7 ms·

I’m surprised by how tenuous the link is between the cave find and the archival find. Is the bar really that low for claims in archaeological papers or am I mis

by rhplus 2y ago

I’m surprised by how tenuous the link is between the cave find and the archival find. Is the bar really that low for claims in archaeological papers or am I missing something? It’s a compelling story, but surely Occam’s razor would conclude that poking sticks into dead animals and fire pits is just what people have done for thousands of years? Where’s the evidence that there was chanting and a healing ceremony? Edit: full paper is freely available on Nature here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01912-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01912-w

gerdesj 2y ago
"Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat. The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat." That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen people poke sticks into tiny hearth's?
- bena 2y ago
  It’s all circumstantial evidence because that’s all we get. Circumstantial evidence is not “weak evidence”, it is evidence concerning the circumstances. For instance, DNA is circumstantial evidence. It’s evidence that can imply a connection between events, but it is not proof of such a connection. Fingerprints: circumstantial. Call logs: often circumstantial. The opposite of circumstantial evidence is direct evidence. Direct evidence is rarer and often not as useful. Direct evidence would be an actual witness to the event. To call back to prior examples: Fingerprints are direct evidence someone touched something. But they are circumstantial evidence they then used that object in commission of a crime. Here, the direct evidence is that things were burned and sticks were sharpened. The circumstances in which they were found implies the rest.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    This sounds like something out of law school, where for some reason "direct evidence" is oddly treated as superior to "circumstantial evidence". So, for instance, you could have a murder, and the prime suspect's fingerprints were found at the scene and on the murder weapon too. However, an eyewitness testifies that he saw the murder committed not by the prime suspect, but instead by furry space aliens who then departed in their UFO. We're supposed to believe the witness? After all the knowledge we have now about how utterly unreliable and frankly worthless most human testimony is, you'd think our courts would stop treating it as worthy of a conviction.
- ertgbnm 2y ago
  Archaeology is almost exclusively circumstantial evidence...
  - tengwar2 2y ago
    It varies a lot. Later European archaeology is generally quite well-founded as it ties in to a historical record. While I don't have any familiarity with the Colosseum, I have heard that there are records of payments to sailors for manipulating the shades. If you get further away from historical records, it does get more tenuous, but there is often a solid basis of scientific or technical evidence. My own doctorate is in use of physics for dating by thermoluminescence and optically stimulated luminescence, which together cover a lot of ground for stuff that cannot be dated by C14. There are several quantitative techniques like that, for instance for isotopic analysis which can be used for deducing trade routes. There are also many qualitative and semi-quantitative techniques, varying from traditional trenches and ground penetrating radar to pollen analysis (which gives you information on climate and ground cover). However all of this has to be tied together in to a picture of human culture. That necessarily has a large element of interpretation. This is not unique - you can see the same pattern in fields like astronomy. Generally I think archaeologists are reasonably good at knowing when they are on uncertain ground. If I may give an example: in Scotland, mainly on the north west coasts, there are the remains of pre-historic buildings called brochs. The biggest stands 40' high, and it is possible to walk up through the stairs between the double walls to the top. We know roughly when they were built, but not why. There are several theories, but I find it interesting that there is an absence of dogmatic assertion that one particular interpretation is true, and it is still possible to have a sensible discussion about a "fringe" theory (my own idea is that some of them may have been for excarnation) which will centre on what evidence you might need to search for (bone fragments in this case).
- gwern 2y ago
