-made stone tools.
I knew chimps etc used sticks but was unaware of actual stone tool use by monkeys
The researchers put the increase in violence in the 5th and 4th millennia BCE down to the agglomeration of humans in the first, still poorly organized, cities. The rate of violence only reduced significantly once legal systems, a centrally controlled army, and religious institutions (for example, religious festivals) developed.
this seems to be the origins of the Tower of Babel story to me.. in the Late Bronze Age people still told stories about a time long before (3000 years prior), when people had tried to settle down in those poorly organized, agglomeration cities mentioned in the article.. they still told stories about the chaos of cities without laws/religion and no common language..
Reminds me of how things like flood myths might have actually come from times of great natural disasters that got passed down in stories.
I’ve also always wondered if stories about elves, dwarves, etc. are ancient, tattered memories of prehistoric times when homo sapiens was not the only hominid walking the earth.
We overlapped with Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, etc. (And interbred. nationalgeographic.com/…/enigmatic-human-relative… ) So there was a time when anatomically modern humans walked the earth when other almost-human-but-not species still lived.
And it’s always seemed to me the variety of almost-humans in mythology from around the world might be in some cases an ancient memory of that.
in general i think we undervalue the ability of pre-literate humans to keep memories alive for truly inconceivable stretches of time.. especially when they are really important, like when entire cities tear themselves apart with anarchy and no doubt every known disease as a result.. the drama of it can't be overstated on the minds of the people who lived it.. they had only recently been kicked out of Eden, which was also very real in their minds.. those people knew all the Gods had turned their backs on them, because they lived the first real large scale human suffering..
Yeah, just post that shit for everyone to read. Ending the world via a scrap of lead covered in ancient poo wasn’t on my end-of-2023 bingo card, but I am honestly not surprised.
As the article states. Slavery is an aspect of Roman society that is so often hand waved away or basically ignored by pretty much every historical discussion or documentary.
When you hear about Julius Caesar in Gaul: one third of the entire population was sold into slavery over the course of a few years.
The entire roman economy ran on slavery.
Spartacus is a staple of modern media thanks to Giovagnoli's novel and its translation into English but the brutality with which it and the other two "Slave wars" were put down in the space of 60 years are rarely touched on.
It is fascinating how they have used this evidence to find a place previously considered "fabled".
However, this part of the article absolutely slays me:
The baboon is the only animal not native to Egypt that is linked with Egyptian deities, Kopp said, and it's a little odd that ancient Egyptians took such interest in baboons. They tend to steal crops and break into homes looking for food, making them difficult to live with, she said.
"The people who coexist with baboons don't really like them," Kopp told Live Science.
Whenever you visit a Roman Fort marked on an O.S. map it’s pretty much always just a barely noticeable hump in the field where there may once have been a wall - if you’re lucky enough to see anything.
Not “AI”. It’s a standard machine learning model Seems to be some image segmentation plus extras using PyTorch. The original source never mentioned the term “AI”, so why did the Guardian decide to bandwagon jump? The research and discovery is just as exciting without smacking the AI label on it.
The 476,000-year-old log structure predates the appearance of the first modern humans by some 150,000 years and was likely the handiwork of the archaic human species Homo heidelbergensis. Paleoanthropologists believe H. heidelbergensis was highly mobile. Thus, it is surprising that the hominins would have invested labor in building a semipermanent structure. “We haven’t seen archaic humans manipulating their environment on such a large scale before,” says Barham. “It suggests an attachment to a single point on the landscape.”
archaeology
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