[HN Gopher] How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?
___________________________________________________________________
How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?
Author : Luc
Score : 520 points
Date : 2024-04-17 12:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (johnhawks.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (johnhawks.net)
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Travertine Man is not on my Anthropology bingo card.
| queuebert wrote:
| Talk about the downtrodden.
| defrost wrote:
| Dentist floored by Precarbonite Man?
| astrodust wrote:
| Precarbonite man literally floored by dentist's parents.
| peteradio wrote:
| Dentist floored by Precarbonite man's mandible floored by
| dentist's parents.
|
| Still easier to understand then the goddamn title.
| visarga wrote:
| They got civilised now, from caves to bathrooms.
| INTPenis wrote:
| This blows my mind because it reminds me of how we find
| dinosaurs!
|
| I love time team, and I know it's not even close to neanderthals.
| But I've grown accustomed to them finding human remains in soil.
| But this is in sedimentary rock! It's like a fossilized human,
| sort of.
| _xerces_ wrote:
| I found out not long ago that Time Team episodes are officially
| available on YouTube, both old and new:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@TimeTeamClassics
|
| https://www.youtube.com/@TimeTeamOfficial
| INTPenis wrote:
| Oh I know! :D
|
| And also Prof. Alice Roberts has a great series called
| Unearthed History[1] where Phil Harding featured recently.
|
| 1. https://www.youtube.com/@UnearthedHistoryChannel
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Does Phil still wear short shorts?
| INTPenis wrote:
| For that dig he sported a very trendy pair of naturally
| torn jeans.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Thank you.
|
| I thought it ended years ago.
| INTPenis wrote:
| It did, but they've crowd funded at least one new episode
| through patreon subscriptions.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| It is a fossilized human if you consider neanderthals human.
| They have now confirmed that they made art, that is good enough
| for me. The teeth aren't mineralized but they never are. A
| hundred million year old shark tooth is still a tooth not a
| fossil. But this jaw bone was mineralized, so it is a fossil.
| It doesn't take anything close 1.2 million years to fossilze a
| bone, and they think that is how old it was. I do see what you
| mean though, for something like 95% of our history, we had
| minds resembling our own, but lived such different lives.
| nomdep wrote:
| "And if you do happen find a jawbone in your bathroom, my
| suggestion is first to contact the local authorities. Sure, a
| fossil in travertine likely comes from hundreds of thousands of
| years ago. It isn't a crime scene. But depending on your state or
| nation of residence, laws governing discovery of human remains on
| your property may be complicated and having the paperwork in
| order with the police, sheriff, or coroner is the first step for
| most investigations."
|
| No thanks. I'm not going to complicate my life with paperwork and
| police investigators because of a small piece of a might-be-a-
| fossil from Turkey.
| lucioperca wrote:
| Correct me if I am wrong, but this was in a cut limestone
| plate. So if it was a crime, I am sure the murderer is long
| deceased and probably not even a homo sapiens.
| tokai wrote:
| Still human remains.
| iopq wrote:
| [citation needed]
|
| it's humanoid remains, but not modern human
| silverquiet wrote:
| I feel like this is peak HN pedantry, but it seems like
| there's some controversy amongst anthropologists these
| days as how to sort of colloquially define human; I've
| heard some say that any species in the genus homo should
| qualify.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| And how to legally define human is extremely
| controversial and always has been.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Is this because there are people walking around today
| with a substantial amount of Neanderthal DNA and were
| being cautious not to denigrate them?
| tokai wrote:
| Right back at you with the citation needed. Humanoid is
| not a taxonomic term anymore. All Homo are humans. Never
| said modern, which it obviously isn't.
| iopq wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human
|
| > Although some scientists equate the term "humans" with
| all members of the genus Homo, in common usage it
| generally refers to Homo sapiens, the only extant member.
| swatcoder wrote:
| There's no citation for that claim and it would be
| unlikely for there to be one.
|
| It's just some dude's personal impression about a
| subjective matter (a word in transition), and carries no
| more weight than any other comment being made here.
|
| A more meaningful source would be a usage guide like
| Garner's Modern English.
| iopq wrote:
| Okay, link to your source
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Actually, it is cited. The fragment you quoted is from
| the lede, which is supposed to summarize the rest of the
| material. So if you read on to the section "Etymology and
| definition", you find that the same claim is cited to
| Merriam Webster.
|
| As it happens, this citation is useless, because it
| doesn't support the claim. Basically, I think it's
| fraudulent to cite that claim to that MW article.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I don't wanna classify you like an animal in the zoo, but
| it seems good to me to know that you're Homosapien too.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HwmO_GZfzI
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I thought the term "humanoid" referred to bipedal aliens
| with bilateral symmetry. Or to human-like robots.
| kergonath wrote:
| It's something that looks like human remains, and that
| needs to be imaged properly to have a definitive answer.
| darkhorn wrote:
| You argue with someone and police makes a visit. Searches
| your criminal history and sees one line "investigated for
| murder". Guess what might happen. Nothing right? Because we
| live in a perfect world.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > Searches your criminal history and sees one line
| "investigated for murder".
|
| That's not even remotely close to how police records work
| in the US. It fits the narrative, but is completely
| ignorant of reality.
| darkhorn wrote:
| Not everyone lives in USA.
