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Left a bigger impression on me than on you, obviously.
…and you are? (?)
Naw I just “lose” stuff sometimes. Anyway. That whole caveman thing is funny, because….that’s not how our ancestors ate. And we have known this for a while now, long before more recent studies put 2 and 2 together and determined that it’s eating cooked food that led to the development of larger brains (basically the cerebral cortex). That is, there has been evidence for a long time that antecedents of humans going back more than a million years used fire.
A lot of people know this stuff but just to get it down in black and white here’s the wiki entry:
Control of fire by early humans
Claims for the earliest definitive evidence of control of fire by a member of Homo range from 1.7 to 2.0 million years ago. Evidence for the “microscopic traces of wood ash” as controlled use of fire by Homo erectus, beginning roughly 1 million years ago, has wide scholarly support.
There are some arguments against the “cooked food causes brains” hypothesis btw. The problem is a lot of them rely on studies of rodents. As your vid pointed out, rodent brains are set up differently from primate brains. So you can’t necessarily draw conclusions on this from studying rodents.
What stage of capitalism is it when people can place legal bets on which country the US is going to bomb next?
Aakash Gupta@aakashgupta
Look at this Norwegian church. It has been standing through Norwegian rain for over 840 years.The trees were prepared for nearly two decades before anyone cut them down.
Workers walked into old-growth pine forests and stripped the chosen trees of their tops and their branches. The trunks stayed standing for fifteen to twenty years. The roots kept pulling resin upward. The pitch bled out of every old branch socket and saturated the heartwood from the inside.
By the time the trunks were felled in winter, the heartwood was no longer wood. It was malmfuru. Ore-pine. Functionally pressure-treated lumber, except the pressure was applied by the tree itself, for free, across two decades before construction started.
That is why iron was rejected. Iron rusts. Iron expands and contracts on a different cycle than the wood around it. After 100 winters iron splits the fiber and the joint dies. Wooden pegs swell with moisture in the same direction as the staves. The joints get tighter over time. Tongue-and-groove walls. Ground sills on a stone foundation. Four corner posts carrying load down through stone, never up through soil.
Then the tar. Pine roots and stumps stacked under clay, lit on fire, burned for two days under controlled airflow. The wood decomposes into pitch. The pitch gets reapplied to the church every 10 to 15 years. Including this decade.
Norway built around 2,000 stave churches between 1150 and 1350. 28 survive. Borgund is the best preserved because its corner staves rest on stone, not soil. The ground never won.
Modern lumber arrives at the construction site finished.
Borgund’s builders made the lumber finish itself.
Look at this Norwegian church. It has been standing through Norwegian rain for over 840 years.
The trees were prepared for nearly two decades before anyone cut them down.
Workers walked into old-growth pine forests and stripped the chosen trees of their tops and their branches.… pic.twitter.com/iIVNd2UPQJ
— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) May 2, 2026
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