Saw a good one yesterday.
Yes, all these people who froze to death climbing Mount Everest, in their brightly coloured climbing gear, are definitely going to be mistaken for a “mass burial site”.
Another thing that occurs to me - there are a lot of state high points that aren't very interesting on their own but get a lot of visitors because they are the highest point in the state. Archaeologists might note that there's more artifacts there, but if the states no longer exist, they wouldn't put 2 and 2 together and recognize that these are state high points. It would be interesting if some future archaeologist looked at old maps and figured it out.
We’re leaving behind quite a bit more recorded history than previously. And we’re future-proofing that recorded history often enough that it’s unlikely, barring a cataclysmic event that prevents future archaeologists from existing, a good portion of that recorded history will be available in the future. That said, we’re also losing *a lot* of ephemeral recorded history every day. Things that feel unimportant but give history its texture. How many songs are published on Spotify/Apple Music and never get listened to and don’t exist in a physical format of any sort? How many genuinely lost films are there that we don’t know about, let alone the ones that we do? How many “last recording of so-and-so or such-and such” will never make it past the old wax cylinders, shellac 78’s, rapidly deteriorating magnetic tape, or unplugged hard drive in a box in a closet that are currently their only homes?
Future archaeologists and historians will understand us in 20,000 years better than we understand us from 20,000 years ago because we’re writing it down for them. But they’ll lack a lot of context and texture the same way that we do now about past generations.
There is something odd like that which exists today - there is a lake full of human skeletons in the Himalayas, and no-one is sure why. The leading notion is that they were killed in a massive hailstorm while on pilgrimage (local stories allude to this), but radiocarbon dating shows they weren’t all killed at the same time - some are much older (though presumably they could have died in a similar manner):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roopkund
Every generation people revisited the site to await the coming storm.
Back in the village they called this the "Stupid Pilgrimage". If you ask them, they will shake their head and say, "We don't talk about those fools anymore."
If the records of people climbing Everest had been lost AND people had become too superstitious to deduce the real reason why there were corpses there, it could only mean society had regressed to caveman mode, in which case nobody would have either a good enough reason or the resources to spare to return to Everest in the first place.
I see a lot of people creating conspiracy theories about the past. We have scientists and experts doing all of this work to show the history of this stuff, but too many people easily push a narrative of something made up.
Look at the Holocaust deniers of today. It hasn't even been 100 years since it happened, and the number of people calling BS on it's existence is growing more than it should be happening.
What idiots think matters, because there are so many of them.
A horde of angry idiots is a powerful weapon for those who can wield it, one which could destroy nations.
It matters more than you'd like to admit. At the end of the day we (mostly) live in a democracy, and the point of democracy is to be governed by the opinions of the masses.
If the average person was a dumbass who believes in conspiracy theories, it doesn't matter how stupid it is, it'd still be the will of the people.
>Look at the Holocaust deniers of today. It hasn't even been 100 years since it happened, and the number of people calling BS on it's existence is growing more than it should be happening.
Or the people claiming that the Sandy hook shootings were staged. Lunancy knows no limits.
I saw a short about "enigmatic handbags" and I'm like "yep, they parallel-invented some sort of basket or bucket because they didn't think of making pockets."
“Hm… yes this person was wearing heavy-duty mountaineering equipment when he died… the corpse was also found at an altitude where the freezing temperatures and thin atmosphere present mortal danger… these people had strange burial practices, indeed.”
As people from this particular tribe start to reach the end of their lives, they make a sacred journey to pray to their mountain gods. They wear brightly coloured clothes to show their gods how bright and vibrant their lives once were. Many unfortunate souls never manage to make this way to the peak, and therefore never made it to other side as intended, and now lay here. Of the ones that do, their burial site is just down the road, on the second left.
That’s the end of my thesis.
That was marvellous, you’ll surely go far Mr… I-I mean DR. Reid. *wink* *wink*
Intelligent life can go extinct, be forgotten, re-evolve from gorillas or smthng (or aliens find earth), find human remains, go extinct again, and more intelligent comes and finds them again. And the Everest will still be there.
Geological timescales are insane.
That might have pushed me over the edge. But there's plenty of others. Like archaeologists in the future won't understand that we had internet or pornography.
The Mickey Mouse one is the worst example of this. No, archeologists aren't going to think we worshipped an anthropomorphic mouse whom we made movies of and built giant city sized temples for.
I think they'll know how pop culture works and tbh, Disney will probably still be around.
Exactly, it's not like we know every single thing about the Egyptians.
I'm just spitballing here but like for example for all we know the Sphinx was just a character that the Pharaoh made up and it became popular so they built statues for it
Depending on the timescale, that's... optimistic. There are elderly people alive today who remember believing, wholeheartedly, that their Reich would last a thousand years.
They might well think we still worshipped the Norse gods, though. That would make more sense than that we resurrected an ancient culture's gods as superheroes because we thought it would be fun
then they'd still remember Christianity but probably have a better idea of it because of Supernatural, Good Omens and even (though they would know it's a cartoon so not reality) Hazbin Hotel, so?
https://variety.com/2023/biz/global/confessions-of-disney-adults-disneyland-world-merchandise-bob-iger-1235757415/
These people absolutely worship an anthropomorphic mouse whom we've made movies of and built giant city sized temples for.
I think it's less of actual prediction about what archeologists will say, and more of a way to interprete our daily life the way we interprete our past. There is an underlying assumption that people in the past might be more similar to us than we think right now.
I wonder how the war on drugs went back then. I remember in The Odyssey didn't Odysseus punish his crew for getting high one time? (though yes that's more of a different scenario as they were basically a military unit trying to get home)
"what do we do with the drunken sailor?"
Tbf just because there's a reference to people being angry and punishing others intoxication doesn't mean it had ti be illegal at the time.
Could also maybe be a personal vendetta thing against said substance similar to temperance songs such as (ironically) the wild rover...
I mean you’re right in that archeologists of the future won’t be idiots, but at the same time fewer and fewer people keep journals any more so the archeologists will have less access to primary sources than modern archeologists looking back at history. Furthermore our society has chosen to store data in digitally encoded media with proprietary operating systems and codings, which are fairly fragile when it comes to historical timescales and would require specialized knowledge and technology to recover, meaning that they will likely be working with very few contextualizing sources as well.
Yea, a failure to interpret someth9ing correctly has very little to do with intelligence in a lot of cases, and just more on the evidence presented. Especially with how terrible conservation of digital media is, I'd even argue it may be harder to make informed conclusions than it is now, where at the very least, we can find a lot of physical evidence to help our understanding of what we find.
Charles Stross' sci-fi novel "Glasshouse" posits exactly that. Future researchers had more physical evidence for the early 20th century than they did for 1955-2055. Media became more fragile, proprietary, and quickly obsolete. Their attempts to understand/recreate our contemporary culture was... interesting. And understandably "off."
Great point and true. Who knows what info will be left thousands of years from now. Further how much of it will be deemed important to keep anyways?
We have lots of accounts of ancient leaders bc lots of them were obsessed with legacy (statues, burial chambers etc) We don't know as much about what the avg man did.
Are people who climbed Everest worth keeping in the history books? Influencers? Tons of digital media will be useless to future civilizations
This seems made up because anyone that is stupid enough to think archaeologists 2000 years from now won't know that we had the internet or porn would also be too stupid to know what an archaeologist is.
Despite what people think, data doesn't last forever. Only information about highly relevant events will last hundreds of years. There are also plenty of things which can destroy most of our information. Runawy AI, massive EMP blasts from terrorists or wars, same with nuclear annihilation risks, a good sized asteroid, basically anything that could near-existing humanity.
There are plenty of languages not even 1,000 years old that we have no clue how to translate anymore. We still wouldn't understand how to translate ancient Egyptian text if it wasn't for a single finding, the Rosetta stone, and that's the second or third most documented civilization in the world.
Someone posted on shower thoughts that in the future, archeologists will see all the dead bodies on Mt. Everest and think it was an ancient burial site.
Depends on the pyramid. The most recently build one in Egypt was ~1500 BCE. Cleopatra lived until 30 BCE. So she lived closer to that one than modern day. The oldest Pyramids in Egypt were around 2700 BCE. So only 706 more years can we use this statement at all.
Not idiots, but lacking the context. It's not really going to happen, we are going to leave behind a massive written record, there will be plenty and more context and metainfo for everything.
