this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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Archaeology

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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.

Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.

The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...

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[โ€“] [email protected] 58 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

To save everyone a click, cave paint has some sun-blocking properties. There is literally zero evidence that people covered themselves in cave paint to protect from the sun.

Indigenous Australians have been observed using mud to protect themselves, and providing they recognised the need to do so it is much more likely that cave people would have observed pigs and hippos doing this and used readily available mud to shield themselves from the sun rather than routinely covering themselves in difficult-to-make pigments.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Now I am just kinda wondering how difficult it was to actually make the paint for cave paintings. I wouldn't have assumed it was hard because, you know... Cavemen made it. ๐Ÿคท๐Ÿปโ€โ™‚๏ธ

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

cave paint has some sun-blocking properties

For anyone curious about this, there's an article by the University of Michigan where the researcher (Raven Garvey) mentioned in OP's shared article is a professor and breaks down in details about it too. https://news.umich.edu/sunscreen-clothes-and-caves-may-have-helped-homo-sapiens-survive-41000-years-ago/

[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 3 weeks ago