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Future archaeologists will be so confused when they find only glass and (maybe, if the wildlife doesn't finish eating it by then) plastic.

> This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians.

Well, we have a lot of Mesopotamian writing. Nothing like the amount they wrote, but more than we want to deal with. Most of their writing sank into the water table and dissolved, like the buildings.

Papyrus isn't a reason for any lack of Egyptian writing; just like everything else, papyrus won't rot in Egypt because of the lack of water.

Accounts by westerners enslaved by nomadic tribes (when they shipwrecked on the coast) often talk about looking for sand to sleep on, especially when in the rocky parts of the Sahara, so I’d wager humans have been sleeping on sand for a very long time.

Sand is a pretty good heat conductor. It’d probably be ok on hot nights, but not so much in winter.

Possibly - but if they transported the sand to where they slept very often, that would show up in archeological digs.

When I was 5 I watched my grandmother making yarn using a foot-powered castle wheel. The machine rotates a string of yarn along its long axis and it collects fibers from a piece of loose wool (roving) thus extending itself. I think I've seen a drop spindle too, but I'm less certain about that.

Same way you weave together yarn. The individual fibers bind together with weaving and friction and form a longer chain.

Here's how: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfaLUi-qtnA

I've wondered the same thing. The fibers aren't that long.

We made rope in boy scouts. You just need to braid three strings and you can splice in broken bits pretty easily. You can also work out kinks with just regular straight sticks and it only takes two people. The theory that these batons were for rope seems unlikely in that regard. Apparently the leading hypothesis is for spear throwing.

Typically called a "perforated baton" in English. The theory of rope twisting is also not widely accepted. It's possible but it's an overly complex device given that you can twist a rope with regular sticks. These guys have contributed to the debate but it's absolutely not settled. They've also discovered hundreds of these across Europe.

https://youtu.be/Q8X9l42ZgsU?is=hW5M_JXqsPtiuHVk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perforated_baton

I'm a big fan of Clickspring. One really interesting aspect of his Antikythera mechanism videos is that, along with constructing the mechanism itself, he is using the physical details of the recovered artifact to make educated guesses about what sorts of workshop technology were available in the eastern Mediterranean world at that time. Including fairly in-the-weeds stuff like entire videos on what sorts of materials a craftsman of that era might have used to lay out marking lines on workpieces or how one might've soldered two metal pieces together.

omg, thank you SO much for the rec on clickspring's antikythera mechanism! i watched the first two episodes years ago and the algorithm never brought the channel back to my feed. now i'm subscribed and will have to watch this again.

i was also lucky enough to visit athens years ago and see the mechanism in person at the national archaeological museum... it's an amazing exhibit, and if you're ever in that neck of the woods i cannot recommend it any more. :)

My only complaint with Clickspring is that it takes so long. I feel like it has been 10 years at this point since he started the Antikythera mechanism build, but I could be wrong.