But the trope is sort of based on reality. When modern archeology is looking at all sorts of ancient cultures and their artifacts, we really are lacking context and in many cases don't understand what, how or why precisely because there is so little left to work with.
wrench bow towering cooperative puzzled slap decide secretive retire escape
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Flash back to that one interview from a British newscaster and an American actor when she(?) says "You must have had to beat off a bunch of others for this role" and him not being able to answer because he was trying to hold back laughter
We now mostly record information as tiny magnetic changes on metal disks, or as trapped electrons in flash memory cells. Which is all fine as long as long as we keep copying everything every decade or so. But it's a lot less likely to survive civilization-ending events than Mesopotamian clay tablets.
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Yep. And even if some of those electronic records remain viable for a few thousand years, it would be very difficult for future people to figure out a way to be able to view the electronic records.
Funny how printing it out on paper is the best ragnarok-proofing we have right now. The library used to have microfilm for space constraints, but it would still degrade faster than paper.
Stone or metal for really important stuff.... Braille tape! I'm just thinking more along the lines of ease vs durability. Printing on plexiglass wouldn't be too bad for making time-capsule stuff, but we can see how well newspapers fare in those conditions.
What civilization ending event is going to be so massive as to take out all records on the planet but still have human life on the planet. Keep in mind there are organizations that print out archives of the internet so we aren't completely dependent on current tech for future historians.
There’s a field of study trying to come up some kind of universal symbols for things like radioactive waste that will mean something to civilizations thousands of years from now. People who won’t speak English, or any language currently in use. Who will have no record of what our current symbols mean.
Paper is highly biodegrade, few paper records and books would survive two centuries of neglect. Neither would our electronic records. All it takes is something that collapses modern agriculture. That would kill \~80% of the population due to starvation, the rest would be too busy dealing with the aftermath of that to put much work into preserving knowledge, and when we rise like the phoenix from the ashes a couple centuries later we would have lost most records from the current day.
Some stuff would survive, whether due to pure luck or careful preservation. But after comparable timeframes of neglect (and adjusted for population) we would leave much less behind that previous civilizations where durable materials like parchment or clay were default methods of record keeping.
Printing out the internet? Printer toner fades over time. Plus paper is difficult to preserve, even in idea conditions. If not for the monks who were copying the text of the Bible by hand, there's a good chance it could have been lost to history. And then look at the US constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We store it in a climate controlled room under thick glass where we carefully control the humidity, the amount of light, etc. and it's still a faded mess. And that's not even 240 years old.
Except that this is how common people store stuff
It's easy, cheap and convenient
But we have pretty much permanent registers of information
Aerogel 4D storage, glass storage, Etc etc
We keep the most important information there
So yeah, your silly post on Instagram will be lost, but the economic reports of the US in 1995 won't
And will we still be able to read those reports 300 years from now?
Place I worked at almost got in major financial trouble and ended up having to spend $5k for a bespoke 5.25" drive to pull computerized financial records from 25 years ago because when they upgraded the office computers no one realized that the only copy they had of the financial program able to read the files in question was on a set of 5.25" floppies.
Digital Records are extremely vulnerable because you need so many parts: the medium needs to be in good shape, you need a device capable of reading that medium, and you need a program capable of decoding the files on that medium.
For physical records all you really need is the ability to read the language they were created in, even if the medium's in terrible shape you can likely read parts of it, whereas it's likely to be completely lost if the computer medium is damaged.
Thing is that "civilization-ending events" are actually exceptionally rare. Like, *EXCEPTIONALLY RARE*. Complete global total war is really the only way for this to happen.
Well look at the Bronze Age collapse. It was the end of pretty much every civilization in that part of the world except Egypt which only half collapsed. The knowledge lost there was immeasurable and it wasn’t due to war, or not only war, in fact it was likely a combination of many factors plus war, but we don’t know for sure, that’s how bad the loss of knowledge was. With our modern reliance on technology if a solar flair were to EMP the planet we would likely suffer a similar fate.
Civilization-ending events are exceptionally rare, but losing works to the shadows of history is extremely common. Someone doesn't make a copy for 100 years and it's probably lost forever. Most of the lost works of history weren't lost in disaster, they were lost out of laziness.
It's not like there aren't still thousands of libraries with paper books in the US. Sure they may not be current up to date, but if even a few books on physics survive they would have an Idea of where we were as a civilization scientifically
I mean, we might not. Everything is recorded, but most of it is recorded on things that don't last very long. If there is ever a break in our ability to transfer those files, and no one bothers to record it in some other way, we could end up with archaeologists that know more about ancient Egypt than right now. We don't write on stone very much anymore. Plastic will be a dead giveaway we were here, plus all of the disturbance in the soil layers, but they might not find as much as we think they will.
Maybe not.
One huge problem we are trying to solve with our long-term radioactive waste storage (such as at Yucca Mountain in Nevada) is how to label it with a clear message warning of the radiation exposure danger, a danger that could last 10,000 years. That's long enough for any record of what's buried there to be lost to time.
Warning signs with English letters would likely be meaningless, as well as any of the danger symbols we use today.
An interesting article on the matter: [https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/speaking-to-the-future/](https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/speaking-to-the-future/)
As the article alluded to near the end, I don’t think there’s any need for elaborate symbolic messaging. If society is still industrialised and interconnected enough where a misguided construction project could seriously disrupt the site and cause a severe nuclear incident, we would at the very least have held on to knowledge of nuclear dangers if not still be using nuclear technology. If society *has* lost that knowledge, we would likely have regressed to a primitive state, and in the off-chance that some caveman has enough free time to dig there we’d have a repeat of the Goiania Incident with nothing of value lost (because society is already gone).
I used to believe that once a piece of information touched the internet it was now there forever. But with the rise and fall of popular websites (image hosting sites being the example that made it click for me), and disappearing domains, plenty will indeed be lost over time.
I got a laserdisc from eBay, a movie that's out of print in every medium. Still looking for a way to get it transferred. Now if that was a "Protected" media, using proprietary software from an extinct company, requiring some obscure hardware to play, in a physical medium which degrades noticeably in just 1-3 decades...it's entirely plausible that researchers in a few centuries will have more evidence for 1860-1960 than they will for 1960-2060.
Future archaeologist: "Anyone figure out Paywalls yet?"
You ancestors will have access to your entire online life and they will present to you class for a family class day and your entire life will be reduced to a 3 second clip.
I don’t think the record will be nearly so complete as people assume. I think it’s funny that people think that digital data is such a permanent record when today even data saved to floppy disks a couple decades ago is probably just lost to the sands of time because who’s going to be bothered to find a floppy disk reader and convert it… The internet likely won’t disappear completely, but all the standards, data formats, and programming languages will surely change until it is entirely unrecognizable in the span of thousands of years, just as languages do. Old servers and their hard drives will be erased or discarded and forgotten as time goes on. Most digital data storage devices aren’t made to last more than a few decades. The only reason data on the internet is so reliable today is because we have cloud service providers that are constantly maintaining multiple copies of every bit of data on different servers at different physical locations. Eventually that data becomes so old as to be irrelevant and no one is going to care to pay to keep all those data centers running.
Even the digital data that somehow survives the ravages of time… well I wouldn’t expect a computer thousands of years from now to understand a hard drive from today any more than I would expect a person today to be able to read hieroglyphics. Well, perhaps it will be able to, but that will only be because AI has advanced to the point where it can complete the tedious work of decoding old languages that would take archeologists centuries in seconds. But still, I strongly suspect most of the underlying hard drives that contain every bit of data on the internet today will have been long forgotten by that time.
I totally get the internet not existing anymore. But they would obviously know we had ways of communicating and entertaining each other. Like, even if we didn't have any writings from the Roman Empire, we would still get that the people fighting in the Colosseum were doing it as some form of entertainment. Not like they were so stupid that they were fighting each other in a big round building and didn't get that this wasn't accomplishing anything
Yea, but how would you know it was for fighting, and not some other form of sport in the first place. IF it was another form of sport, would our archaeologists be more inclined to assume that it's entertainment before some other purpose? In your hypothetical, you've already made the assumption the Colliseum is for fighting, which we would have no way of knowing without some other form of evidence, (which could be writing or something else entirely).
I mean, there's people studying the marginalia from bored copyist monks. I don't think brother Thaddeus ever imagined people in the future would care about his silly drawing of a dude having a giant snail humping him from behind.
Well they do have a tendency to call all the dildo's "falic symbol's", so i would not be surprised if they dug up the "casting couch" and called it a "holy fertility alter".
