Archaeology interlude:

[applegrove]

This is the “Lady with the Hood.” It is 28,000 years old & perhaps the earliest depiction of a human face. Made from mammoth ivory, its delicate modelling & drapery of the hood belie the idea palaeolithic people were artistically crude. It is a beautiful piece.

🏛️📷 National Archaeological Museum🇫🇷

— Carausius (@carausius286.bsky.social) 2026-05-25T11:59:43.996Z

[surfered]

1. You would think they wouldn't have had the free time. Amazing.

Curious….where was it found?

[applegrove]

2. I don't know. I think some foragers did have some free time.

That is the latest I've read.

[bluedigger]

3. Hunter gatherer societies have significantly more free time than we do.

It's all dancing and singing when you aren't hunting for supper.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. I have read that modern hunter-gatherer societies spend about 20 hr/wk seeking and processing sustenance ...

much of the rest of the time is devoted to family and tribe -- celebrations, rituals, songs, gossip.

Agricultural societies devote more time to meeting basic needs during the growing and harvesting seasons, but have plenty of time to kill in the winter, assuming the stored food doesn't run out. That's when all the woodcarving, needlework, etc. takes place, and it provides contact between family and tribal members when they all can gather around a warm fire and swap stories.

[surfered]

6. You would think they spent all their time just trying to survive.

[wnylib]

7. Once adapted to their environment, they know how to

exploit resources with pretty good skill. But they do have greater periods of struggling to survive during harsher than usual winters, or serious drought conditions. Under such conditions, they sometimes need to migrate and adapt to new environments, temporarily or permanently.

But when things are going well, they have leisure time for family and communal events once basic necessities are met.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. In very bad times, they do. But on average, they don't need to exhaust themselves just to stay alive.

If food is short and women are starving and malnourished, they can't carry a pregnancy to term, and often can't even conceive. This is how Nature keeps the population from increasing and making things worse. Population declines in hard times, slowly recovers when abundance returns. Harsh, but effective.

[PJMcK]

5. My wife volunteered at a dig in Panama this past winter

We bought a modest apartment on the Pacific coast of Panama about an hour and a half from Panama City. She found a dig about another hour and a half along the Trans American Route One.

During her tenure, they found golden artifacts from pre-Colombian times, 1,200 years ago!

Many archeologists never find gold during their careers but my “tiny dancer” scored! I couldn’t be more proud.

[wnylib]

8. What a great experience for her.

I volunteered on a dig once in northwestern PA. No gold, but nobody expected to find any given the local history and prehistory.

The dig took place on national forest land in cooperation with the Archeology Institute of Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA. At the time, the director of the Institute was Dr. James Adovasio, the archeologist who had excavated the Meadowcroft Rock Shelter near Pittsburgh, where human occupation dates went back 14,000 years and farther, upending Clovis dates for the first humans in North America.

The excavation was mandatory field experience for Mercyhurst archeology students. The forest service and Mercyhurst allowed volunteers from the general public to join them.

Nothing significant was found on that dig
A few years earlier, they had uncovered artifacts from an extinct Iroquoian tribe, the Eriez, who had been defeated and dispersed by the Seneca in the early 1600s. At deeper levels, they also found some artifacts of the ancient Hopewell Culture going back almost 2000 years.

But, although nothing like that was found at the dig that I volunteered for, the experience was a chance for me to see how a dig gets set up and worked. I met other volunteers, like a mother and daughter who had volunteered at the huge Cahokia site in Illinois. While we waited for the students to get set up, a forest ranger took the volunteers on a tour of the area to show us trees planted on waterways by Native Americans to prevent erosion of the banks and keep the waterways open as "highways" for travel.

I also had the chance to meet with some archeology faculty and staff and discuss alternate theories of when and how the first people arrived in North America since the Clovis theory was being challenged by other sites besides Meadowcroft.

[hunter]

10. Wikipedia article here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_of_Brassempouy

The Venus of Brassempouy (French: la Dame de Brassempouy, [la dam də bʁasɛ̃pwi], meaning "Lady of Brassempouy", or Dame à la Capuche, "Lady with the Hood&quot is a fragmentary ivory figurine from the Upper Palaeolithic, apparently broken from a larger figure at some time unknown. It was discovered in a cave at Brassempouy, France in 1894.[1] About 25,000 years old, it is one of the earliest known realistic representations of a human face.