Even when the only possible "consumer goods" was a rock, there were luxury rocks.
"What were they used for?" is asked like there's only one answer. They were probably used for anything else a rock is useful for, but being nicely sized for a hand, pretty, etc made them easier to use, more effective, or just flashier.
AFAIK the class of objects referred to here don't share a lot of qualities that would make them a class in other contexts; there's no single shape, some have wear that may indicate original uses, etc etc. It just appears to be some of the early personal artifacts that people valued that are durable enough to see today.
All my kids have brought home rocks that were deemed special in some way when they where about 5 years old . I guess at that age we somehow start to get around the idea of "owning" things in a more involved way, and it feels nice to have something special, like a nice round rock. Maybe stonage kids felt that way too.
Whenever we humans find something unique or special, we either take it and store it somewhere safe or mark it on a map. The prehistoric individuals who did that would be more likely to happen to have just the right thing for surprise challenges. They would then have an advantage over those who didn't care about special things, because by definition they're hard to come by. And those surprise challenges often have asymmetric upside for those who have a solution, because everyone else is desperate for a solution or because they can solve the problem drastically more efficiently than everyone else.
At the same time, mundane things aren't worth collecting because it's easy for anyone to go out and get it, so there exists no advantage for the collector.
Therefore, if individuals who collected rare things ended up with more resources, power, and the resulting reproductive success, it also makes sense that young humans would do the same early on and that collecting rare things regardless of their utility is one of the most important status signals.
I will tell my wife, next time she asks, that my pile of electronic junk will lead to us and our offspring having "more resources, power, and the resulting reproductive success."
In our current society being technologically adept probably does get you more luck with women over a lifetime than most professions.
While a hoard of electronics may not have an instant connection to status like a fancy car, it's probably correlated to other attributes which are rapidly become more more valued.
>
Whenever we humans find something unique or special, we either take it and store it somewhere safe or mark it on a map. The prehistoric individuals who did that would be more likely to happen to have just the right thing for surprise challenges. They would then have an advantage over those who didn't care about special things, because by definition they're hard to come by. And those surprise challenges often have asymmetric upside for those who have a solution, because everyone else is desperate for a solution or because they can solve the problem drastically more efficiently that everyone else.
This is a beautiful story, but I can draft an equally beautiful, completely contradictory[1] story about how prehistoric individuals that wasted time collecting cool but useless rocks were less likely to have just the right thing for surprise challenges, because they directed their efforts towards hoarding useless bling. [2]
Here's my explanation - and bear with me, here.
Some people collect weird things.
That trait sometimes does, and sometimes does not result in an evolutionary or cultural advantage.
Making definitive statements about where this set of weird things falls on the spectrum above is just blindly guessing in the dark.
[1] Which is why beautiful, hand-wavy stories that explain the behaviour of people tens of thousands of years dead are largely useless for understanding that behaviour.
[2] If I were given the choice between asking for help dealing with a surprise challenge, and my options were two people, one of whom I know collects Funko Pops, and the other one does not, knowing nothing else about those individuals, I'm not going to bias my selection towards the former.
Sure, except your story doesn't any explanatory power for unusual modern day behavior, so it's not actually that beautiful.
If your story is true, then you would expect the trait of collecting useless bling to have died out a long time ago, or at least not be as prevalent as it is today.
And by the way, you could extend my story to not just being about collecting lots of physical things, but also seemingly useless information and skills. Rare knowledge and rare abilities aren't a huge leap from rare physical resources.
> Sure, except your story doesn't any explanatory power for unusual modern day behavior, so it's not actually that beautiful.
Sure it does. The explanatory power is that not all human traits have a strong impact on evolutionary fitness, either on the individual level, or on the social level.
Unless conclusively demonstrated otherwise (which a story composed post-facto is not), this is all meaningless noise.