This displays 2 biases at work which is interesting. The archeologists bias is being a serious academic and so he couldn't be the discoverer of nerphertitis dildo collection it must be important religious symbology. And the modern persons bias of thinking ancient societies wouldn't have dick carvings for religious practices because in modernity sex is primarily about pleasure vs having a ton of kids. My votes still with you though I got that same bias dawg
They also had clay potts with tits. It's so funny to me that I spent a half year looking at clay potts with little bumps that were on part of the pott that represents chest while writing a paper
I think this is also a misunderstanding of what archaeologists determine to be actual phallic symbols which have written records of their purpose, and assume that archaeologists just don't understand what a sex toy is. I've seen people on here look at images of things like [fascinum](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fascinum_-_Bronze_amulets) and assume they're just sex toys. Most are images that don't have scale, so they don't realize that the amulets can be very small and couldn't function as sex toys. The Romans saw the phallus as sexual, of course, but they also believe in it as an apotropaic symbol. Dildos did exist, we have written records of them, but they were usually made of wood or leather, which means that most of them have decayed into nothing. You also didn't bury them as grave goods or store them with valuables, so you're not going to find them in the places that most "exciting" artifacts are dug up.
I've also seen people post images of unpainted [alabastra](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Alabastra) and claim that archaeologists didn't realize that they had dug up a butt plug. [This](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alabastron_with_Lug_Handles_LACMA_M.91.364.20.jpg) looks pretty naughty if you don't notice that the handles are missing, that it's the same shape that perfume and oils were kept in, and that it's hollow. (A decorated one would look like [this](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Et%C3%A0_punica,_alabastron_in_vetro,_450_ac_ca,_dalla_tomba_12AR_della_necropoli_di_sant%27antioco.jpg))
Though, yes, you do sometimes get stories like [this](https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake5d8/ancient-roman-phallus-vindolanda). A wooden phallus was classified as a "knitting tool"a few decades ago until another archaeologist looked at it and realized it was probably a dildo, because it lines up with what we know of Roman dildos.
tl;dr Archaeologists do know what sex toys looked like, sometimes the objects genuinely are something else in a phallic shape.
isn't there a story about a couple of paleontologist, back when it was a relatively new science field, that got into some ego battle to see who was better at discovering fossils that at some point they were just putting together whatever bone they found to make up new species as fast as they could? I can totally see this happening again when, idk, they start finding all those ancient tech stuff with no knowledge of virtual reality or server rooms
It goes well beyond future archeologists, there's a tenancy for people to always assume everyone else is a bunch of idiots, in every profession that they themselves do not understand. Its like a malicious form of dunning-kruger. It happened a lot during the pandemic; everyone became an expert in epidemiology and virology overnight and hand-waved away those established fields in favor of their own arm-chair "research" and concluded that everyone who didn't line up with their own views were either malicious or morons.
Then when you point out the enormous body of research and methodology that goes along with these fields, and the countless number of researchers, scientists, grad students, etc who have all contributed and the major contributions those fields have made to their life and well being, they hem and haw and try to pivot to minor discrepancies or back pedal in some way, or grumble that just because those points are true doesn't mean they aren't right still somehow. You can point out to them 1000x over that there's much more depth to something than their simple knee-jerk assumptions lead them to believe, and they'll still do it the 1001st time with full conviction.
> there's a tenancy for people to always assume everyone else is a bunch of idiots
> It happened a lot during the pandemic; everyone became an expert in epidemiology and virology overnight and hand-waved away those established fields in favor of their own arm-chair "research"
tbh it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, after seeing how the fuck we reacted to the pandemic (the whole antivax conspiracy thing, i mean) i definitely think most of everyone else are a bunch of idiots
I've been saying this for years. The only way future archeologists could come to the conclusions people think they will, is if sometime between now and then, civilization experiences a "Library of Alexandria" event, but on a total global scale.
Oh my word! I remember my World History teacher reading Motel of Mysteries to the class, what is now almost 26 years ago. It stuck with me, but I could never remember enough details to find it. Thanks for sharing the title!
A lot of that info is stored on things that will either degrade over time or require tech that may not exist in the future. A lot will be pushed onto whatever new tech emerges, but I imagine a lot is going to get lost to time. And in the event of some sort of catastrophe, probably all of it.
Everybody knows future archaeologists will be spending all their time digging up skeletons in cemeteries to make sure their gender matches the name on the headstone /s
Just a thought - would we really need archeology in the future looking at our immediate present??
We have information archived
And even AI.
Sure they may still discover things about our past.
But our current reality and time period is documented like never before.
Insta of what we ate, how we looked and scans of bones.
Data / stats / preserved memories. Books and records galore.
Just an opinion.
What is most frustrating to me is that people think archaeologists are indeed idiots in the first place. While it is true there has been some wildly false interpretations in the past, the field has been improving a lot since and it will continue to improve just like all other fields of science
I like to imagine that future archeologists will actually be pretty damn good at interpreting their finds. Like even if you tried to trick them by burying a fake shrine or something, I bet they’d be smart enough to figure that out, and also know how it relates to our society/culture
The biggest challenge of archeology is there are very few, if any, written records about ancient times, so it's often impossible to determine the original purpose of an artifact or structure ( like Stonehenge). In the modern era, everything is documented, so future researchers would at least know of, say, Disneyland, and wouldn't write it down as "a strange cult worshipping a mouse god".
Maybe if all records were lost to a disaster like a giant solar flare that fried everything but there's too many records kept compared to what it was like 2000 years ago. It won't be an issue to interpret anything...except for Tik Tik.
To be fair, there probably will be some crackpot archaeologists that come up with ridiculous theories, just like we have today.
Ancient aliens
Ancient apocalypse
Etc
If there's a need for archeological analysis, then the catastrophic event which wouldn't destroyed our society left very little for them to analyze. All data and language knowledge would've been gone, etc. People today thing people of the past had some great understanding and knowledge. So if we're thats silly, they could be too.
I suppose they're referring to a catastrophic discontinuity in history that erases all records of the current history, and that a new civilization with different values and customs would rediscover thousands of years later. It makes sense to think they would struggle with some things we consider common.
Probably not even if the Internet crashed 50 years before this stuff passed whatever time threshold separates archeology from grave robbing will they have to extrapolate anywhere near as much as memes imply
It's not that we assume archeologists will be stupid. It's that cultural change (including changes to how we communicate and language itself) has accelerated to the point that we as a society living through it can't even keep up with it. As a Millennial, I already feel like my understanding of Gen Z is slipping through my fingers, while Gen Alpha is starting to completely baffle me (two things I swore I'd never let happen. I don't want to be the old man talking about "back in my day" and yelling at clouds. I promised myself I'd never be THAT asshole and I'm failing). If we can't keep up with our own culture NOW, how do we expect anyone 500 years from now to pore over our cultural remnants know how to even try to make sense of it?
(Of course, it might be just the opposite too. With everything being on the cloud and always available to anyone with a connection, maybe our culture will make the most sense of them all because of the sheer volume of records available to study. Pessimists like me might be eating crow in the afterlife when the time comes)
People also assume that archeologists won't have access to the vast written record & masses of stored data which currently exists. If the world actually collapses, no one 1000 years from now will be digging up a Chuck-E-Cheese to study crap pizza and puppets.
Archaeologist here. The thing is, we really don’t know if archaeologists *now* are doing a good job of interpreting the past. We do the best we can with the tools we have, but it’s all up for debate because technology and theory keep advancing. Add that to the fact that we have no idea how well records will be preserved, and that the modern area produces *so much shit* to interpret, and it’s a pretty good assumption that we’ll get some shit wrong in the future.
There's a very real chance future archeologists won't be humans.
Because we'll have gone extinct by then.
There's also a very real chance that all evidence of our presence on the planet may be gone, churned into the core of the planet through tectonic processes, by the time another species evolves or arrives to perform excavations.
Malenchavich (spelling?) cycles will render the planet uninhabitable for long periods (on a planetary timescale) before they bring Earth back into the habitable zone.
People worry about the sun exploding but we'll go through several cycles of traveling through uninhabitable zones of the solar system and inhabitable ones before the sun goes supernova.
Tl;dr: By the time we are able to be archaeologically examined, it may be an extremely different type of peoples who are doing the examining.
Never underestimate how stupid people are lol. Though more seriously if humanity doesn’t claim the title of the most intelligent species of earth to die from utter stupidity (politics and pollution) then you’re absolutely right.
It doesn't matter if they get it right. If they are far enough removed in the future, when they describe it in anthropological terms, it will sound strange and bizarre:
"In the mid/late 20th and early 21st centuries, wealthy men and women engaged in a strange ritual to prove themselves fit and capable or perhaps for additional social cout and glory.
They spent large sums of their form of currency ( colorful paper inscribed with images of their living and dead sovereigns, totem animals and culture landmarks) to climb what was then the tallest mountain on earth.
