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People slept on grass beds 200k years ago
- qubex 6y agoOf course they slept on grass to begin with (outdoors)... and of course, once they settled, they would reproduce the same arrangement in a proto-domestic setting. Also: people at some point discovered they could lay down floors, because it felt good underfoot. Then they realised that floors would be great to have in more places. Then somebody came up with the idea of making mobile pieces of floor and strapping them to the underside of your feet. And so, sandals and footwear were born. Archeological records are good, but deduction will get you a surprisingly long way.
- bowmessage 6y agoIs making such deductions not a sub-form of anthropomorphism, though? (To whatever extent humans 200k years ago were different than us, I suppose.) > Modern psychologists generally characterize anthropomorphism as a cognitive bias. That is, anthropomorphism is a cognitive process by which people use their schemas about other humans as a basis for inferring the properties of non-human entities in order to make efficient judgements about the environment, even if those inferences are not always accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropomorphism
- qubex 6y agoExcept I’m making considerations about fellow humans, not non-human entities. Anthropomorphism doesn’t apply here (unless you subscribe to Jaynes’ surprisingly compelling hypothesis set forth in The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind which is controversial, fringe, supported by strangely compelling but also very circumstantial evidence, and hard to justify neurologically, that is). I suppose I could be accused of a bunch of other fallacies, and those would be fair game.
- hammock 6y agoYou really think floors came before shoes did? Or is this a joke?
- qubex 6y agoI’m pretty damned sure of it. Why would they do so otherwise when feet of the habitually-unshod are so perfectly adapted to walking on terrain? It’s not like (like in the case of clothes) they could see animals with warm furry coats and think “I want one of those”. You construct what you want to emulate. In the case of sandals, they wanted to emulate floors, not paws.
- cobbzilla 6y agoWhile the oldest shoes discovered are 7-8kya, the evolution of foot bone structure points to shoe-wearing as long ago as 40kya [1], predating the Neolithic. It is very likely that shoes predate floors and were worn for easier travel over rough terrain. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe#History
- qubex 6y agoThanks for the reference and the comment, I really do appreciate it (and I’m not being sarcastic), but evidence of foot structure mutating 40,000 years ago as a conseuqnce of wearing shoes only undermines my theory if floors can be definitively placed later than that. As for the 7,000-8,000 year ago shoes, that’s well within the horizon of architecture, of which the earliest example we are aware of is Gobekli Tepe which is considered to be 13,000 years old.
- kyuudou 6y agoJust FYI to all the shoe fascists, there's a guy Cody Lundin [1] who walks around barefoot all the time, even in freezing temperatures and does quite fine with it. I first found out about him as a survivalist author. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cody_Lundin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cody_Lundin
- LeoPanthera 6y agoIf only the paleoanthropologists at the University of Witwatersrand had consulted you first they could have saved all this time! (Don't say "of course" to experts. It's patronizing, and there's a good chance what is obvious to you is actually wrong.)
- JadeNB 6y agoEven when the obvious thing is right, there's a difference between an obvious conclusion arrived at by guessing and an obvious thing arrived at by scientific inquiry. The former is highly subject to bias, and indistinguishable from the wrong and obvious guess that accompanied it; the latter is less subject to bias, and can be distinguished from its wrong variant. (To put it maybe more pithily, someone who believes an obvious thing has given me no new information, but someone who proves an obvious thing has given me new information. There's a reason science places so much weight on reproducibility, even though, eventually, it's just giving the 'obvious' result!)
- qubex 6y agoI wholly agree. Sorry if my initial post gave the opposite impression. I’m very much in favour of supporting hypotheses with evidence and discarding those which are incompatible with facts as observed.
- cntainer 6y agoThe issue with this kind of reasoning is that without any kind of archeological proof to back your hypothesis what you end up with is informed guessing based more on ones knowledge and experience than on scientific facts. For example, I could formulate a completely different hypothesis about how footwear appeared: - doing any kind of activity on rough terrain while barefoot increases the risk of injury, like cuts or punctures - any kind of wound could easily infect and lead to death - the easiest would be to try and protect my feet wrapping something like leaves, animal skins, etc around my feet - this is a good solution but this footwear isn't very resilient, hmm, maybe tree bark would work better, it's still flexible but should be more resilient. - hmm, what else could I do that is better than tree bark, maybe some dried animal skin would be even better - and so on... Is this hypothesis better than yours? I don't know without proof, and the interesting part is that they could both easily be true in completely different contexts: different parts of the world, different cultures, different climatic conditions, etc. So yeah deduction and induction can get you very far but when we're missing so many facts on which to base our hypothesis you can easily get very far in a very wrong direction. This is why I think archeology is fun. EDIT: The wikipedia page on footwear also contains a few lines that add another interesting dimension: > Some ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and Greece however saw no practical need for footwear due to convenient climatic and landscape situations and used shoes primarily as ornaments and insignia of power.