The first thing about knowing something is being clear about the limitations of that knowledge. Just-so stories have no such limitation, which is why they come up so often as unfalsifiable nonsense. They can explain everything and anything, and therefore, explain nothing. All they are is a vehicle for repeating the biases of the storyteller.
We are tool makers and users. We evolved to be this... we are not alone in this, but we are (a lot) better at it than any other animals on this planet. And a tool-maker needs materials, and the best materials aren't available everywhere... any old rock may serve as a hammer in a cinch, but not just any rock can be turned into a sharp hand axe. You need something knappable, like quality flint. Pretty hard to find.
Given this, the story that collecting potentially useful materials is an evolved instinct makes a lot more sense than your story. Some of us have it more than others; I find it really hard to resist picking up something that looks like it might be useful and taking it with me. It comes from a place deeper than my conscious appreciation of beauty. Feels like pure instinct.
Even today people collect nice looking rocks, or minerals even. And I know that poor people would leave pebbles at altars when doing pilgrimage. So is it really so far fetched to say that these rocks were tactile enough for someone to keep them?
They are all roughly spherical, so they could be cooking stones. Heated in a fire, they can be then rolled into a pit which contains the food and water, allowing the food to be boiled slowly without burning.
"Also, most of the 20 balls that have been found in the Orkney Islands are carved and etched with patterns and designs. These, on the other hand, were polished smooth."
It seems that these orbs are "complicated". A cooking stone as you describe is unlikely to be decorated. Do you inscribe your kettle! I have never heard of a quern being decorated either.
Major religions and people of the past found great significance in their food and sources of food, so I wouldn't find it strange that significance and ornamentation would be applied to what's used to prepare that food.
Grain millers had fierce debates about what patterns worked best on what stones and for which grains. some grooves are of great functional benefit, but then beyond that ...
To provide some contemporary evidence to support your hypothesis that there were "luxury rocks" and that humans would be interested in such things, here is a gallery of various skins for a handheld rock in the videogame Rust. One of them costs $68
"What were they used for?" is asked like there's only one answer.
- the author literally goes to lengths to explain that they believe they had multiple purposes at different places/times. It's like you didn't actually read the article...
> Alternatively, they were shaped by hand, though I'd expect them to be smoother if that were the case.
Maybe they were a way of marking the passage of time in one's life? If the owners made a tiny amount of progress toward a sphere shape every day (or week/month/etc.), only the oldest folks would end up buried with one that looked like a sphere. All of the others would look more like normal rocks, and probably be ignored if they were found while digging.
Two of them together, with roughly the same amount of smoothing, might mean a couple was originally buried there. The second one could also have belonged to a grieving spouse or relative, or even be a trophy taken from an enemy.
> The question is, how closely do the sizes of the two objects match?
My initial guess was they were used as a retrievable projectile for hunting and eventually evolved into symbolic items, because they are just the right size for throwing; any larger would make them unwieldy, any smaller less effective. But a lot of them are exactly the same size. So there must be a reason for this precision.
"Many of the late Neolithic stone balls have diameters differing by only a millimetre. The discovery of this led to the suggestion that they might have been meant to be used together. By plotting the find sites on a map it can be demonstrated that often these petrospheres were located in the vicinity of Neolithic recumbent stone circles. Models using small wooden balls placed in a groove in parallel longitudinal pieces of wood 'sleepers' with a carrying board above have shown such megalith transport to be practical in some situations."[1]
Following that wiki section's footnote reveals this is Andrew Young's theory [2], which does, at least, explain the need for such close precision, at least for the ones that have nearly identical diameters.
Given how popular lawn bowls is in Scotland, I'm surprised no one appears to have considered these objects might be part of some game or sport. To this day, people take their fandom to their grave, why not then too?
There are a lot of these carved stone balls around but mainly in Scotland. They are very mysterious: no one really knows what they are or why they were created.
In paleolithic Ireland, such stones were used for cooking. They would be heated to a high temperature in a fire, and then rolled into a pit containing water to boil food.