  If they had been doing the ritual regularly enough to preserve it for over 12,000 years in a relatively small range, it seems surprising that the excavations didn't turn up way more instances than it did. They can find 2 perfect instances within centuries of each other 12kya in the same excavation, then it just teleports without a trace to the 1880s? This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are so many rituals and superstitions in indigenous peoples over the millennia that it would be shocking if you could never find cases of things that looked vaguely similar when reduced to an archaeological residue and you cast a net as wide as 'anything which anyone has ever described which sounds similar no matter how many millennia'. (I would also note that 'fat smeared on stuff and involving fires' is not nearly as rare as it might sound. Fat is important and used in many sacrifices or medicines - eg Homer, with all that fat wrapped on or stacked on top of bones in a holocaust to the gods.)
  - stubish 2y ago
    Its a stick in the ground. People might have tripped over thousands of them, and millions lost to the elements and time. This find was only noticed because someone with the right specialized knowledge was looking in a specific location for artifacts, bothered to test the stick, and managed to link it to an obscure document written 150 years earlier, itself amazing that this particular ritual from this particular region was documented, unlike the unknown but huge number that were not. It is surprising we find this sort of thing at all. They might have cooked their lunch with a 35,000 year old stick without realizing it.
    - gwern 2y ago
      > People might have tripped over thousands of them Obviously not, because when these guys tripped over them, they were struck enough to then spend years looking for explanations. > unlike the unknown but huge number that were not. The more that are not documented, the more plausible it becomes that vaguely similar rituals which yield the same residue may exist in many times and places, and enter into the sum total of rituals available for birthday-paradox collision. Arguing that it must be the same with zero intervening evidence is like arguing that that because an Aboriginal word for dog is 'dog' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22dog%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22...) both Mbararam and English must be descended from the same language which existed hundreds of thousands of years ago and have remarkably preserved one word for all that time. What are the odds?!
iLoveOncall 2y ago
[flagged]
- the-smug-one 2y ago
  I really don't think that watching documentaries are equivalent to being able to discerning anything about an academic field. That reminds me of reading press releases to understand scientific papers, which we all understand to be a junk way of doing it.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  Psychology as well is built on a house of cards.
  - bowsamic 2y ago
    I have a PhD in physics and even physics itself is in a poor state, yet I totally get why all the other sciences envy physics: they're even worse
    - mensetmanusman 2y ago
      This is explained by complexity. The more components involved in a field, the less feasible the scientific method is. (E.g. math > physics > chemistry > materials science > cell biology > human biology > psychology > sociology)
      - ninetyninenine 2y ago
        Math is not a science. Math is fundamentally opposite of science. In science nothing can be proven. Proof is exclusively the domain of mathematics. The Lack of proof is foundational to science, it’s built into the core axiom of the scientific method. This axiom is actually the reason why science is so “bad” because nothing can really be confirmed. But something like psychology is on a whole different level because of the replication crisis. Psychology has outright fraud going on.
gadders 2y ago
[flagged]
- decremental 2y ago
  [dead]
- ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
  I know we're supposed to ascribe the most benevolent motive to a comment. So the above is both rather absurd and also rather patronising.
  - gadders 2y ago
    Similar things are happening in NZ: https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/14-11-2022/busting-the-myths-about-matauranga-maori https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/14-11-2022/busting-the-myths-a...
- nemo44x 2y ago
  It’s such a weird pissing contest because if you’re alive today that means your ancestors survived to produce you and that’s saying something as most groups and cultures, etc have not survived to the present day. So just surviving as a group for thousands of years is quite the accomplishment. That’s good enough.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mistermann 2y ago
