Same technique is also used for spinning a wooden churner to get butterfat out of curd. A standing woman would pull the rope back and forth for a few minutes on the long churner stick that is churning the curd in a clay pot placed on the floor.
Because electricity was unreliable and machinery was expensive.
But if you don't see how people yearn to believe in big dramatic things like conspiracies, aliens, bigfoot, or even simple narratives about single people changing the course of history, and how they only accept the complicated and/or boring reality with conscious effort, then, well, you seem to be living in a better universe than I am.
Could you provide some evidence of your own? Archaeology has always been tied to evidence, as any scholarship is.
Can you explain what you're referring to? Obviously "ancient aliens" does not count as archaeology, despite your insistence otherwise.
(Just saw the snark about ancient aliens; no idea where that came from. If you're going to try to imply that that's my position you'll need to produce some artifacts to back it up.)
There are also numerous examples where physical artifacts haven't been immediately accepted. The white sands footprints. Monte Verde II. Others like Monte Verde I, Buttermilk Creek, and Cooper's ferry still aren't accepted despite physical evidence.
Consensus generally has high standards for anything that pushes boundaries. It's very easy to construct an "obvious" explanation that's totally wrong. We call these "just-so" stories. A narrative that's supported by physical evidence is a lot more verifiable.
Two examples from over a century is not evidence of unreliability.
> if you have a theory that explains facts (e.g. drilled holes) but no physical artifacts (in this case drills) it will be rejected".
Evidence is a requirement in all scholarship; the rest is speculation - which can be useful as a direction for searching for evidence, but is not sufficient to be accepted in any field. What field accepts claims without evidence?
As for the examples, when they start with "swings over the years" they're clearly taking a long-term perspective, and not trying to claim that modern archaeology will "believe anything" (especially not when their more prominent claim is that modern archaeology believes too little).
Archaeology has come a long way over the last couple of centuries. It used to be little better than grave robbing and crackpot (often racist) theories. Archaeologists made all sorts of assumptions that turned out to be ridiculously (and sometimes tragically) wrong. Excavations once involved dynamite and bulldozers. Things have changed. Techniques for re-analyzing and extracting new information from old finds are allowing archaeologists to make discoveries without digging at all. Even a careful, modern dig is a destructive act that can only be conducted once.
It's not frustrating. It's progress.
For me the ‘archaeology not accepting things’ has been fueled by Graham Hancock etc. Archaeology is a lot like science, it sits on a body of research, if there’s evidence of advanced tooling and it’s properly investigated and written up, verified, no archaeologist would deny it.
That thing has probably been independently invented a hundred thousand times over. Trying to figure out who did it first is silly.
Also that is not a "sophisticated" tool at all. It's literally one step above hitting rocks together. Sharp rocks happens to be the only tool you need to make a basic bow drill.
You need to create string. You need to cut the wood for the bow. The bow and the string need to be the right sizes too. You need something that is sharp enough to work as the drill bit but also small AND approximately round enough to work in the bow. That also needs to be made of a material that is harder than the one you are drilling - here in this story there was some sort metallurgy involved to create the alloy, so that likely involves working with ores etc (mining, identifying, processing etc etc).
There are a lot of steps. You can't just find a random "vine" to wrap snuggly and securely around a random thing you find to use as a drill bit that is like 1cm in diameter - you'll need something of consistent size and highly flexible for the string, similar for the drill bit needs to be the right size and so on.
The next step up from banging rocks together is probably using sharp stone chips as scrapers or crude knives. Even napped stone axes are quite difficult to create and require skill, even if the raw components are literally laying around.
I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.
That region typically used flax for string. That's another thing that can be done with virtually no tools.
Even if you skip the retting and merely hand-strip the fibers you still get something usable enough for some use.
These people didn't sit inside looking at screens all day. If your region had a plant that can be trivially turned into usable string you'd know - especially since they had contact/trade with neighboring Asia and there's evidence of flax processing in Georgia another 30k years earlier.
> I suspect the average person would struggle to make fire, let alone hand tools.
It took us maybe a few days of experimenting to finally figure out as boys. We used some modern string, random sticks, and an assortment of materials to try to start a fire with. It's harder than it seems, but not much so if you're determined. If some bored 8 year olds can do it, then so can anyone of any era.
I don't think the linage of anyone for whom that was truly so unattainable would have survived to this day.
True. Good thing no one is trying to do that.