this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Science Memes

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GLAMour (mander.xyz)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 56 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Same vibes as this video with Adam Savage. Apparently this piece of armour was a big mystery with tons of different drawings etc trying to place it as horse armour when Adam almost immediately correctly identifies it when first looking at it.

This is the power of diverse experience where experts can have a blind spot that's easily solved by others that have a different perspective.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Tldw crotch protector, and the historians did know that.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Well it took them 50 years to figure out, whereas Adam guessed it immediately.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Didn't they confirm it after 50 years? They had suspicions in different directions, including crotch armor?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Yeah this is the key point in all of this. You can speculate forever, until you can confirm it your confidence will be very low.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Yeah historians and archeologists generally have about a dozen ideas and wont discount or accept them till enough data has been collected. A prime example are those weird Roman dodecahedrons, where it could be everthing from a knitting instrument to a niche tool to something as simple as a nick nack. Though I think the knitting example is actually discounted because the type of knitting that was done with it was either not common enough to justify a specialized tool or not invented yet.

Anyways archeology is fun cause you can sometimes find new ways an artifact was used, like for example a helmet can be used as a helmet, a pisspot, or a bowl. This means we sometiems have no clue what an artifact was used for, unless they say fertility ritual then we know exactly what it was used for.