
Giant ‘Arrows’ Seen From Space Point to a Vanished World - Thevet
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/desert-kites-out-of-eden-walk-uzbekistan-iron-age-saiga/
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mortenjorck
It'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
Or were they built by upstarts who disrupted the most experienced hunters?

Interesting perspective either way.

~~~
anotheryou
I 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)

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cyberferret
Ah, 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-303823...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-3038232/Just-
mysterious-concrete-arrows-America.html)

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johngalt
I 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.

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100pctremote
There are many of these ancient fish ponds throughout the Hawaiian islands --
some of them enormous and very pretty.

~~~
205guy
I 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.

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hemmer
Interestingly, 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/bacteri...](http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2009/oct/23/bacteria-
power-micro-ratchet)

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gefh
I was hoping from the headline that this was about an exoplanet but antelope
traps are interesting too...

~~~
ekianjo
"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
I 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.

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erobbins
Really 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.

~~~
nkrisc
People 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
They had knowledge too, just in other areas. They would probably look down on
modern humans for not knowing how to skin a deer or how to rotate crops.

~~~
jessaustin
Many modern humans have that knowledge. It's not really inaccessible to anyone
reading HN.

~~~
dualogy
As long as the grid and Youtube still runs! /prepper voice off

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pathikrit
See 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.

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rmchugh
This 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.

