[HN Gopher] Mysterious Stone Orbs Stashed All over Neolithic Bri...
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Mysterious Stone Orbs Stashed All over Neolithic Britain
Author : samizdis
Score : 63 points
Date : 2021-10-02 11:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| memorylane wrote:
| I listened to a Sean Carrol Mindscape podcast recently concerning
| Memory Palaces that have been used ubiquitously by ancient
| peoples. The theory goes that when people started settling down,
| the did not travel extensively and could no longer effectively
| use country for the palace in their mind. They therefore made
| physical objects with distinctive surfaces to serve as the
| physical part of a memory palace. This is well documented for
| Australian aborigines and native Anerican peoples who you can
| just ask. There are no equivalent populations in Europe to ask
| directly.
|
| Once writing/printing became commonplace these practices were
| abandoned.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fYhVkbzr60E
|
| Edit: add YouTube link.
| rawoke083600 wrote:
| anunaki-mass-storage devices !!
| h2odragon wrote:
| Even when the only possible "consumer goods" was a rock, there
| were luxury rocks.
|
| "What were they used for?" is asked like there's only one answer.
| They were probably used for anything else a rock is useful for,
| but being nicely sized for a hand, pretty, etc made them easier
| to use, more effective, or just flashier.
|
| AFAIK the class of objects referred to here don't share a lot of
| qualities that would make them a class in other contexts; there's
| no single shape, some have wear that may indicate original uses,
| etc etc. It just appears to be some of the early personal
| artifacts that people valued that are durable enough to see
| today.
| INTPenis wrote:
| Even today people collect nice looking rocks, or minerals even.
| And I know that poor people would leave pebbles at altars when
| doing pilgrimage. So is it really so far fetched to say that
| these rocks were tactile enough for someone to keep them?
| Zuider wrote:
| They are all roughly spherical, so they could be cooking
| stones. Heated in a fire, they can be then rolled into a pit
| which contains the food and water, allowing the food to be
| boiled slowly without burning.
|
| https://www.thoughtco.com/stone-boiling-ancient-cooking-meth...
| gerdesj wrote:
| "Also, most of the 20 balls that have been found in the
| Orkney Islands are carved and etched with patterns and
| designs. These, on the other hand, were polished smooth."
|
| It seems that these orbs are "complicated". A cooking stone
| as you describe is unlikely to be decorated. Do you inscribe
| your kettle! I have never heard of a quern being decorated
| either.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Major religions and people of the past found great
| significance in their food and sources of food, so I
| wouldn't find it strange that significance and
| ornamentation would be applied to what's used to prepare
| that food.
| ganonm wrote:
| To provide some contemporary evidence to support your
| hypothesis that "there were luxury rocks" and that humans would
| be interested in such things, here is a gallery of various
| skins for a handheld rock in the videogame Rust. One of them
| costs $68
|
| https://rust.esportinfo.gg/skins/tools/rock
|
| Humans haven't changed all that much since the Neolithic...
| cloudking wrote:
| Now we have valuable digital rocks https://etherrock.com/
|
| Full circle?
| edoceo wrote:
| Oh, that's not a joke.
| progre wrote:
| All my kids have brought home rocks that were deemed special in
| some way when they where about 5 years old . I guess at that
| age we somehow start to get around the idea of "owning" things
| in a more involved way, and it feels nice to have something
| special, like a nice round rock. Maybe stonage kids felt that
| way too.
| h2odragon wrote:
| My child is a teen now. The last time I said to her, "hey i
| found this cool rock, you want it?" was last week :)
| 123pie123 wrote:
| I still like looking at nice interesting rocks or pebbles
| and I'm way older than a teenager
|
| finding the pure white and very black ones and arranging
| them in patterns or matching piles is some what
| interesting*
|
| *when I'm forced to go to a beach and told to enjoy myself
| for hours on end whilst looking after the kids
| anonporridge wrote:
| It's probably an evolutionary adaptation.
