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I had one of the best sleeps of my life on a bed of soft sand, in the curve of a dry creek that I really should not have slept in due to flash flood risk. Since then I've wondered if ancient people might have made mattresses of sand, but they were so simple and evanescent that they left no trace.
It would be in fact quite amusing if the technology the Neolithians were actually most proud of had nothing to do with stone, just didn’t last. Better fabrics? Waterproof clothing? Elaborate wooden tools made using “dumb” stone ones?
Rope is one thing that I wonder how to make from scratch if you'd be dropped somewhere in nature. I know it's about weaving plant fibers, but, how can it get so long?
The trick is the twist. You roll each bundle one direction, then twist two bundles together the opposite way, so they lock instead of unravel. I learned it with dogbane and nettle stalks. Stagger where you add new fibers so the splices never line up.
When I was 5 I watched my grandmother making yarn using a foot-powered castle wheel. The machine rotates a string of yarn along its long axis and it collects fibers from a piece of loose wool (roving) thus extending itself. I think I've seen a drop spindle too, but I'm less certain about that.
The drop spindle is the same trick with less machinery. You spin a weighted stick, the twist runs up into the fibers you're feeding it, and you just keep adding more. Slow, but a wheel only speeds up what the spindle already does.
We made rope in boy scouts. You just need to braid three strings and you can splice in broken bits pretty easily. You can also work out kinks with just regular straight sticks and it only takes two people. The theory that these batons were for rope seems unlikely in that regard. Apparently the leading hypothesis is for spear throwing.
If you've never watched Clickspring's Youtube videos you're in for a treat.
He has a long-running series where he works to make a new Antikythera mechanism using ancient (bronze age) technologies. He's a master machinist, so he has fabulous insight into workholding, precision, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/show/VLPLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4...
I'm a big fan of Clickspring. One really interesting aspect of his Antikythera mechanism videos is that, along with constructing the mechanism itself, he is using the physical details of the recovered artifact to make educated guesses about what sorts of workshop technology were available in the eastern Mediterranean world at that time. Including fairly in-the-weeds stuff like entire videos on what sorts of materials a craftsman of that era might have used to lay out marking lines on workpieces or how one might've soldered two metal pieces together.
omg, thank you SO much for the rec on clickspring's antikythera mechanism! i watched the first two episodes years ago and the algorithm never brought the channel back to my feed. now i'm subscribed and will have to watch this again.
i was also lucky enough to visit athens years ago and see the mechanism in person at the national archaeological museum... it's an amazing exhibit, and if you're ever in that neck of the woods i cannot recommend it any more. :)
My only complaint with Clickspring is that it takes so long. I feel like it has been 10 years at this point since he started the Antikythera mechanism build, but I could be wrong.
Typically called a "perforated baton" in English. The theory of rope twisting is also not widely accepted. It's possible but it's an overly complex device given that you can twist a rope with regular sticks. These guys have contributed to the debate but it's absolutely not settled. They've also discovered hundreds of these across Europe.
Same with "Lochstab" in the older literature, the Germans just treated it as a generic find category. Funny part is "Kommandostab" was the previous name, from when everyone assumed they were chieftain's badges. Typology names stick long after the theory dies.
Small nitpick: "Neolithians" aside, most of the cordage evidence here is Paleolithic, tens of thousands of years before the Neolithic. IIRC the Lascaux cord fragment is around 17,000 years old. But yeah, the point stands: stone is just what survived.
"The Egyptians built using stone but wrote day to day on papyrus.
The Sumerians built with mud and wrote on clay tablets.
This is why we have lots of Egyptians buildings but not much of their writing and the opposite with the Sumerians."