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Pharaoh RutinTutin

NP Tuesday November 02, 2021

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1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:

I 'shave' with hair clippers, always have stubble, so I guess I'm on the caveman spectrum.

This makes me wonder: "How did cavemen manage this, lacking hair clippers?" and "Would the caveman spectrum be based on their fire pit light source, or are we talking the audio spectrum of their culture, or the various hues strewn about as they and their various prey slew each other?" Both the first and the third would tend toward what photographers call the warm tones.

Of course, since I'm on the caveman spectrum, I can just measure myself.

 

My understanding is that before the invention of bronze razors, people used blades made from obsidian glass, which can be so sharp that it is used to make scalpel blades even in modern times.

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On 11/2/2021 at 8:33 AM, mlooney said:

As opposed to French ones, where there is a central source of all thing related to the language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Académie_Française

Which source, the people of France routinely ignore. Let alone the people of other French-speaking countries.

This is because the philosophy of the Académie Française is that Parisian French, devoid of the last couple hundred years of imports from other languages and particularly from English, is the only true French. That philosophy is not so popular even among the agency's tech-support staff, let alone the businesses across the street.

There's also an official authority on the Spanish language, established by Spain. It gets respect and cooperation from Spanish-speaking countries around the world, because its philosophy is merely that the various versions of Spanish spoken around the world (three of which are official languages recognized nationally in Spain) should be kept mutually intelligible for as long as they can manage. Fully acknowledging and accepting that difference will happen and that imports from other languages will occur.

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Of course, in Spain, sunbathers don't all sunbathe in the same place. Indeed, some insist on doing it as far away from others as they can get. Perhaps you've heard of them - the Basque Separatists? :P

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9 hours ago, mlooney said:

Why am I now thinking about Cro-magnon and/or Neanderthals with ZZ top style beards?  

In order of precedent, wouldn't ZZ Top have Cro-Magnon and/or Neanderthal beards?

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8 hours ago, ijuin said:

My understanding is that before the invention of bronze razors, people used blades made from obsidian glass, which can be so sharp that it is used to make scalpel blades even in modern times.

The Aztecs made a weapon that was essentially a club embedded with sharp obsidian shards that would cut, but being brittle would also tend to break off and leave pieces in the wounds to exacerbate the problem. They had a crazy notion that they could save the world from an angry sun god by appeasing him(?) with human sacrifices, so the goal was to disable, but capture still alive, and serviceable condition did not matter so much, they didn't have to last long anyway. It must have worked, the sun still hasn't eaten us. 

In the grand scheme of world religions, this is definitely one of them. I'm not sure how it rates compared to others, surely it matters if you have to live close to them; your next door neighbors are Aztec sun god worshipers and there goes the neighborhood. But at least the damage is localized.

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1 minute ago, mlooney said:

Well, yeah.

I thought about it some more after I posted, and I lean toward what you originally said. Time perception is a lot like spacial perception, 'now' is the center, and it flows out from there. If you know the sequence, you can put things in chronological order, but perception-wise, further in the past is further away, so the now we know comes first. We know what beards ZZ Top rocks, prehistoric beards are speculative.

You have me curious if they in any sense shaved, and when it started. And why we have beards and hair on our heads that grow so long; our nearest ape cousins have no such encumbrance. What ancient purpose does it serve? Indicator of health or food gathering ability?

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3 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:

What ancient purpose does it serve? Indicator of health or food gathering ability?

Maybe they serve the ancient purpose of keeping our bloody heads warm. One thing that distinguishes us from other hominids is the massive amount of energy our brains consume compared to the rest of our bodies. It is actually for this reason we also eat meat, back then it was the only way to keep our brains going. If we let our heads get cold we would require even more energy to keep our fershlugginer brains going, hence beard and hair starts to seem like a really good idea.

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56 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Maybe they serve the ancient purpose of keeping our bloody heads warm. One thing that distinguishes us from other hominids is the massive amount of energy our brains consume compared to the rest of our bodies. It is actually for this reason we also eat meat, back then it was the only way to keep our brains going. If we let our heads get cold we would require even more energy to keep our fershlugginer brains going, hence beard and hair starts to seem like a really good idea.

 

12 minutes ago, mlooney said:

I've had both long and short hair in the same place weather wise.  Long hair doesn't help that much, if at all.

I'd go with some hair helps retain head heat, long hair does not give much advantage. Facial hair, beards and mustaches appear to be primarily for display, evidenced by they are for the most part a male feature; if it was about heat retention, both sexes would have them.

Old Hack, your use of the term furshlugginer threw me. The only other place I've ever seen that was ages ago in MAD magazine. So I looked it up, and, "Ah, it's Yiddish, that makes sense." MAD was published in NYC, and many of the original crew were Jewish. I never realized it was a real word, I thought they made it up. It would not have been atypical. Hmm ...

