r/history Jan 19 '23

Prehistoric Fashion: Cut Marks On Ancient Bones Reveal The Trends 320.000 Years Ago - Archaeology Magazine Article

https://archaeology-magazine.com/prehistoric-fashion-cut-marks-on-ancient-bones-reveal-the-trends-320-000-years-ago/
1.9k Upvotes

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u/mikaelnorqvist Jan 19 '23

According to ancient bones discovered at a German archaeological site, prehistoric fashion or bear skinning by ancient people dates back at least 320,000 years.

The patterns discovered on the phalanx and metatarsal paw bones of a cave bear (Ursus spelaeus or U. deningeri) are among the earliest examples of this kind of evidence and show one strategy our prehistoric ancestors employed to survive the harsh winters that prevailed in the region at the time.

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u/JACCO2008 Jan 19 '23

I didn't even know humans existed in our current form that long ago.

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u/bittoxic00 Jan 20 '23

It wasn’t us, article said it was Homo heidelbergensis which split off into homo sapian and Neanderthal. They were smart though and sometimes I wonder if the smartest ‘human’ that ever lived lived 250k years ago

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u/Blenderx06 Jan 20 '23

What specifically makes you think they were maybe the smartest? Curious.

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u/RedditIsPropaganda2 Jan 20 '23

They had big brains relative to their size, but that doesn't really mean they were smarter

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u/DConstructed Jan 20 '23

I read a hypothesis that said since they didn’t have a way of recording things they had to have excellent memories.

If you are a hunter, gatherer you have to be able to remember successful hunting grounds of the past and how to return to them. Some could be quite far away.

Could be true. Who knows.

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u/ComfortablyAbnormal Jan 20 '23

I mean, for most of history, the vast majority of people were illiterate and worked on memory as well.

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u/DConstructed Jan 20 '23

True. And once they had spoken language passed down lore.

I believe the implication in the article was that they more or less needed maps in their heads. I don’t know how that compares to other forms of memory.

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u/GrandBed Jan 20 '23

They could have also had maps galore written on animal skins, papyrus or a hundred other types of parchment. It’s just not anything that would have survived today.

That’s why we should all build large megalithic structures, so in 100,000 years we aren’t viewed as being as dumb as we might be.

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u/DoctorSalt Jan 20 '23

"wow, they needed all the megalithic structures for something we just use our brains for. They must've been dumb"

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u/notblackblackguy Jan 20 '23

Saw a study recently that showed London cab drivers have enlarged hippocampus due to memorising the streets of London

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u/Torodaddy Jan 20 '23

aren't you born with whatever sized brain you have?

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u/DConstructed Jan 20 '23

That’s really interesting. Do you have a link?

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u/Lil_Cato Jan 20 '23

I can remember how to drive to at least 100 different restaurants without a map

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '23

Oh yeah? I can walk into another room 10 feet away and not know why the hell I went there.

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u/Onedaynobully Jan 20 '23

Well, I can think of something I'd like to do on my phone, open the app for that and then forget what I was doing

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '23

Hold up, you can find the app?

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u/bmalek Jan 20 '23

ADHD crowd represent!

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u/Volunteer-Magic Jan 20 '23

The what crowd? Sorry, I was thinking of a tv show I haven’t seen in 5 years

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u/JBredditaccount Jan 20 '23

At least you make it to the room. I walk halfway to somewhere and then forget where I was planning to stand around wondering why I was there.

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u/automatvapen Jan 20 '23

There was a study on London cab drivers and their ability to remember every street and addresses in their daily work. Their brain masses had increased and where bigger than your average joe. Can't remember the name of the study, but it does show that brain matter increases when you need to remember a lot of stuff.

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u/newtoon Jan 20 '23

implying that my brain is shrinking that all I remember today is how to type my question / location in Google.

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u/DConstructed Jan 20 '23

Very cool. Another poster mentioned it too. Do you have a link?

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u/CptHammer_ Jan 20 '23

they didn’t have a way of recording things

They did though. Not only the same method as any other animals, but they also had at least pictographic writing and tally marking.