| outworlder wrote:
| > "investigated for murder"
|
| Seriously overestimating the willingness of police to give
| a shit about what are clearly _really old_ remains.
|
| The CYA part about talking to authorities (whoever
| applicable in your jurisdiction, not necessarily police)
| still applies. There are often laws about human remains.
| THOSE would show on your record if this is mishandled.
| buildsjets wrote:
| That will be a great comfort to know, after the trigger happy
| local yokel cops shoot you in the head while executing their
| no-knock warrant because they think that you are reaching for
| a hidden weapon.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I think the theory is that if you don't tell the cops before
| anyone else, then when they find out they might try to bust
| you for failing to report human remains. Even the dimmest
| sheriff wouldn't try to persuade a prosecutor that a fossil
| was the victim of a living murderer.
| fnordian_slip wrote:
| Well, I'm not telling you how to live your life, but someone
| who used to work in a related field, please at least consider
| it if you ever are in that situation. It's always useful to
| have more data, and some data will always come from random
| findings like this.
|
| Maybe AI image recognition is good enough by then to actually
| determine if it is from a human or some other animal, so that
| you know beforehand that your paperwork will not be in vain at
| least. I don't expect that there will be much of a police
| investigation, the age should be rather obvious in most cases.
| On the other hand I've heard that there are states where the
| police get less than half a year of training, so maybe there
| will be one. But still, think of the potential scientific value
| :)
| Zandikar wrote:
| If the recommended course of action to contribute here is to
| involve the police and inform them there might be human
| remains on your property, then I strongly doubt you're gonna
| get many people willing at all. If this is a genuine and
| serious potential source of fact finding/analysis that is of
| value to the field, then the field needs to find a less...
| lets call it polarizing, option.
| montagg wrote:
| I think the other comment is more accurate: this isn't
| about polarization, it's a potential threat to your safety.
| kergonath wrote:
| Involving the police for something like that is _not_ a
| threat to your safety in a civilised country. It is,
| indeed, the best course of action in any country with a
| functioning police force.
| lesostep wrote:
| Well, a functioning police force wouldn't mind if you
| reach to online communities and paleontologists to verify
| that those remains are human before reaching to police to
| file a report, I'd assume.
|
| And so, if the law force action could have serious
| consequences, then the tiles would be better left
| untouched, no paperwork needed. And if it couldn't, then
| it's okay not to file paperwork first.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Yeah, like if they said "call the archeology department of
| your local university to see if they want to document it",
| I'd totally do that. But I'm not going to call the police,
| explain to them what I'm calling about and potentially open
| a crime scene investigation in my own home.
|
| Though realistically, I don't expect that the police would
| even come out or do anything at all, they don't bother to
| come out for car breakins, so I don't see them coming out
| for "I saw something in my new countertop that looks sort
| of like it could be a 500,000 year old human fossil"
| bilalq wrote:
| Putting the lives of your family and yourself at risk by
| involving police would be incredibly irresponsible.
| astrange wrote:
| This is an unreasonable comment even for an American. But
| in other countries it's especially not a concern. You might
| have to report it to a different government agency (like an
| archaeologist or animal control) but you are supposed to
| report it to someone.
|
| The other reddit category of things you should report to
| the police (or someone else) is of course people who find
| old grenades in their house.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/4x9u4p/un
| c...
| bilalq wrote:
| Sure, it's different in other countries. But as a dark
| skinned person in America, this is not unreasonable, but
| pragmatic. Reporting to an archaeology organization is
| not at all the same thing as reporting to police.
| kashyapc wrote:
| Yeah, most people's lives are complicated enough as is. This
| "suggestion" is asking you to go well out of your way to get
| buried in some tedious paperwork and investigations. Only those
| who are into fossils might give a care.
|
| Also notice how smoothly they equate a potential fossil with
| "human remains". Yeah, technically right.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| And misunderstandings about "human remains" somewhere in some
| complicated cross jurisdictional chain of command could end
| up with you in handcuffs, or shot.
|
| Or the media could run some poorly researched human interest
| story about you that makes you sound like Jeffrey Dahmer.
| astrange wrote:
| Or something that's never happened can continue never
| happening. People have found hominid fossils out in public
| before and it's been obvious they were fossils. The worst
| that's happened is they're returned to native tribes who
| then keep them.
| tomxor wrote:
| I'm also pretty sure there are more human skeletal remains than
| any other species on the planet, whether comparing by count or
| mass.
|
| Whether or not that's already making it into materials used in
| fancy house decorating materials is a more complicated question
| I guess.
| autoexec wrote:
| Seriously. People have ended up dead from calling the police
| about things far less likely to cause concern/confusion than "I
| have dead human parts in my bathroom"
| smsm42 wrote:
| Maybe "I have dead human parts in my bathroom" is not the
| best way to explain the situation and one would be served
| better if they concentrated on how to make the communication
| convey the intended message the best, instead of being
| satisfied with "technically correct is the best kind of
| correct".
