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sometimes we get lost in the sauce
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2025
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Exoticizing ancient and foreign cultures is bullshit.
Yeah they believe dtuffthat sounds crazy to you,but they aren't fucking aliens. Having people with actual relevant experience participate in archaeology is essential. Wjenlooking at stonework, bring a mason. When looking at hair, bring a barber. When looking at textiles, bring a seamstress.
Early humans are just that, humans. Their brains worked basically identically to how ours work, they just had wildly different lives. If you plucked a baby from today and time swapped it with a baby born 10,000 years ago, they’d be fine and grow up as if they didn’t know (disease notwithstanding)
This is a difficult concept for Westerners (including myself at one point) since Western historiography has a tendency to portray history as linear and unidirectional.
You say aliens but there are many archaeological engineering marvels from the ancient world that don't fit the "primitive" narrative and so there are conspiracy theorists that believe it must have been aliens. One example would be the Kailasa temple in India which was carved out of the face of a cliff
It almost always boils down to "nonwhite people couldn't have done this" and it pisses me the hell off
Yeah, because they're racist as fuck
Carving stone isn't even really that hard.
No, but it takes years of full time labor in a time where most human labor had to be spent on subsistence. That a community at that low tech level would feed and house someone doing something decorative for that many years is really cool. And I guess to some not believable.
that's the thing though, humans spent the most time on just baseline survival during the agricultural revolution.
Hunter-gatherers actually have quite a lot of downtime, since they'd generally travel to follow food sources and thus food was readily available to them. There's also very clear archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherers straight up carrying and hand-feeding people who would have been completely unable to care for themselves due to severe injuries, so clearly they weren't opposed to "wasting" efforts.
Charity food and health care is generally accepted as a good thing. By contrast, the idea of some kind of UBI (universal basic income) as a floor - where a person could have food and housing while pursuing a dream like creating art - is widely opposed ("paid work gives dignity!").
Disbelief that our distant ancestors paid labor "taxes" to support artists in their community (which they definitely did) might be some psychological projection.
I know you are partly joking but there are three reasons why this a marvel of the ancient world.
It is carved from Deccan Trap basalt, a volcanic rock that is extremely hard and dense, far tougher to work than softer limestones used in many other rock‑cut monuments.
The construction method is unique: artisans began at the top of the cliff and excavated downward, removing material from a single massive block rather than assembling stones piece by piece. This top‑down approach required careful and unconventional forethought in order to maintain structural integrity and for efficient systems of removing debris. The debris is thought to have been moved particularly effectively as it has never been found.
It the largest monolithic rock‑cut temple in the world at 100 by 300 feet.
You do it then
If I didn't have to pay these damn taxes maybe I would
When looking at statues of "fertility goddesses", bring a teenage boy. That shit wasn't evidence of a "cult of fertility", it was porn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_prostitution
That you think there must be a separation of sexuality and religion is a product of your own cultural biases