A recent discovery shows what we're considered random tally marking of cave art, was probably moon cycles counting from the animals natural reproductive cycle, next to pictures of those animals. Possibly an indication of when and where to hunt for them, aka the good months and near these drawings.

The tally marks line up with animals that still exist. This gives us a lot of insight into the extinct animals pictured.

Keep in mind, if this information is useful to us today, how much more useful it was then. This is also the minimum amount of recording and communication, there likely was more.

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u/GrandBed Jan 20 '23

We would have to define smarter.

People 5,000 years ago were identical to people today, yet “we” still a few thousand years until people were writing of burning bushes that could talk.

“We” don’t need our brain’s abilities as much as we did 100,000-10,000 years ago when civilizations were being built such as Göbekli Tepe.

Since we don’t need to know/remember as much information as a person ten thousand years ago for survival. We don’t need to be “smart” to order food to our homes via our phones. Modern society in most cases just doesn’t let us die for something stupid, like starvation, or curable diseases. So we could have plenty of smarter people in the past, certainly within our “Modern Human” group of the past 30,000+ years.

It’s interesting to imagine that a recent ancestor such as the ones responsible for this article, who had larger Brian’s, could have been smarter, just not connected with enough other smart people to leave any significant remnants that survived to recent history to be studied.

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u/InGenAche Jan 20 '23

I would argue that modern man has to remember far more than our ancient ancestors.

Consider our education; even disadvantaged nations have compulsory education until 12 or 16 where even the most basic of subjects would seem incredibly complex to prehistoric man, maths, reading and writing.

And even if the vast majority of what we know is comparatively mundane compared to the tools for survival they required, it doesn't detract from the fact of its complexity.

I'm no expert, but even their art was only as complex as our grade schoolers which to me is indicative of an ability to form and communicate abstract ideas.

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u/6XJPCmTMB7gm3rMhUKE5 Jan 20 '23

People 5,000 years ago were identical to people today, yet “we” still a few thousand years until people were writing of burning bushes that could talk.

That very myth is probably more than 4000 years old.

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u/RedditIsPropaganda2 Jan 20 '23

I kind of think you're just describing how modern humans lived for the majority of their existence

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u/bittoxic00 Jan 20 '23

Of the over 100 billion humans who’ve walked the earth plus our close relatives I just think it’s hard to imagine our recent history has the best and the brightest, statistically

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u/YodelingTortoise Jan 20 '23

It really matters on how you measure intelligence.

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u/Blenderx06 Jan 20 '23

It's really fascinating to look at these intelligent relatives who are long gone with hardly a trace they ever existed. Puts modern humanity in perspective. We are just as expendable in the scheme of things.

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u/OldManChino Jan 20 '23 edited Jan 20 '23

Edit* I'm an idiot who believed a factoid, no need to school me anymore, my lesson has been fully learned

There's more people alive now than has died previously. I'm no statistician, but those numbers alone surely mean the smartest has to be now no? Can someone smarter than me chime in on this?

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u/bittoxic00 Jan 20 '23

I think they’ve theorized over 100 billion modern humans have existed on earth, so 8%ish of all humans ever are alive today, 92% have passed. So 9/10 chance the human with the greatest capacity for intelligence and or strength never lived in modern times. The best bodybuilder with modern training and medicine has likely existed but the person with the most potential has likely passed. I think the same with intelligence, there might have been someone in Ancient Greece with the most potential

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u/Nestor4000 Jan 20 '23

“There's more people alive now than has died previously. I'm no statistician“

You don’t say?

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u/OldManChino Jan 20 '23

Dang, I always took that factoid on faith, and now I have egg on my face.

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u/Somnisixsmith Jan 20 '23

While those living 250k years ago would have looked very very similar to us physically, the evidence suggests we did not become as smart as we are today until about 70k years ago. My understanding is that this claim is based on the fact that the earliest evidence we have of things like art, musical instruments, fish nets, etc. don’t appear in the archeological record until 70k years ago.

