When stone tools were considered lightning remnants – and weapons of the gods
www.theguardian.com
Neolithic stone axes were known as thunderstones and thought to have magical powers
  • Transporter Room 3English
    53•6 months ago

    I love listening to researchers talk about places like Ur and Karahan Tepe and all the things we know about in between.

    What I don’t love is the very clear tendency to believe that people 10,000 years ago had the mental capacity of a frog.

    No, I don’t think the pit-like dwellings that don’t have roofs were proof they were savages who lived under the open sky, I think in the TEN THOUSAND YEARS SINCE THEN the roof disintegrated. It’s not a hard concept to put something over your head to stay out of the rain.

    It IS however, hard to make a roof out of mud unless you know where to get special mud and how to cook it. They would have to use branches, leaves and long grasses to keep rain off, which definitely wouldn’t survive 10 millennia.

    So DID they have roofs? No idea, but trying to point at lack of roofs as “proof” of anything is kind of dumb.

    Respect for the ones that straight up say “we don’t know but it’s speculated that…” though

    Also it’s disgusting to me how many times I’ve seen “because the people who found the artifact thought it was heretical/sacreligious/proves their religion wrong they destroyed most of it”