How Did Ancient Humans Actually Beat Boredom?

You are holding more entertainment than anyone in history, and you are still bored. Fourteen thousand years ago, someone in a cave in southern France sat down with a piece of bone, cut it into a disc, drilled a hole through the middle, carved a chamois on each side and threaded a string through it. Twist, pull, and the animal moves. A little animation made of bone and string. This video follows that disc, then asks where anyone found the time. It puts the disc next to what anthropologists have actually recorded: how many hours went into getting food at Dobe in 1964, how the Agta split their daylight, who was sitting nearby when they rested, what people talked about by firelight among the Ju/'hoansi in 1974, and a bark-disc gambling game among the Hadza that could eat a man's hunting gear. Then it comes back to your evening, and to the child tugging at your sleeve who wants to see the animal move again. The archaeology and the ethnography are two different kinds of evidence, and the video says which is which every time. The people in the studies were observed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, not in a cave fourteen thousand years ago. CHAPTERS 0:00 Everything to watch, still bored 0:25 The animal on the bone 3:28 Where did they find the time? 5:30 Around the fire 8:09 What an afternoon can cost 10:14 The disc we started with REFERENCES Needham A et al. (2019). Spinning in Circles: the Production and Function of Upper Palaeolithic Rondelles. EXARC Journal 2019/3. https://exarc.net/issue-2019-3/at/spi... Lee RB (1968). What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources. In: Lee RB, DeVore I (eds) Man the Hunter. https://www.thetedkarchive.com/librar... Dyble M, Thorley J, Page AE, Smith D, Migliano AB (2019). Engagement in agricultural work is associated with reduced leisure time among Agta hunter-gatherers. Nature Human Behaviour 3:792-796. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-06... Wiessner PW (2014). Embers of society: Firelight talk among the Ju/'hoansi Bushmen. PNAS 111(39):14027-14035. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1404212111 Lewis J (2019). Sharing pleasures to share rare things: hunter-gatherers' dual distribution systems in Africa. In: Lavi N, Friesem DE (eds) Towards a Broader View of Hunter-Gatherer Sharing, ch. 7. McDonald Institute. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint... Conard NJ, Malina M, Münzel SC (2009). New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany. Nature 460:737-740. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature08169 DISCLAIMER The cave scenes, the person carving the disc and the child asking for it again are reconstructions drawn to illustrate the narration. The replica discs, the spinning test and the spindle test are experiments from 2017; the original use of the ancient discs is still debated. The hours, the conversations and the bark-disc game come from living communities, not from ancient people, and the video says so. Every drawing in this video was made for it. Narration is synthesized speech. #ancienthumans #prehistory #huntergatherers #boredom