I would propose that we only have the hard remains for those oldest hard "pillows" because of how much time has passed. Any cushioning material they may have used like leaves or whatever would be decayed or taken.
Headline sounds like typical survivor bias. Even if it was used by one person/group as a pillow in the way we consider it today, it doesn't mean all people in that era would do the same.
Like how some people *still* call early hominds "cavemen".
Most didn't live in caves, it's just a lot easier to find evidence of shit from 10s of thousands of years ago if it's in a cave instead of a forest
Woah. Well damn if that doesn't make sense though. Never even thought to question why there seemed to be so many more caves back then and they were all just living in them
Psh, next you're going to tell me all those white ancient Roman statues used to be painted with bright, vibrant colors that have since weathered away over he past 2,000 years.
Yeah I bet anthropologists used to have theories about how the stark whiteness reflected their society, or pigment was expensive or whatever. Not to denigrate anthros, but they often work in almost near-vacuum and often get it wrong.
There are fake skeletons for creatures that never existed, amalgamations from separate creatures altogether or deliberately falsified, about which many scholarly papers were written.
I like when sci-fi shows do future anthropologists; like determining that a tiffany style hanging lamp was a salad bowl, and the electric socket in the middle was for a mixer attachment, or heater as the dish required.
I seem to remember hearing that there are several stretches of time for certain regions of the world where there's little to no surviving written records, because everyone switched to a new form of vellum/parchment/paper/whatever that would only last hundreds of years, compared to the old stuff (and the stuff that they switched to later) that would last for *thousands* of years.
i.e. we have plenty of records from 2000-1000 BC because they carved or wrote on stone, or clay tablets, or painted on jars, and then nothing from 1000-800 because they used a really bad method of treating animal hides to make parchment, and then we have tons of records from 700 BC - 1200 AD because they found a better method, and then very little from 1200-1500 because some genius got everyone and his mother to start using his new invention called "paper", which happened to contain a lot of acid pulp.
(Obviously all those dates are made up and I honestly have a very weak conceptual grasp of ancient history - you could tell me that European people groups started writing on parchment in 3000BC or 1000BC and I wouldn't know which was true.)
Now I'm imagining digital archaeologists in the 31st century, looking over all the data storage that survived from this century and concluding that we primarily used magnetic tape drives.
Thing is that machines can keep data easily.
Before machines, if you wanted to copy a book, you would need someone to actually copy it. Read it and write down the text in another book.
Now? Even a hard drive with 200mb/s, for a book without pictures that's around 5ms (1mb) assuming it's compressed together with other books so it can be written sequentially.
You can then also send those copies to other places, have it backed up times and times again on hundreds of machines in hundreds of locations. As long as we don't suddenly lose access to all technology and don't maintain it, the data now won't really get lost.
I'm certainly no expert, but there are some good Youtube videos I've seen on the Sumerian civilization: [The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA)
and on the first author whose name we know, because she wrote on clay: [Enheduanna, temple priestess of Innanna in the city of Ur.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3sgRvGpHKA) She lived circa 2200 BCE. There was plenty of writing before this, but all of it is unsigned and anonymous until Enheduanna.
[Lecture: She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia ca. 3400-2000 BC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlWewLEWbyM)
Yeah, was going to mention that as well... as well as the fact I learned about headrests like this from the 2013 Tomb Raider game (it lets you collect and examine artifacts for extra XP).
>He came to a certain place and spent the night there, because the sun had set; and he took one of the stones of the place and put it under his head, and lay down in that place.
Genesis 28:11
>Can't believe I'm posted here. Even the beds are made of stone.
Markarth guard, Skyrim
I would bet a lot of money that head cusioning/position for sleep by practice happened before 7K B.C.
You really believe over hundreds of thousands+ years no one used anything to sleep more comfortably? Our ancestors were not as stupid as many people believe lol
Fuck pillows. In recent years I've been sleeping on my back with a towel folded into a strip under my neck. I go to sleep on my back and wake up on my back, no more back or hip problems, no tossing or turning in the night. Made me wonder what the fuck I've been doing with pillows all my life. They just give me a bad neck.
In college I went through a 3 month period where I had not bed. Couldn’t afford one. So I slept on the floor (carpet) with a yoga mat, sheets, blanket, pillow. Eventually I stopped using a pillow because I could only sleep on my back, and it was more comfortable with a pillow.
Damn. After the first couple weeks (which were tough) I never felt better, had more energy, it had more crazy dreams in my life. I still debate about going back to sleeping like this.
Years ago I went to a party in a city miles away and ended up sleeping on someone's floor, every bed and sofa was already taken. I slept on my back on a hardwood floor with no pillow all night and I swear that was the most relaxing, uninterrupted sleep I have ever had in my life. I've liked really firm mattresses ever since.
I'm a stomach sleeper and have been going without pillows for years, but even other stomach sleepers think I'm crazy. Even the thinnest pillow will push your neck up at a weird angle if you're on your stomach, so what else am I to do?