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Like opening with "I'm pretty sure this is a non-issue, but
| there's a fossilized jawbone fragment in some travertines I
| just had installed. Do you need to investigate that or are
| we good?"
| buildsjets wrote:
| You need to read the old internet 1.0 lore "In The
| Beginning there was Plan" and then consider how
| communication happens in any bureaucratic organization.
| (Poorly, intermittently, and with multiple transmission
| errors)
|
| You tell the dispatcher that you found a fossilized jawbone
| in your tile, by the time the report makes it's way to the
| responding officer the story is you found a severed head in
| your sink.
| krisoft wrote:
| Would it be possible (even just theoretically) to discover
| fossils like this non-destructively via some form of scanning? If
| we would have a huge chunk of stone on a table, could we somehow
| tell if there is any humanoid bones in it without cutting it up?
|
| I suspect the very low contrast between the fossil and the
| surrounding rock would mean that either we need a very sensitive
| sensor, very long exposures or likely both.
| crote wrote:
| I believe this can be done with CT scans - they are already
| applied to non-destructively learn more about known fossils.
|
| Routinely scanning random chunks of stone would be
| prohibitively expensive, of course.
| defrost wrote:
| Depends really .. if the source quarry is pulling blocks and
| thin slicing them for tiles | counter tops then it's
| _relatively_ easy (in the world of industrial mining) to
| photographically scan the top and bottom of _every_ slice of
| stone _after_ it 's been cut to tile thickness.
|
| A number of quarries already automate the slicing and
| "inspect" surfaces for defects via computer vision.
|
| The trick is pattern recognition to catch things of interest
| so that _if_ required the raw slices can be retrieved before
| they 're shipped.
|
| It's _destructive_ tomography .. with an option to digitally
| reconstruct a solid, or even to physically rejoin slices.
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| Obviously the solution is to CT scan the whole planet. Then
| it'll be easy to spot the fossils.
| perihelions wrote:
| Indiana Jones and the Tomography of Doom
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Finally, after all these years, I have a use for all of my
| real-estate investments in subterranean cave systems.
| krisoft wrote:
| Well :) if you would vote me to the emperor of everything
| (don't recommend it, i have eccentric tendencies) I would
| dig up a mile by mile by mile of random cube somewhere and
| document it in excruciating detail. Kinda like a
| paleontological version of the Hubble Deep Field image. A
| very detailed and very good look at somewhere where
| otherwise we don't expect to find anything particularly
| interesting.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| I'd love to see an /r/TheyDidTheMath on the energy required
| to CT scan the entire Earth all the way thru. I assume
| you'd have to vaporize the planet.
| flir wrote:
| You could do secants rather than diameters. Just image
| the surface layers. Although even just the 5km or so to
| the horizon sounds like a scary amount of energy.
|
| How about neutrino imaging? (I thought I was joking,
| but... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-018-0319-1)
| snakeyjake wrote:
| CT scanners can visualize the interior of stone blocks to
| locate fossils for the purpose of extraction planning but
| obviously you're limited to the dimensions of the scanner.
| They're also used to image the inside of fossilized eggs.
|
| Ground penetrating radar can be used to visualize fossils but
| the conductivity of the material greatly impacts resolution
| (it's poor no matter what) and reach. Low-conductivity
| materials can be imaged up to tens of meters, high-conductivity
| materials you're lucky to get one meter.
|
| There are other methods for imaging that can penetrate further
| but I don't think they have the resolution to be useful (think:
| "there's an oil deposit down there" not "there's a body").
| em-bee wrote:
| my first read of this title was: "how many bathrooms did
| neanderthals have?" making me wonder "neanderthals had
| bathrooms?"
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I was stuck for ages trying to parse the title, thinking it was
| a Google-style interview question - "How many bathrooms are
| there in the Netherlands?"
| g105b wrote:
| Me too. It really crossed a wire in my brain!
| navane wrote:
| It's because up until the very last word the sentence can
| be passed very differently: "How many bathrooms have
| Neanderthals in the average household?"
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > thinking it was a Google-style interview question - "How
| many bathrooms are there in the Netherlands?"
|
| Where does the idea that this is a Google-style interview
| question come from? They've never interviewed that way.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Whether it's true or not, there is the "How many piano
| tuners are there in Chicago?" meme interview question
| https://www.wired.com/2014/08/how-to-solve-crazy-open-
| ended-...
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That style of question was notorious long before Google
| existed. It has never been associated with Google.
| dekhn wrote:
| We called them fermi estimation problems in grad school
| imzadi wrote:
| Same. I re-read it at least four times. I kept seeing "How
| many bathrooms in the Netherlands have tile?"
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I read "How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the title?"
| and thought "people name bathrooms?"
| dotancohen wrote:
| I'm sitting in Denisovan right now. Thank the maker for
| mobile devices to pass the time while nature does it's
| thing.
| hinkley wrote:
| I parsed it right but still assumed Google was involved
| somehow.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Low risk assumption, since they seem to be involved in most
| websites today for some reason.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I read it as "How many bathrooms have Nederlanders in the
| tile?"
| semaj123 wrote:
| Before reading the article, I thought it was about Neanderthal
| themed designs on the tile.
| em-bee wrote:
| that thought briefly crossed my mind too
| asveikau wrote:
| To be fair it's kind of that.
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| GPT kind of agrees: https://chat.openai.com/share/f52068c0-26
| 68-4343-9446-aaa145...
