This is the axe

My knuckle rests exactly in the triangular plane just above the orange intrusion, and my thumb on the plane with the white patches.

How many hands held it just like that?
How many generations was this passed down?
Were you lost? or did you fall into disuse when technology improved?

Do you still desire to be held?

This was the axe that made me ugly cry in the museum. It was created half a million years ago by either Erectus or Heidelburgensis, and was passed down from person to person, long enough that somehow a neanderthal picked it up, and passed it down to their family.

It has now felt 3 generations of human species hands, it's smooth but still sharp except where the very tip has been broken off, but it shows that this axe was loved and taken care of. And it is still being taken care of! It was used to teach archaic children to build, to carve meat, to break bones, and now it is being used to teach us about all those people who came before us and put their hands right where we put ours.

The fact that @gallusrostromegalus and I put our hands on the same place and felt the same rush of emotions only days apart is amazing, but its not new. People loved this axe, it belonged to their loved ones and it's full of all those emotions. And if there's anything to take away from humanity, new and old, it's that we love a good rock.

Hello! You and I never met, but I feel like we've held hands now, the same way that we held hands with everyone else who's held that axe, and I think that's lovely :)

Ever since I read about a caveman vampire in one of the Anita Blake books, I thought it was an amazing and under-explored idea.

And ever since that guy got taken out easily like some random villain-of-the-week, I’ve thought the idea deserved better.

Somebody write it.

I like this so much better than the idea that our ancestors would be embarrassed or ashamed of us for being “soft” or some crap like that.

My ancestors, watching me stuff my face with fried chicken while studying: She eats like an imperial concubine and can afford to study like am imperial scholar. WE MADE IT

She eats like an imperial concubine and can afford to study like am imperial scholar

My ancestors watching me use my stand mixer while living in a small apartment and attending university: Thou hast kneadeth bread in FOUR hail marys??? FOUR??? And thou ist poor as a churchmouse, yet liveth in a fine cottage with four pounds butter and fresh berries in thy larder!! And two featherbeds! And thou attendeth the King’s college, as a lord!!

My ancestors being like:

Look at this fine young lady! She can paint she can sew and embrody, she sings and read

And without a wealthy father to pay for that, plus she is florid in the body! She doesn’t know hunger!

We did it!

Me: /wearily studying/

My Ancestors: TRULY SH— what? They? A little unorthodox, but reasonable I suppose. TRULY THEY PROSPER, FOR THEY LIVE IN A DWELLING WITH MANY ROOMS AND ONLY THEIR SPOUSE TO SHARE IT WITH! THEY HAVE DOGS WHO DO NOT PERFORM A FUNCTION! THEY HAVE MANY BOOKS AND DO NOT HAVE TO SPIN THEIR OWN YARN! THEY BATHE AT A WHIM WITH GENTLE SOAP FREE OF LYE! OUR DESCENDANT BRINGS HONOR AND PRIDE TO OUR LINEAGE!

Me: /yawns and sips my coffee/

My Ancestors: /cheer wildly/

Me: *hunched over at my desk nursing a headache.*

My Ancestors: “Truly, we prosper; see here, our infirm descendant need not even work on her poor days, but has the luxury to rest as she sees need! A doctor attends to her illnesses; her clothes are warm and free of pests; she cares for exotic and dangerous animals within her own home! We have found the height of luxury!”

Me: *treats myself to a pineapple and a bunch of bananas*

My Georgian ancestors: ZOOTH SHE HAS BOUGHT A PINEAPPLE! NOT MERELY BORROWED ONE! TRULY SHE HAS ACHIEVED FAR MORE THAN WE COULD KNOW!

me: [puts on warm socks and a blanket, is now warm regardless of the weather outside]

My impoverished Russian Jewish ancestors:

Originally posted by bramblywitch

Me: [learns to knit from youtube videos]

My ancestors: Our descendant, the heir to all our hopes and fears for a far-off future… She can buy fine clothes woven and knit by automatons, with but a fraction of a day’s earnings… and she does… she has so much free time to do as she pleases… and she uses some of that time to do what we did.

One woman from rural Poland, who died from smallpox in 1717 CE, a grandmother at 35: I knit roses and peonies into my and my children’s gloves… it wasn’t much extra work to dye the red, once I had already cleaned the wool and spun the yarn, and to knit in the designs… and I wasn’t a gifted knitter but I was a good knitter, and I thought, well, it might not make a difference to how warm the glove is, but it made the children happy and it made me happy. I liked to make things beautiful when I could.

