by ungreased0675
6 subcomments
- Why do the Swiss people continue to make timepieces in the difficult mechanical form, when making quartz movements would be easier and cheaper?
Must be religious reasons. Maybe they serve a purpose in rituals by Swiss shaman.
Anthropologists have no creativity.
by DoctorOetker
1 subcomments
- perhaps the purpose was didactic:
when a child gets interested or wants to help those tribe members making stone tools, it is not yet aware of difficulty levels of different materials.
teaching a newcomer to make a proper tool from a more annoying material, may make their skills more robust when relaxing to easier materials later on.
think of all the skills you had to learn in your own education, and how little of it you actually use today, or at least how little you think you use of it today.
by vintermann
3 subcomments
- I'm always suspicious of "it was religious" claims in archeology.
- Could it be that relatively few quartz arrowheads were made, but that disproportionately many of them survived to have been subsequently discovered? Survivorship bias.
by mring33621
2 subcomments
- Because it looks cool!
by lexicality
1 subcomments
- Given I've spent the last few weeks teaching myself CAD and completely designing a custom 3d printed racking system for my consumer networking gear from scratch, I would like to think that "I decided to do this ostensibly stupid and pointlessly difficult thing for a minor aesthetic improvement even when a blatantly easier (and possibly better) option is available" is a valid reason for humans to do things.
Besides, that green quartz crystal is beautiful. If you can only afford to carry a limited number of objects then I personally would try to find a way to turn it into an object I can hold, use, and admire every day.
- There goes Peter with his fancy quartz points does he think he is better than us?
- The original paper and referencing article are paywalled so I'm not sure if this is mentioned there, but the answer to the question "why did they use XXX for arrow points?" is surely answered by putting yourself in the position of "them" and thinking about how you'd get material for your arrows. No Amazon, no Home Depot. You'd wander around in your environment looking for suitable material. There are many places around where I live where the regular rock is soft (sandstone) but there are deposits of quartz here and there (no idea why, but there is a whole federal park devoted to the phenomenon[1]). So if you lived in such an area you'd use quartz because it's the only available usable material.
Only once long distance trade routes/gathering expeditions were a thing, people used material from further away. E.g. there are examples of obsidian from a specific location in Yellowstone being found up to a thousand miles away[2].
[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/r01/beaverhead-deerlodge/recreation/...
[2] https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/historyculture/obsidiancliff....
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