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Why did ChatGPT say that's fascinating? I thought it was a
| large language model that had no feelings or opinions.
| djur wrote:
| Because it's tuned to be as positive as possible about
| anything you give it. Try asking it to review your poetry
| sometime.
| gwern wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
| drooby wrote:
| I read that title and I was nearly convinced I was having a
| stroke.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| But how many bathrooms Neanderthals had?
| xattt wrote:
| Continuing with the Neanderthal theme:
|
| > how is babby formed? How girl get pragnent?
|
| [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-is-babby-formed
| jdubb wrote:
| I still don't understand the title, no matter how hard I try.
| Is there a word missing? A misspelling?
| thedanbob wrote:
| "How many bathrooms have (fossilized remains of) Neanderthals
| in the (wall/floor) tile?"
|
| I had to start reading the article before I was able to parse
| it correctly.
| starkrights wrote:
| Just got it. Have is the possessive definition, not the
| helper verb for a past participle.
|
| Read like: How many tiles contain Neanderthals within their
| tiles?
| alamortsubite wrote:
| From the title, I fully expected the story to be about a next-
| generation CAPTCHA.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Quickly solved by inserting "remains embedded" after
| Neanderthals
| RIMR wrote:
| Absolutely wild the number of people in the comments on the
| original Reddit thread who earnestly think OP should call the
| police to report human remains.
| outworlder wrote:
| They should look up applicable laws in their jurisdiction.
| Police may not be appropriate, but most places govern how human
| remains should be handled.
| coding123 wrote:
| I couldn't parse the title until I read the article.
| tomxor wrote:
| I couldn't parse the tile until I read the article.
| clucas wrote:
| To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not
| imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he
| find it stopping a bung-hole?
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Oh god, I couldn't deal with having that in my floor; that tile
| would definitely be getting replaced.
| mongol wrote:
| Me neither.That is basically part of corpse in your home,
| right?
| creshal wrote:
| Limestone is generally made of dead corals and marine
| animals, this batch just included a slightly wider variety of
| species than average.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| This makes it especially fun to climb on, there are pretty
| little shell indentations and such to appreciate on your
| way up.
| 13of40 wrote:
| The magic ingredient in concrete is cement and the magic
| ingredient in cement is limestone, so our cities are
| literally built out of bones. Sleep tight.
| outworlder wrote:
| Interesting. Cities are built on death and suffering,
| literally and figuratively.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Much (most?) of the entire biosphere of earth comes from
| billions of years of life forms killing and eating other
| life forms.
|
| The universe is a rough place. Beautiful in many ways,
| but quite gnarly.
| dotancohen wrote:
| > The universe is a rough place. Beautiful in many ways,
| but quite gnarly.
|
| It's wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both
| subtle and gross. But it's not for the timid.
| vkou wrote:
| Unless you're a primary producer (photosynthesize your
| own food, or something of the sort), all life is built on
| death and suffering. We eat what we kill.
| kragen wrote:
| except, hooray for parasites and scavengers!
| abeppu wrote:
| ... in fairness, there's not really any particular reason
| to believe that the organisms which contributed to
| limestone suffered any more than their peers who didn't.
| And insofar as all the elements that are components of
| life exist in finite quantities which get recycled on
| earth, all life is built on death.
| kragen wrote:
| this is a mistake i made for many years, so hopefully i
| can save someone else: bones and teeth are calcium
| phosphate, while corals and seashells and eggshells and
| limestone are calcium carbonate. that's why you can't
| dissolve teeth or chicken bones in vinegar. cement is
| made by calcining calcium carbonate (with silicates), not
| calcium phosphate
|
| mineral calcium phosphate (apatite) is broken down for
| fertilizer with sulfuric acid. it is not used for cement
| to my knowledge
|
| the phosphate and carbonate of calcium are not especially
| similar, not any more than the hydroxide and sulfate of
| sodium, or the sulfide and hydroxide of iron
|
| in summary, your cities are not literally built out of
| bones
| 13of40 wrote:
| Valid point, but let's tease that apart: We're talking
| about seashells and coral, not the sort of bones you'd
| find in a mammal, but still the skeletal structures of
| animals. So maybe "skeletons" not "bones". Same
| difference.
| kragen wrote:
| true, your cities are literally built out of skeletons
| mr_toad wrote:
| > so our cities are literally built out of bones. Sleep
| tight.
|
| They moved the cemetery but they left the bodies!
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Yep. I have a few seashells poking out of my bathroom tile.
| It's not (ugly) travertine though.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Uh, sure, but that doesn't look like "an identifiable part
| of a human head" that's going to be catching your eye when
| you're using the bathroom.
| surfingdino wrote:
| It's not uncommon to build using human remains or on top of
| the human remains. Quite a few plague pits got uncovered in
| London in recent years by developers wanting to build on
| whatever scrape of land they can find. Developers are
| required to allow some time for researchers to go through the
| site before they are free to then pour concrete over them and
| erect their towers.
| berkes wrote:
| I live in a city that was founded by the Romans around the
| time of Christ. But has been abandoned and rebuild a couple
| of times (by a.o. Charlemagne). Everytime something is
| built, dug, or torn down, they find old or ancient
| foundations. Sometimes underneath old foundations.
| Fortresses underneath mideaval cellars, city walls below a
| casino. A Bathouse in a parking garage.
|
| It makes building stuff, quite cumbersome. And I can only
| imagine the amount of ancient foundations that have been
| quickly eradicated, so that a real estate developer could
| keep on schedule to maximize profits.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| If you run across this situation, I'll buy you a new tile and
| take that one off your hands so I can put it in my floor.