Have you ever watched US State Department press briefings, and paid close attention to how they use language (ie: "X is linked to Y")? Or, heard the public subsequently discussing what was said in them (say, right here on HN)? Humans are a story based species...always have been always will be. Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.
- walterbell 2y ago
  > Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector. Stories (and LLM 'story models') can be fine tuned and A/B tested against humans with live neural monitoring to evaluate narrative effectiveness.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    "Evaluate", on what scale? Donald Trump can tell a story (which is what all humans run on) adequate to motivate thousands of people up to no good to descend upon the nation's capital, do you think LLM's (science, etc) can compete in that specific arena/domain, at that level? (To be fair though, the Normies have been motivated to do more than a few silly things themselves by their trainers. Donald is good, but he ain't the best.) There are readings of brain activity, and then there is brain activity that causes humans to do particular things with their bodies. One of these is more powerful than the other. (Pardon for the vitriol, no offense intended.)
    - walterbell 2y ago
      12 years ago, https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2012/04/department-of-defense-neuroscience-bioethics-brains-law/ https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2012/04/departm... > FY2012 budget states a plan to “initiate investigations into the relationship between…neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-cognition interactions, and narrative structures.” What has transpired since then is left as an exercise for the reader.
busterarm 2y ago
Have to agree here. Also just kind of doesn't pass the common sense test. We all learn the "game of telephone" as a kid and how information can change even just being passed once. In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions. A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not really comfortable sharing.
- cess11 2y ago
  Where I grew up "game of telephone" didn't include repetition over and over and over again. It also didn't include meter or rhymes.
  - busterarm 2y ago
    Okay. Take Shakespeare then. https://thegreatthinkers.org/shakespeare-and-politics/bibliography/brief-discussion-editorial-problems-various-editions-shakespeares-plays/ https://thegreatthinkers.org/shakespeare-and-politics/biblio...
    - cess11 2y ago
      Confirms what I'm hinting at, through tradition a version is consolidated that becomes the consensus and can reach a very long-lived stability.
- alfiopuglisi 2y ago
  Please do share! Often those are the most interesting ones :)
- danans 2y ago
  > In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions. Maybe you meant 1000 years? If you really meant 100 years, there's an obvious counterexample: The "Happy Birthday Song", published in 1893. Arguably no one learns it by reading the words and notes from a page. Furthermore, considering that until pretty recently in history most people were illiterate, the stories they learned were transmitted to them orally (even if read from a book).
ars 2y ago
I came to post the same thing. You have a stick from 12,000 years ago, and a story from 100 years ago, and they link them because of a similarity "there is fat at the end of the stick". You could get fat on a stick by roasting a small mouse (so a small hearth), or tons of other ways. This really isn't enough evidence, not without a ton more findings of the same thing at various dates over the timeperiod.
- griffzhowl 2y ago
  If tiny hearths with fat-covered sticks were common elsewhere, this would be a valid objection. But as it is, this seems to be a distinctive practice that is present at the same location separated by 12k years, and the ancient one was buried and so not observed for most of that time. What's the alternative explanation except a common root in a cultural practice?
griffzhowl 2y ago
It's actually not that far-fetched when you consider the long view of human history. Hominins have been capable of cultural transmission for millions of years, and during most of that time it made most sense to repeat what the previous generation had done as closely as possible, since they had by definition survived and reproduced well enough to make a new generation. Among all those practices of toolmaking, hunting strategies, herbal knowledge, and whatever we call 'ritual', it wouldn't have been clear to the practitioners which were actually effective at increasing survival and which not, so everything gets repreated over generations (with occasional modifications catching on and producing cultural evolution ofc)

