[HN Gopher] A skeleton made from the bones of at least eight peo...
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A skeleton made from the bones of at least eight people thousands
of years apart
Author : mhb
Score : 104 points
Date : 2024-11-10 00:51 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| keepamovin wrote:
| A lost ancient technology that allowed you to replace your
| missing or damaged limbs with spare parts built from revivified
| millennial old remains? Haha
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Isn't this explained by Gormogon?
| anonzzzies wrote:
| Indeed, a Bones reference is hard to _not_ make here.
| imoverclocked wrote:
| I love how we create stories of bones we find whose original tale
| is long gone. I have no idea where this thread of human
| exploration will take us but I look forward to hearing the
| story's evolution.
| FredPret wrote:
| > "They knew what they were doing"
|
| Maybe it was ancient anatomists doing research
| orblivion wrote:
| Imagine you're just fucking around with something because you're
| bored and then leave it there and forget about it and 2000 years
| later archaeologists find it and wonder "how odd, I wonder what
| the deep significance of this might be"
| SlightlyLeftPad wrote:
| I felt this was potentially true with Picasso's work. It was
| considered groundbreaking and is currently revered. When
| actually the faces he painted were really mimicking the
| phenomenon of staring into someone else's eyes too closely,
| like when your forehead's touch. The eyes tend to merge into
| one or appear displaced. It's a Simple thing that nobody seemed
| to have done before.
| bcraven wrote:
| My understanding was that it was generally agreed to be
| related to concurrent mathematical breakthroughs in higher-
| dimensional space:
|
| _"Picasso was particularly struck by Poincare's advice on how
| to view the fourth dimension, which artists considered
| another spatial dimension. If you could transport yourself
| into it, you would see every perspective of a scene at once.
| But how to project these perspectives on to canvas?
| Poincare's suggestion in Science and Hypothesis was to do so
| one at a time, showing each in succession. Picasso disagreed.
| He wanted to depict them all at once."_
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/jul/17/henri-p.
| ..
| evoke4908 wrote:
| That's an extremely fascinating angle I've never seen
| before. Thanks!
| bitwize wrote:
| Picasso was deliberately playing with perspective. One theory
| goes that he was doing a pisstake of classical artists faking
| perspective by painting half the face from the front and half
| the face from the side. Another says that he was attempting
| to capture more of an object than an accurate rendering from
| a single perspective could convey, sort of a painter's
| equivalent of those animated GIFs that show an object from
| different camera angles, yielding a 3D effect.
| lmm wrote:
| I gained a lot of respect for Picasso when I saw the works of
| others in the movement. You can walk into a room full of
| notionally similar paintings and immediately pick out the
| Picasso because it looks better than the others. I still
| don't particularly _like_ his work, but he was evidently
| doing something that 's harder than it looks.
| rendall wrote:
| My story about it is that in Roman times, someone deeply revered
| or loved a person whose head or skull they possessed, perhaps of
| a family member, a mentor, or a romantic partner. The individual
| sought to restore dignity and completeness to the deceased. They
| turned to a collector of old bones, perhaps an anatomist, who
| helped them reconstruct a body and bury it, along with the head.
| This was a personal, unique act of grief or honor, since a whole,
| intact body was not necessary in Roman funeral rites.
| relistan wrote:
| Honestly this makes more sense to me in human terms than the
| possibilities suggested in the article.
| janwillemb wrote:
| The source article[1] suggests that (in my own words) it may have
| to do with several kins that were brought together and tried to
| seal their bond by assembling a fictive individual from several
| deceased relatives. Or that an original important burial site was
| disturbed and they tried to restore the body.
|
| [1]
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/as...
| _Microft wrote:
| Maybe we should add some bones, bury the skeleton again and wipe
| all records of what we did.
| beng-nl wrote:
| Maybe that's what happened already.
| metalman wrote:
| the very nature of our current record keeping, guarantees that
| a very great deal of anything bieng done now will vanish
| papyrus will survive long after the inevitable neglect and bit
| rot destroy our digital archives The massive physical remains
| of our times ,accompanied by those most enduring of our written
| records, labels and logos, wont tax future investigators
| imaginations in figuring out what happened to us. I personaly,
| have access to many bones, and have toyed with creating chimera
| skeletons, history is too deep, and people are too wierd to
| draw any conclusions, much of the time.
| lolinder wrote:
| People always say this like it's somehow unique to bit rot,
| but only ancient Egypt really managed to preserve a
| substantial portion of their original records, and that's
| just because they won the geographic lottery in that regard.
| Pretty much every other field of history relies on copies
| that were made of the most popular works.
|
| > papyrus will survive long after the inevitable neglect
|
| This isn't inherently true of papyrus. Taken into a climate
| wetter than Egypt (in other words, pretty much any other
| climate where people actually live) it begins to disintegrate
| very quickly and needs constant maintenance.