| hinkley wrote:
| This is honestly either shitty workmanship or bad luck. They
| should have noticed this and swapped it for another tile during
| construction. Either the installer wasn't looking at what they
| were doing (apathy) or there were other tiles with more obvious
| "flaws" and they ran out of spares.
|
| But then I don't think I want limestone in my bathroom in the
| first place.
| haunter wrote:
| My local grocery store has red marble flooring and one of the
| tiles has a ~1m diameter perfect ammonite fossil in it. It's
| huge and I pray they renovate the store one day cause I want to
| get that tile from the constructors.
| autoexec wrote:
| Have you ever thought about just asking the owner for it in
| exchange for paying for a replacement tile and the labor
| expenses? Maybe they'd be up for it. Seems better than just
| hoping you notice their plans to renovate in time, or that it
| doesn't get shattered/damaged.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think this would probably be the coolest thing in my house.
| I'd love it.
| jobu wrote:
| Same. I would look at that every time I was in the bathroom and
| wonder how they died. Did they suffocate from toxic gasses
| while exploring a cave? Maybe it was more gruesome like falling
| into a hot spring and getting boiled to death...
|
| It would bother me forever.
| petesergeant wrote:
| 100%. No issue with someone else having it in _their_ house,
| but it'd horrify me to have that in my house
| Archelaos wrote:
| In 2022, I was able to visit the excavation site Bilzingsleben,
| which is mentioned in the article, and can highly recommend a
| visit to everyone interested in science. The site itself is just
| a quarry, but they have built a museum right above the place
| where they found fossils of thousands of creatures. You can then
| stand over a control table like in the spaceship Enterprise and
| trigger 3D animations of those animals and humans in their
| natural environment on a large screen on the wall on other side
| over an excavation ditch. But the best thing was getting to know
| to the curator of the site. He himself took part in the
| excavation, published scientific articles about it and seems to
| know everything about the site, its excavation history and
| palaeological topics related to it. I was able to talk with him
| for more than an hour.
|
| The excavation site is located about 20km north of Erfurt
| (Thuringia, Germany). In the summer it is open Weddensday to
| Sunday and on holidays from 10:00 to 17:00. For those with a
| camper-van: it is no problem to stay in their very quite car park
| for the night for free. Its Web-site can be found at
| http://www.steinrinne-bilzingsleben.com/ (in German).
| treprinum wrote:
| How about Grube Messel? Is it similar to Bilzingsleben?
| Archelaos wrote:
| Grube Messel is still on my agenda. (It is literally like
| this: I have bookmarked the location in my navigator app.)
| However, from what I heared, both must be quite different. In
| contrast to Messel, there are no spectacular finds on display
| in Bilzingsleben. What is associated with Homo Erectus is on
| display in the Landesmuseum fur Vorgeschichte in Halle.[1]
|
| The scientific worth of Bilzingsleben is that it is sort of a
| Homo Erectus version of Pompeji (of a much, much smaller
| size, though): the place was covered with mud at a certain
| time during a flood disaster, which hindered decomposition
| and later errosion. It is now more or less completely
| excavated. So the site itself is just a big ditch.
|
| As I said, the best thing about my visit was the opportunity
| to talk with a real expert curator. I have hardly ever met a
| museum guide who knew so much about his subject matter. I
| hope he is still there.
|
| [1] Photos and descriptions of this and a few other nice
| finds are available online https://nat.museum-
| digital.de/search?q=Bilzingsleben (texts in German,
| navigation available in English)
| gravescale wrote:
| Somehow I find marble and travertine in things like hotels a bit
| depressing. It took millions of years to form and it's a marvel
| of serendipitous geological processes. Then it gets sliced and
| stuck to a wall for a decade or two before another renovation or
| a demolition happens and it gets smashed up and thrown away.
| golergka wrote:
| Would it be better for billions of tons of it to just sit
| locked away in the Earth and never see the light of day?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Or consider iron. Almost all of it has actually sank into the
| Earth's core, the deposits we extract it from are but tiniest
| scraps of the metal left on the face of the planet. So
| irreverent!
| gravescale wrote:
| Ah well, but we could always get as much more of it as we
| want with an exciting enough mining project!
|
| And if that fails, just sit tight and it'll be most of the
| universe for a few quadrillion years, somewhere between
| "cold, dark and quiet" and "very cold and very dark and
| very quiet"
| acchow wrote:
| We could probably even make more iron in a fusion reactor.
| But anything heavier than iron would probably require a
| supernova.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| I don't think there's anything stopping us from making
| trace amounts of elements heavier than iron. The
| superheavy elements have only been synthesised in the
| laboratory.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheavy_element
| namibj wrote:
| Way easier to just electrolyze olivine, of which we have
| plenty. Downside is that you actually get more silicon
| and magnesium out of it, and those are higher strength
| each than the iron you get from each chunk of rock. I.e.,
| if you wanted to use them to make a bridge, it'd be
| mostly of something like silicon fiber reinforced
| magnesium instead of steel. Unless refining them to
| sufficient purity turns out to be too difficult to be
| worth it.
| gravescale wrote:
| It kind of _feels_ like at least you "should" stick it to
| something that you expect will last a substantial amount of
| time, rather then something that is entirely expected to be
| gutted in, on the scale of how long a tile could practically
| last, relatively short order. Obviously, I know that The
| Market says "no", it's a few dollars a tile wholesale!