Another woman, a peasant from what’s now France, who died from getting kicked by a mammoth in 8995 BCE: [Patting her on the back] I made my family’s clothes too. Every day my sister and I wove and wove and tended our children. We went out of our way to make the cloth lovely. Not a trace of it remains anywhere on earth now… But it mattered to us. And she might not know our names, or know it was us, but evidently, it matters to her too. She has so much beauty available to her, in every direction, and she wants to make it where we once made it.

[everyone sobbing and high-fiving each other.]

A man from Britain, 1104 CE, sitting at the trans-temporal telescope, reporting on my doings: She’s stopped knitting and now she’s playing minecraft.

The other ancestors: Ah, yes, the dream of building. We know this one well. What vision doth she design now?

Telescope man: Looks like… Some kind of floating temple?

Everyone: [Goes completely apeshit]

Me: *literally just sitting here petting my dog*

My ancestors from 25,000 years ago: puppy

Me: *reading this on the couch while a Roomba trundles by, cleaning the floor for me*

All my ancestors: *losing their minds*

@butwhypants your tags have been peer reviewed

#for all our vaunted tools sometimes we find ourselves in the dark#surrounded by fear and things unkown#and in times like that there is nothing more comforting than a creature who loves you with some very very sharp teeth <3

IM NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING SHUT THE FUCK UP

[transcription:

Have you ever wondered about like cave paintings?  Like, “What were they doing?  These don’t…  look very good,” -chuckles- In fact, almost every cave painting has Spaghetti Lines, which are webs of lines drawn over-top images, which you can see here.

-picture changes to a grayscale image of a deer standing in tall grass-

And here’s an example of natural Spaghetti Lines in nature, but we’ll get to that in a second.

-picture changes to a photo paleolithic drawing of a mammoth.  Alongside the photo is a tracing of the drawing, to clarify the lines-

The second weird thing is like sometimes animals are given extra body parts, like here the mammoth has two trunks.  And here, there’s a drawing of an antelope or a deer, it looks like, that seems to have two heads.

For a long time, people would assume like maybe the Spaghetti Lines were just some kind of paleolithic graffiti, and maybe the animals were these kind of religious creatures that they had mythologized.  But then, in 1993, a German scholar went into this cave in southern France, and it changed everything.

Unlike the other caves he had been to, this one was very poorly funded, so it had no artificial lights, and he had to be guided in by a local farmer, with nothing but a flickering lantern to guide his way.  Here is how he described the experience. 

He said, “M. Lapeyre finished his story and wanted to move on.  I encouraged him to remain and to slowly swing his lantern back and forth a few feet from the cave wall.  As he moved the light, I saw the colors of the tectiform begin to shift.  When the lamp arced to the left, the blacks faded, the browns became red and the red intensified.  When the light moved to the right, the pattern reversed, creating a shifting color scheme.
Moreover, the engraved lines under and around the tectiform became animated.  Suddenly, the head of one creature stood out clearly.  It lived for a second, then faded as another appeared.  The spaghetti lines were no longer a confused two-dimensional pattern.  Rather, they became a forest or a bramble patch that concealed and then revealed the animals within.
By firelight, a secret of the cave painters was exposed.  In the space of a few moments, I saw cuts and dissolves, change and movement.  Form appeared and disappeared.  Colors shifted and changed.  In short, I was watching a movie.”

Understood this way, the antelope with two heads, under the dance of the firelight, is an antelope going from grazing to checking for predators.  And the mammoth with two or three trunks becomes a mammoth in motion, swinging his trunk.

There’s something beautiful to me about knowing that hundreds of thousands of years ago, ancient humans descended into the depths to watch movies.

/end transcription]

I heard about this recently and about lost my fucking mind. I am begging someone to actually film the effect so we can see it for ourselves!

@lucithefer

here is a video showing some examples of this

Animation is one of the oldest kinds of art in human history and yet people treat it as insignificant

#WHAT #WHERE HAVE THE GIANT GROUND SLOTHS GONE

They went the way of the woolly mammoth, and other prehistoric friends. But we’ve cared for one of their favorite foods for them, making sure the avocado didn’t go extinct too.

(The sloths are why the seeds are so big. Giant ground sloths used to swallow avocados whole, and the seeds would sprout from their dung.)

I wonder if those children saw any avocado trees nearby while they played.