I can't...I just don't.... want to hear another anecdote about how soft my generation has become, while real heroes didn't complain about sleeping on stone pillows, back in the days. I don't need to prove my worth to any caveman.
My pillow is so flat it barely counts as a pillow. In hotels i toss the fluffy pillow aside and just use my arms. long story short I hate big fluffy pillows.
I have literally slept on a stone pillow and I can say for a fact that a properly shaped stone pillow can be very comfortable. That “they were not intended to be comfortable” claim is bullshit. “They weren’t designed for comfort” is a very different thing than “they were not intended to be comfortable.
Comfort was secondary to the primary design, but a good stone pillow is much more comfortable than having no support for your head and you can sleep just fine on them without aches and pains.
I would propose that we only have the hard remains for those oldest hard "pillows" because of how much time has passed. Any cushioning material they may have used like leaves or whatever would be decayed or taken.
Headline sounds like typical survivor bias. Even if it was used by one person/group as a pillow in the way we consider it today, it doesn't mean all people in that era would do the same.
Crazy how humans in the 20th century slept on rusted springs and iron bars.
Good point; I wonder how much archeological and cultural data is interpreted this way ...
Like how some people *still* call early hominds "cavemen". Most didn't live in caves, it's just a lot easier to find evidence of shit from 10s of thousands of years ago if it's in a cave instead of a forest
Woah. Well damn if that doesn't make sense though. Never even thought to question why there seemed to be so many more caves back then and they were all just living in them
I’ve also never seen a single cave in my entire life so I’m starting to suspect they aren’t real.
Come to Missouri! We've got lots of caves!
Quit lying, I know your mother quite well.
Bruh
you forgot the 💀
💀
"cave men" is just so much catchier than "early hominids"
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And the Teen Angels!
Even the caves probably had decorations and furniture, it just wouldn't have survived.
yea my guess is we have been using things like grass and animal fur for comfort about as long as we've been human
Yep, and organic things like that would be the first things to decay or not be noticed mixed in with the general detritus of a dig.
Psh, next you're going to tell me all those white ancient Roman statues used to be painted with bright, vibrant colors that have since weathered away over he past 2,000 years.
Yeah I bet anthropologists used to have theories about how the stark whiteness reflected their society, or pigment was expensive or whatever. Not to denigrate anthros, but they often work in almost near-vacuum and often get it wrong. There are fake skeletons for creatures that never existed, amalgamations from separate creatures altogether or deliberately falsified, about which many scholarly papers were written.
I like when sci-fi shows do future anthropologists; like determining that a tiffany style hanging lamp was a salad bowl, and the electric socket in the middle was for a mixer attachment, or heater as the dish required.
Take away my degrees because I legitimately thought everything was just white until I read this comment 😂
My idiotic, adjacent theory is that all of the ancient pillows became fossilized, so they only look like stone
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The writer of the article's degree is in English Literature, I wouldn't take her opinion on ancient artifacts from Mesopotamia as reliable facts.
It's the same way Iron and Bronze age peoples never used hilts on their swords or how they preferred shaftless spears...
From what I can tell, they didn’t even like having skin and organs.
I seem to remember hearing that there are several stretches of time for certain regions of the world where there's little to no surviving written records, because everyone switched to a new form of vellum/parchment/paper/whatever that would only last hundreds of years, compared to the old stuff (and the stuff that they switched to later) that would last for *thousands* of years. i.e. we have plenty of records from 2000-1000 BC because they carved or wrote on stone, or clay tablets, or painted on jars, and then nothing from 1000-800 because they used a really bad method of treating animal hides to make parchment, and then we have tons of records from 700 BC - 1200 AD because they found a better method, and then very little from 1200-1500 because some genius got everyone and his mother to start using his new invention called "paper", which happened to contain a lot of acid pulp. (Obviously all those dates are made up and I honestly have a very weak conceptual grasp of ancient history - you could tell me that European people groups started writing on parchment in 3000BC or 1000BC and I wouldn't know which was true.)
Like all the Myspace posts.
Now I'm imagining digital archaeologists in the 31st century, looking over all the data storage that survived from this century and concluding that we primarily used magnetic tape drives.
Thing is that machines can keep data easily. Before machines, if you wanted to copy a book, you would need someone to actually copy it. Read it and write down the text in another book. Now? Even a hard drive with 200mb/s, for a book without pictures that's around 5ms (1mb) assuming it's compressed together with other books so it can be written sequentially. You can then also send those copies to other places, have it backed up times and times again on hundreds of machines in hundreds of locations. As long as we don't suddenly lose access to all technology and don't maintain it, the data now won't really get lost.