- qubex 6y agoFair enough, good points, but you’ll find that habitually unshod people have surprisingly thick (and yet still perfectly sensitive!) soles that are very resilient to puncture and yet do not experience pain when walking over terrain that makes us grimace. That doesn’t pertain to all of your hypotheses, and even those it does apply to are not ruled out by it, so I concede you could be correct, as could I. The real question is: which these(s) can be proven. That’s what’s interesting about this article: that they have found archeological evidence that supports an... I’m struggling not to use ‘obvious’ because I’ve been chided for using it... but a... very plausible hypothesis.
- cntainer 6y ago
- hombre_fatal 6y agoFor someone congratulating themselves on their deductive skills, coming up with shoes = "portable floors" instead of just simple protection isn't a very impressive display of deductive reasoning. Then you go on to be skeptical of other theories, but not your own convoluted, arbitrary theory because it presumably has something going for it that the others do not: you came up with it. This just isn't the paragon of deduction and reasoning that you think it is. Though the self-aggrandizing spirit of your posts is a great show of how ideas traffic on social media where we confuse our ability to come up with something as something that must then contain some sort of axiomatic truth. With an insight like "shoes = portable floors", you must think a babbling six-year-old is a real oracle of wisdom.
- war1025 6y agoWe sleep on a bed made of wool batting enclosed in two sewed together wool blankets. It is super comfortable. I think most people would be better served by abandoning modern "inner-spring" mattresses
- chrisco255 6y agoDoes anyone manufacture these? Or do you have a photo?
- war1025 6y agoWe bought our batting from Shepherd's Dream [1], which looks like it also sells actual beds. The blankets are just queen sized wool blankets that you can find various places. We made our bed in the winter of 2013/2014. We used 5 wool blankets with a layer of "2yd extra thick wool batting" between each pair of blankets. It starts out very thick, but compresses down to probably 2-3 inches thick over time. We just made a set of similar beds for our three kids, but we used 3 yards of wool and a single queen sized wool blanket folded in half for the exterior. I will see if I can get some pictures. Happy to answer questions either here or at the email in my profile if people are interested. [1] https://shepherdsdream.com/ https://shepherdsdream.com/ Edit: The blankets might actually be twin sized. Their dimensions are very close to the footprint of a standard queen bed. So I think that means they are a size down since usually blankets will overhang the mattress.
- hirundo 6y agoThe best mattress I ever had was soft fine sand in the curve of a dry gulch, after weeks of sleeping on hard ground on a long hike. It was also one of the stupidest places I've slept since a flash flood could have ended me. But if I had to sleep rough in one place for long I might build a sand box bed. If the ancients did that I doubt archaeologists would discover it, since it's just a pile of sand.
- rv-de 6y agoas in you are lying directly on the sand without a separating sheet? i can believe that this is comfortable but only until the first sand gets into clothes, cracks and cavities. or how does it work?
- hirundo 6y agoIn a sleeping bag. I just shook it out as usual before stuffing it.
- rv-de 6y agowhat do you mean with "stuffing it"? you put the sand into the sleeping bag?
- OkayPhysicist 6y agoWhen you put away a sleeping bag, you stuff it into a little sack. He's saying that he slept in the sleeping bag in the sand, woke up, shook out his bag, and put it away.
- analog31 6y agoI've napped on sand at the beach. Yes it gets everywhere. Then you shake it all off, or take a dip in the water.
- yencabulator 6y agoI've seen a few campgrounds with dedicated tent sites that each had a tent-size sandbox.
- bookofjoe 6y agoIf money is no object: https://www.hypnosbeds.com/us https://www.hypnosbeds.com/us
- mnemonicsloth 6y agoIt's a bad idea to romanticize the lives of paleolithic peoples. They may have had cozy beds, but it's likely these people were: - thirsty (no tech for carrying water) - hot (no air conditioning) - hungry (hunter gatherers don't eat every day) - practicing "open defecation" - covered with insect bites - riddled with intestinal parasites - frequently sick (no vaccines/antibiotics) - one compound fracture away from death by sepsis and liable to be murdered by humans from other tribes or, according to some studies, possibly from your own if you ever stop pulling your weight.
- jessaustin 6y agoEven worse, they only worked a couple of hours a day, and goofed off the rest of the time. So unproductive! One of the nice things for me about living on a large ranch is that it's no problem to "practice open defecation" on a regular basis. Don't knock it until you've tried it.
- jiofih 6y agoOnly works for extremely low density living (which is really only practical with the help of modern amenities). Doesn’t work that well for places like India.
- sjtindell 6y agoAnthropologists before and in our lifetimes have gone and lived with tribes of hunter gatherers. We don’t need to romanticize or use cliches. Lots of them weren’t living as you describe. In fact their eyesight, teeth/gums, mental health, general physical health, sex lives, and life satisfaction seemed pretty great sometimes, and there’s interesting points to be made about why modernity might not have all the answers. Let’s take your poop example. The average American, depressed and overweight according to the stats (both conditions rarely recorded in interactions with tribal hunter gatherers), poops in a toilet, they don’t “practice open defecation” (what funny phrasing). And that’s bad for you. We know now that if you don’t squat, it makes you strain (people literally die on toilets straining to poop) and you can’t get it all out. So we’ve invented poop stools. You should get one, it’s fantastic by the way, you’ll never poop the same again. This is just one of the many ways supposedly superior modern living has essentially played us, and our inventions solve problems that progress creates in the first place! You’re right in some ways. I’m not a believer in “noble savages“. Modern sanitation is responsible probably more than anything for humanities success so far. But it’s a subtle topic.