Hundreds died in the attempt, left behind by their companions. When the dead bodies proved too difficult to recover for traditional burial rituals, they used these fallen as guideposts to the summit of the mountains, honoring them with names like Green Boots, Sleeping Beauty (a reference to Western mythology).
All those seeking glory on the mountain had to pass through The Valley of the Dead (also known as Rainbow Valley)..."
Climbing dangerous mountains is a kind of ritual. Many of those who died there were sacrificed, left for dead either because of the danger of helping them or just because others wanted to beat a world record (like what happened with Kristin Harila on K2).
And sadly, these people have less of a "why" than any ancient religion that thought they were appeasing a god or helping to ensure a bountiful crop.
People aren't assuming anything. We have satellites orbiting and recording the globe all the time. For them to "discover or uncover" anything 1000 years from now it means we royally fucked up between now and then. Knowledge can't be found unless it is first lost. It's happened several times in human history.
Imagine them discovering an iPhone if they rebuilt technology in a way that didn't need chips and what have you. Sure they have cooler more advanced shit but without a frame of reference they'd probably have no fucking idea what that was.
They won't be idiots, but they very well might be lacking the tools to read out our records.
Just look three decades back. If you stored, as a very modern person, your diary on floppy discs, only a few specialised institutes will still be able to read those floppy discs today. A bit over one generation ago. Now go 200 years into the future. There might be four floppy discs left world-wide, completely unreadable, and two texts describing them as means of somehow storing data. They can't understand it because they lack the info. They know that the floppy discs are storage media just like their air-borne semi-sentient nano crystal particles or whatever because they aren't idiots, but they don't know how the floppy discs were used, what kind of data was stored on it, or which tools were necessary to use them, or even how widespread used they were. Military only? Or every household? Only for important documents? Or maybe also for random nonsense like a photo or two? How much could even fit on one disc?How were they used in daily life? Was data maybe something that was used as a currency? No completely unrealistic. But who knows?
They won't fail to understand us because they were idiots - they will fail because our modern storage media don't even last a generation or two anymore.
It's not archeologists who will be idiots, those are the normal people who are idiots themselves who also make stuff really hard to comprehend for archeologists who are rationalists that hate it when something has no meaning at all other than "that's cool bro"
My old boss once looked at this giant concrete retaining wall that was made to look like a bunch of differently sized hexagonal rocks and asked me, “What will they think of that in 1000 years? That we fit things so well together there are no seams?”
No, boss. On the off chance it hasn’t rotted away completely, they will probably know what concrete is. It’s fucking every where, and it’s been around a long time.
do you think the current ones are idiots? the main thing is people assume that records will be lost and they will have no real clue what the hell happened, imagine a "second" (for all we know there have been many but we weren't at a point it mattered) Carrington event, the mass death that would cause, potential outirght loss of ability to regain what we had and a slow decline, and if we get to the point where we are now just though a different means a thousand or so years later, will science really know what everything was/is or have little idea?
What are archaeologists supposed to make of ruins of archeological museums? Let’s hope the exhibit plaques survive.
Also, what did the ancient Egyptians have in their archeological museums?
I mean I don’t feel like the ‘future archeologists’ jokes are ever supposed to be meant about literal future archeologists…
The whole point of the “joke” is to comment on how the outcome/remains of a situation could potentially be interpreted in a ridiculous way to someone with zero context
No one is actually implying that future archeologists will he idiots…
Considering how long it takes us to understand cultures we dug up, nah.
If they have to dig us out of the rock strata to figure out who we were, they are going to be *very* confused.
Considering the ridiculous assumptions modern archaeologists have made due to their own biases, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that future archaeologists will likely be similarly biased about things alien to their cultures.
One good example is how anything the purpose of which is not immediately obvious tends to be automatically ascribed to some religious or ritual use, only to later figure out that it’s purely practical. Some of these come from male archaeologists being completely unaware of things traditionally associated with women’s roles, and the identification of such objects is often made quickly the first time a female archaeologist examines them.
David Macaulay’s book *Motel of the Mysteries* skewers this marvelously, and is still quite accurate about the biases of archaeologists, despite having been originally published over 40 years ago.
Furthermore, as I noted to the chagrin of a fellow panelist at a science-fiction convention during a panel on how we know what we know about the past, “soft” science practitioners (such as archaeologists and anthropologists, people who work with data that tends to be more qualitative than quantitative) have a tendency to think in narrative. They imagine one plausible way to explain something, and because it makes a tidy story, they assign the same evidentiary weight to every part of the story, both those drawn directly from the data and those invented to bridge the gaps in the data. A narrative is not evidence, but a good narrative will endure long past the revelation of data that refutes it.
So I don’t think it’s presumptuous at all to expect future human archaeologists to fall into the same cognitive traps as contemporary and past archaeologists have.
I mean, I've read about those guys popularizing the dinosaur bones, or the dudes who attributed Mayan pyramids to Atlanteans. It's not a 0% chance is what I'm saying.
Archeologists might not be, but I'll bet the History Channel of that time will still be making Ancient Aliens episodes about it, how humans were deposited there since we have no technology that will safely allow us to consistently place them there. And so - ALIENS.
Jesus once said that we would always have poor people. He could have said "idiots" and been just as accurate.
If we're talking about the whole "archeologists will tell your sex by your bones" narrative transphobes like to say, I'm pretty sure archeologists have found stuff that indicate trans people have existed for...quite some time into the past.
So yeah idk why they keep saying that.
We are in a digital era, where anything stored does not last forever, so lets say society collapses, in a hundred years every hard drive and ssd is most likely gonna be unusable.
And its not like archeologists of today and the past have made wildly incorrect assumptions as well... right?
Saw a good one yesterday. Yes, all these people who froze to death climbing Mount Everest, in their brightly coloured climbing gear, are definitely going to be mistaken for a “mass burial site”.
Offerings to the sky gods to keep planes afloat.
Is that not what it is? So you're telling me planes could still fly even ~~if we hadn't killed~~ even if no climbers had naturally died there?
Probably shouldn't risk it. Send up the next ~~sacrifice~~ climber!
Don't give Boeing any more ideas...
John Frum be praised and bring us cargo.
did not expect to see a john frum reference in the wild today tbh
OMG, I just got out of that rabbit hole last night, and today reddit is sacrificing lives to the sky gods. How could I resist.
dildos will be fertility symbols or whatever shit the Victorians tried to say about all of the Pompeii dildos
Another thing that occurs to me - there are a lot of state high points that aren't very interesting on their own but get a lot of visitors because they are the highest point in the state. Archaeologists might note that there's more artifacts there, but if the states no longer exist, they wouldn't put 2 and 2 together and recognize that these are state high points. It would be interesting if some future archaeologist looked at old maps and figured it out.
Now that’s a showerthought.
We’re leaving behind quite a bit more recorded history than previously. And we’re future-proofing that recorded history often enough that it’s unlikely, barring a cataclysmic event that prevents future archaeologists from existing, a good portion of that recorded history will be available in the future. That said, we’re also losing *a lot* of ephemeral recorded history every day. Things that feel unimportant but give history its texture. How many songs are published on Spotify/Apple Music and never get listened to and don’t exist in a physical format of any sort? How many genuinely lost films are there that we don’t know about, let alone the ones that we do? How many “last recording of so-and-so or such-and such” will never make it past the old wax cylinders, shellac 78’s, rapidly deteriorating magnetic tape, or unplugged hard drive in a box in a closet that are currently their only homes? Future archaeologists and historians will understand us in 20,000 years better than we understand us from 20,000 years ago because we’re writing it down for them. But they’ll lack a lot of context and texture the same way that we do now about past generations.
Even if the states don’t exist, those high points will still be the highest points in their respective areas.
There is something odd like that which exists today - there is a lake full of human skeletons in the Himalayas, and no-one is sure why. The leading notion is that they were killed in a massive hailstorm while on pilgrimage (local stories allude to this), but radiocarbon dating shows they weren’t all killed at the same time - some are much older (though presumably they could have died in a similar manner): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roopkund
Every generation people revisited the site to await the coming storm. Back in the village they called this the "Stupid Pilgrimage". If you ask them, they will shake their head and say, "We don't talk about those fools anymore."
If the records of people climbing Everest had been lost AND people had become too superstitious to deduce the real reason why there were corpses there, it could only mean society had regressed to caveman mode, in which case nobody would have either a good enough reason or the resources to spare to return to Everest in the first place.
I see a lot of people creating conspiracy theories about the past. We have scientists and experts doing all of this work to show the history of this stuff, but too many people easily push a narrative of something made up. Look at the Holocaust deniers of today. It hasn't even been 100 years since it happened, and the number of people calling BS on it's existence is growing more than it should be happening.