My personal theory on this is that humans became significantly more intelligent around 74k years ago as a result of extreme selective pressures due to the cataclysmic eruption of the super volcano known as Mount Toba (in Sumatra I believe). We know for a fact this eruption occurred and that it sent the world into a 1000 year ice-age (think nuclear winter minus the radiation for a decade followed by a thousand years of significant global cooling). During this period the human population fell to only a few thousand or less. That this population bottleneck occurred is a result of the eruption is a fairly well known hypothesis supported by some genetic evidence.

The part of this that I came up with on my own (my personal theory - though I’m probably not the first to connect the dots) is that during this period of genetic bottlenecking only the smartest managed to survive. The extreme environment those people must have lived through would have challenged them far beyond anything they had faced before. Most did not make it. Whole clans/tribes died out in those first years after the eruption. Only the cleverest (and perhaps most cooperative/social) managed to survive and procreate. With a massively reduced population, any genetic variation that could provide additional survival advantages would be selected for, and that selected process would have an exaggerated effect due to the low population numbers.

This theory would help explain why we start seeing archeological evidence of modern human intelligence (again, via art, nets, etc.) around 70k years ago. Perhaps it also explains why we almost seem “too smart” or seemingly smarter than necessary today.

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u/showerfapper Jan 20 '23

A decade spent in a cave eating bugs and bone marrow, followed by 990 years of cold hard living, would certainly select out the most socially cooperative of our species.

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u/entotheenth Jan 20 '23

He actually came up with both calculus and relativity but nobody believed him.

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u/Photon_Farmer Jan 20 '23

He made the mistake of writing it all down in a Palm Pilot, which no one can use anymore.

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u/oneplusetoipi Jan 20 '23

Really!?! I thought it was on a Zune.

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u/Cyanopicacooki Jan 20 '23

I was clearing on office last year and found a 20ish year old palm pilot - I put it in the charging cradle, and 3 hours later I had - and stil have -a fully functioning, touch screen palm pilot. Which I could use. And it would be about as much use as an axe made by Homo Heidelbergensis - work maybe once or twice then disintegrate.

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u/Gingorthedestroyer Jan 20 '23

Mitochondrial DNA “Eve” is 200,000 years. So there were Homo sapiens 200k years ago. Look how far we came from the dark ages in 500 years. Make me wonder what the first 100k years looked like.

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u/bittoxic00 Jan 20 '23

Didn’t they disprove mitochondrial eve? Genuinely curious

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u/Gingorthedestroyer Jan 20 '23

Wikipedia seems to think it’s legit. Haven’t seen anything to the contrary in my searches.

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u/long_dickofthelaw Jan 20 '23

Ehhh I wouldn't call these humans in our current form. Behavioral modernity for humans is generally accepted to begin about 160,000–60,000 years ago. Nailing down exactly when Homo Sapien as a species emerged is a lot more difficult.

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u/TheVentiLebowski Jan 20 '23

Good point. Humans became anatomically modern around 300,000 to 200,000 years ago, but intellectually modern around 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. Though this is disputed.There's a good summary on Wikipedia if you're interested.

There was a massive volcanic eruption around 74,000 years ago. It has been proposed that this caused a genetic bottleneck in the human population. Though this, too, has been disputed.

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u/JACCO2008 Jan 20 '23 edited Jan 20 '23

That's more the timeline I was thinking. It would be interesting to try to have a conversation with one of the humans who made the jewelry. See if they're anything in common at all.

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u/LeagueOfLegendsAcc Jan 20 '23

Honestly I don't think there's any reason to think they would be much different behaviorally, we know at least 3 species of human have mated in the past. They also existed well into the time period of modern humans so I would bet we mated with them too but it may not be easy to tell in the genomic record. They probably wouldn't mate unless they were similar in many ways, but mainly behaviorally. Classifications that distinguish between different species of human are mainly physical differences, this leads me to believe that ancient human species were much more alike than we would be led to believe by our current colloquial definitions of species.

