2024-05-21 A little archaeological rant. ; Youtube comment formatting.

First find versus first occurence..

I was watching some thing on YouTube, about the "mysterious" "perforated batons" found across Eurasia for 50,000-odd years. Conventional theory has that they're tools for making some sort of rope - maybe plant-stem cordage, rather than sinew ... maybe also good for preparing sinew. No huge mystery there. But why are most 1- or 2 hole, but a few 3- or even 4-hole batons? Clearly not totally solved, but the "rope preparation/ handling tool" is pretty strong.

But I came up with this little rant, which is more generally applicable, and I think it's worth keeping a copy of. (YT comments use the USENET convention of *bold*, [hyphen]strikethrough[hyphen] or _italic_ AFAIK. I really ought to check up on their formatting rules.)

@YouTubeCommentator5527 "As it turns out they were invented 72.000 - 60.000 years ago"

They were invented before 72-60 kyr BP ; the oldest successfully dated finds are dated to 72-60 kyr BP.

In general, finding a technological artefact means you've found a widespread, popular, well-developed technology. The first several thousand years of a Palaeolithic "Leonardo of Ug", slaving away trying to get his "throw sticks at mammoth, but harder" device to work properly probably resulted in 1 small pile of broken prototypes outside a single ivory tower [mammoth ivory? it was used as a boulding material] at "Ug". But 10 years after he got it working, every single "Ug[X], of Ug" would have had one. A year later, their neighbours the Uggs of Ugli wanted ones, with "go-faster" stripes. Then Marketing came up with a "better" name (an atlatl - really?) ... and soon everyone on the continent had one. Including the inevitable ones that get lost.

The odds of finding those prototypes are far worse than finding the effective, widespread production model. Where is Benz's first "automobile"? One copy, in one single museum. Where are the Model-T Fords? In every second ditch, and abandoned barn ; broken by the side of innumerable roads. Everywhere.

I like that rant. I'm going to save it for re-use! Polish it a bit. If he weren't ded, yet, I'd apologise to Pterry for mis-(?)appropriating Leonardo of Quirm's Palaeolithic ancestor for a starring rôle.

From the same video, but quoting someone un-named : "the easiest way to be wrong about our ancestors is to underestimate them." Very true. Grahaam Hancock and the "Ancient Aliens" people don't dare think that, becaasue it would harm their sales.

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YouTube Comment Formatting markup

Inevitably, there's a video. 25MB to download (plus adverts if you don't block them) to express what takes less than a line of text (all above - there is no more). Sheesh. It's also one of those incredibly annoying American drawls where you need to connect your phone to the defibrilator to get wake-up calls for a new byte of information. That is modern communications?

OK, I needed to edit that for clarity. The USENET encoding was of the form :

[tag] [no whitespace] emphasised text [no whitespace] [tag]

… and that seems to be what YT expects too. Reasonable enough - no need for wheel re-invention here. Somebody will probably try redesigning it to use picking from several thousand near-identical emojis, becauuse that is somehow "easier" than using a keyboard. [Shrug]

Now I need to focus on that Venus article.
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