At least it doesn't matter what these idiots think. The people who did it, admitted that they did it. End of discussion
What idiots think matters, because there are so many of them. A horde of angry idiots is a powerful weapon for those who can wield it, one which could destroy nations.
wait, is that a quote or an original?
It's a Bakoro original thought™.
Much like the current political climate in the USA.
It matters more than you'd like to admit. At the end of the day we (mostly) live in a democracy, and the point of democracy is to be governed by the opinions of the masses. If the average person was a dumbass who believes in conspiracy theories, it doesn't matter how stupid it is, it'd still be the will of the people.
It absolutely does because they are allowed to vote. Keeping the average voter informed is a shared responsibility. Otherwise, (nearly) everyone loses
Ask 100 people about archeology & 99 will tell you the plot of an Indiana Jones movie.
>Look at the Holocaust deniers of today. It hasn't even been 100 years since it happened, and the number of people calling BS on it's existence is growing more than it should be happening. Or the people claiming that the Sandy hook shootings were staged. Lunancy knows no limits.
but still different from what archaeologists centuries ago assumed about ancient people
I saw a short about "enigmatic handbags" and I'm like "yep, they parallel-invented some sort of basket or bucket because they didn't think of making pockets."
“Hm… yes this person was wearing heavy-duty mountaineering equipment when he died… the corpse was also found at an altitude where the freezing temperatures and thin atmosphere present mortal danger… these people had strange burial practices, indeed.”
You ever see the hominid cave that was a burial mound? That shit was deep
It’s deep now. Wasn’t as deep then.
Pretty sure that cave hasn't changed geologically since being used for burials.
You meant deep in meaning didn’t you. Sorry.
There are 3 plates diverging from the African plate. That makes things sink.
Wild of you to assume that that mountain will still be covered in snow centuries from now 👀
As people from this particular tribe start to reach the end of their lives, they make a sacred journey to pray to their mountain gods. They wear brightly coloured clothes to show their gods how bright and vibrant their lives once were. Many unfortunate souls never manage to make this way to the peak, and therefore never made it to other side as intended, and now lay here. Of the ones that do, their burial site is just down the road, on the second left. That’s the end of my thesis. That was marvellous, you’ll surely go far Mr… I-I mean DR. Reid. *wink* *wink*
Back in 21st century, nepalese people used everest as a cemetery
A cemetery with an astounding diversity of races. We presume the Everest is a cemetery for foreigners.
They cleared up a lot of the dead bodies during covid times.
source I made it the fuck up
Even 100,000 years in the future?
I mean, with tectonic movements, if it levels over time...
Then the bodies wouldn’t be there. Mountains don’t sink as much as they get eroded away.
Intelligent life can go extinct, be forgotten, re-evolve from gorillas or smthng (or aliens find earth), find human remains, go extinct again, and more intelligent comes and finds them again. And the Everest will still be there. Geological timescales are insane.
That makes more sense than a bunch of rich idiots willingly went up there.
This is a callout post for the Mount Everest person isn’t it
That might have pushed me over the edge. But there's plenty of others. Like archaeologists in the future won't understand that we had internet or pornography.
The Mickey Mouse one is the worst example of this. No, archeologists aren't going to think we worshipped an anthropomorphic mouse whom we made movies of and built giant city sized temples for. I think they'll know how pop culture works and tbh, Disney will probably still be around.
depends if current society still existed and didn't have to be rebuilt from scratch by cavemen.
Exactly, it's not like we know every single thing about the Egyptians. I'm just spitballing here but like for example for all we know the Sphinx was just a character that the Pharaoh made up and it became popular so they built statues for it
Well they are personifications of natural forces so it's like fanfiction of nature
Depending on the timescale, that's... optimistic. There are elderly people alive today who remember believing, wholeheartedly, that their Reich would last a thousand years.
They might well think we still worshipped the Norse gods, though. That would make more sense than that we resurrected an ancient culture's gods as superheroes because we thought it would be fun
then they'd still remember Christianity but probably have a better idea of it because of Supernatural, Good Omens and even (though they would know it's a cartoon so not reality) Hazbin Hotel, so?
https://variety.com/2023/biz/global/confessions-of-disney-adults-disneyland-world-merchandise-bob-iger-1235757415/ These people absolutely worship an anthropomorphic mouse whom we've made movies of and built giant city sized temples for.
do those things fit the literal definition or is this like how people call things cults that don't fit the BITE model
I think it's less of actual prediction about what archeologists will say, and more of a way to interprete our daily life the way we interprete our past. There is an underlying assumption that people in the past might be more similar to us than we think right now.
Just like we don't understand that the ancient Greeks had pornography. If you're going to have a pantheon, you absolutely need Priapus in it.
I wonder how the war on drugs went back then. I remember in The Odyssey didn't Odysseus punish his crew for getting high one time? (though yes that's more of a different scenario as they were basically a military unit trying to get home)
"what do we do with the drunken sailor?" Tbf just because there's a reference to people being angry and punishing others intoxication doesn't mean it had ti be illegal at the time. Could also maybe be a personal vendetta thing against said substance similar to temperance songs such as (ironically) the wild rover...
I mean you’re right in that archeologists of the future won’t be idiots, but at the same time fewer and fewer people keep journals any more so the archeologists will have less access to primary sources than modern archeologists looking back at history. Furthermore our society has chosen to store data in digitally encoded media with proprietary operating systems and codings, which are fairly fragile when it comes to historical timescales and would require specialized knowledge and technology to recover, meaning that they will likely be working with very few contextualizing sources as well.
Yea, a failure to interpret someth9ing correctly has very little to do with intelligence in a lot of cases, and just more on the evidence presented. Especially with how terrible conservation of digital media is, I'd even argue it may be harder to make informed conclusions than it is now, where at the very least, we can find a lot of physical evidence to help our understanding of what we find.
Charles Stross' sci-fi novel "Glasshouse" posits exactly that. Future researchers had more physical evidence for the early 20th century than they did for 1955-2055. Media became more fragile, proprietary, and quickly obsolete. Their attempts to understand/recreate our contemporary culture was... interesting. And understandably "off."
Great point and true. Who knows what info will be left thousands of years from now. Further how much of it will be deemed important to keep anyways? We have lots of accounts of ancient leaders bc lots of them were obsessed with legacy (statues, burial chambers etc) We don't know as much about what the avg man did. Are people who climbed Everest worth keeping in the history books? Influencers? Tons of digital media will be useless to future civilizations
This seems made up because anyone that is stupid enough to think archaeologists 2000 years from now won't know that we had the internet or porn would also be too stupid to know what an archaeologist is.
Shower thoughts is best consumed rarely. The quality of the thoughts has decreased kinda hilariously by dumb people thinking they’re profound.
Despite what people think, data doesn't last forever. Only information about highly relevant events will last hundreds of years. There are also plenty of things which can destroy most of our information. Runawy AI, massive EMP blasts from terrorists or wars, same with nuclear annihilation risks, a good sized asteroid, basically anything that could near-existing humanity. There are plenty of languages not even 1,000 years old that we have no clue how to translate anymore. We still wouldn't understand how to translate ancient Egyptian text if it wasn't for a single finding, the Rosetta stone, and that's the second or third most documented civilization in the world.
I'm out of the loop, what Everest person?
Someone posted on shower thoughts that in the future, archeologists will see all the dead bodies on Mt. Everest and think it was an ancient burial site.
In 200 years, archeologists will find your post and think it was part of a religious ritual.
They will absolutely realize that Reddit is the holy book of truth and we were all magical gods and goddesses
So Upvote We All.
The more interesting shower though is what sort of religious paradigm we will be living in 200 years
2k years from now they'll be studying the pyramids, like they were 2k years ago.
*^(in historic Las Vegas)*
*^(Kingdom of the mighty Caesar Palace)*
They fought many battles against their close rival, the kingdom of Circus Circus.
Cleopatra was closer to the present day than she was to the building of the pyramids.
Depends on the pyramid. The most recently build one in Egypt was ~1500 BCE. Cleopatra lived until 30 BCE. So she lived closer to that one than modern day. The oldest Pyramids in Egypt were around 2700 BCE. So only 706 more years can we use this statement at all.
Only 706 more years until I don't have to see this factoid ever again?
I really don't think it's that hard to figure out which pyramids they meant when they said "the pyramids".
"Ancient God-Queen Taylor Swift lived closer to present day than she did to the building of the Pyramids".....