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '23

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '23

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '23

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u/Stock_Regular8696 Jan 20 '23

Bear went from Deningeri to Denim Gear.

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u/allpraisebirdjesus Jan 20 '23

I think this article was written by an AI. It is full of errors.

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u/FortunateInsanity Jan 20 '23

Nothing about fashion in the article. Fashion is art. Using bear hides for warmth in the winter is a practical survival method. The article can be summed up by saying “evidence points to Neanderthals hunting bears for their pelts.”

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u/danceswithshelves Jan 20 '23

Yeah the wording of this title is deceptive. Had nothing to do with fashion and I want my five minutes back lol.

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u/[deleted] Jan 19 '23

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u/[deleted] Jan 19 '23

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u/The_Human_Bullet Jan 20 '23

So early humans wore bear pelts to stay warm?

Colour me surprised?

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u/RegisterOk9743 Jan 20 '23

Killing a bear with just sticks and rocks is pretty impressive though.

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '23

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u/RegisterOk9743 Jan 20 '23

Were these humans or roadrunners?

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u/The_Human_Bullet Jan 20 '23

Oh yeah, but I always assumed early humans were badass? They didn't have time to waste pondering the nonsense we do.

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '23

They were badass. Even in nomadic lifestyles, because they combined their efforts, they had a ton of free time on their hands. Some American Indian tribes from just a couple hundred years ago could pack up and move to follow their game within 30 minutes or less. Or else it was free.

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u/henchman171 Jan 20 '23

The things you can achieve if you avoid social media apps

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u/sleeplessGoon Jan 20 '23

I’m 2 weeks Twitter clean & I just killed my first grizzly!

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u/uhyeahreally Jan 20 '23

Can be avoided, just wait for the bear to die. Bears die by themselves if you wait.

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u/matteam-101 Jan 20 '23

Don't the bears hibernate, in a den or cave? Just the time to cut their throats and fabricate Bearskin robes by Brooks Brothers.

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u/ThePreciseClimber Jan 20 '23

I think they didn't even have bows yet.

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u/Lagiacrus111 Jan 20 '23

Humans were in the arctic 320,000 years ago?

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u/LeagueOfLegendsAcc Jan 20 '23

Homo Heidelbergensis, not homo sapiens. We evolved in Africa and migrated out to populate the world. To pick a random ancestor the human/chimpanzee last common ancestor (CHLCA) is theorized to possibly be graecopithecus, whose fossils were found in southern Europe. So at some point between CHLCA and homo sapiens our ancestors migrated into Africa and stayed there. The implication is that other human species could have left Africa sooner, or never came in the first place.

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u/bmilohill Jan 20 '23

The revelation here isn't what they were doing, but further evidence regarding when they were doing it.

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u/BadBreath69 Jan 20 '23

Nonono it's "prehistoric fashion trends"!

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u/[deleted] Jan 19 '23

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u/[deleted] Jan 20 '23

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u/LimpCroissant Jan 20 '23

Summary: Scientists found that ancient human's wentuged the paw bones of cave bears with cutting implements. Because of this, they surmise that they must have been using the bear pelts to stay warm, as there is not enough meat on a bear paw to bother carefully skinning it.

My perspective: That was a terribly written article that said practically nothing in a whole lot of words. Oh and Wentuged for President! Hopefully this same AI is the one that ends up coming for the human race eventually.

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u/hmz-x Jan 20 '23

Gouge → Wentuged

Is that it?

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u/LimpCroissant Jan 20 '23

Yup, that's it. Somebody else figured it out though, I cant take credit.

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u/poppadoppacoppa Jan 20 '23

Oh my god, did you see what grunts was wearing yesterday? That was so paleolithically fetch!

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u/[deleted] Jan 19 '23

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u/FunnyGlove Jan 20 '23

Isn’t this Wilma and Betty from the flint stones? Are we saying the Flintstones are historically accurate now?

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u/NatiAti513 Jan 20 '23

Sooo..... prehistoric Thots?