I listened to a Sean Carrol Mindscape podcast recently concerning Memory Palaces that have been used ubiquitously by ancient peoples. The theory goes that when people started settling down, the did not travel extensively and could no longer effectively use country for the palace in their mind. They therefore made physical objects with distinctive surfaces to serve as the physical part of a memory palace. This is well documented for Australian aborigines and native Anerican peoples who you can just ask. There are no equivalent populations in Europe to ask directly.
Once writing/printing became commonplace these practices were abandoned.
Pet Rock is a collectible toy made in 1975 by advertising executive Gary Dahl. Pet Rocks are smooth stones from Mexico's Rosarito Beach. They were marketed like live pets, in custom cardboard boxes, complete with straw and breathing holes. The fad lasted about six months, ending after a short increase in sales during the Christmas season of December 1975. Although by February 1976 they were discounted due to lower sales, Dahl sold over 1 million Pet Rocks for $4 each, and became a millionaire.
My guess is that they were club heads, tied to wooden sticks; we are talking about a stone age culture who didn't have too much spare time/resources. They may have started out as utilitarian weaponry, but gradually morphed into status indicators. Knobs make it easier to lash them onto a stick with rope/leather thongs. Weapons/badges of office were often buried along with the owners. Leather/Wood rots so may not have been found along with them, though there may have been traces left behind.
I've yet to read one mention of sport or the possibility of use in some kind of game. Given the Ubiquity of games that involve round objects - especially in the British Isles, something like would seem like a natural progression of sorts.
Sooner or later, it would be great to identify the main purpose of the stone orbs. It looks quite fascinating considering that it lasted over the years and is still recognizable.
63 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread"What were they used for?" is asked like there's only one answer. They were probably used for anything else a rock is useful for, but being nicely sized for a hand, pretty, etc made them easier to use, more effective, or just flashier.
AFAIK the class of objects referred to here don't share a lot of qualities that would make them a class in other contexts; there's no single shape, some have wear that may indicate original uses, etc etc. It just appears to be some of the early personal artifacts that people valued that are durable enough to see today.
Full circle?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EtherRock
finding the pure white and very black ones and arranging them in patterns or matching piles is some what interesting*
*when I'm forced to go to a beach and told to enjoy myself for hours on end whilst looking after the kids
Whenever we humans find something unique or special, we either take it and store it somewhere safe or mark it on a map. The prehistoric individuals who did that would be more likely to happen to have just the right thing for surprise challenges. They would then have an advantage over those who didn't care about special things, because by definition they're hard to come by. And those surprise challenges often have asymmetric upside for those who have a solution, because everyone else is desperate for a solution or because they can solve the problem drastically more efficiently than everyone else.
At the same time, mundane things aren't worth collecting because it's easy for anyone to go out and get it, so there exists no advantage for the collector.
Therefore, if individuals who collected rare things ended up with more resources, power, and the resulting reproductive success, it also makes sense that young humans would do the same early on and that collecting rare things regardless of their utility is one of the most important status signals.
Wish me luck.
While a hoard of electronics may not have an instant connection to status like a fancy car, it's probably correlated to other attributes which are rapidly become more more valued.
This is a beautiful story, but I can draft an equally beautiful, completely contradictory[1] story about how prehistoric individuals that wasted time collecting cool but useless rocks were less likely to have just the right thing for surprise challenges, because they directed their efforts towards hoarding useless bling. [2]
Here's my explanation - and bear with me, here.
Some people collect weird things.
That trait sometimes does, and sometimes does not result in an evolutionary or cultural advantage.
Making definitive statements about where this set of weird things falls on the spectrum above is just blindly guessing in the dark.
[1] Which is why beautiful, hand-wavy stories that explain the behaviour of people tens of thousands of years dead are largely useless for understanding that behaviour.
[2] If I were given the choice between asking for help dealing with a surprise challenge, and my options were two people, one of whom I know collects Funko Pops, and the other one does not, knowing nothing else about those individuals, I'm not going to bias my selection towards the former.