|
| Whenever we humans find something unique or special, we
| either take it and store it somewhere safe or mark it on a
| map. The prehistoric individuals who did that would be more
| likely to happen to have _just_ the right thing for surprise
| challenges. They would then have an advantage over those who
| didn 't care about special things, because by definition
| they're hard to come by. And those surprise challenges often
| have asymmetric upside for those who have a solution, because
| everyone else is desperate for a solution or because they can
| solve the problem drastically more efficiently that everyone
| else.
|
| At the same time, mundane things aren't worth collecting
| because it's easy for anyone to go out and get it, so there
| exists no advantage for the collector.
|
| Therefore, if individuals who collected rare things ended up
| with more resources, power, and the resulting reproductive
| success, it also makes sense that young humans would do the
| same early on and that collecting rare things regardless of
| their utility is one of the most important status signals.
| pengaru wrote:
| There's a rock shop in Joshua Tree that regularly has a line
| out the door on weekends, or at least did pre-pandemic.
| mtw wrote:
| Why not used as currency
| mikewarot wrote:
| My first thought was they were found glacial erratic spheres,
| which could have been traded, or used as a talisman of luck.
|
| Alternatively, they were shaped by hand, though I'd expect them
| to be smoother if that were the case.
|
| The question is, how closely do the sizes of the two objects
| match? If it's within a few percent, they are unlikely to be
| found objects.
| blincoln wrote:
| > Alternatively, they were shaped by hand, though I'd expect
| them to be smoother if that were the case.
|
| Maybe they were a way of marking the passage of time in one's
| life? If the owners made a tiny amount of progress toward a
| sphere shape every day (or week/month/etc.), only the oldest
| folks would end up buried with one that looked like a sphere.
| All of the others would look more like normal rocks, and
| probably be ignored if they were found while digging.
|
| Two of them together, with roughly the same amount of
| smoothing, might mean a couple was originally buried there. The
| second one could also have belonged to a grieving spouse or
| relative, or even be a trophy taken from an enemy.
| 34679 wrote:
| Stone Spheres of Costa Rica:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_spheres_of_Costa_Rica
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Carving stone from a giant's kettle?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant%27s_kettle#/media/File:G...
| staplung wrote:
| Come on _scientists_...they're obviously petrified Pokeballs.
| rhplus wrote:
| Why does it have to be "mysterious"? Making balls is one of the
| most innate and pleasant artistic things humans can do with their
| hands.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorodango
| pixel_tracing wrote:
| Reminds me of shotput maybe it was used in a sport?
| detritus wrote:
| Given how popular lawn bowls is in Scotland, I'm surprised no one
| appears to have considered these objects might be part of some
| game or sport. To this day, people take their fandom to their
| grave, why not then too?
| [deleted]
| tyleo wrote:
| Be careful. Not all of them are accounted for.
| yosito wrote:
| Orbs, plural, but the linked article only has a photo of one of
| them.
| gennarro wrote:
| Came here to say the same. Really disappointing - I wanted to
| see the cache and instead I got one rock that sort of looked
| like what I was expecting.
| progre wrote:
| Also, that one photo makes it look like it's not a deliberately
| polished stone, more like a regular wave polished beach rock.
| sherr wrote:
| There are a lot of these carved stone balls around but mainly in
| Scotland. They are very mysterious: no one really knows what they
| are or why they were created.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carved_stone_balls
| Zuider wrote:
| In paleolithic Ireland, such stones were used for cooking. They
| would be heated to a high temperature in a fire, and then
| rolled into a pit containing water to boil food.
| dreyfan wrote:
| The original NFT
| drewcoo wrote:
| No mention of lawn bowls in the article?
|
| https://www.jackhighbowls.com/help/history-of-lawn-bowls
| c3534l wrote:
| Describing a few round rocks as a "mysterious stone orb" seems a
| bit dramatic.
| spython wrote:
| Reminds me of Dorodango, the Japanese art of making mud balls.
| https://www.laurenceking.com/blog/2019/09/26/dorodango-blog/
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(page generated 2021-10-03 23:00 UTC)