So, I just learned, Potrzebie is a Polish word. It means 'necessity'.

More than you want to know about hair and insulation.

It seems evident that we have evolved to depend on external covering to replace natural covering, just as we've evolved to depend on external weapons to replace natural weapons.

 

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Once we started bringing down big game, we also started stealing their fur for ourselves.

But yes, hair that gets so long that it gets caught on everything does not seem to be an advantage. Perhaps it is one of those handicapping signals—advertising that you are so fit that you can afford a handicap.

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1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:

I'd go with some hair helps retain head heat, long hair does not give much advantage. Facial hair, beards and mustaches appear to be primarily for display, evidenced by they are for the most part a male feature; if it was about heat retention, both sexes would have them.

Depends on what era you are talking about. Both sexes might well have had them back before clothing and furs became a thing. Even today there are women who grow facial hair.

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

I always thought that Naugas were a wild species

Ok, the Nauga legend is a little lie my family told outsiders

We were really Nerf Herders

1 hour ago, The Old Hack said:

I thought you raised bandages

That was my Father's side of the family

When his other relatives found out about my mother's Nerf Herder heritage, they cut us out of the family fortune

(Actually, the so-called fortune was just a Pyramid scheme)

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1 hour ago, mlooney said:

I always thought that Naugas were a wild species.  We would hear tales of the great nauga hunters nearly making the nauga extinct. 

I have a friend that has a Nauga, like they used for the ads. Oh, you can buy them. But hers looked like the one in the old ads, with the triangular teeth, not these toothless fakes.

Nauga.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

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8 hours ago, The Old Hack said:

Depends on what era you are talking about. Both sexes might well have had them back before clothing and furs became a thing. Even today there are women who grow facial hair.

True in the sense that you can speculate anything prior to the present and that is not far from the path of know features, but it is unfalsifiable. We also don't know whether Homo Habilis had pointy elf ears, but we have no reason to think they did. That's not very far off the path of know features either.

So, what do we see at our endpoint? Some women have a slight beard. It is considered to be unattractive, to the point that they will go to some lengths to eliminate it. A very few women have an anomalously full beard. And round ears.

Our nearest cousins are chimps and bonobos. They do not sport egregious facial hair. And they also have round ears. It is a reasonable speculation, then, that our most recent common ancestor had round ears. Facial hair is, if you will pardon the expression, fuzzier. Somewhere betwixt us and Bonzo, our males picked up a trait of having facial hair at maturity, as testosterone kicks in. Eh, it is possible that females shared this for a while, especially if you accept that it is climate induced. Our current evidence at least suggests that it might be linked to sexual attractiveness, and even then the one does not exclude the other. Still speculative though, no strong evidence for it, either.

Final two cents, with the advent of clothes, long hair becomes counterproductive in cold climates. You can stay warmer with layers of clothes than with hair. Hair can afford trapped air a space, but if it does not seal well, it allows cold air to circulate. I have had long hair and a beard, and it never made me appreciably warmer, but it did require more care in selecting covering. Even now, with COVID, I find myself trimming more often so my mask will seal.

You can see this in various cultures and militaries. Russians, Fins, and Scandinavians do not have notably long hair as a culture, neither do Canadians nor Alaskan town dwellers. Cold weather troops are not encouraged to grow long hair, rather, they are given warmer clothes. Fishermen in northern latitudes so not grow long hair, they bundle up.

Granted, Homo Habilis had less options than we do, so we do not know, but it seems like we'd need firm evidence to speculate otherwise. Am I wrong?

 

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5 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

True in the sense that you can speculate anything prior to the present and that is not far from the path of know features, but it is unfalsifiable. We also don't know whether Homo Habilis had pointy elf ears, but we have no reason to think they did. That's not very far off the path of know features either.

BULL.

There are demonstrably women with facial hair in our day and age. I do not think there is ANY example of any living or recorded member of homo sapiens sapiens that ever had elf-like ears, certainly not in the numbers we have women with facial hair. It is just as plausible to posit that facial hair was more common in a day and age with colder climate as it is to posit that our genus once possessed tails -- indicated by the vestiges of one on our spines.

Elf ears is just you trying to render my plausible speculation farcical, much like a TERF attempting to render trans and nonbinary people farcical by asking why she can't identify as Australia.

NEXT.

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Ok, let me just say here that you seem to be reading anti-trans sentiments into a lot of what members are saying lately even when such is clearly not their intention. Some of us are trans ourselves, you know.

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17 minutes ago, ijuin said:

Ok, let me just say here that you seem to be reading anti-trans sentiments into a lot of what members are saying lately even when such is clearly not their intention. Some of us are trans ourselves, you know.

I call it as I see it.

I am trans, too.

And internalized transphobia is a thing. I call that out, too.

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