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dr_dshiv 6 hours ago [-]
Short story: stones were used to make “arrow-heads” (blades on sticks too small for spears) 25k years earlier than expected.
khalic 6 hours ago [-]
> being shot with a modern laminated bow (36 lbs) on a complete uneviscerated carcass of a small ungulate hung in anatomical position in order to start documenting impact breakage and microscopic linear impact traces for the shape and raw material under study
They were thorough…
ahazred8ta 2 days ago [-]
The paper does not appear to distinguish between 'darts' used with atlatl throwing sticks, and arrows used with bows. Darts were used before bows.
(projectile point design is difficult; you can't haft archaic and yeet it too)
card_zero 7 hours ago [-]
What do you mean, can't haft and yeet too, is that about weight?
fnordian_slip 7 hours ago [-]
As a non-native speaker, you have to sound it out. It's a pun of "can't have your cake and eat it".
HN has been overrun with puns and attempts at humour in the past few years, while substantive comments have declined imho. But that's just the way it is.
card_zero 6 hours ago [-]
Ha, OK. The darts seem designed to separate from the fletched part of the shaft, like a two-stage rocket, so the pun sounded confusingly truthful, as in they're not quite hafted.
7 hours ago [-]
metalman 6 hours ago [-]
wow!
uber ancient stone tool geeks working diligently to elucidate EXACTLY how evidence of knaping and the wide variety of wear and damage occured.
personaly I have some small collections of lithic tools and several microscopes, including a specimin scope, the last is adictive to use on a wide variety of objects, as a whole world of detail leapes into view that is otherwise just at the edge of naked eye visibility, vs 1000x microscipy
that is otherwise invisible and requires painstaking attention, sample preperation and record keeping.
so between modern experiments to recreate such tools, and then show how they flake, chip/wear and respond to heat and other forces, and verrify these things exactly, we get a wide variety of information about how the makers of the archialogical examples lived, as this is one of the only windows into there lives, knowing the invariable angles that certain types of stone chip, and at what pressure, gives us body size , position, grip strength, production times(value), and much more.
and so they craft weapons and tools and abuse lightly damaged road kill in the search for squeezing a bit more data from the archioligical lithic and bone evidence.
A general level of skilled research that might become more relevant in determining what actualy constitutes real evidence in the age of mass produced 'data'
They were thorough…
(projectile point design is difficult; you can't haft archaic and yeet it too)
HN has been overrun with puns and attempts at humour in the past few years, while substantive comments have declined imho. But that's just the way it is.
uber ancient stone tool geeks working diligently to elucidate EXACTLY how evidence of knaping and the wide variety of wear and damage occured.
personaly I have some small collections of lithic tools and several microscopes, including a specimin scope, the last is adictive to use on a wide variety of objects, as a whole world of detail leapes into view that is otherwise just at the edge of naked eye visibility, vs 1000x microscipy that is otherwise invisible and requires painstaking attention, sample preperation and record keeping. so between modern experiments to recreate such tools, and then show how they flake, chip/wear and respond to heat and other forces, and verrify these things exactly, we get a wide variety of information about how the makers of the archialogical examples lived, as this is one of the only windows into there lives, knowing the invariable angles that certain types of stone chip, and at what pressure, gives us body size , position, grip strength, production times(value), and much more. and so they craft weapons and tools and abuse lightly damaged road kill in the search for squeezing a bit more data from the archioligical lithic and bone evidence. A general level of skilled research that might become more relevant in determining what actualy constitutes real evidence in the age of mass produced 'data'