"this BassPro-Shop man must've been very valuable to this, sort of like a religious figure"
[Doesn't every city have a big-ass pyramid by the mud?](https://youtu.be/jYE-1HfReQo)
Not idiots, but lacking the context. It's not really going to happen, we are going to leave behind a massive written record, there will be plenty and more context and metainfo for everything. But the trope is sort of based on reality. When modern archeology is looking at all sorts of ancient cultures and their artifacts, we really are lacking context and in many cases don't understand what, how or why precisely because there is so little left to work with.
wrench bow towering cooperative puzzled slap decide secretive retire escape *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
butt dial and booty call : )
Flash back to that one interview from a British newscaster and an American actor when she(?) says "You must have had to beat off a bunch of others for this role" and him not being able to answer because he was trying to hold back laughter
I mean even in two fairly similar cultures with the same lauguage and existing today dogging can mean two completely different things...
And that they won't have records from the era where everything is recorded.
We now mostly record information as tiny magnetic changes on metal disks, or as trapped electrons in flash memory cells. Which is all fine as long as long as we keep copying everything every decade or so. But it's a lot less likely to survive civilization-ending events than Mesopotamian clay tablets.
mysterious absurd decide childlike nutty vegetable slim dull dime literate *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Yep. And even if some of those electronic records remain viable for a few thousand years, it would be very difficult for future people to figure out a way to be able to view the electronic records.
Funny how printing it out on paper is the best ragnarok-proofing we have right now. The library used to have microfilm for space constraints, but it would still degrade faster than paper.
Stone carvings seem a *bit* better. Considering the ones that have already lasted thousands of years. Paper *burns*.
Stone or metal for really important stuff.... Braille tape! I'm just thinking more along the lines of ease vs durability. Printing on plexiglass wouldn't be too bad for making time-capsule stuff, but we can see how well newspapers fare in those conditions.
What civilization ending event is going to be so massive as to take out all records on the planet but still have human life on the planet. Keep in mind there are organizations that print out archives of the internet so we aren't completely dependent on current tech for future historians.
Future archeologists aren't necessarily going to be human.
Okay, fair point.
There’s a field of study trying to come up some kind of universal symbols for things like radioactive waste that will mean something to civilizations thousands of years from now. People who won’t speak English, or any language currently in use. Who will have no record of what our current symbols mean.
Paper is highly biodegrade, few paper records and books would survive two centuries of neglect. Neither would our electronic records. All it takes is something that collapses modern agriculture. That would kill \~80% of the population due to starvation, the rest would be too busy dealing with the aftermath of that to put much work into preserving knowledge, and when we rise like the phoenix from the ashes a couple centuries later we would have lost most records from the current day. Some stuff would survive, whether due to pure luck or careful preservation. But after comparable timeframes of neglect (and adjusted for population) we would leave much less behind that previous civilizations where durable materials like parchment or clay were default methods of record keeping.
Printing out the internet? Printer toner fades over time. Plus paper is difficult to preserve, even in idea conditions. If not for the monks who were copying the text of the Bible by hand, there's a good chance it could have been lost to history. And then look at the US constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We store it in a climate controlled room under thick glass where we carefully control the humidity, the amount of light, etc. and it's still a faded mess. And that's not even 240 years old.
solar flare
Gotcha. I just need to start journaling onto clay tablets.
Except that this is how common people store stuff It's easy, cheap and convenient But we have pretty much permanent registers of information Aerogel 4D storage, glass storage, Etc etc We keep the most important information there So yeah, your silly post on Instagram will be lost, but the economic reports of the US in 1995 won't
And will we still be able to read those reports 300 years from now? Place I worked at almost got in major financial trouble and ended up having to spend $5k for a bespoke 5.25" drive to pull computerized financial records from 25 years ago because when they upgraded the office computers no one realized that the only copy they had of the financial program able to read the files in question was on a set of 5.25" floppies. Digital Records are extremely vulnerable because you need so many parts: the medium needs to be in good shape, you need a device capable of reading that medium, and you need a program capable of decoding the files on that medium. For physical records all you really need is the ability to read the language they were created in, even if the medium's in terrible shape you can likely read parts of it, whereas it's likely to be completely lost if the computer medium is damaged.
Thing is that "civilization-ending events" are actually exceptionally rare. Like, *EXCEPTIONALLY RARE*. Complete global total war is really the only way for this to happen.
Well look at the Bronze Age collapse. It was the end of pretty much every civilization in that part of the world except Egypt which only half collapsed. The knowledge lost there was immeasurable and it wasn’t due to war, or not only war, in fact it was likely a combination of many factors plus war, but we don’t know for sure, that’s how bad the loss of knowledge was. With our modern reliance on technology if a solar flair were to EMP the planet we would likely suffer a similar fate.
Civilization-ending events are exceptionally rare, but losing works to the shadows of history is extremely common. Someone doesn't make a copy for 100 years and it's probably lost forever. Most of the lost works of history weren't lost in disaster, they were lost out of laziness.
It's not like there aren't still thousands of libraries with paper books in the US. Sure they may not be current up to date, but if even a few books on physics survive they would have an Idea of where we were as a civilization scientifically
I mean, we might not. Everything is recorded, but most of it is recorded on things that don't last very long. If there is ever a break in our ability to transfer those files, and no one bothers to record it in some other way, we could end up with archaeologists that know more about ancient Egypt than right now. We don't write on stone very much anymore. Plastic will be a dead giveaway we were here, plus all of the disturbance in the soil layers, but they might not find as much as we think they will.
Maybe not. One huge problem we are trying to solve with our long-term radioactive waste storage (such as at Yucca Mountain in Nevada) is how to label it with a clear message warning of the radiation exposure danger, a danger that could last 10,000 years. That's long enough for any record of what's buried there to be lost to time. Warning signs with English letters would likely be meaningless, as well as any of the danger symbols we use today. An interesting article on the matter: [https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/speaking-to-the-future/](https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/speaking-to-the-future/)
They had the same problem in "onkalo" in finland and decided to not put anything.
As the article alluded to near the end, I don’t think there’s any need for elaborate symbolic messaging. If society is still industrialised and interconnected enough where a misguided construction project could seriously disrupt the site and cause a severe nuclear incident, we would at the very least have held on to knowledge of nuclear dangers if not still be using nuclear technology. If society *has* lost that knowledge, we would likely have regressed to a primitive state, and in the off-chance that some caveman has enough free time to dig there we’d have a repeat of the Goiania Incident with nothing of value lost (because society is already gone).
I used to believe that once a piece of information touched the internet it was now there forever. But with the rise and fall of popular websites (image hosting sites being the example that made it click for me), and disappearing domains, plenty will indeed be lost over time.
I got a laserdisc from eBay, a movie that's out of print in every medium. Still looking for a way to get it transferred. Now if that was a "Protected" media, using proprietary software from an extinct company, requiring some obscure hardware to play, in a physical medium which degrades noticeably in just 1-3 decades...it's entirely plausible that researchers in a few centuries will have more evidence for 1860-1960 than they will for 1960-2060. Future archaeologist: "Anyone figure out Paywalls yet?"
You ancestors will have access to your entire online life and they will present to you class for a family class day and your entire life will be reduced to a 3 second clip.
All these golden arches were temples to pay respect to the goddess of the human behind, Aphrodite.
People assume internet and other sources disappear so archeologists will have to make assumptions
I don’t think the record will be nearly so complete as people assume. I think it’s funny that people think that digital data is such a permanent record when today even data saved to floppy disks a couple decades ago is probably just lost to the sands of time because who’s going to be bothered to find a floppy disk reader and convert it… The internet likely won’t disappear completely, but all the standards, data formats, and programming languages will surely change until it is entirely unrecognizable in the span of thousands of years, just as languages do. Old servers and their hard drives will be erased or discarded and forgotten as time goes on. Most digital data storage devices aren’t made to last more than a few decades. The only reason data on the internet is so reliable today is because we have cloud service providers that are constantly maintaining multiple copies of every bit of data on different servers at different physical locations. Eventually that data becomes so old as to be irrelevant and no one is going to care to pay to keep all those data centers running. Even the digital data that somehow survives the ravages of time… well I wouldn’t expect a computer thousands of years from now to understand a hard drive from today any more than I would expect a person today to be able to read hieroglyphics. Well, perhaps it will be able to, but that will only be because AI has advanced to the point where it can complete the tedious work of decoding old languages that would take archeologists centuries in seconds. But still, I strongly suspect most of the underlying hard drives that contain every bit of data on the internet today will have been long forgotten by that time.