| abofh wrote:
| Don't worry, the market corrects - what's the market price
| on Galapagos turtle soup or dodo omelettes?
|
| Others are right - the matter is neither created nor
| destroyed, but you are also right, that form is/was unique,
| and it is at least a bit sad to know that it's unlikely to
| be seen again. Take from that what you will, but I take
| from it that the world will only be like this for a moment,
| and if I want to see it, the only way to encourage that is
| to go and see it, not hope that society will realize it
| needs to (or wished it had) preserve things.
|
| Whether these are the things we'll regret losing -
| different question, but I'm sure a british museum will hang
| onto one :)
| cultofmetatron wrote:
| > or dodo omelettes
|
| we should definitely not let it get that far....
| abigail95 wrote:
| This comment is all over the place. Is the market for
| marble good or bad in this case? Is it producing an
| efficient outcome? Can it be made to do so? What are the
| non market solutions? You fault something just because it
| exist but give no alternative.
|
| Species like Dodo are expected to go extinct as humans
| flourish and move other things out of our way. All
| species eventually go extinct. We only exist because we
| out competed what came before us, which out competed what
| came before it.
|
| You can mourn the loss of the Dodo not existing in a zoo
| for you to gawk at but I find that to be on the level of
| complaining about a TV show being cancelled. If it filled
| such an essential biological niche that its loss is
| noticed (it obviously wasn't - hundreds of years went by
| before anyone noticed it was gone) - if it were noticed,
| and was such a heavy loss, that's the first niche that
| will be filled by something else. You can't have
| Darwinian evolution without this.
|
| The Galapagos Giant Tortoise will never go extinct
| because the market for protecting and investigating and
| gawking at them is too strong. If that interest ever
| wanes the animal will no longer occupy a useful niche and
| will cease to exist, unless it adapts.
| golergka wrote:
| Do you have a blog? If you do, please drop a link. If
| not, you should. You just put the thoughts that I had
| about this comment into writing more eloquently than I
| ever could.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| We'd at least be able to clad the interiors of the generation
| ships with them 10,000 years from now if we did
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > It took millions of years to form and it's a marvel of
| serendipitous geological processes.
|
| Wait until you hear what happens to oil...
| neuronic wrote:
| The storage medium for sunlight are carbohydrates U
| danans wrote:
| > before another renovation or a demolition happens and it gets
| smashed up and thrown away.
|
| That's sort of material has a high resale value and usually is
| sold for reuse in other applications.
| abeppu wrote:
| ... is that generally true? What are those other
| applications?
|
| Like, if I want to put in new stone counters, in general I'm
| picking a kind of stone I like, and the firm measures or
| makes a template of my use, and cuts from a slab, right? If I
| have a really small job, perhaps it's possible to get a deal
| from the offcuts of some prior _installation_. I don 't think
| it's generally an available option to e.g. get measurements
| and then peruse a list of countertops _removed_ from recent
| local renovations where the dimensions are strictly larger
| than mine, and have my counter cut by trimming their 11 '
| linear counter to my 10' space. But given that widths/depths
| are often determined by (standard) cabinet or vanity
| measurements, I feel like this ought to be doable, and these
| materials could have a straight-forward series of multiple
| uses.
| hattmall wrote:
| Stone countertops haven't been in super wide usage long
| enough that there is a huge supply for used. But if getting
| one replaced there's certainly a market for a stone
| counter. Even the sink cutouts for real stone can sell for
| a good bit.
|
| A lot of stone countertops though are actually cheap
| composites where the slab is mass produced. Like how you
| can walk into an apartment complex and they all have
| granite countertops with nearly identical patterns.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > A lot of stone countertops though are actually cheap
| composites
|
| That still call themselves granite? Quartz is the well
| known man-made composite, but it tends to be a little
| more expensive than granite, not less.
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| I don't think they call themselves granite - caesarstone
| is one I've heard of.
| bunabhucan wrote:
| In Boulder CO there are incentives to deconstruct rather
| than demo houses. The materials are sold at a local yard.
| They send a weekly materials alert:
|
| https://imgur.com/kFax0eK
| MetallicCloud wrote:
| Could you share the name of the yard?
| danans wrote:
| Seems like there are lots of companies willing to sell you
| reclaimed marble slabs:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=reclaimed+marble+slabs&oq=r
| e...
|
| I'd imagine this stuff is pretty local though because
| shipping heavy stuff like marble too far wouldn't make much
| sense.
| abeppu wrote:
| Do some businesses exist which deal in old slabs? Sure.
| Though the large majority of results I see in your link
| are pretty small.
|
| But more importantly there are a lot of kitchen and
| bathroom renovations (and I _think_ renovations outnumber
| new construction by a lot ...) so one might think that
| almost as many countertops being removed as installed,
| and that a large portion of these could be serviced by
| recycled ones. The comment from danans asserted that
| these materials are "usually" reused -- which I am
| doubtful of.
| outop wrote:
| As a private person wanting to decorate your own house in a
| fancy way you are something of an edge case. If your
| contractor came to you and said "this material has a
| questionable provenance but it's 20% cheaper and will look
| 99% as good" you might be likely to decline. Many
| businesses, faced with the same opportunity, would be
| delighted.
