
Discovery of oldest bow and arrow technology in Eurasia - diodorus
https://phys.org/news/2020-06-discovery-oldest-arrow-technology-eurasia.html
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pritovido
When they talk about "tropical home", or "tropical rainforrest" they are
making the assumption that the weather was the same 48.000 years ago, which
was not.

The last glacial period goes from 120,000 and 11,500 years ago, so the weather
in Sri Lanka at the time was probably like Germany today, even while being
"tropical".

Using the world "tropical" will confuse most people, as they link the current
word meaning with the one in the past, degrading it.

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sradman
> The last glacial period goes from 120,000 and 11,500 years ago, so the
> weather in Sri Lanka at the time was probably like Germany today..

When it comes to the paleoclimate of current subtropical/tropical regions
during glacial maxima, the question is how the 120 meter lower sea levels
impacted the local hydrology. If the endemic species continued throughout one
or more glacial maxima (e.g. gorillas, chimps, bonobos in the Congo basin,
orangutans on Borneo/Sumatra) then the adapted ecosystem probably remained
constant. The climate history of Sri Lanka should be well documented. My
intuition is that tropical rainforest is a fine assumption.

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netcan
Really interesting find.

An old theme in archeology has been the importance of invention, in a chain of
events leading to modernity. A pretty orthodox interpretation of neolithic
cultural changes was: (1) surpluses from agriculture (2) division of labour
(3) specialisation (4) invention (5) economic revolution (6) cities, castes,
religion, complex society etc.

I don't think anyone meant this totally literally and linearly but, it _was_
thought of as a chain of events.

Increasingly, neolithic and mesolithic finds seem to contradict it. In
Gobeklli Tepeh, for example, #6 happened several millennia before #1. The bow
seems to have been invented many times, and bow using culture use grew and
receded many times.

The one concept I enjoyed most in "Sapiens" was a different concept of human
progress: group size. The literal size of closely cooperative groups, but also
federation and cultural supergroups that can exchange memes (and genes)
fluidly.

The truth of it is an empirical question that we can't easily answer. As a
speculative theory, I enjoy its indirectness. The path forward isn't defined a
chain of milestones. It puts group psychology and cultural elements ahead of
technological ones. Much of archeology seems parsimonious to it.

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jojobas
Group size was defined by food sources. You can't feed a large group by
hunting-gathering - the food will be too far. Groups can convene when there's
plenty of food but have to disperse again.

~~~
netcan
Perhaps. I mean, it is certainly true that everyone needs to eat.

OTOH, thinking of these as a chain of events is what I am calling the orthodox
view. IE, new food sources (maybe because new food production/gathering
methods) lead to larger groups and other complexity.

Gobekli Tepeh, for example, gives us a somewhat reversed picture. Preceding
grain cultivation and other neolithic elements, we find a major cultural site.
Acres of statuary, stone structures. But if we are going to narrate a chain of
events... it can't be agriculture first, then large group sizes, then more.
Complex religious, politics or whatever the Gobeklin Tepens were up to
preceded agriculture. Their agriculture grew from a culture that already had
large group sizes, and the religious/political/cultural machinery that comes
with it.

Maybe pre existing group sizes demonstrated by the scale of the site created
the demand for agriculture. Maybe large group sizes are necessary for
discoveries like grain cultivation methods to spread.

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akiselev
I think you're reading way too much into Gobekli Tepeh and making the same
mistakes we made a hundred years ago thinking that absence of evidence is
evidence of absence.

The Gobekli Tepeh excavation was started in the mid-90s and it's still on-
going. How its discoveries fit into the rest of anthropology is an open
question and something as simple as a repeat analysis of the agricultural
artifact dating could reverse the timeline.

~~~
netcan
I think it runs the other way.

There is an orthodox view of the chain of events. We can call it a theory, but
it is more suggestive than predictive. Still, its only the strongest theory as
long as it is most parsimonious with existing evidence, artifacts mostly.
Artifacts are sparse, but it isn't totally absent. Maybe I'm over
extrapolating, but not using lack of evidence as evidence.

Lack of evidence as evidence comes into play more in the the orthodox view
before. It extrapolates a timeline of the fertile crescent. First comes semi-
nomadic agriculture,^ then permanent villages, then towns, then "civilised"
religion/politics/etc. The timeline assumes an absence of institutions like
religion or politics from the absence of public buildings or monuments.
Gobekli Tepeh is one hell of a public building, monument or whatever it is.

Gobekli Tepeh is firmly dated before any known agricultural, villages, towns,
etc. The agriculture date is especially strong, because archeology agrees with
genetics. It is some sort of big political/religious/cultural _thing_. Using
the same logic as the theory I'm challenging, we need to reorder things... or
maybe conclude we have no idea. That said, it seems like (most scholars agree)
that the site was made by non agricultural people.

IMO, even concepts like settled/nomadic may need rethinking. How nomadic? What
kind of nomadic. The range of possibilities is much bigger than village life.

