Wanna read a digest of a fun anthro thing I've been up to lately? Our recent work on knots present and past has just been covered in @pnas.org Journal Club www.pnas.org/post/journal... - ThreadSky

felixthehauskat.bsky.social • 61 days ago

Wanna read a digest of a fun anthro thing I've been up to lately? Our recent work on knots present and past has just been covered in @pnas.org Journal Club https://www.pnas.org/post/journal-club/knots-archaeologists-see-evidence-cultural-exchange-and-perhaps-early-sparks-cognition

Comments

mikegeoarch.bsky.social•61 days ago

This looks cool. Will take a proper read later, thanks

felixthehauskat.bsky.social•61 days ago

It's a neat summary of our paper in CAJ https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-archaeological-journal/article/ties-that-bind-computational-crosscultural-analyses-of-knots-reveal-their-cultural-evolutionary-history-and-significance/B35E9C2DB89FA3C81F58F309B8F754FA

felixthehauskat.bsky.social•61 days ago

Which in turn builds on this paper where we apply the same mathy approach to knots/unknots to the iconic string figures https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2024.0673

felixthehauskat.bsky.social•61 days ago

What is it all about? Early anthropologists found that string figures were globally distributed, often played by children but more often integral parts of storytelling, knowledge encoding and other core features of the societies they encountered. It's a global human (near)universal!

felixthehauskat.bsky.social•61 days ago

The amazing @roope.bsky.social dug deep on this and teaming up with topologist extraordinaire @allisonhenrich1.bsky.social we devised a first-ever tidy way of turning knot patterns into string code, which can then be analysed readily for patterns. We natch also have the coordinates.

felixthehauskat.bsky.social•61 days ago

Both knots and string figures show really interesting patterns: in both domains most societies traditionally practice only a limited repertoire of all the possible ones suggesting some deeply shared history.

felixthehauskat.bsky.social•61 days ago

Some regions also have their very own unique practices perhaps reflecting their particular histories of dispersal and interaction.

ilirisufi.bsky.social•60 days ago

Fun read, thanks for sharing!

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