Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? We don't need yet another gender flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The specific information in your comment is good. If you dropped the first sentence, the last sentence, and the snark ("Maybe - just maybe"), your comment would be a much better contribution to HN.

"maybe don't post shitty popsci articles about how men are evil" - me, 2019

That's not a fair description of the article, but for fun, let's suppose it were. Your argument doesn't wash. If someone vandalizes your house or (let's say) a city park, that doesn't make it ok for someone else to vandalize.

Not sure why you're getting down-voted, because you're totally right. I'd add the fibulae to the list of "female" archaeological artifacts closely studied by, well, archeologists. For example the history of late 6th - early 7th century Slavs in South-Eastern Europe is mostly "deduced" by studying women-worn fibulae like those presented in articles like this [1]

[1] https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=639506

To be fair, studies like history and archaeology are anything but hard sciences. One of the history courses I took during my degree was dedicated entirely to looking at historical texts and trying to see the biases of the historian who wrote them. There's always reason to look for bias in primary sources and secondary sources and then try and learn from them. Re-framing what we know in different lights definitely has value.

All that being said, it does feel like a weird jab to throw in the male bit at the beginning. But that's who was studying this at one time, and realizing that and being open to re-framing doesn't hurt.

I think it's important to acknowledge the biases of the scientists or researchers that study first-hand materials. They absolutely affect the research and conclusions they produce and affect how the broader public understand history and science.

That said, you are absolutely right in the particulars here. Pottery is extremely important to our understanding of human history -- that was an absurd mistake in the article, since it is so important -- and it makes sense that fabrics have been less important simply because there is much less evidence of the particulars of it.

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On an unrelated note, I love flax and its many uses. I love that when we eat it as seed we call it "flax seed," when we use it as cooking oil we call it "flax oil," when we use it as a protective finish we call it "linseed oil," when we make it into cloth we call it "linen," and when we make it into flooring we call it "linoleum." Let me know if I missed others.

So here's a question about flax, and other things.

It seems like there is a technological progression in clothing from "I take the unprocessed hides from the animals I kill or the leaves and vines around me and just wear them" to "I tan hides to make leather" to "I grow flax or cotton to make fibers and fabric"

Actual question: Do these technologies correspond to lengthy time frames in large areas in such a way that it could be useful to identify a "Leather Age/Culture" or "Plant fiber Age/Culture"?

Sewing is a vital technology, since only with sewn, multi-layer clothing was cold-intolerant Homo sapiens able to colonize the middle and upper latitudes of the Eurasian continent during the last Ice Age. In the referenced article, it mentions needles from about 35,000 years ago. Presumably the earliest garments were furs stitched with sinew threads, but plant fiber thread from 34,000 has been found in Georgia. The archaeological problem is that bone needles and organic fibers do not endure to the present like stone and copper.

I know a few female archaeologists. They've uniformly experienced sexism, ridicule, scorn, and harassment for being women. The hard sciences are steeped in identity politics, and have been as long as there have been hard sciences. God forbid somebody actually talk about the assumptions and biases that result.

Archaeology is not usually considered part of the "hard" sciences - depending on whom you ask, it's either among the "soft" or the "social" sciences.

Archaeology is among the hardest of the "soft" sciences. They routinely rely on radioactivity, density of pollen varieties, tree-ring correlation, and genetic analysis to determine ground facts.

They use hard science tools, but archaeology is still trying to determine facts about culture and ancient societies, which are distinctly not hard.

Won't debate you on that. I'm a mathematician. IMNSHO, physics is a soft science because they accept 5-sigma experimental results as "proof."

My parent made the claim that "identity politics" are invading archaeology, and my point is that "identity politics" have always been there -- it's no longer acceptable to explicitly forbid women from the sciences, but that doesn't mean that implicit gatekeeping isn't happening.

But then do you consider mathematics a science?

I do! Mostly. It's a little complicated. Read the Mathematics page on wikipedia, and you'll find I'm in good company.

My strong, loosely held, opinion is that rigorous mathematics is the hardest of sciences. Where mathematicians reject computer proofs over all-human proofs, I balk at their lack of rigor and consider their stance unscientific.

Mathematics is one of the only sciences that finds absolute ground truth: we state axioms, and elaborate proofs based entirely upon those axioms. Axioms are assumptions, and we freely acknowledge that results are only guaranteed to hold if the axioms are satisfied. Logicians are seen as philosophers, but I hold them as equals.

There's a perspective that "science" deals purely with the natural world, and mathematicians aren't bothered by the surreality of their axioms. The way I see it is, these are truths that can extend beyond even our universe, should anything more exist. And occasionally, pure mathematical results come hundreds of years before natural observations require them -- what looks absurdly inapplicable now might not in a few generations.

I agree for the most part, as I'm somewhat of a mathematician myself (theoretical computer science).

However, you state "mathematics is one of the only sciences that finds absolute ground truth", which I would argue sets it apart from being a science: science does not deal with absolute truth. The scientific method and experiments allows you to inductively make more and more accurate predictions about the object of your study (most often the natural world), but it will never give the deductive truth like math.

So rather than classifying almost all sciences as lacking rigor, I myself consider math to simply be not a science, but something else, as implied with my question.

I guess it depends on ones definition of "science". Is any process resulting in knowledge a science, or does it have to involve the scientific method, hypotheses, experiments.

> I agree for the most part, as I'm somewhat of a mathematician myself (theoretical computer science).

Haha, see? You can call yourself a scientist and nobody will bat an eye! Computer Science was once a branch of mathematics; and now it's a full-fledged field. But as you note, the pure-math roots still shine brightly. I'm somewhat of a computer scientist myself; I peddle in algorithms, graph theory, and more generally discrete math. Which brings me to a point I forgot to make: fundamentally, I'm an experimentalist. Not all mathematicians are.

> However, you state "mathematics is one of the only sciences that finds absolute ground truth", which I would argue sets it apart from being a science: science does not deal with absolute truth.

Happy to live with this disagreement, but not all mathematicians find ground truths. For example, there's a significant industry on "conditional proofs" in number theory -- they assume that the Riemann Hypothesis, or even the Generalized Riemann Hypothesis, is true, and discover results based on that. Others work on the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. They collect evidence, and report on it; similar to the 5-sigma proofs I derided earlier -- the distinction is that they only call things proofs when they're actual proofs.

In our shared world, there is the question of P vs NP. We've got a hypothesis (I tend to believe that NP won't be constructively equal to P; but I wouldn't be terribly surprised by a nonconstructive proof). Folks devote their lives to examining this dichotomy: given a problem class, resolve it into P or NP -- I call that an experiment!

I claim that endeavors like the above are actually following the scientific method. Only we use somewhat different language. I've seen snobbery on both sides^ -- scientists and mathematicians are happy to build and maintain a fence. And I find that sad.

^and, oops, I did that with my 5-sigma dismissal

That's not what they said, they were showing that the article was claiming biases without a sound argument.

Investigating bias can be important, but I feel this author needs to consider their own biases.

The idea that women might favor naming based on textiles or clothing appears purely based on stereotypes about women, and seems a bit offensive to me.