|
| A large portion of our records _will_ be lost, such is the
| nature of things, but I 'm going to bet that we leave a
| greater percentage of our works than any other civilization.
| We'll probably beat ancient Egypt, but we'll certainly beat
| everyone else. People are keenly aware of how ephemeral
| records are (digital or paper) and make concerted efforts to
| archive them in permanent storage.
| noworriesnate wrote:
| A huge portion of Assyrian cuneiform was preserved due to
| the fact that fires ravaged their cities, baking their clay
| tablets, if I understand correctly. Most of it hasn't even
| been translated yet. The Assyrian Empire was in the early
| iron age though, and Egyptian records go much further back
| than that I think.
| jvm___ wrote:
| Was Egypt able to keep their culture for so long, and build
| many structures and temples - simply because they could
| transmit ideas through time? Other cultures would be stuck
| relearning the same building techniques and religious
| ceremonies every generation and relying on faulty oral
| histories.
|
| Papyrus as a communication method through time.
| evoke4908 wrote:
| Probably not, at least not significantly. AFAIK most
| people couldn't read, it was mainly the clergy and
| nobility as in most ancient civilizations.
|
| Egyptian culture persisted because _Egypt_ persisted. The
| Nile provided immense prosperity and sustained the
| country for millenia. Once we get to modern antiquity,
| they had a massive trade operation with Rome which
| sustained them for a thousand years.
|
| Culture can persist and be transmitted without written
| record. Most cultures operated this way, at least
| initially.
|
| Remember that universal literacy did not exist until just
| a few hundred years ago. Most people throughout history
| were not taught to read. Their stories were recorded by
| the clergy in writing for posterity, but on a day to day
| basis, they were passed down by word of mouth.
|
| I might be wrong about this one but AFAIK the heiroglyph
| script we associate with Egypt was a lost language for a
| long time. It was a ceremonial language known only by the
| priests and it was forgotten after the last dynasty.
| Until the Rosetta stone was discovered, all of that
| writing was effectively lost, unreadable until modern
| times.
| yoz-y wrote:
| From what I understand ancient civilizations rarely kept
| records of things that could be easily transmitted by
| speech. It seems to me that most practical skills are
| better taught this way anyway.
|
| They didn't have manuals and grimoires of building
| techniques, flora and fauna. Most of the texts were
| either religious or for bookkeeping. This was true of
| Egypt as well. Almost everything on display today is
| about death rites.
|
| Of course it might be that these records were just fewer
| and eventually lost.
| PittleyDunkin wrote:
| I'm skeptical of the idea that they could be thought to
| have kept their culture. Even through records we see
| massive changes over time.
|
| Anyway, oral transmission can be extremely durable over
| time.
| baud147258 wrote:
| > Taken into a climate wetter than Egypt (in other words,
| pretty much any other climate where people actually live)
| it begins to disintegrate very quickly and needs constant
| maintenance.
|
| For example papyrus was massively used in the roman empire
| and all those records have disappeared, only what had been
| copied and re-copied since then reached us.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Why....do you have access to 'many bones'
| karim79 wrote:
| I would throw in an iPhone for good measure.
| DimuP wrote:
| It's kinda interesting tho
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| I saw something recently that the Vikings practiced similar bone
| replacement for their guys who lost limbs in battle. One poor guy
| was emasculated with an axe and had to be buried with a
| replacement boar's tusk 'down there'.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Maybe it was used for educational purposes, someone collected
| bones from different places until they had a whole skeleton?
|
| And then when they died, nobody wanted to keep it and it was
| buried as it was human remains after all.
| vivekd wrote:
| possibly but finding a 2000 year old human remain is a big deal
| today and was probably a big deal back then. If the skeleton
| was assembled for some purpose you'd expect the bones to be at
| the most several centuries apart.
|
| I guess there are burial mounds used for long periods - like
| the mount of olives in Israel. But even then it would take
| quite a bit of effort to find the 2000 year old remain over a
| more recent one
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Would they _know_ that it 's a set of 2,000 year old remains?
| Or would they just go, "huh, another dead body."
| alexpc201 wrote:
| "Whether the assembly of the bones occurred in the late Neolithic
| or in the Roman period, the presence of the 'individual' was
| clearly intentional," write the researchers."
|
| I would like the researchers to explain to me what hypotheses
| they consider to suggest that in the Neolithic they had bones
| from the Roman period.
| LegionMammal978 wrote:
| From the abstract: "The burial is explained as a composite
| Neolithic burial that was reworked 2500 years later with the
| addition of a new cranium and grave goods."
|
| The hypothesis here would be that the assembly was originally
| created in the Neolithic period, but that it was later modified
| with new bones in the Roman period.
| dash2 wrote:
| My first hypothesis would be that the original discovery was a
| fraud, like Piltdown man.
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| alien
| fregonics wrote:
| I cant stop imagining the grin of an old roman historian troll
| doing this and imagining how confused it would make people in the
| future.
| yapyap wrote:
| so.. mix and match?
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