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y'know how archaeologists only relatively recently learned that a lot of cave paintings were ANIMATED when viewed by campfire? & how cave paintings show a remarkable level of anatomy and linework and composition to begin with? I wish we knew more about "cave people" leisure time
what did stone age games look like? I know we find those bone-dice things and people usually assume they're at least part oracular/spiritual, but also what if they just straight up made board games and shit?
I mean, we have boardgames from ancient Egypt, before the First Dynasty even, but those are pretty complex and fancy already. So there were probably other complex and fancy games before that led to them, but what I want to know is what SHITTY games existed.
by which I mean some bored stone age person drawing squares on a rock in chalk, grabbing their bone dice and going "hey its board game night, who wants to play my new masterpiece?" and they came up with a whole backstory for each piece and the board but it was only played once
Sure we might one day find some amazing-looking stone-age game with beautiful tiles and pieces that could be a prototype to the kinds of games we see in later civilizations, but just think of all the stuff we'll NEVER see. There is SO MUCH we'll never see.
was there stone age art discourse? what was it? we'll never know! we'll never even be able to properly guess! but it definitely existed, because they were all making art and had language and were people and people are fucking weird
there is no possible way that a neolithic artist didn't have some weird-as-fuck beef with another artist over something. there is no way these people were making animated gifs on cave walls and making statues of fat titties and not talking about it.
stone age people almost definitely had drinking games, because when have people NOT had drinking games, and how could we ever know what they were or even begin to find out?
stone age people told stories, and so probably came up with what we now call "OCs." Another stone age storyteller almost definitely told a story about another's character, how could that never have happened? How could that NEVER have led to a weird fight between two storytellers?
there's anthropologists and ethnomusicologists who like trying to remake stone age musical instruments and guess as to what songs might have sounded like based on recorded music made centuries later from similar instruments, but think of all the shitty neolithic love songs
think of all the songs created by horny stone age dipshits just trying to get laid. we'll NEVER hear them.
how many attempts at domesticating an animal do you think took place before we nailed the dog? how many do you think were attempted after the dog thing worked out for us, but were dropped due to lack of interest or obvious benefit?
chickens were first domesticated in southeast asia JUST for cockfighting, and they weren't raised for meat until long after EVERYONE had adopted the practice of raising them to watch them fight. thousands of years of chicken domestication passed before we regularly ate them!
and I'm now seeing that there's studies and research from JUST THIS YEAR still trying to figure out the exact moment chickens changed from primarily a "fighting friend" to primarily an "eating friend" and just think of all the animals someone raised to fight but were just dropped
also, you know how during the Spanish and Portuguese rule, they not only burned and destroyed the historical records, recorded language and art of South American cultures, but also intentionally wiped out their domesticated animals, including the Fuegian dog, a domesticated fox?
and then even today there's dipshit scholars going "no one in the Americas domesticated anything or had written language because I don't see any, do you?" how many times do you think that happened in history that we DON'T hear about because some nerd makes a twitter thread?
like, jeez, think of all the stone age art and history and culture we'll never see not just because of the nature of time and entropy, but because of prehistoric genocide
this thread is taking a turn, yes, but also what about prehistoric jokes. You're really telling me that no one told a single joke before Ancient Sumeria, five second google search? Impossible. but we'll never hear any!
did stone age jokes lean toward dry observational commentary? absurdist nonsequitors? perhaps paraprosdokian word play? not only will we never know, but it is so useless to even attempt to know that I would probably look down on anyone who tried. but the jokes existed!
and, yes, everything we make today is just as ephemeral and pointless and even if it survives it will be misunderstood and re-contextualized, but also there's the possibility that whatever horny, stupid, indulgent bullshit you make can be the future's venus of willendorf
and if that doesn't inspire you to make MORE horny, stupid, indulgent bullshit then I guess I just don't know what to tell you.
also, you know how much of Sappho's poetry we only know of because someone got lucky and found a torn piece of papyrus IN A GARBAGE DUMP IN THE 1920S? and the other half was found even more recently AS PART OF A MUMMY'S WRAPPINGS! think of how much we know only by accident.
also as an aside: who wants to hear my new pitch for a story about this lesbian-poetry mummy, because it will be spicy.
history as we know it is written by the victors, but wait long enough and history ends up being accidentally written by whatever ding dong is lucky or unlucky enough to have their nonsense survive long enough to get tripped over by one of the victors' stupid-ass descendants.
