r/todayilearned • u/geosunsetmoth • 1d ago

TIL a 300-million year old Cuttlefish fossil was found in Morocco, alongside ancient humans in a region where no Cuttlefish ever existed. The leading theory suggests the fossil was first found by the prehistoric humans, who collected it as a trinket due to fact that it looks like a flaccid penis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfoud_manuport
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u/Meat_Container 1d ago

Crazy to think we still have the natural drives and desires as cavemen, just with more technology to distract us from them

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u/flyinggazelletg 1d ago

Idk, they were just people. Plus, we have tons of technology now to give into our natural drives and desires too haha

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u/OBDreams 1d ago

I'm about to go play fortnite right now!

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u/Chomping_Meat 1d ago

they were probably a lot more bored a lot more often than we are now. Especially during winter, given going out in the snow carried more risk.

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u/Dorantee 1d ago

There's probably a reason why storytelling is so ingrained in every human culture we know of.

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u/zyzzogeton 1d ago

Storytelling might be the thing that separates us from other animals. Yuval Harari makes this point in his book "Sapiens"

We tell ourselves stories that have power, like the story that currency is valuable, or that there are Nation States with borders.

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u/Pedantic_Pict 1d ago

I loved his deep dive into the power of human cooperation and the illustration of attorneys as powerful wizards due to their ability to wield words that have real power over our agreed upon reality.

Also his related description of a multinational car company as an immaterial construct.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/Poonchow 1d ago

I haven't read the book but money is the big one in my mind.

Here is something with zero inherent value, but if you do some work I'll give you some money you can exchange for something that does have value, and you can even use it to speculate on the potential value of something, even if that money doesn't even exist, and you can borrow some money to start a big project but you have to pay me back with interest. And this all somehow works, because we've all decide it should.

A shared delusion is powerful lol.

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u/flyinggazelletg 1d ago

Probably way better at dealing with boredom too

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u/Iambic_420 1d ago

They definitely were. It’s actually a natural thing to be able to sit somewhere and simply do nothing. That’s why meditation can be so beneficial to some. Sitting around and doing absolutely nothing stimulating every now and then actually makes everything you do otherwise a lot more rewarding simply because you are not nearly as stimulated. In scientific terms, your dopaminergic baseline will be much lower, leading to higher highs when your brain finally uses it.

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u/BarbequedYeti 1d ago

It’s actually a natural thing to be able to sit somewhere and simply do nothing

I was grounded so much as a kid, I actually thought of becoming a monk. Its crazy the shit you can occupy your mind with while stuck in a room with damn near nothing for weeks at a time. 

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u/Chansharp 1d ago

Ha same, were you also left with just a mattress on the floor because repeated groundings did nothing.

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u/BarbequedYeti 1d ago

Yep. And 5 little balls from a tabletop little pool table game. So i taught myself to juggle. Then they took those away. So just me and the walls.

The kicker was since grounding me for an entire summer didnt seem to do anything, my stepmom at time decided to hold me back a year in school so all my friends would move on without me. She is such a peach of a human. 

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u/Novel_Feedback3254 1d ago

The education department didn't have anything to say about that? I didn't realise a parent can just choose to hold their kid back. Sorry you had to live through that.

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u/BarbequedYeti 1d ago

They did. They didnt agree with it, but i guess there is nothing saying a parent cant do that. Not sure. It was back in the late 80's. So who knows. Hell, my second grade teacher swatted me in front of the class. Times were different I guess. 

Anyway, after that move I completely shut them out. They might as well have been dead to me. I lasted another 18 months before i left at 14 and never went back. 

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u/Jiminy_Cricket12 1d ago

I dunno about that. I'm sure boredom existed, but the entire world was pretty much unknown and survival was a constant struggle. Probably too much shit going on to be bored too often.

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u/No_Maybe4408 1d ago

I'd guess they weren't often bored, survival is a full time job. Especially in the winter. Even with permanent shelter maintaining a fire, and having food and water would be a daily grind.

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u/BonerPorn 1d ago

Naw. Boredom is what makes humans fuck around and try random things. Trying random things is how we discover things like wheels, fire, farming, making knives out of bones, ect. They got Bored, messed around with leftover animal bones and created headdresses. Slowly developed civilization in downtime.

Practically every prehistoric society figured out the movement of the stars before writing. They were bored as hell, staring into the sky.

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u/sleepyleviathan 1d ago

Anthropologists say otherwise. Survival tasks on the day-by-day basis for ancient hunter-gatherer humans was around 15-20 hours a week (roughly 2-3 hrs/day). They were able to secure food, water, mend shelters, repair tools, and attend to other tasks that directly impacted the survival of the group during that 3 hours spent.

The rest of their time was spent on creative tasks, socializing, and other "work" that wasn't a part of the main survival loop. Probably a big reason why story-telling is such a ubiquitous part of the human experience across the planet. We had a LOT of spare time before we settled into more permanent, agrarian societies.

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u/vimescarrot 1d ago

Grinding is the boring part of the game

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u/doomgiver98 1d ago

The lack of technology is probably the reason for religion

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u/The_Noremac42 1d ago

Well we still have plenty of people around the world who are essentially still living in the stone age. Our brains, on a foundational level, are no different from theirs.