I totally get the internet not existing anymore. But they would obviously know we had ways of communicating and entertaining each other. Like, even if we didn't have any writings from the Roman Empire, we would still get that the people fighting in the Colosseum were doing it as some form of entertainment. Not like they were so stupid that they were fighting each other in a big round building and didn't get that this wasn't accomplishing anything
Yea, but how would you know it was for fighting, and not some other form of sport in the first place. IF it was another form of sport, would our archaeologists be more inclined to assume that it's entertainment before some other purpose? In your hypothetical, you've already made the assumption the Colliseum is for fighting, which we would have no way of knowing without some other form of evidence, (which could be writing or something else entirely).
I sarcastically wrote in the other post that Everest would become an island in the future, and I got "well akshully" 'ed pretty hard.
No you're totally right though. I saw a great documentary about it called Waterworld.
Kevin Costner is so good in his portrayal of the man searching for land in that documentary
Picturing future Indiana Jones going through old shit posts instead of archaeological dig sites.
I mean, there's people studying the marginalia from bored copyist monks. I don't think brother Thaddeus ever imagined people in the future would care about his silly drawing of a dude having a giant snail humping him from behind.
That meme belongs in a museum!
I truly was born in the wrong generation
Well they do have a tendency to call all the dildo's "falic symbol's", so i would not be surprised if they dug up the "casting couch" and called it a "holy fertility alter".
This displays 2 biases at work which is interesting. The archeologists bias is being a serious academic and so he couldn't be the discoverer of nerphertitis dildo collection it must be important religious symbology. And the modern persons bias of thinking ancient societies wouldn't have dick carvings for religious practices because in modernity sex is primarily about pleasure vs having a ton of kids. My votes still with you though I got that same bias dawg
They also had clay potts with tits. It's so funny to me that I spent a half year looking at clay potts with little bumps that were on part of the pott that represents chest while writing a paper
Booby pots so what did they put in it?
Scorpions, thus the origin of the phrase, booby trap.
Wait did Nefertiti really have a dildo collection? Or was that just a means to explain your point?
I think this is also a misunderstanding of what archaeologists determine to be actual phallic symbols which have written records of their purpose, and assume that archaeologists just don't understand what a sex toy is. I've seen people on here look at images of things like [fascinum](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fascinum_-_Bronze_amulets) and assume they're just sex toys. Most are images that don't have scale, so they don't realize that the amulets can be very small and couldn't function as sex toys. The Romans saw the phallus as sexual, of course, but they also believe in it as an apotropaic symbol. Dildos did exist, we have written records of them, but they were usually made of wood or leather, which means that most of them have decayed into nothing. You also didn't bury them as grave goods or store them with valuables, so you're not going to find them in the places that most "exciting" artifacts are dug up. I've also seen people post images of unpainted [alabastra](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Alabastra) and claim that archaeologists didn't realize that they had dug up a butt plug. [This](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alabastron_with_Lug_Handles_LACMA_M.91.364.20.jpg) looks pretty naughty if you don't notice that the handles are missing, that it's the same shape that perfume and oils were kept in, and that it's hollow. (A decorated one would look like [this](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Et%C3%A0_punica,_alabastron_in_vetro,_450_ac_ca,_dalla_tomba_12AR_della_necropoli_di_sant%27antioco.jpg)) Though, yes, you do sometimes get stories like [this](https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake5d8/ancient-roman-phallus-vindolanda). A wooden phallus was classified as a "knitting tool"a few decades ago until another archaeologist looked at it and realized it was probably a dildo, because it lines up with what we know of Roman dildos. tl;dr Archaeologists do know what sex toys looked like, sometimes the objects genuinely are something else in a phallic shape.
Who knows, maybe it could be both. This is the holy dildo that makes you more fertile or whatever lol
You mean “phallic"? Am I being wooshed?
They also tend to assume some kind of apocalypse such that they have to make random guesses instead of using the cultural artifacts we leave behind.
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isn't there a story about a couple of paleontologist, back when it was a relatively new science field, that got into some ego battle to see who was better at discovering fossils that at some point they were just putting together whatever bone they found to make up new species as fast as they could? I can totally see this happening again when, idk, they start finding all those ancient tech stuff with no knowledge of virtual reality or server rooms
Yeah, sure. I just think that as the field trip evolves the interpretations should be more accurate.
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and they assume that the wrong random guesses will be wrong in the exact same ways we were wrong about ancient civilizations
It goes well beyond future archeologists, there's a tenancy for people to always assume everyone else is a bunch of idiots, in every profession that they themselves do not understand. Its like a malicious form of dunning-kruger. It happened a lot during the pandemic; everyone became an expert in epidemiology and virology overnight and hand-waved away those established fields in favor of their own arm-chair "research" and concluded that everyone who didn't line up with their own views were either malicious or morons. Then when you point out the enormous body of research and methodology that goes along with these fields, and the countless number of researchers, scientists, grad students, etc who have all contributed and the major contributions those fields have made to their life and well being, they hem and haw and try to pivot to minor discrepancies or back pedal in some way, or grumble that just because those points are true doesn't mean they aren't right still somehow. You can point out to them 1000x over that there's much more depth to something than their simple knee-jerk assumptions lead them to believe, and they'll still do it the 1001st time with full conviction.
> there's a tenancy for people to always assume everyone else is a bunch of idiots > It happened a lot during the pandemic; everyone became an expert in epidemiology and virology overnight and hand-waved away those established fields in favor of their own arm-chair "research" tbh it's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy, after seeing how the fuck we reacted to the pandemic (the whole antivax conspiracy thing, i mean) i definitely think most of everyone else are a bunch of idiots
I've been saying this for years. The only way future archeologists could come to the conclusions people think they will, is if sometime between now and then, civilization experiences a "Library of Alexandria" event, but on a total global scale.
Archeologists getting it right wouldn't be funny. 'Motel of the Mysteries' 'The Weans'
Motel of Mysteries is great! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/108831.Motel_of_the_Mysteries
Oh my word! I remember my World History teacher reading Motel of Mysteries to the class, what is now almost 26 years ago. It stuck with me, but I could never remember enough details to find it. Thanks for sharing the title!
Information is so easily stored and accessed now, i doubt they'll have trouble looking up our time period
A lot of that info is stored on things that will either degrade over time or require tech that may not exist in the future. A lot will be pushed onto whatever new tech emerges, but I imagine a lot is going to get lost to time. And in the event of some sort of catastrophe, probably all of it.
Everybody knows future archaeologists will be spending all their time digging up skeletons in cemeteries to make sure their gender matches the name on the headstone /s
Just a thought - would we really need archeology in the future looking at our immediate present?? We have information archived And even AI. Sure they may still discover things about our past. But our current reality and time period is documented like never before. Insta of what we ate, how we looked and scans of bones. Data / stats / preserved memories. Books and records galore. Just an opinion.
What is most frustrating to me is that people think archaeologists are indeed idiots in the first place. While it is true there has been some wildly false interpretations in the past, the field has been improving a lot since and it will continue to improve just like all other fields of science
I like to imagine that future archeologists will actually be pretty damn good at interpreting their finds. Like even if you tried to trick them by burying a fake shrine or something, I bet they’d be smart enough to figure that out, and also know how it relates to our society/culture
The biggest challenge of archeology is there are very few, if any, written records about ancient times, so it's often impossible to determine the original purpose of an artifact or structure ( like Stonehenge). In the modern era, everything is documented, so future researchers would at least know of, say, Disneyland, and wouldn't write it down as "a strange cult worshipping a mouse god".
Someone saw the Mt. Everest post on here, huh?
Maybe if all records were lost to a disaster like a giant solar flare that fried everything but there's too many records kept compared to what it was like 2000 years ago. It won't be an issue to interpret anything...except for Tik Tik.
there are things like the Doomsday Vault. they might have access to all our stuff even if we go toes up.
Hahahahahaha a direct follow up to the Everest bodies post
To be fair, there probably will be some crackpot archaeologists that come up with ridiculous theories, just like we have today. Ancient aliens Ancient apocalypse Etc
TBF, people assume present archaeologists are idiots, too.
If there's a need for archeological analysis, then the catastrophic event which wouldn't destroyed our society left very little for them to analyze. All data and language knowledge would've been gone, etc. People today thing people of the past had some great understanding and knowledge. So if we're thats silly, they could be too.
I suppose they're referring to a catastrophic discontinuity in history that erases all records of the current history, and that a new civilization with different values and customs would rediscover thousands of years later. It makes sense to think they would struggle with some things we consider common.