| tnmom wrote:
| Really? As a private person I'd jump at that opportunity.
| outop wrote:
| You must be an exception within an edge case.
| lightedman wrote:
| "What are those other applications?"
|
| For starters, Travertine is highly popular in jewelry. When
| a rockhound passed away here where I live, his custom house
| was being demolished by the new owners and they invited the
| community to come rescue any thing they could. I rescued a
| bunch of the travertine slabs to use as teaching material
| for new rock cutters.
| pavon wrote:
| Even our local Habitat for Humanities Restore wouldn't
| accept used natural stone countertops in good condition.
| The guys manning the donation drop off didn't know the
| reason.
| defrost wrote:
| There are two opposing extremes of building philosophy.
|
| If there's an architectural design up front then there's a
| need to source materials that fit the plan, as you
| describe.
|
| The opposite approach was taken by a friend of mine who
| was, for a decade, a _prolific_ builder here in Australia
| .. he continuously had two or three houses on the go in
| staggered completion (clean builds and|or significant
| rennovation) that all sold well for their design,
| uniqueness and craftsmanship.
|
| His starting point was salvage yards, looking for cheap big
| statement pieces; bay windows, big wall cabinets, doors,
| window sets, impressive looking ketchen sets, big counter
| tops, etc.
|
| The next step would be to design a house plan that fitted
| around quality salvage and well suited the site for views,
| access, etc.
|
| His arc in life was art school in Victoria followed by |
| interleaved with a salvage job that dismantled entire
| (small) towns ahead of dams, flooding, other projects -
| they prepped wooden houses for moving elsewhere,
| disassembled structures to "flats", reclaimed historic
| bridges, etc.
|
| Then came the building that built up his cash reserves,
| then a big rural property with sheds, glassblowing studios,
| metal work, etc.
| 48864w6ui wrote:
| It's unclear if William Morris would've approved of this
| approach to an Arts & Crafts career, but I certainly do.
| defrost wrote:
| The running joke in the arts & crafts circles I was
| tangential to concerned the difference between an artist
| and a craftsperson; _Craft people have to pay their
| bills_ ... :-)
| crubier wrote:
| This is what happens to essentially all materials. Metals,
| Plastics, Oil, Stone, Sand, Concrete all come from things that
| have been standing mostly still for millions of years before we
| extracted their components
| cogman10 wrote:
| Some materials are more replaceable than others. A pine wood
| fixture can be regrown relatively quickly. Even something
| like oak based furniture can be replaced in a few hundred
| years.
|
| Heck, even plastic is pretty replaceable as reducing bio-
| material into plastic isn't unheard of. (The first plastics
| were made out of casein from milk).
| ametrau wrote:
| You can make plastic from air and light.
| berkes wrote:
| How?
| feoren wrote:
| Use lots of photovoltaic power (light) to sequester CO2
| and H2O and jam it together into more complex carbon
| compounds? If trees can do it, we can at least
| approximate it (trees come from the air, not the ground).
| concordDance wrote:
| Absurdly expensive though.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Depends on how literal/direct you are being. Algae
| plastic isn't terribly expensive to produce.
| krick wrote:
| I get anxiety when I see helium balloons.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| With relatively few exceptions, everything you ever owned or
| interacted with more than x years ago is rotting in some
| landfill.
| berkes wrote:
| Depends on how big you make x.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Most iron (and steel) comes from iron ore formations which
| are at least 1 billion, and up to 3 billion years old: banded
| iron formations (BIFs).
|
| The oldest of those are literally legacies of the first major
| burst of biological activity on Earth, which released oxygen
| into the atmosphere, which for most of a billion of years or
| so resulted in reducing unoxidized minerals, particularly
| iron, in the Great Rusting.
| lazide wrote:
| Another way to think about it -
|
| It was formed and buried in ways that no one could ever see or
| appreciate it, until now.
|
| A decade or two in a high visibility location is more attention
| than it ever would have gotten buried under ground.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The tiles in my house are reclaimed.
| gravescale wrote:
| I wonder how they get them off the wall intact? I took up a
| bathroom floor of (glazed ceramic) tiles and I barely had a
| piece larger than a handspan to show for it, they were nearly
| all absolutely welded to the adhesive. Would be great if
| there could be a 3M Command Strip style pull-to-release tab!
| deadbabe wrote:
| If only we felt this sentimental about human beings.
| ugh123 wrote:
| The bright side is more people will have seen and touched the
| marble than if it had stayed where it was.
| zeristor wrote:
| I do agree with your sentiment, however this is pretty much how
| geology works.
|
| Rocks brought to the surface, and eroded by water, or plunged
| into the depths and melted to spew out as volcanoes, etc, etc,
| etc.
|
| Perhaps the remnants of bathroom tiles will be subjected into
| the ground and mined in millions of year to decorate a future
| species bathroom.
| lightedman wrote:
| "It took millions of years to form"
|
| Not particularly. Travertine and dolomite limestone are
| hydrothermal depositions. They form quite rapidly, and in some
| locations you can watch it being formed to this day, like in
| some areas of Yellowstone (where the travertine is only a few
| thousand years old at best.) Dolomite is a little slower than
| Travertine to grow, but what we now understand about its
| formation also means it was very likely to have been rapidly-
| formed by simple geologic acid washes over shorter periods of
| time than we initially thought - read
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidbressan/2023/11/27/scienti...
