Agreed. Personal ornamentation is right out. Given how even animals are observed collecting useless crap, I think it might be hard-wired.
Even with modern artifacts, it is difficult for even professionals in the field to differentiate between a knickknack and a tchotchke.
Also, i think “paddywhack” is related to an older use of the word “knickknack”
knick-knack (n.)
also knickknack, nicknack, “a pleasing trifle, toy,” 1570s, a reduplication of knack (n.) “ingenious device, toy, trinket” (1530s), a specialized sense of knack (n.) “stratagem, trick.”
Entries linking to knick-knack
mid-14c., “a deception, trick, device,” a word of uncertain origin. Perhaps from or related to a Low German word meaning “a sharp sounding blow” (compare Middle English knak, late 14c.; German knacken “to crack;” also knap) and of imitative origin. Sense of “special skill” (in some specified activity) is first recorded 1580s, if this is in fact the same word. In old slang (mid-18c. to mid-19c.) nacky meant “full of knacks; ingenious, dexterous.” For pronunciation, see kn-.
But gewgaws are their own thing, right?
Don’t geegaws fall under the “personal ornamentation” exception? Or am I thinking of something different?
This thread reminds me that a replica of a seashell carved in stone was found in Europe dating back possibly to Neanderthals. Although found in central Europe, it wouldn’t be that difficult to carry a shell from the coast inland, but someone felt the need to carve a replica out of stone.
I think it’s a projection of our modern easy-going values into very different worlds to think the Löwenmensch or other similar artefacts were carved just for the fun of it, or to be toys etc. The people responsible for producing them were Ice Age hunter-gatherers living in an animistic world, where religious beliefs penetrated every facet of life and communication with the spirits of animals, weather, ancestors etc. was of utmost importance.
Carving striking images in ivory with simple stone tools was not a small job. Hard-to-work but durable-for-it materials were used here. Toys or knick knacks would have been likely made from much easier, more perishable materials such as twigwork, skin offcuts, reed etc.
Archaeologists are often criticized for offering “ritual item” type explanations for mute artefacts from the distant past. But the peoples making these artefacts were awash in ritual behavior and ritual thinking. Human and animal images, or human-animal images as it were, had profound meaning, being seen essential for negotiating with the spirit world for survival and cosmic balance.
How do we know this?
Or this?
Or they could have seen real seashells in stone deep inland and copied those.
And you know this how, exactly?
This was a spiral shell in remarkable detail. Clam shells and the like embedded in stone are rather common. Even though this one was small and likely a type with a delicate shell it’s not out of the question that it was based on something embedded in stone. I think it more likely the stone copy was durable while the actual shells were less likely to have survived long as a trinket and that may have made a copy of a shell more valuable than the original. But I doubt there’s a way to find out.
We know this from what we know about hunter-gatherers of historic times, off a global sample. These cultures exhibit massive differences in their lifeways, yet striking similarities as well, when it comes to religious and spiritual concepts and behavior.
The widespread links and continuum between the religion of, say, Siberian hunter-gatherers of c. AD 1900, and the religion of Stone Age cultures of Northern Eurasia is not exactly a contested issue among scholars in archaeology and comparative religious studies.
There is no exact knowledge here, obviously. But to submit that “we just don’t know” is not true, either.
So, projecting?
Or…prehistoric counterfeiters.
It’s called utilizing ethnographic analogies, a basic tool of archaeological interpretation.
Archaeologists do believe this was true, and have no good reason to believe that modern-day hunter-gatherers were wildly different from early humans in that regard.
Archaeologists also believe that humans today value toys, crafts, beauty, and fun just for pure enjoyment, and have no good reason to believe that ancient peoples were wildly different from modern humans in that regard.
I see no good reason to believe that the two statements are mutually exclusive. Humans can exhibit both traits and many more. That complexity is buried very deep into the timeline. Some aspects of it are found in other classes of animals, so they must predate hominids, but the layers and layers of possible ways of looking at the world are a quantitative difference that turned into a qualitative difference.
I’m not even precisely clear on why modern humans keep knickknacks, let alone people who lived in the previous 1000 centuries.
Ivory is hard to carve. Someone had a lot of free time if they carved ivory figurines just for fun. But… Maybe someone was bored over a long winter or something.
“Early humans” is a dangerously vague term here. We have no way of knowing what the religious ideas of early humans were, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Talking about the Venus figurines, the LionMan etc., we are dealing with things that were made relatively recently, by modern humans that had already experienced “the Great Leap Forward”, and exhibited the same complex behavior (as seen in the archaeo record) as recent hunter-gatherers.
Note that no-one has claimed Stone Age cultures didn’t have toys, beautiful things, ornamentation, playing and free time.
You have 23 odds and ends on a table. 22 of them fall off. What do you have left, an odd or an end?
—George Carlin