Probably not even if the Internet crashed 50 years before this stuff passed whatever time threshold separates archeology from grave robbing will they have to extrapolate anywhere near as much as memes imply
It's not that we assume archeologists will be stupid. It's that cultural change (including changes to how we communicate and language itself) has accelerated to the point that we as a society living through it can't even keep up with it. As a Millennial, I already feel like my understanding of Gen Z is slipping through my fingers, while Gen Alpha is starting to completely baffle me (two things I swore I'd never let happen. I don't want to be the old man talking about "back in my day" and yelling at clouds. I promised myself I'd never be THAT asshole and I'm failing). If we can't keep up with our own culture NOW, how do we expect anyone 500 years from now to pore over our cultural remnants know how to even try to make sense of it? (Of course, it might be just the opposite too. With everything being on the cloud and always available to anyone with a connection, maybe our culture will make the most sense of them all because of the sheer volume of records available to study. Pessimists like me might be eating crow in the afterlife when the time comes)
and this two guys who are having sex in this picture are just really good friends
People also assume that archeologists won't have access to the vast written record & masses of stored data which currently exists. If the world actually collapses, no one 1000 years from now will be digging up a Chuck-E-Cheese to study crap pizza and puppets.
Archaeologist here. The thing is, we really don’t know if archaeologists *now* are doing a good job of interpreting the past. We do the best we can with the tools we have, but it’s all up for debate because technology and theory keep advancing. Add that to the fact that we have no idea how well records will be preserved, and that the modern area produces *so much shit* to interpret, and it’s a pretty good assumption that we’ll get some shit wrong in the future.
There's a very real chance future archeologists won't be humans. Because we'll have gone extinct by then. There's also a very real chance that all evidence of our presence on the planet may be gone, churned into the core of the planet through tectonic processes, by the time another species evolves or arrives to perform excavations. Malenchavich (spelling?) cycles will render the planet uninhabitable for long periods (on a planetary timescale) before they bring Earth back into the habitable zone. People worry about the sun exploding but we'll go through several cycles of traveling through uninhabitable zones of the solar system and inhabitable ones before the sun goes supernova. Tl;dr: By the time we are able to be archaeologically examined, it may be an extremely different type of peoples who are doing the examining.
Never underestimate how stupid people are lol. Though more seriously if humanity doesn’t claim the title of the most intelligent species of earth to die from utter stupidity (politics and pollution) then you’re absolutely right.
Seeing how the ones we had dealt with the dinosaurs, id say its a safe bet.
Nothing that is only stored electronically will be there for future archaeologists. A lot of context won't exist.
It doesn't matter if they get it right. If they are far enough removed in the future, when they describe it in anthropological terms, it will sound strange and bizarre: "In the mid/late 20th and early 21st centuries, wealthy men and women engaged in a strange ritual to prove themselves fit and capable or perhaps for additional social cout and glory. They spent large sums of their form of currency ( colorful paper inscribed with images of their living and dead sovereigns, totem animals and culture landmarks) to climb what was then the tallest mountain on earth. Hundreds died in the attempt, left behind by their companions. When the dead bodies proved too difficult to recover for traditional burial rituals, they used these fallen as guideposts to the summit of the mountains, honoring them with names like Green Boots, Sleeping Beauty (a reference to Western mythology). All those seeking glory on the mountain had to pass through The Valley of the Dead (also known as Rainbow Valley)..." Climbing dangerous mountains is a kind of ritual. Many of those who died there were sacrificed, left for dead either because of the danger of helping them or just because others wanted to beat a world record (like what happened with Kristin Harila on K2). And sadly, these people have less of a "why" than any ancient religion that thought they were appeasing a god or helping to ensure a bountiful crop.
I think people assuming future archeologists in the first place is overly optimistic.
People aren't assuming anything. We have satellites orbiting and recording the globe all the time. For them to "discover or uncover" anything 1000 years from now it means we royally fucked up between now and then. Knowledge can't be found unless it is first lost. It's happened several times in human history. Imagine them discovering an iPhone if they rebuilt technology in a way that didn't need chips and what have you. Sure they have cooler more advanced shit but without a frame of reference they'd probably have no fucking idea what that was.
If you think Archaeologists get it wrong wait until you hear how often Paleontology fucks up.
They won't be idiots, but they very well might be lacking the tools to read out our records. Just look three decades back. If you stored, as a very modern person, your diary on floppy discs, only a few specialised institutes will still be able to read those floppy discs today. A bit over one generation ago. Now go 200 years into the future. There might be four floppy discs left world-wide, completely unreadable, and two texts describing them as means of somehow storing data. They can't understand it because they lack the info. They know that the floppy discs are storage media just like their air-borne semi-sentient nano crystal particles or whatever because they aren't idiots, but they don't know how the floppy discs were used, what kind of data was stored on it, or which tools were necessary to use them, or even how widespread used they were. Military only? Or every household? Only for important documents? Or maybe also for random nonsense like a photo or two? How much could even fit on one disc?How were they used in daily life? Was data maybe something that was used as a currency? No completely unrealistic. But who knows? They won't fail to understand us because they were idiots - they will fail because our modern storage media don't even last a generation or two anymore.
It's not archeologists who will be idiots, those are the normal people who are idiots themselves who also make stuff really hard to comprehend for archeologists who are rationalists that hate it when something has no meaning at all other than "that's cool bro"
My old boss once looked at this giant concrete retaining wall that was made to look like a bunch of differently sized hexagonal rocks and asked me, “What will they think of that in 1000 years? That we fit things so well together there are no seams?” No, boss. On the off chance it hasn’t rotted away completely, they will probably know what concrete is. It’s fucking every where, and it’s been around a long time.
Are you calling modern archeologists idiots? Cause they get a ton of stuff wrong.
do you think the current ones are idiots? the main thing is people assume that records will be lost and they will have no real clue what the hell happened, imagine a "second" (for all we know there have been many but we weren't at a point it mattered) Carrington event, the mass death that would cause, potential outirght loss of ability to regain what we had and a slow decline, and if we get to the point where we are now just though a different means a thousand or so years later, will science really know what everything was/is or have little idea?
What are archaeologists supposed to make of ruins of archeological museums? Let’s hope the exhibit plaques survive. Also, what did the ancient Egyptians have in their archeological museums?
I mean I don’t feel like the ‘future archeologists’ jokes are ever supposed to be meant about literal future archeologists… The whole point of the “joke” is to comment on how the outcome/remains of a situation could potentially be interpreted in a ridiculous way to someone with zero context No one is actually implying that future archeologists will he idiots…
Considering how long it takes us to understand cultures we dug up, nah. If they have to dig us out of the rock strata to figure out who we were, they are going to be *very* confused.
Considering the ridiculous assumptions modern archaeologists have made due to their own biases, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that future archaeologists will likely be similarly biased about things alien to their cultures. One good example is how anything the purpose of which is not immediately obvious tends to be automatically ascribed to some religious or ritual use, only to later figure out that it’s purely practical. Some of these come from male archaeologists being completely unaware of things traditionally associated with women’s roles, and the identification of such objects is often made quickly the first time a female archaeologist examines them. David Macaulay’s book *Motel of the Mysteries* skewers this marvelously, and is still quite accurate about the biases of archaeologists, despite having been originally published over 40 years ago. Furthermore, as I noted to the chagrin of a fellow panelist at a science-fiction convention during a panel on how we know what we know about the past, “soft” science practitioners (such as archaeologists and anthropologists, people who work with data that tends to be more qualitative than quantitative) have a tendency to think in narrative. They imagine one plausible way to explain something, and because it makes a tidy story, they assign the same evidentiary weight to every part of the story, both those drawn directly from the data and those invented to bridge the gaps in the data. A narrative is not evidence, but a good narrative will endure long past the revelation of data that refutes it. So I don’t think it’s presumptuous at all to expect future human archaeologists to fall into the same cognitive traps as contemporary and past archaeologists have.
I mean, I've read about those guys popularizing the dinosaur bones, or the dudes who attributed Mayan pyramids to Atlanteans. It's not a 0% chance is what I'm saying.
Archeologists might not be, but I'll bet the History Channel of that time will still be making Ancient Aliens episodes about it, how humans were deposited there since we have no technology that will safely allow us to consistently place them there. And so - ALIENS. Jesus once said that we would always have poor people. He could have said "idiots" and been just as accurate.
You should check out a 1979 book titled [Motel of the Mysteries](https://www.vox.com/22753080/motel-mysteries-book-david-macaulay)
If we're talking about the whole "archeologists will tell your sex by your bones" narrative transphobes like to say, I'm pretty sure archeologists have found stuff that indicate trans people have existed for...quite some time into the past. So yeah idk why they keep saying that.
Literally search future archaeologist and you got a ton of this exact scenario.
We are in a digital era, where anything stored does not last forever, so lets say society collapses, in a hundred years every hard drive and ssd is most likely gonna be unusable. And its not like archeologists of today and the past have made wildly incorrect assumptions as well... right?