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Giant ‘Arrows’ Seen From Space Point to a Vanished World
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- johngalt 10y agoI want to say that there were fish traps that followed similar designs. Curving walls that led the fish into tidal pools that they couldn't escape when the tide went out.
- failrate 10y agoYes, and some river traps work on a similar principle.
- 100pctremote 10y agoThere are many of these ancient fish ponds throughout the Hawaiian islands -- some of them enormous and very pretty.
- 205guy 10y agoI believe Hawaiian fish ponds were for pisciculture--raising fish. Saw a rock marked with a sign in a park, the Hawaiians used the hollowed out part to store fish while transporting between streams and ponds. They were not hunter-gatherers, they were (mostly) farmers.
- troels 10y agoExactly my thoughts. This is a giant fyke, but on land.
- michaelbuckbee 10y agoThe audio's not great. But here's a fish trap using a similar concept to the traps in the article. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAB7KljY-9E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAB7KljY-9E
- PeterWhittaker 10y agoYes, weirs. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_weir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_weir
- erobbins 10y agoReally neat to see these.. just reminds me how humans have been intelligent for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years.. we just didn't have advanced technology or large numbers until recently. We had to work with the little accumulated knowledge we had.
- ekianjo 10y ago> we just didn't have advanced technology Mastering Fire, Steel were already what I would call advanced technologies. We should not belittle what people were capable of with the means that they had. And the knowledge even back in antiquity was abundant - look at the work done by the Greek scientists, it's amazing what they knew with the limited observation tools they had.
- int_19h 10y agoFire and steel are rather different cases. Steel required some form of highly organized collective arrangement, to procure the needed materials and perform the labor necessary to obtain the end result. This pretty much implies a fairly well-developed society, which is probably why the earliest steel artifacts we know of are only a few thousand years old. Fire, on the other hand, is about learning to control, and eventually propagate, a natural phenomenon. Human ancestors have done so a very long time ago - by some estimates, more than a million years ago (thus significantly predating anatomically and behaviorally modern humans).
- aaron695 10y agoI think hard work and organisation (possibly slaves?) is more what it was.
- nkrisc 10y agoPeople seem to think sometimes that ancient humans were dumb because they didn't have smartphones. No, they were as smart us, they only lacked knowledge, not intelligence.
- cooper12 10y ago
- gefh 10y agoI was hoping from the headline that this was about an exoplanet but antelope traps are interesting too...
- ekianjo 10y ago"Space Point" is indeed misleading and completely stretching it. Those are not huge structures and would be very hard to detect from Space. It's more about having a little elevation than anything else.
- mintplant 10y agoI also made the same incorrect assumption as gefh, and I'm not entirely convinced that wasn't deliberate, but to be fair, the article does discuss how satellite imagery has been used by archaeologists to study these sites.
- JorgeGT 10y agoThe "space" bit is total click bait. They can be seen from space... with a huge Earth Observation telescope. They are crediting DigitalGlobe for the remote sensing so in that sense any random car can be "seen from space": https://www.digitalglobe.com/gallery?category=&page=2#gallery-detail-13 https://www.digitalglobe.com/gallery?category=&page=2#galler...
- Razengan 10y agoMe too. It instantly reminded me of the old PC game, Star Control II (the spiritual precursor to Mass Effect), in which an advanced alien race leaves behind artificially-created planets with similar properties, which when plotted together on a map, converge towards the location of their homeward, as if a galactic arrow pointing the way.
- cyberferret 10y agoAh, fascinating article. But when I first saw the title, I thought it was going to be about these particular arrows scattered across the US landscape... http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3038232/Just-mysterious-concrete-arrows-America.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-303823...
- mortenjorck 10y agoIt's amazing to put yourself in the mind of a member of one of these nomadic peoples 2500 years ago, having only ever known the traditions of your tribe, living out your days tracking and catching wild game beneath the desert sun – and then deciding to do something new. Building on the knowledge of your most experienced hunters to design and engineer a modification to your environment that will permanently change the way your society hunts. Truly these were the first hackers.
- russell_h 10y agoOr were they built by upstarts who disrupted the most experienced hunters? Interesting perspective either way.
- anotheryou 10y agoI think the markets might have been more in control, at least within the community. You don't just keep it all to yourself in a tribe. (But actually I have no Idea how big these groups where and how abstract and complex their power structures)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- oh_sigh 10y agoThere's no way to tell how these were thought of. Maybe it happened the way you declared, maybe it happened as a very iterative process of refinement over thousands of years.
- simonh 10y agoI can imagine it starting off as noticing the the Antelope follow natural ridges in the land and lying in wait at the end of a ridge to ambush the animals. Later they build artificial ridges and then low walls. Finally, they add the kill pits and iterate on the wall layouts to produce the sophisticated guiding shapes shown in the article. Interesting stuff.
- thedonkeycometh 10y agoL33T mob grinder! edit: (context) http://www.instructables.com/id/Minecraft-Mob-Grinder/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Minecraft-Mob-Grinder/
- sctb 10y agoPlease comment civilly and substantively on HN or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- hemmer 10y agoInterestingly, these look very similar in design to so-called bacterial ratchets (see Fig 7 of [1]) which allow swimming bacteria to be sorted by size or swimming speed etc. People have even used these ideas to create tiny bacteria-powered motors [2]. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.01072 https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.01072 [2] http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2009/oct/23/bacteria-power-micro-ratchet http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2009/oct/23/bacteri...
- rmchugh 10y agoThis hunting method features in Kim Stanley Robinson's Shaman where the Ice Age hunters use similar structures to corral migrating caribou. In his account (presumably based on scientific speculation), the hunters glut themselves with meat in order to gain enough weight to survive the winter.
- pathikrit 10y agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_jump Some buffalo jumps were used for thousands of years and had CRUSHED BONES from millions of animals falling over compressed into walls tens of feet high.