If your story is true, then you would expect the trait of collecting useless bling to have died out a long time ago, or at least not be as prevalent as it is today.
And by the way, you could extend my story to not just being about collecting lots of physical things, but also seemingly useless information and skills. Rare knowledge and rare abilities aren't a huge leap from rare physical resources.
Sure it does. The explanatory power is that not all human traits have a strong impact on evolutionary fitness, either on the individual level, or on the social level.
Unless conclusively demonstrated otherwise (which a story composed post-facto is not), this is all meaningless noise.
The first thing about knowing something is being clear about the limitations of that knowledge. Just-so stories have no such limitation, which is why they come up so often as unfalsifiable nonsense. They can explain everything and anything, and therefore, explain nothing. All they are is a vehicle for repeating the biases of the storyteller.
Given this, the story that collecting potentially useful materials is an evolved instinct makes a lot more sense than your story. Some of us have it more than others; I find it really hard to resist picking up something that looks like it might be useful and taking it with me. It comes from a place deeper than my conscious appreciation of beauty. Feels like pure instinct.
https://www.thoughtco.com/stone-boiling-ancient-cooking-meth...
It seems that these orbs are "complicated". A cooking stone as you describe is unlikely to be decorated. Do you inscribe your kettle! I have never heard of a quern being decorated either.
Grain millers had fierce debates about what patterns worked best on what stones and for which grains. some grooves are of great functional benefit, but then beyond that ...
https://rust.esportinfo.gg/skins/tools/rock
Humans haven't changed all that much since the Neolithic...
- the author literally goes to lengths to explain that they believe they had multiple purposes at different places/times. It's like you didn't actually read the article...
Lots of other "consumer goods" made of more perishable materials just do not have survived...
https://www.jackhighbowls.com/help/history-of-lawn-bowls
Edit to add: the 'Towie ball' [0] even has a lovely 3D viewer
0 - https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/stories/scotti...
Alternatively, they were shaped by hand, though I'd expect them to be smoother if that were the case.
The question is, how closely do the sizes of the two objects match? If it's within a few percent, they are unlikely to be found objects.
Maybe they were a way of marking the passage of time in one's life? If the owners made a tiny amount of progress toward a sphere shape every day (or week/month/etc.), only the oldest folks would end up buried with one that looked like a sphere. All of the others would look more like normal rocks, and probably be ignored if they were found while digging.
Two of them together, with roughly the same amount of smoothing, might mean a couple was originally buried there. The second one could also have belonged to a grieving spouse or relative, or even be a trophy taken from an enemy.
My initial guess was they were used as a retrievable projectile for hunting and eventually evolved into symbolic items, because they are just the right size for throwing; any larger would make them unwieldy, any smaller less effective. But a lot of them are exactly the same size. So there must be a reason for this precision.
"Many of the late Neolithic stone balls have diameters differing by only a millimetre. The discovery of this led to the suggestion that they might have been meant to be used together. By plotting the find sites on a map it can be demonstrated that often these petrospheres were located in the vicinity of Neolithic recumbent stone circles. Models using small wooden balls placed in a groove in parallel longitudinal pieces of wood 'sleepers' with a carrying board above have shown such megalith transport to be practical in some situations."[1]
Following that wiki section's footnote reveals this is Andrew Young's theory [2], which does, at least, explain the need for such close precision, at least for the ones that have nearly identical diameters.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carved_stone_balls#Megalith_co...
[2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101130010931.h...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_spheres_of_Costa_Rica
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carved_stone_balls
Once writing/printing became commonplace these practices were abandoned.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fYhVkbzr60E
Edit: add YouTube link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorodango
You meditate (samatha) on one of these until you can visualize it pretty good (each is unique).
Then you can "teleport" to wherever the stone orb is (astrally speaking).
You might want to think twice before you take one home.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock
Are you trying to say you wish you could edit my comment? If so, why?