| and you'll catch on to what I'm saying.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| Doesn't natural erosion have a similar effect on probably a
| much larger scale?
| m463 wrote:
| although it is NOT what you're talking about, you reminded me
| of this article:
|
| https://www.theonion.com/geologists-we-may-be-slowly-running...
|
| Personally I think of those caves full of ancient crystals, or
| the stalag[mt]ites in newly unearthed caves. And the lost
| redwoods.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| > Dating of the travertine by Anne-Marie Lebatard and
| collaborators in 2014 suggests that the individual lived sometime
| between 1.6 million and 1.2 million years ago.
|
| What the...? Am I misunderstanding something? I didn't think
| human ancestry started so long ago.
| djur wrote:
| Homo habilis existed as long as 2.8 million years ago.
| danans wrote:
| TIL, fossils exist from < O(1M+)ya
|
| Also TIL, (from tangential reading) even dinosaur fossils contain
| original bone material from the organism, not just rock in the
| shape of the original bones.
|
| Of course it makes complete sense in retrospect.
| pimpampum wrote:
| Wow, I wasn't aware that was a correct sentence.
| adamc wrote:
| Makes me sad to think of the fossils lost, but it's also kind of
| inevitable.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Good article.
|
| I thought I was going to hear that some type of ceramic consisted
| in part of ground-up Neanderthal bones. I think I'd be
| unpleasantly surprised to find a human jawbone on the bathroom
| floor.
| jbandela1 wrote:
| I believe statistically, you are almost certain when you are
| peeing in the bathroom to be peeing out some of the exact same
| water molecules that exact same Neanderthal who is in the tile
| peed out when they were alive.
| Jeremy1026 wrote:
| I read this title early in the morning. Thought it said
| "Netherlands", now that I'm reading it more awake, I'll be honest
| when I say I'm not sure if Neanderthals is more or less
| comforting.
| leto_ii wrote:
| In Bucharest we have an entire subway station tiled with marble
| containing countless very visible fossils [1], specifically of
| rudists [2]. Here are a few nice photos:
|
| https://www.descopera.ro/wp-content/uploads/media/401/321/59...
|
| https://www.descopera.ro/wp-content/uploads/media/401/321/59...
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politehnica_metro_station
|
| [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudists
| refactor_master wrote:
| Same thing can be seen in Bologna, Italy [1].
|
| And if I'm not mistaken, several other Italian cities as well.
|
| [1] https://pauls-bologna.blog/dsc08058/
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Amazing... I have this stuff in my own bathroom, and assumed it
| was some sort of synthetically generated random pattern, e.g. a
| type of ceramic or concrete tile with coloring swirled in or
| something. To be honest, I find it a bit ugly and didn't
| understand why anyone would design a tile to look like this.
|
| Can't wait to get home and actually look carefully. I suspect
| I'll appreciate it a lot more knowing what it actually is.
| dropbox_miner wrote:
| Can you post a picture?
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| There are photos in the article here, mine looks identical
| other than the jaw bone.
| frutiger wrote:
| Travertine is a pretty "famous" stone and was used extensively
| by the Romans to build some of their most famous structures
| (including the Coliseum). Since then architects have used it in
| many famous buildings (e.g. the Seagram building's lobby).
| krick wrote:
| Unless you are certain "this stuff in your own bathroom" is
| real travertine, it most likely _is_ "some sort of
| synthetically generated random pattern". They make it out of
| colored cement, which is pretty similar to a real thing, but
| obviously cheaper and more resistant to some hardships of
| everyday life.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I'm not an anthropologist, but I saw right away that it was a
| jawbone. How could anyone miss it?
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| To be fair, you're only seeing that one small part in
| isolation.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| This title made _absolutely no sense_ until I read the article.
| Fascinating stuff.
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| There is a concrete pour next to the place I lived as a child
| which was done around 1970. A cat walked through and my parents
| showed the traces to me when I was a small kid, explaining how
| fossiles were created.
|
| Fast forward 35 years or so, I live 2 km from the place I was
| born after travelling the world and I went there with my own
| child to "discover" the steps again, together with the story
| about fossiles.
|
| I then had my kid take my parents to that place when they were
| visiting so that he could show them the traces and explain how
| fossiles are formed.
|
| Full circle of life :)
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| It's a heartwarming story, but I don't understand how cat
| tracks have anything to do with fossils, which are usually the
| remains of a once-living animal.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_track
| danparsonson wrote:
| After 35 years, I'm sorry to say, that cat is a once-living
| animal :-)
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| Well, that is the sad part I left to my wife to explain :)
| BrandoElFollito wrote:
| The idea was to explain that one can find traces in stone in
| the form of imprints. Typically these would be trilobites or
| shells, but also leaves and actual animal steps.
|
| It was more an introduction to the idea of fossilization,
| layers of sediments etc. than a university course :) with the
| general message of "you can find traces of stuff in stones,
| and next we will crack open a stone to show you that".
|
| Not far away from that place there is a church with steps
| built from sedimentary stone where there are plenty of
| fossiles so it was a nice introduction.
| zeristor wrote:
| Yikes, seeing someone's jawbone each day is off putting.
|
| The odd ammonite would be sad, you'd think that this would be
| rejected on quality grounds.
| The28thDuck wrote:
| This building has people in it.
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