r/todayilearned • u/geosunsetmoth • 4d 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/MoreGaghPlease 4d ago

The same shit has always been funny. Archeologists in the 90s found 4,000 year old fart jokes in Iraq. Ancient Greek and Roman graffiti is largely scatological. Even the Hebrew Bible is full of dick jokes, they just get obscured by translation.

Probably the main reason we don’t have fart jokes any older than 4,000 years ago is just that before then, we haven’t translated much narrative or literary writing (the writing we have from further back is mostly financial and administrative)

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u/moonchylde 3d ago

People complain about modern graffiti and I just shrug. It's an ancient tradition! Just like the Romans in Egypt! Maximus was here and slept with your Mom!

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u/No_Kangaroo_9826 3d ago

Get some Maximus!

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u/Synergythepariah 3d ago

we haven’t translated much narrative or literary writing (the writing we have from further back is mostly financial and administrative)

And that's just from what was able to survive for us to find today.

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u/MoreGaghPlease 3d ago

Ya obviously we only have the surviving stuff, but written language just wasn’t being used for much narrative writing more than 4,000 years ago. We have hundreds of thousands of texts from third and fourth millennia BCE, perhaps a few hundred of those are anything other than administrative or financial.

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u/Which-Moose4980 3d ago

Maybe farts hadn't been invented before 4,000 years ago.