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sean Profile picture
sean
@DilettanteryPod
//𓃭\\ For I was once already boy and girl,/ Thicket and bird, and mute fish in the waves./ And then we came unto a roofèd cave... \\𓆘//
Twitter author Profile picture general prudential roulette Profile picture Potato Of Reason Profile picture german Profile picture 4 subscribed
Apr 17 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Mass literacy destroyed many complex systems of dactylonomy (finger counting/finger math) used in the ancient world.

There were methods for approximately calculating square roots and counting to 9,999 on two hands. Image "The earliest reference to this method of using the hands to refer to the natural numbers may have been in some Prophetic traditions going back to the early days of Islam during the early 600s." Image
Apr 17 • 12 tweets • 6 min read
The Iñupiat of Alaska traditionally use a base-20 number system. In 1994, students at Kaktovik middle school worked with their teacher to invent a way to write this, since they found our base-10 unfamiliar. After the invention of Kaktovik numerals, test scores rose significantly

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Image The differences between the standard Arabic number system and theirs is more complicated than just a different base number - they also have a sub-base of 5
Apr 6 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
China invented papermaking, the compass, gunpowder, printing, and DreamWorks Face Meanwhile, in the Amazon



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Apr 4 • 17 tweets • 7 min read
"One of the mysterious boats painted in an Australian cave several hundred years ago"

Awunbarna, Arnhem Land, Northern coast of Australia 🧵 Image "The researchers were stunned by the level of detail captured in the paintings."

The drawings predate European contact, and "based on certain features, such as the oars and pennants, researchers concluded that these boats likely weren't fishing vessels." Image
Feb 16 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
guy who invents a new technological epoch just so we'll have a new cosmological metaphor
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Jan 12 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
2,500 year-old city found in eastern Ecuador

"It reveals a large, complex society that appears to be even bigger than the well-known Mayan societies in Mexico and Central America."

bbc.com/news/science-e…


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Jan 8 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
people usually judge things from their own context, not our own



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Dec 10, 2023 • 24 tweets • 10 min read
Since the photos of stripped Palestinians reminded me of these photos from British camps in Kenya during the anticolonial Mau Mau Uprising (1952–1960), I was curious how the NYT covered it. Really depressing how similar it is.

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Image The nyt, December 7, 1952:

Right off the bat, contradictory. They say the British admit to not knowing "what they are fighting, not even what the name means." But then launches into a diatribe about how the rebels want to kill all white people and Christians, and how Russia
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Dec 8, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
quite the jump! Rarely has a single find changed scholars’ views of the capabilities of people of the past as radically as the discovery of the world’s earliest known wooden architecture, which dates to nearly half a million years ago. The pair of interlocking logs joined by an intentionally cut notch was unearthed beneath a bank of Zambia’s Kalambo River by a team led by University of Liverpool archaeologist Larry Barham. Researchers believe the logs may have formed part of a walkway or the foundation of a platform built over wetlands. Prior to this discovery, the oldest known surviving wooden structures ... archaeology.org/issues/537-fea…
The 476,000-year-old log structure predates the appearance of the first modern humans by some 150,000 years and was likely the handiwork of the archaic human species Homo heidelbergensis. Paleoanthropologists believe H. heidelbergensis was highly mobile. Thus, it is surprising that the hominins would have invested labor in building a semipermanent structure. “We haven’t seen archaic humans manipulating their environment on such a large scale before,” says Barham. “It suggests an attachment to a single point on the landscape.” At the same site, the team unearthed stone axes as well as fo...
Sep 29, 2023 • 13 tweets • 6 min read
Richard Bradley, dressed as a Union soldier, ripping down the Confederate flag that San Francisco mayor Dianne Feinstein insisted on flying, 1984. It was ripped down 3 times and replaced 3 times by Feinstein. She made sure Bradley was prosecuted and made to pay for the damages.
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Image "The flag was burned by a member of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 6 as 'a crowd of Black people, trade unionists and socialists broke into jubilant cheers, and a chorus of ‘John Brown’s Body’ rang out.'"

sfbayview.com/2019/04/its-tr…
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Sep 21, 2023 • 36 tweets • 18 min read
Thread about one of the coolest papers I've ever read, "Shamanic Microscopy: Cellular Souls, Microbial Spirits" by César E. Giraldo Herrera.

Herrera argues the shamanism, at least in the Amazon, was much more scientific than most assume.

Are some shamans also microbiologists? Image Herrera points out that Western medicine has adopted many treatments from South American shamanism, but neglected the theories underlying it, what the shamans themselves say. Despite material successes like this, shamanic epistemologies are considered simply incorrect and naive.
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Aug 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
A missionary in South Papua.....lol Image This is probably the best way to respond to missionaries
Jul 28, 2023 • 62 tweets • 18 min read
Cave Bear, thirty-thousand years older than Jesus Image The painter would have to wait the amount of time that separates ourselves from Jesus *15 times* to meet him
Jul 9, 2023 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Nature created representational images of scenes well before humans. This moth (Macrocilix maia) has a mural of two red-eyed flies eating bird guano on their back.

(I assume this moth has existed before 44 000 years ago?)
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Image Many art traditions with visual representation lacked "scenes" with multiple representational figures meaningfully interacting (as on the moth). In Mesopotamia, this didn't occur until after the influence of writing.

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Jul 5, 2023 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
...the masses need light propaganda pamphlets...
-Dziga Vertov
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Jan 12, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
have bigfoot people...heard about gorillas? someone should tell them. "they're like bigfoot but you can hang out with them and there's lots" bigfoot:gorillas::conspiracy theories:politics
Jan 12, 2023 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
2015 paper looks at 18 orally transmitted stories from coastal Aboriginal Australian groups, finding that they likely had been told for 7000-13 000 years, describing sea level rise.

"Some tribes can still point to islands that no longer exist—and provide their original names." screenshots of text from here: https://theconversation.com/a it's hard to pinpoint when exactly, since the post-ice age sea level rise occurred over millennia, but b/c multiple cultural groups with distinct traditions all tell similar stories (and no stories describe the sea going the opposite way), it's likely based on ancient observation
Jan 12, 2023 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
"Novae and supernovae are rare astronomical events that would have had an influence on the sky-watching peoples who witnessed them....there are many proposed but no confirmed accounts of supernovae in oral traditions/material culture."

Proposed examples:
arxiv.org/pdf/1404.3253.…
Nov 23, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
[waving a gun around at the local map store] BRING BACK RHUMBLINE NETWORKS OR ELSE efficiency be damned, they look cooler
Nov 23, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
𝒥𝑒𝒶𝓃-𝒫𝒾𝑒𝓇𝓇𝑒 𝐵𝒶𝓇𝑜𝓊: First of all, by what single trait would you define love in the animal world?

𝐹𝓇𝑒𝒹𝑒𝓇𝒾𝒸 𝑅𝑜𝓈𝓈𝒾𝒻: By madness... Does absolute love exist?

Certainly. Take for instance antigonal cranes...
Nov 9, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
HOLY SHIT

stanfordvr.com/mm/2016/11/won…