Sandi Toksvig is a treasure.

TBF 28 days is also the length of a lunar month, so it _could_ have been something to keep track of the moon's phases.

Maybe because the word "man" can be used to describe both sexes? Full disclosure: I did not go to Cambridge, so I'm not "sophisticated."

For those who aren't aware a woman has her period about every 28 days so that is why we would mark a calendar like that

Or... It is just a bone with 28 incisions. It is quite daring to assume a record of some cyclic event when we have only one bone with one set of incisions.

Perfect

I believe tides are governed by a 28 day cycle (4 complete cycles of 2 High and 2 low tides) so very important to keep track of this if you live in a Hunter-Gatherer culture and your stamping ground is around a tidal estuary or along the sea (So this bone is known as the Ishango bone and was found in a site known as the "Fisherman Settlement" near a river that is at the headwaters of the Nile). Equally likely to have been created and owned by a female or a male tribe member, of course. But then what do I know, I'm neither a Paleolithic tribesperson or Sandi Toksvig.

Man in this case just means the human race

Maybe, just maybe, what's being overlooked is the work of the first woman in astronomy. And her waterproof lunar calendar.

Barry

Barry

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Not to put down women's contributions to science but 28 days is also a lunar month and it's way easier to measure time by the moon than the sun. That's a way more plausible hypothesis than a menstruation calendar.

I will repeat - only 13% of all women have a 28 day cycle, and a lunar cycle is 29.5 days. They both are wrong, and they both suffer from typical sociology issues. Sociologists have an annoying tendency to base their "theories" on high school-level science. They also have a tendency to look for deep meanings in every artifact that they find which was left behind by "primitive" people. Of course, that deep meaning somehow always supports the cultural biases of the sociologist themselves. What these ones seem to lack is the humility to admit "I have no idea". We also have no idea whether it was a man or a woman - notches have no gender, nor do tools.

This is powerful

Wellll... Man also counts THAT 28 days! 😉

This is probably correct...until we started putting "c**p" in our bodies. Stating this for the US only. Our food has antibiotics, fillers and who knows what else which has completely changed our bodies.

When my Dad was in college he worked one summer in a forest fire lookout tower. When he practiced his clarinet every day, he'd spread out a handful of birdseed and nuts, and soon birds and chipmunks learned to come for food when they heard him practicing. That's right, my Dad was a Disney princess.

Yes! This would work!

Who said scientist don't have a sense of humour?

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Welcome to Trump-MAGA land, the same loons that brought you such Darwin Award winning views as The 2020 election was a cheat, Yes you can inject detergent as an antiviral, The Moon Landing is fake, Jan 6 was a peaceful Love in, Nazis are OK, Dictators are OK, In Fact Russia is pretty Damn Good, Guns are Great, and Extreme Right Wing Christianity is Great, and Did I say Nazis are Great? Oh, and the Government Controls the Weather, don’t forget that

And of course he couldn't just buy the Magenta alone, he had to buy the Blue, Yellow and Black too.

And they save money too, if you've got a recently deceased relative! Or if you live close to a graveyard and have a shovel!

Ahh, the good old days, when politicians trusted the experts instead of wanting them tarred and feathered

The question is, did you end up marrying the butterfly man?

Said it on a halloween costume post, I'll say it here too... FEED ME!

Just feed the dumb tourists to the bears.

I would hire you on that alone

I have seen this a few times, the movie a lot more... I JUST got this joke...

In germany cats have only seven lifes...

Can jellyfish vote?

So that's what those are! I used to pick those leaves off as kids and poke my brother with them.

😂

Did you find a flower pot close by?

When the bod of one was first taken back to England from Australia a coupla hundy years ago, the lads at the Royal Geographic Society thought it was a wind-up. They thought it was fake

I think stegosaurus was already extinct when that happened.

Did he have a cat and if so where is it?

Very Studio Ghibli

It really is the best technology we have. The trick is to lock up the carbon in the form of biomass. You grow the trees. You harvest the trees. You lock up the wood in a form where it's not going to return to the environment as CO2 again. Maybe as buildings and housing.

Zoom back tens of thousands of years: this stew tastes nice but the hooves are sticking my teeth together 💡

Damn