by rhplus 2y ago

gerdesj 2y ago

"Each one was found in a separate fireplace around the size of the palm of a hand—far too small to have been used for heat or cooking meat. The slightly charred ends of the sticks had been cut specially to stick into the fire, and both were coated in human or animal fat." That's rather more than circumstantial evidence. Granted the ritual might have changed a bit over 12,000 odd years but where else have you seen people poke sticks into tiny hearth's?

bena 2y ago
It’s all circumstantial evidence because that’s all we get. Circumstantial evidence is not “weak evidence”, it is evidence concerning the circumstances. For instance, DNA is circumstantial evidence. It’s evidence that can imply a connection between events, but it is not proof of such a connection. Fingerprints: circumstantial. Call logs: often circumstantial. The opposite of circumstantial evidence is direct evidence. Direct evidence is rarer and often not as useful. Direct evidence would be an actual witness to the event. To call back to prior examples: Fingerprints are direct evidence someone touched something. But they are circumstantial evidence they then used that object in commission of a crime. Here, the direct evidence is that things were burned and sticks were sharpened. The circumstances in which they were found implies the rest.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  This sounds like something out of law school, where for some reason "direct evidence" is oddly treated as superior to "circumstantial evidence". So, for instance, you could have a murder, and the prime suspect's fingerprints were found at the scene and on the murder weapon too. However, an eyewitness testifies that he saw the murder committed not by the prime suspect, but instead by furry space aliens who then departed in their UFO. We're supposed to believe the witness? After all the knowledge we have now about how utterly unreliable and frankly worthless most human testimony is, you'd think our courts would stop treating it as worthy of a conviction.
ertgbnm 2y ago
Archaeology is almost exclusively circumstantial evidence...
- tengwar2 2y ago
  It varies a lot. Later European archaeology is generally quite well-founded as it ties in to a historical record. While I don't have any familiarity with the Colosseum, I have heard that there are records of payments to sailors for manipulating the shades. If you get further away from historical records, it does get more tenuous, but there is often a solid basis of scientific or technical evidence. My own doctorate is in use of physics for dating by thermoluminescence and optically stimulated luminescence, which together cover a lot of ground for stuff that cannot be dated by C14. There are several quantitative techniques like that, for instance for isotopic analysis which can be used for deducing trade routes. There are also many qualitative and semi-quantitative techniques, varying from traditional trenches and ground penetrating radar to pollen analysis (which gives you information on climate and ground cover). However all of this has to be tied together in to a picture of human culture. That necessarily has a large element of interpretation. This is not unique - you can see the same pattern in fields like astronomy. Generally I think archaeologists are reasonably good at knowing when they are on uncertain ground. If I may give an example: in Scotland, mainly on the north west coasts, there are the remains of pre-historic buildings called brochs. The biggest stands 40' high, and it is possible to walk up through the stairs between the double walls to the top. We know roughly when they were built, but not why. There are several theories, but I find it interesting that there is an absence of dogmatic assertion that one particular interpretation is true, and it is still possible to have a sensible discussion about a "fringe" theory (my own idea is that some of them may have been for excarnation) which will centre on what evidence you might need to search for (bone fragments in this case).
gwern 2y ago
If they had been doing the ritual regularly enough to preserve it for over 12,000 years in a relatively small range, it seems surprising that the excavations didn't turn up way more instances than it did. They can find 2 perfect instances within centuries of each other 12kya in the same excavation, then it just teleports without a trace to the 1880s? This sounds more like a birthday paradox. There are so many rituals and superstitions in indigenous peoples over the millennia that it would be shocking if you could never find cases of things that looked vaguely similar when reduced to an archaeological residue and you cast a net as wide as 'anything which anyone has ever described which sounds similar no matter how many millennia'. (I would also note that 'fat smeared on stuff and involving fires' is not nearly as rare as it might sound. Fat is important and used in many sacrifices or medicines - eg Homer, with all that fat wrapped on or stacked on top of bones in a holocaust to the gods.)
- stubish 2y ago
  Its a stick in the ground. People might have tripped over thousands of them, and millions lost to the elements and time. This find was only noticed because someone with the right specialized knowledge was looking in a specific location for artifacts, bothered to test the stick, and managed to link it to an obscure document written 150 years earlier, itself amazing that this particular ritual from this particular region was documented, unlike the unknown but huge number that were not. It is surprising we find this sort of thing at all. They might have cooked their lunch with a 35,000 year old stick without realizing it.
  - gwern 2y ago
    > People might have tripped over thousands of them Obviously not, because when these guys tripped over them, they were struck enough to then spend years looking for explanations. > unlike the unknown but huge number that were not. The more that are not documented, the more plausible it becomes that vaguely similar rituals which yield the same residue may exist in many times and places, and enter into the sum total of rituals available for birthday-paradox collision. Arguing that it must be the same with zero intervening evidence is like arguing that that because an Aboriginal word for dog is 'dog' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22dog%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbabaram_language#Word_for_%22...) both Mbararam and English must be descended from the same language which existed hundreds of thousands of years ago and have remarkably preserved one word for all that time. What are the odds?!

iLoveOncall 2y ago

[flagged]

the-smug-one 2y ago
I really don't think that watching documentaries are equivalent to being able to discerning anything about an academic field. That reminds me of reading press releases to understand scientific papers, which we all understand to be a junk way of doing it.
ninetyninenine 2y ago
Psychology as well is built on a house of cards.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  I have a PhD in physics and even physics itself is in a poor state, yet I totally get why all the other sciences envy physics: they're even worse
  - mensetmanusman 2y ago
    This is explained by complexity. The more components involved in a field, the less feasible the scientific method is. (E.g. math > physics > chemistry > materials science > cell biology > human biology > psychology > sociology)
    - ninetyninenine 2y ago
      Math is not a science. Math is fundamentally opposite of science. In science nothing can be proven. Proof is exclusively the domain of mathematics. The Lack of proof is foundational to science, it’s built into the core axiom of the scientific method. This axiom is actually the reason why science is so “bad” because nothing can really be confirmed. But something like psychology is on a whole different level because of the replication crisis. Psychology has outright fraud going on.