It's possible that earlier evidence for agriculture will be discovered, which
would mean ice age agriculture... possibly of species that are no longer
cultivated. Gobekli Tepeh itself will definitely turn up more dates, very
possibly older too.

~~~
AlotOfReading
In my opinion, Gobekli Tepe isn't interesting because it's suggestive of pre-
agricultural sedentary societies. We know those existed a long, long time
before recognizable domestication occurred and probably even before the LGM.
Gobekli Tepe is interesting because it's clearly monumental a heck of a lot
earlier than the traditional narrative thought was possible. Classically,
archaeologists argued that monuments were a thing of "big, complex hierarchial
societies with full agriculture". The modern counterexamples were dismissed as
unrepresentative, anomalous, or "cultural transmission" (i.e. copy-cats).
Newer generation folks, myself included, think it's a dumb dismissal and
having sites to corroborate that is nice.

Unrelated, but there are species that were formerly cultivated by early
foragers/farmers that got dropped over time. Rambling vetch is one example.
There are some large preservation biases in what we're able to see of early
sites. Grasses preserve best, so we've focused a bit too much on them relative
to what was likely consumed.

~~~
netcan
I think we agree. I'm not even sure hobekki tepeh _is_ evidence of sedentary
society. It is evidence of what it is, primarily: the existence of a large
monument/statuary site.

I even think "sedentary" becomes an less interesting characteristic, largely
because of GT. If something like GT existed before agricultural economies,
then sedentary is not a "necessary condition" for the development of
monumental culture.

Sedentary agriculturalism _is_ interesting because it later became prominent,
but not as a milestone.

Overall, my anateur interpretation of the site is "culture comes first." This
is at odds with both the Marxist & Victorian views that put "material
conditions" first.

My other speculative take is that invention is constant. People probably
"invented agricultural" many times. They may have even practiced it in
significant ways. The spread an development of ideas is the limiting factor,
not invention. GT, as place of gathering or some other custom that involved
large groups, makes a lot more sense as a contributor to what happened next in
Anatolian history

GT isn't just early, it's adjacent to and immediately precedes one of the
earliest known hotspots for neolithic human activity. I don't think that's a
coincidence.

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mprovost
Why is it that these articles never show the $item? Even a reconstruction
would be nice.

~~~
AlotOfReading
It's not explicitly pointed out, but some of the artifacts in the very first
image (directly under the title for me) are the arrowheads mentioned. I
wouldn't expect them to have recovered wood or other soft, organic materials,
so there probably isn't anything else.

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082349872349872
Bows are interesting because they allow time-shifting. An atlatl helps
impedance match between human biomechanical force generation and spear
inertia, but a bow allows a pull over a relatively long period of time to be
stored, then used to accelerate an arrow over a relatively short period.

~~~
nestorD
With the caveat that most movie depict people holding war bow for unrealistic
amount of time, treating them like modern weapons whereas it takes non-trivial
strength to hold a bow once it is armed.

See this article for more information:
[https://acoup.blog/2020/05/28/collections-the-battle-of-
helm...](https://acoup.blog/2020/05/28/collections-the-battle-of-helms-deep-
part-v-ladders-are-chaos/)

~~~
catalogia
The youtube channel Todd's Workshop did an interesting video with Tobias
Capwell and a few others examining the effectiveness of English longbows
against plate armor that I found interesting in a number of respects. In the
video they had archer Joe Gibbs shooting a 160lb longbow. For this, he uses a
posture that looks unusual by modern archery standards but which is evidently
supported by contemporary illustrations of English longbowmen. Apparently this
unusual posture is the only way he can manage to draw bows like this at all
(he can draw up to 200lb bows like this.) He seems to be able to hold the bow
drawn for a moment or two, but it's a far cry from what movies generally
depict.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBxdTkddHaE)

~~~
082349872349872
Excellent. He's got slings and crossbows as well...

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sergeykish
I like how first appearance reflects how hard it is to replicate for
individual. Is there a place with a timeline? The first appearance of spear,
bow, pottery, basket, cloth, wheel, wood joins, etc? And the way how it was
done, like sharpening spear on fire, pottery without wheel.

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weddpros
Why use "Eurasia" instead of Asia? Sri Lanka is nowhere near Europe...

~~~
pritovido
You can consider Europe and Asia the same portion of land, aka a continent,
hence Euroasia as a continent, because it is, there is no big amounts of water
in between.

This is used in Archeology because humans could travel easily across the same
pieces of land. E.g 10.000 years ago humans could cross easily the English
channel because it did not exist as the water level was way lower.

There are barriers that isolate parts of Europe and Asia, like desserts and
mountains, but very early there were determined humans that crossed them.

~~~
tomcooks
Brilliant, eye opening explanation. Thanks! Would the Hymalaian chain be
considered a southern border with India, in the archeological sense?

~~~
User23
Not an archaeologist, just someone who reads a bit, but yes. Any effectively
impassable barrier to large scale travel would qualify. For most of the time
modern humans have been extant that meant the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the
Himalayas, and the Sahara desert to name a few really big ones. This is not to
say that nobody ever crossed these barriers, they just didn't in any quantity.
There are plenty of anomalous finds, like the apparently Solutrean tools found
in North America that are dated 19,000 to 26,000 years ago[1]. One explanation
is that it's just a coincidence, another is that a group of ancient Europeans
(who by the way were probably not very related to modern Europeans) found
their way to North America. My personal opinion is the most scientifically
sound way to figure out these questions is genetic analysis of any skeletons
that can be found in the area. However digging up American Indian grave sites
for sequencing presents serious ethical considerations, to put it mildly.

[1] [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-
eviden...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-evidence-
suggests-stone-age-hunters-from-europe-discovered-america-7447152.html)

