I ran across a couple of anecdotal writings about our distant human ancestors that I found really interesting to think about:
User: systlin
Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them.
Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.”
“Wait you’re still using the exact same [bleeping] thing 50,000 years later???”
“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”
It’s just.
50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.
I also want to point out that this is a tradition that has been handed down, practitioner to practitioner, master to apprentice, for fifty thousand years.
It’s not really written down, except of course in more modern times. But for the vast, vast majority of that time, this knowledge has been handed down orally, from one leatherworker to another, from one generation to the next, in an unbroken line reaching clear back to the [bleeping] stone age.
And when a new technology arose, of course the new generation would experiment with it as is human nature, only to determine that it wasn’t as good, and go back to the same old tool that had been serving faithfully for tens of thousands of years.
I’ve got one that I made from a deer rib bone that I got from a deer a hunter friend of mine killed. (I got some venison too and it was delicious.) I’m using it to waterproof leather to make myself some moccasins to wear while hiking (which are another example of an old, old thing still being the best thing).
And I’m holding it now, reading this article and watching this documentary, and it’s kind of humbling and exhilarating all at once, to have something in your hand that so viscerally ties you to a thousand generations of your ancestors, people you’ll never know the names of but lived and worked and died using this same [bleeping] thing.
I just.
Incredible.
