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Comment by qubex | Hacker News Reader

Of course they slept on grass to begin with (outdoors)... and of course, once they settled, they would reproduce the same arrangement in a proto-domestic setting.

Also: people at some point discovered they could lay down floors, because it felt good underfoot. Then they realised that floors would be great to have in more places. Then somebody came up with the idea of making mobile pieces of floor and strapping them to the underside of your feet. And so, sandals and footwear were born.

Archeological records are good, but deduction will get you a surprisingly long way.

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The issue with this kind of reasoning is that without any kind of archeological proof to back your hypothesis what you end up with is informed guessing based more on ones knowledge and experience than on scientific facts.

For example, I could formulate a completely different hypothesis about how footwear appeared:

  - doing any kind of activity on rough terrain while barefoot increases the risk of injury, like cuts or punctures

  - any kind of wound could easily infect and lead to death

  - the easiest would be to try and protect my feet wrapping something like leaves, animal skins, etc around my feet

  - this is a good solution but this footwear isn't very resilient, hmm, maybe tree bark would work better, it's still flexible but should be more resilient.

  - hmm, what else could I do that is better than tree bark, maybe some dried animal skin would be even better

  - and so on...

Is this hypothesis better than yours? I don't know without proof, and the interesting part is that they could both easily be true in completely different contexts: different parts of the world, different cultures, different climatic conditions, etc.

So yeah deduction and induction can get you very far but when we're missing so many facts on which to base our hypothesis you can easily get very far in a very wrong direction. This is why I think archeology is fun.

EDIT: The wikipedia page on footwear also contains a few lines that add another interesting dimension:

> Some ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and Greece however saw no practical need for footwear due to convenient climatic and landscape situations and used shoes primarily as ornaments and insignia of power.

Fair enough, good points, but you’ll find that habitually unshod people have surprisingly thick (and yet still perfectly sensitive!) soles that are very resilient to puncture and yet do not experience pain when walking over terrain that makes us grimace. That doesn’t pertain to all of your hypotheses, and even those it does apply to are not ruled out by it, so I concede you could be correct, as could I. The real question is: which these(s) can be proven. That’s what’s interesting about this article: that they have found archeological evidence that supports an... I’m struggling not to use ‘obvious’ because I’ve been chided for using it... but a... very plausible hypothesis.

The article makes it pretty clear that they have the evidence to support their hypothesis about the history of bedding, so there's no question about that part :).

My point was more focused on your example about footwear and on the fact that just using deduction or other reasoning techniques without starting from real archeological proof can easily lead one astray.

So I'm not trying to compete on which hypothesis about footwear is better I just gave that example in support of the point I just mentioned above.

It's easy to say a technology should have been obvious in hindsight, but...grass beds? It would be more surprising to me if humans 200,000 years ago hadn't hit on that. Remember these are modern humans from an evolutionary point of view, as intelligent as us or close.

Birds make nests, after all. You could convince me bears or apes make beds of grass, too. It's cool to find evidence that humans did it, just not surprising.

>You could convince me bears or apes make beds of grass, too

Apes build trees beds: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2012/04...

For someone congratulating themselves on their deductive skills, coming up with shoes = "portable floors" instead of just simple protection isn't a very impressive display of deductive reasoning.

Then you go on to be skeptical of other theories, but not your own convoluted, arbitrary theory because it presumably has something going for it that the others do not: you came up with it.

This just isn't the paragon of deduction and reasoning that you think it is. Though the self-aggrandizing spirit of your posts is a great show of how ideas traffic on social media where we confuse our ability to come up with something as something that must then contain some sort of axiomatic truth.

With an insight like "shoes = portable floors", you must think a babbling six-year-old is a real oracle of wisdom.

Is making such deductions not a sub-form of anthropomorphism, though? (To whatever extent humans 200k years ago were different than us, I suppose.)

> Modern psychologists generally characterize anthropomorphism as a cognitive bias. That is, anthropomorphism is a cognitive process by which people use their schemas about other humans as a basis for inferring the properties of non-human entities in order to make efficient judgements about the environment, even if those inferences are not always accurate.

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

Except I’m making considerations about fellow humans, not non-human entities. Anthropomorphism doesn’t apply here (unless you subscribe to Jaynes’ surprisingly compelling hypothesis set forth in The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind which is controversial, fringe, supported by strangely compelling but also very circumstantial evidence, and hard to justify neurologically, that is).

I suppose I could be accused of a bunch of other fallacies, and those would be fair game.

If only the paleoanthropologists at the University of Witwatersrand had consulted you first they could have saved all this time!

(Don't say "of course" to experts. It's patronizing, and there's a good chance what is obvious to you is actually wrong.)

Even when the obvious thing is right, there's a difference between an obvious conclusion arrived at by guessing and an obvious thing arrived at by scientific inquiry. The former is highly subject to bias, and indistinguishable from the wrong and obvious guess that accompanied it; the latter is less subject to bias, and can be distinguished from its wrong variant.

(To put it maybe more pithily, someone who believes an obvious thing has given me no new information, but someone who proves an obvious thing has given me new information. There's a reason science places so much weight on reproducibility, even though, eventually, it's just giving the 'obvious' result!)

I wholly agree. Sorry if my initial post gave the opposite impression. I’m very much in favour of supporting hypotheses with evidence and discarding those which are incompatible with facts as observed.

You really think floors came before shoes did? Or is this a joke?

I’m pretty damned sure of it. Why would they do so otherwise when feet of the habitually-unshod are so perfectly adapted to walking on terrain? It’s not like (like in the case of clothes) they could see animals with warm furry coats and think “I want one of those”. You construct what you want to emulate. In the case of sandals, they wanted to emulate floors, not paws.

While the oldest shoes discovered are 7-8kya, the evolution of foot bone structure points to shoe-wearing as long ago as 40kya [1], predating the Neolithic.

It is very likely that shoes predate floors and were worn for easier travel over rough terrain.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe#History

Thanks for the reference and the comment, I really do appreciate it (and I’m not being sarcastic), but evidence of foot structure mutating 40,000 years ago as a conseuqnce of wearing shoes only undermines my theory if floors can be definitively placed later than that. As for the 7,000-8,000 year ago shoes, that’s well within the horizon of architecture, of which the earliest example we are aware of is Gobekli Tepe which is considered to be 13,000 years old.

Just FYI to all the shoe fascists, there's a guy Cody Lundin [1] who walks around barefoot all the time, even in freezing temperatures and does quite fine with it. I first found out about him as a survivalist author.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cody_Lundin

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