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5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools
  • Oarch
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For the curious, Clickspring has recreated something a lot like this and uses it on his Antikythera Mechanism videos on YT.
Bow drills were still commonly used in India in 25 years ago.

Because electricity was unreliable and machinery was expensive.

It's what a lot of engineers have been saying for decades: Looking at the surfaces of the artefacts, it's obvious more advanced tooling, than what was claimed by archaeologists, must have been used. Oh irony, the bits were already lying about in the museum's archive for a century.
Quite frustrating how archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example". While some of the excesses of the past were clearly excessive, drilled holes should have been sufficient evidence of drills, people living on islands should be sufficient evidence of boats, rope-worn bones should be considered evidence of rope and so forth.
  • beloch
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It's possible to put holes through things without a drill. People can get onto islands without boats. How do you define rope, and what else might cause similar wear? Are you certain you can distinguish them?

Archaeology has come a long way over the last couple of centuries. It used to be little better than grave robbing and crackpot (often racist) theories. Archaeologists made all sorts of assumptions that turned out to be ridiculously (and sometimes tragically) wrong. Excavations once involved dynamite and bulldozers. Things have changed. Techniques for re-analyzing and extracting new information from old finds are allowing archaeologists to make discoveries without digging at all. Even a careful, modern dig is a destructive act that can only be conducted once.

It's not frustrating. It's progress.

  • mmooss
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> archeology swings over the years from "we'll believe anything" to "we won't accept any claim without a preserved example".

Could you provide some evidence of your own? Archaeology has always been tied to evidence, as any scholarship is.

Balance would be nice, yes, but I think the conservative approach is closer to correct, especially given the natural human bias toward believing sensational theories.
Maybe not closer to correct, but definitely less likely to admit errors. But sometimes the negative space around a particular thing becomes overwhelming. To me this is like circumstantial evidence—in general it’s weaker than physical evidence, but in high enough numbers it can serve.
  • mmooss
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But what does the negative space indicate? It says something is missing - which few will dispute - but there are many possible answers in a sort of superposition. Speculation about this answer or that one isn't reliable. It resolves to one answer (or a few) when you have actual evidence.
That's an interesting thought. I wonder if you can quantify this belief? That Weibull (presumably) distribution would be an interesting and useful thing to know.
Quantify the belief that humans are biased toward sensationalism? No, I have no idea how to do that. Actually you could make an argument that it's a bit circular, that "sensationalism" is defined as the kind of ideas that humans are biased towards and which are therefore more able to cause a "sensation".

But if you don't see how people yearn to believe in big dramatic things like conspiracies, aliens, bigfoot, or even simple narratives about single people changing the course of history, and how they only accept the complicated and/or boring reality with conscious effort, then, well, you seem to be living in a better universe than I am.

> we'll believe anything

Can you explain what you're referring to? Obviously "ancient aliens" does not count as archaeology, despite your insistence otherwise.

The Kamitakamori tools? Piltdown fossils? The pattern roughly seems to be "if you have physical artifacts that support a theory / fit a pattern they will be accepted (even if bogus) but if you have a theory that explains facts (e.g. drilled holes) but no physical artifacts (in this case drills) it will be rejected".

(Just saw the snark about ancient aliens; no idea where that came from. If you're going to try to imply that that's my position you'll need to produce some artifacts to back it up.)

Piltdown was rejected 70 years ago, so hardly a current example. Kamitakamori was someone taking legitimately old artifacts and putting them in other places. You can detect that (as people did), but it's much less obvious than you're suggesting.

There are also numerous examples where physical artifacts haven't been immediately accepted. The white sands footprints. Monte Verde II. Others like Monte Verde I, Buttermilk Creek, and Cooper's ferry still aren't accepted despite physical evidence.

Consensus generally has high standards for anything that pushes boundaries. It's very easy to construct an "obvious" explanation that's totally wrong. We call these "just-so" stories. A narrative that's supported by physical evidence is a lot more verifiable.

And for the record, my grump here is about soft / organic tools and artifacts and coastal / high weathering sites being discounted while everyone falls all over themselves for rocks and bones, even if fake. No aliens, just weavers, sailors, and the like.
  • mmooss
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> The Kamitakamori tools? Piltdown fossils? The pattern roughly seems to be "if you have physical artifacts that support a theory / fit a pattern they will be accepted (even if bogus)

Two examples from over a century is not evidence of unreliability.

> if you have a theory that explains facts (e.g. drilled holes) but no physical artifacts (in this case drills) it will be rejected".

Evidence is a requirement in all scholarship; the rest is speculation - which can be useful as a direction for searching for evidence, but is not sufficient to be accepted in any field. What field accepts claims without evidence?

They didn't say things should be accepted without evidence. That's a laughably bad-faith reading. They proposed a different standard of evidence that they think is less infeasibly high while still not accepting nonsense. I don't totally agree but it's a reasonable direction to argue.

As for the examples, when they start with "swings over the years" they're clearly taking a long-term perspective, and not trying to claim that modern archaeology will "believe anything" (especially not when their more prominent claim is that modern archaeology believes too little).

This is true in many, many, many, many places. It takes a significantly higher bar of evidence to put forward specific tooling than an engineer's intuition to make the mark in archaeology.
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Given need, access to anything that might serve as string, pieces of wood, and too much time to think about the problem, most singular humans will come up with that within the year, if not within days.

That thing has probably been independently invented a hundred thousand times over. Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.

Also that is not a "sophisticated" tool at all. It's literally one step above hitting rocks together. Sharp rocks happens to be the only tool you need to make a basic bow drill.

But to make a drill bit of highly alloyed copper you need a bit more tools and knowledge
> Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.

True. Good thing no one is trying to do that.

Basic research is never silly.
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