[HN Gopher] Mysterious Stone Orbs Stashed All over Neolithic Bri... ___________________________________________________________________ Mysterious Stone Orbs Stashed All over Neolithic Britain Author : samizdis Score : 63 points Date : 2021-10-02 11:26 UTC (1 days ago) (HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com) | memorylane wrote: | 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. | | https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fYhVkbzr60E | | Edit: add YouTube link. | rawoke083600 wrote: | anunaki-mass-storage devices !! | h2odragon wrote: | 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. | INTPenis wrote: | 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? | Zuider wrote: | 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. | | https://www.thoughtco.com/stone-boiling-ancient-cooking-meth... | gerdesj wrote: | "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. | heavyset_go wrote: | 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. | ganonm wrote: | 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 | | https://rust.esportinfo.gg/skins/tools/rock | | Humans haven't changed all that much since the Neolithic... | cloudking wrote: | Now we have valuable digital rocks https://etherrock.com/ | | Full circle? | edoceo wrote: | Oh, that's not a joke. | progre wrote: | 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. | h2odragon wrote: | My child is a teen now. The last time I said to her, "hey i | found this cool rock, you want it?" was last week :) | 123pie123 wrote: | I still like looking at nice interesting rocks or pebbles | and I'm way older than a teenager | | 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 | anonporridge wrote: | It's probably an evolutionary adaptation. | | 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. | | 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. | pengaru wrote: | There's a rock shop in Joshua Tree that regularly has a line | out the door on weekends, or at least did pre-pandemic. | mtw wrote: | Why not used as currency | mikewarot wrote: | My first thought was they were found glacial erratic spheres, | which could have been traded, or used as a talisman of luck. | | 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. | blincoln wrote: | > 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. | 34679 wrote: | Stone Spheres of Costa Rica: | | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_spheres_of_Costa_Rica | Gravityloss wrote: | Carving stone from a giant's kettle? | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant%27s_kettle#/media/File:G... | staplung wrote: | Come on _scientists_...they're obviously petrified Pokeballs. | rhplus wrote: | Why does it have to be "mysterious"? Making balls is one of the | most innate and pleasant artistic things humans can do with their | hands. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorodango | pixel_tracing wrote: | Reminds me of shotput maybe it was used in a sport? | detritus wrote: | 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? | [deleted] | tyleo wrote: | Be careful. Not all of them are accounted for. | yosito wrote: | Orbs, plural, but the linked article only has a photo of one of | them. | gennarro wrote: | Came here to say the same. Really disappointing - I wanted to | see the cache and instead I got one rock that sort of looked | like what I was expecting. | progre wrote: | Also, that one photo makes it look like it's not a deliberately | polished stone, more like a regular wave polished beach rock. | sherr wrote: | 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. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carved_stone_balls | Zuider wrote: | 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. | dreyfan wrote: | The original NFT | drewcoo wrote: | No mention of lawn bowls in the article? | | https://www.jackhighbowls.com/help/history-of-lawn-bowls | c3534l wrote: | Describing a few round rocks as a "mysterious stone orb" seems a | bit dramatic. | spython wrote: | Reminds me of Dorodango, the Japanese art of making mud balls. | https://www.laurenceking.com/blog/2019/09/26/dorodango-blog/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-10-03 23:00 UTC)