gadders 2y ago

[flagged]

decremental 2y ago
[dead]
ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
I know we're supposed to ascribe the most benevolent motive to a comment. So the above is both rather absurd and also rather patronising.
- gadders 2y ago
  Similar things are happening in NZ: https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/14-11-2022/busting-the-myths-about-matauranga-maori https://thespinoff.co.nz/atea/14-11-2022/busting-the-myths-a...
nemo44x 2y ago
It’s such a weird pissing contest because if you’re alive today that means your ancestors survived to produce you and that’s saying something as most groups and cultures, etc have not survived to the present day. So just surviving as a group for thousands of years is quite the accomplishment. That’s good enough.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

mistermann 2y ago

Have you ever watched US State Department press briefings, and paid close attention to how they use language (ie: "X is linked to Y")? Or, heard the public subsequently discussing what was said in them (say, right here on HN)? Humans are a story based species...always have been always will be. Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector.

walterbell 2y ago
> Stories are our weak spot, the ultimate attack/control vector. Stories (and LLM 'story models') can be fine tuned and A/B tested against humans with live neural monitoring to evaluate narrative effectiveness.
- mistermann 2y ago
  "Evaluate", on what scale? Donald Trump can tell a story (which is what all humans run on) adequate to motivate thousands of people up to no good to descend upon the nation's capital, do you think LLM's (science, etc) can compete in that specific arena/domain, at that level? (To be fair though, the Normies have been motivated to do more than a few silly things themselves by their trainers. Donald is good, but he ain't the best.) There are readings of brain activity, and then there is brain activity that causes humans to do particular things with their bodies. One of these is more powerful than the other. (Pardon for the vitriol, no offense intended.)
  - walterbell 2y ago
    12 years ago, https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2012/04/department-of-defense-neuroscience-bioethics-brains-law/ https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2012/04/departm... > FY2012 budget states a plan to “initiate investigations into the relationship between…neurotransmitters such as oxytocin, emotion-cognition interactions, and narrative structures.” What has transpired since then is left as an exercise for the reader.

busterarm 2y ago

Have to agree here. Also just kind of doesn't pass the common sense test. We all learn the "game of telephone" as a kid and how information can change even just being passed once. In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions. A claim of 12000 years needs strong evidence. Given what I've seen from the field lately I have a counter-theory, but I'm not really comfortable sharing.

cess11 2y ago
Where I grew up "game of telephone" didn't include repetition over and over and over again. It also didn't include meter or rhymes.
- busterarm 2y ago
  Okay. Take Shakespeare then. https://thegreatthinkers.org/shakespeare-and-politics/bibliography/brief-discussion-editorial-problems-various-editions-shakespeares-plays/ https://thegreatthinkers.org/shakespeare-and-politics/biblio...
  - cess11 2y ago
    Confirms what I'm hinting at, through tradition a version is consolidated that becomes the consensus and can reach a very long-lived stability.
alfiopuglisi 2y ago
Please do share! Often those are the most interesting ones :)
danans 2y ago
> In fact I've heard archaeologists in the past specifically say that no oral tradition can survive intact more than 100 years. Usually this statement is in reference to certain creation myths being relatively modern inventions. Maybe you meant 1000 years? If you really meant 100 years, there's an obvious counterexample: The "Happy Birthday Song", published in 1893. Arguably no one learns it by reading the words and notes from a page. Furthermore, considering that until pretty recently in history most people were illiterate, the stories they learned were transmitted to them orally (even if read from a book).

ars 2y ago

I came to post the same thing. You have a stick from 12,000 years ago, and a story from 100 years ago, and they link them because of a similarity "there is fat at the end of the stick". You could get fat on a stick by roasting a small mouse (so a small hearth), or tons of other ways. This really isn't enough evidence, not without a ton more findings of the same thing at various dates over the timeperiod.

griffzhowl 2y ago
If tiny hearths with fat-covered sticks were common elsewhere, this would be a valid objection. But as it is, this seems to be a distinctive practice that is present at the same location separated by 12k years, and the ancient one was buried and so not observed for most of that time. What's the alternative explanation except a common root in a cultural practice?

griffzhowl 2y ago

It's actually not that far-fetched when you consider the long view of human history. Hominins have been capable of cultural transmission for millions of years, and during most of that time it made most sense to repeat what the previous generation had done as closely as possible, since they had by definition survived and reproduced well enough to make a new generation. Among all those practices of toolmaking, hunting strategies, herbal knowledge, and whatever we call 'ritual', it wouldn't have been clear to the practitioners which were actually effective at increasing survival and which not, so everything gets repreated over generations (with occasional modifications catching on and producing cultural evolution ofc)