- amelius 6y agoInteresting old HN discussion on mattresses in case anyone is planning to buy some: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22376248
- ffritz 6y agoThe ref I was looking for. Thanks!
- LolWolf 6y agoThe DOI link in the article is broken, but if anybody is interested, the original paper appeared in Science: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/863 https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6505/863 (paywalled) There are several websites that can help get around this paywall :)
- tpmx 6y agoReading these comments seems pretty similar to listening to a podcast ad. Just saying.
- trhway 6y agoonce many years ago went hiking into forest (Russian North West) with minimal gear (knife, lighter, fishing thread and hooks, several SPAMs and some bread). For 3 nights i slept on a very comfortable pile of fir tree branches ("lapnik") by the campfire under a fir tree - so even small rain actually didn't reach me. It was late Spring, pretty warm. For winter time it is pretty established practice to sleep right on top of the extinguished campfire. Speaking of mattresses - my wife has already close to 20 years been sleeping on a Japanese rice straw tatami mats (put onto a nice real wood frame), and she loves it. A bit too tough for me though.
- throw_this_one 6y agoYo how do I gain the skills to do something like that? Sounds awesome.
- trhway 6y agoit isn't really considered a skills, it is kind of in the air surrounding you. For example i didn't take nor toothpaste nor toothbrush - it isn't an omission nor i'm anti-hygienic - instead i used small fir sticks to chew and to pick between and clean the teeth - the resin has mild anti-microbial properties and have that nice smell. Such possibility was mentioned to me once by a friend, one of the strongest mathematicians in our year, a city dweller, when we were taking a walk around campus (if memory serves me right it was in the context of discussing such a practice in some region(s) in India where a local plant is used for that purpose ). It is somewhat puzzling and sad that despite large territory and amazingly rich Nature, there is such a profound separation from Nature in US. Almost all the land is private, and even if not it is still mostly fenced with limited access and permits for everything (and naturally the very few available places are overcrowded because of such a [pretty artificial] scarcity). Limited access to land also naturally affects access to water bodies. You can't just come to a body of water and say go for swim if water is clean, like you'd do say in Russia. From US land rights system POV even the Nordic private property system with "right to roam" looks like communism :)
- crooked-v 6y ago
- bdr 6y agoIf you're interested in how ancient humans lived, I recommend "The Old Way: A Story of the First People" by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, who lived among the hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari. It has a nice mix of information, narrative, and hypothesis. Grass beds are one of the first things she talks about.
- User23 6y agoIt sounds rather a lot less pleasant when you describe it as a straw pallet. That said, early humans that managed to survive childhood most likely had generally pleasant lives. That and their average level of physical fitness based on archeological evidence would rate at the elite level today. I recall reading about a fossilized set of footprints in Australia that indicated a foot speed that would shame Usain Bolt, and presumably fossilization doesn’t have a foot speed bias.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago>I recall reading about a fossilized set of footprints in Australia that indicated a foot speed that would shame Usain Bolt I can't help but feel that guy must have really been scared by something.
- flak48 6y agoWelp, down I go the rabbit hole of looking for how one might guess the speed of a runner from foot prints
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mkl 6y agoOr he was hunting, and something was really scared by him.
- brendawalsh 6y agoI think clever hunting should not require alot of running, as a human.
- Kuinox 6y agoHumans were good at long distance running hunting
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- Nacdor 6y agoI'm trying to understand the moderation policies here. Why was the word 'comfy' removed from the HN title even though it's part of the article's title? When I checked HN a few hours ago the word 'comfy' was definitely there.
- tazedsoul 6y agoOn a related note, I recently tried floor sleeping. I started on a carpet, which was nice. Then we moved to a place with hardwood floors. Painful. So I bought a Japanese futon. I don’t feel much desire to return to the modern mattress. Since I began this experiment, I’ve only slept better and felt better than I did sleeping on various such mattresses over the years.
- bostonvaulter2 6y agoAnd a benefit of a Japanese futon is that you can store it in the closet and use the floor space for other functions during the day.
- seventhtiger 6y agoI've noticed my allergies are more severe when sleeping on the floor. I believe more dust settles on the futon and bedding if it's directly on the floor. Platform beds are great, and there are quite minimal ones. It improved my allergies.
- johndoe42377 6y ago> 200k years ago Oh, really? And what evidence do we have about anything this distant?
- protomyth 6y agoIf I remember correctly horse hide keeps the fleas away. Remember that from a book I read on the Mongols.
- nix23 6y agoTake out the organs and bones of a pig, rub it with salt stuff it with straw..best mattress ever. http://store.michaelyamashita.com/media/5c5bc58c-418e-11e3-be82-afc8ec78b92a-mosuo-tribesmen-carry-a-salted-pig-used-as-a-mattress-and-for http://store.michaelyamashita.com/media/5c5bc58c-418e-11e3-b...