Only happy when it's complicated...

They were us.

Like literally genetically they were US, just like. A while ago.

Like

Would you trust a TV caveman with a baby? Probably not

As long as homo sapiens have existed, we have had the same emotional and mental capacity as you and I do today. You nailed it. They were US. Even Neaderthals existed alongside and had offspring with Homo Sapiens for many thousands of years.

There's much evidence that cavemen would have had complex spoken language, culture (learned information passed down), symbolic interpretation, and I think they most certainly would have been able to handle holding a baby. In fact I have my suspicisions that an ancient homo sapiens mother may be a more present, attentive, and knowledgable mom than I could be today.

Do not let media trick you into believing we are the pinnacle of humanity. Unilinial evolution theory (google it quick I beg) is BUNK, GARBAGE, and the root of so much evil.

At the beginning of the next class, my teacher showed us a cave painting of a horse. And then he showed all of our horses, which he had scanned and put into the presentation.

He then pointed out all the ways that our horses looked similar to the prehistoric horse. Same features, drawn from the same angle, etc.

And then he asked us, "Isn't it cool that you draw horses the same way as someone who lived 20,000 years ago?"

Yeah. That stuck with me for a while.

Scientists are now pretty sure the scribbles were made by kids ages 3-6, more or less on their own. The adult cave artists were probably doing what any modern parent might do when they want to keep small children out of their hair for awhile: they gave the kids some drawing tools of their own and a small section of wall to work on, out of the way but still close enough to keep an eye on them, and let them have at it.

The team compared the ancient art with the developmental stages exhibited by modern children: the furiously scribbled circles and push-pull lines typical of 3-year-olds just learning to control their bodies, for example, or the wobbly, right-angled figures of slightly older kids beginning to master fine motor skills.

Both are apparent in the cave, superimposed on each other as though two or more kids were drawing at once. That’s a clue the Las Monedas marks were likely made by “siblings or a mixed-age play group within the sphere of safety around adults, but also within their own space,” says co-author Felix Riede, an Aarhus archaeologist.

...

“They’re experimenting to get to know materials that are important in their world. They’re not trying to draw animals, they’re just trying to break the charcoal.” [...]

Astrologers helped design the study

No one did better than random chance, even though they only included people in the study who are experienced with astrology and stated that they expect themselves to do better than random chance

They gave every astrologer a set of 50 things about a person and 5 birth charts to choose from. They weren’t even coming up with the chart themselves!

After taking the test, most thought they nailed it. Zero out of 152 did better than 5 out of 12. None nailed it

Astrologers who rated themselves highly experienced (“world class experts”) did the same or worse as those who said they have limited experience. Both performed the same as random chance

Meanwhile, the other half are from people who've worked in IRL labs going "well yeah, that's exactly how any scientist would dress in those circumstances, he thinks that's appropriate because he's Literally Right."

And then I realized two days later that this hits a lot (way, way too many) of the same points that I'm running into with the current state of K-12 science education curriculum in the US.

Glad you asked. I have arrived at 'modern flax is Bullshit compared to what we had in historical textiles, the flax widely available for handspinning is basically the tow that would be discarded from textile creation and used with tar to caulk ships back in the day'

This naturally led me down a hole of 'why is the staple length of this stuff a bullshit 6 inches' and the answer is 'we have bred modern flax more for the oil than the fiber because cotton usurped the place of everyday textile thanks to slavery and the cotton gin'

Anyway, THIS led me to a rabbit hole that culminated in me finding flax seed bred for proper 30 inch tall plants for fiber, sold by some fellow minded nerds on a website that has not been updated since 1998 and you have to email them to buy anything.

To everybody who wants to know why I can't/don't:

I teach eleven-year-olds at a Catholic school.

Nothing is a habit! It's all deliberate choices and it's EXHAUSTING

It's like the difference between automatic breathing and conscious breathing. Imagine if automatic breathing didn't work for you and if you didn't decide to breath you would just run out of air. So you have to mentally manage your breathing on top of your normal functioning.

Now make that EVERYTHING. So no I'm not going to brush my teeth without thinking about it or do the exercise program automatically or make my bed or whatever. If I'm not thinking I'm not doing anything! I'm staring at a wall! And at the end of the day I'm almost always at this point where I have no mental spoons left and that means task queue is empty. My brain is tired and I'm powering down! I'm not even "going to bed" with all of the sub-steps that this entails like changing into pajamas and brushing my teeth, I'm just done for the day no more tasks the end.

So that stuff you can do as a habit is just another task on my to-do list requiring mental energy. Even resting is a task with its own requirements! And it leads to the constant feeling that I don't have enough time to do all the things I need to do, even when none of those things take very much time. It's just the task queue is so long! That's too many things! I can't add any more things, I don't have time! And managing the Task Queue is it's own task!

ADHD people fall into patterns of behavior all the time! Hell, dumping all thought and staring at the wall in Idle Mode is a pattern. Sometimes these even seem habit-like, in the 'doing them without thought' sense. The key difference I've found, after several decades living in my own ADHD brain, is that these patterns of repeated behavior ALL tend to come down to one thing: what is the easiest way, with the lowest possible cognitive load, to solve this recurring problem right now?

Sometimes, "the same thing we always do please do not make me think harder than that" is easiest, even if there might be other options that would take less physical effort. So we follow patterns of solving the same problem the same way every time, because it's easier to put the keys in our hand as we walk through the door on the kitchen counter nearest said door than to figure out a better place for them. Other times, we forget! Circumstances change very slightly. The usual solution his a road block -- there's a pile of mail on that part of the counter today. Or for some reason it won't work -- we simply cannot face another night of Lean Cuisine or chicken fingers for dinner. Or the problem doesn't present itself in the same way so we end up completely off script -- we had enough extra brain to do a whole fancy skin care routine before bed and therefore completely forgot to take evening meds.