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Comment by pants2 | Hacker News Reader

Religion always seems like the default explanation for anything without an obvious use and it seems lazy. Maybe it was a game, a rite of passage, a boundary marker, or perhaps there was a Peruvian Mr. Beast running a competition. Anyone else remember the Cards Against Humanity "Holiday Hole"?

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> Religion always seems like the default explanation for anything without an obvious use and it seems lazy.

This is one of the bits I remember from reading A Canticle for Leibowitz as a kid. It's about monks in a post nuclear armageddon world. At one point they find an ancient fallout shelter with a bathroom, and they interpret it as a spiritual space where a priest would sit on the "throne" and read "holy scrolls" held by the metal bar next to the throne...

I think we make that kind of mistake when doing armchair archeology or anthropology a lot.

The same joke is in David Macauley's Motel of the Mysteries (see drawing in https://www.byanyothernerd.com/2020/04/stranger-days-39-myst...).

We can only speculate on evidence we have. The prehistoric chubby dolls (Venus figurines) from archaeological digs that many hypothesized to be fertility totems can be hypothesized to be just idealized symbols of female form as the shape changed depending upon the average temperature - ice age meant fatter dolls, temperate times meant thinner dolls. https://www.sciencealert.com/the-mystery-of-the-enigmatic-ve...

We always want to pretend that we're better and more evolved than those knuckle draggers of ages past -- simply because someone else made a computer for us to use.

Chronological snobbery.

Would you rather live then or now?

That does seem like an orthogonal question to me. That we are wealthier and better off now doesn't really say much about the raw capabilities of the people now vs then, when it's obvious that technology has a truly gigantic role in the wealth of modern times (and compounds onto itself: many technologies making developing new technology easier).

Ive heard that same criticism from working archeologists and anthropologists, especially relooking over old finds but still often used in current unexplained finds. Stick with weird holes drilled in it? Religious scepter. Stone dildo? Religious fertility symbol. Weird hermit hut foundation? Religious monk retreat.

But I think ancient peoples were far more practical and far less concerned over religion and gods than we like to pretend. Sure they might believe lightning are the gods being angry or meteors are the gods taking a dump above the earth or that it is just the nature of existence, they got no real way to explain such things. But that doesn't mean everyone spent all their extra time worrying about such things and furiously producing endless amounts of religious offerings and symbols.

Archeologists consider the ancients to be a game of Dwarf Fortress - once food and security is provided for, you turn everything else into religious trade goods for the caravan.

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