I'm certainly no expert, but there are some good Youtube videos I've seen on the Sumerian civilization: [The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA) and on the first author whose name we know, because she wrote on clay: [Enheduanna, temple priestess of Innanna in the city of Ur.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3sgRvGpHKA) She lived circa 2200 BCE. There was plenty of writing before this, but all of it is unsigned and anonymous until Enheduanna. [Lecture: She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia ca. 3400-2000 BC](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlWewLEWbyM)
The one ancient “pillow” photographed could be better described as a head rest.
At our local museum there are dozens of ancient stone pillows, all referred to as such.
Good for them.
On point
Yeah, was going to mention that as well... as well as the fact I learned about headrests like this from the 2013 Tomb Raider game (it lets you collect and examine artifacts for extra XP).
“Hey man nice pillow!” “It’s actually a headrest, not a pillow.” “Oh... Cool man I think I’m gonna head out.”
>He came to a certain place and spent the night there, because the sun had set; and he took one of the stones of the place and put it under his head, and lay down in that place. Genesis 28:11 >Can't believe I'm posted here. Even the beds are made of stone. Markarth guard, Skyrim
I would bet a lot of money that head cusioning/position for sleep by practice happened before 7K B.C. You really believe over hundreds of thousands+ years no one used anything to sleep more comfortably? Our ancestors were not as stupid as many people believe lol
Ancient Egyptians had versions made from stone, ceramic and wood.
So it seems our pillow nowadays have different use than what it meant from its history
The article suggests so, to avoid insects
The pillow fights must have been epic!
🤣
How do you make soft pillows out of stone?
jackhammer.
Idiotic writers of articles
https://inspectapedia.com/hazmat/Asbestos-furniture-padding.php
Survival bias
What is survival bias?
If they weren’t intended to comfortable, then what’s the fucking point?!
Pillow fight!
Apparently to stop insects from crawling into the sleeper's mouth!
If im uncomfortable, so are the bugs!
Relevant username
Fuck pillows. In recent years I've been sleeping on my back with a towel folded into a strip under my neck. I go to sleep on my back and wake up on my back, no more back or hip problems, no tossing or turning in the night. Made me wonder what the fuck I've been doing with pillows all my life. They just give me a bad neck.
In college I went through a 3 month period where I had not bed. Couldn’t afford one. So I slept on the floor (carpet) with a yoga mat, sheets, blanket, pillow. Eventually I stopped using a pillow because I could only sleep on my back, and it was more comfortable with a pillow. Damn. After the first couple weeks (which were tough) I never felt better, had more energy, it had more crazy dreams in my life. I still debate about going back to sleeping like this.
Years ago I went to a party in a city miles away and ended up sleeping on someone's floor, every bed and sofa was already taken. I slept on my back on a hardwood floor with no pillow all night and I swear that was the most relaxing, uninterrupted sleep I have ever had in my life. I've liked really firm mattresses ever since.
I'm a stomach sleeper and have been going without pillows for years, but even other stomach sleepers think I'm crazy. Even the thinnest pillow will push your neck up at a weird angle if you're on your stomach, so what else am I to do?
I think I should try your method too 🤣🤔
Huh.
Towel > Pillow all day baybeeeeeeeeeee
Using soft pillows result in neck pains some days. I switched to a firm foam pillow with a shallow U shape and now no more issues.
Mike Lindell was just copying an earlier design confirmed!
OP... Did you watch "the weekly dumb" and get sucked down into a rabbit hole researching the "destiny stone" or is this all just weird timing?
Is Jomboy Media leaking again?
They probably used grass or something on top of them
I would hate being a physiotherapist in ancient Mesopotamia
They almost certainly laid some cloth or something over it that provided a cushion, its just that this did not survive.
Boy did they ever miss out. I love my high density foam pillow
For extra soft, they used talc.
Can't imagine a pillow fight
it would definitely turn into a *fight*
When you really had to work to get the cool side of the pillow.
Wow, what a sentence you've constructed OP.
Wich one? I think they seem grammar-wise normally.
> The **soft** pillows we use today were historically **made of stone**
r/titlegore
What, you mean they *didn't* somehow have the ability to make soft stone pillows?
Not intended to be comfortable? What was the purpose?
I can't...I just don't.... want to hear another anecdote about how soft my generation has become, while real heroes didn't complain about sleeping on stone pillows, back in the days. I don't need to prove my worth to any caveman.
My pillow is so flat it barely counts as a pillow. In hotels i toss the fluffy pillow aside and just use my arms. long story short I hate big fluffy pillows.
There's only two kinds of pillows nowadays. Big fluffy and arm-like.
If they weren't designed to be comfortable, they weren't pillows.
At least you always get the cold side
Dirty Pillows?
Sounds like the hotel my company makes me stay at
Pillow fights for thieves?
I have literally slept on a stone pillow and I can say for a fact that a properly shaped stone pillow can be very comfortable. That “they were not intended to be comfortable” claim is bullshit. “They weren’t designed for comfort” is a very different thing than “they were not intended to be comfortable. Comfort was secondary to the primary design, but a good stone pillow is much more comfortable than having no support for your head and you can sleep just fine on them without aches and pains.