xkcd.WTF!?

Explanation ➲

Cueball, tasked to look at details of active Paleolithic culture (the "Old Stone Age"), in the era that extended until not quite 10,000 BCE, has accidentally 'discovered' developments (roughly equivalent to those that occurred from around 6,500 BCE to 5,000 BCE) that render obsolete the practices that he was supposed to be studying. He presents his improvement over the stone arrowheads used by early humans, which were produced through shaping flint by expertly knocking flakes off a suitable raw piece of stone. In contrast, once the use of metals is developed, a far more scalable industry can eventually cast smooth copper arrowheads as depicted in Cueball’s presentation.

In real history, this was initially with lumps of copper nuggets being taken and cold-hammered into awls, chisels, ornaments and spear heads (perhaps by first trying to apply stone-knapping techniques upon different kinds of rock, in areas where different geology forced such experimentation with 'inferior' raw materials), before later learning that heat from campfires could be used to soften and rework it in completely unprecedented ways. After that, it took improvements in the management of fire and heat to to be able to fully melt, refine and cast it (leading eventually to deliberate alloying with the contents of tin-bearing rocks to create the next 'age' of development).

Metalworking requires some knowledge of ores and often (depending upon the processes used for any given metal) how to maintain and control high temperatures. The era of mass-produced metal objects heralded the waning of the Stone Age and eventually led to the Bronze Age, by way of the copper-using Chalcolithic, in some parts of the world. Once metal arrowheads were produced, in any given region, the practice and expertise of making flint arrowheads largely died out.

The caption below the comic tells us that Cueball has based his entire dissertation on the false proposition that an archaeologist's job is to advance technology from some historic level, rather than revealing it. This would be considered disastrous for Cueball, as dissertations take a large amount of time and effort to complete, and he may have instead used the effort to effectively reengineer several thousand years of human development, leading away from the original subject, if not just have taken on entirely modern techniques and learnt nothing of any value at all. He even calls the process he uses "my method", perhaps implying/claiming that it is a personal innovation with no historical standing.

Some archaeologists put considerable effort into researching the processes used to create ancient technologies to determine how they were achieved, when historical records do not include that information. This can be based on clues such as the chemical composition or physical details of ancient artifacts, and asking questions such as which processes could have led to the objects that we see now.

In the absence of any historical documentation and accounts, researchers into stoneworking methods do examine extant flint arrowheads, and any of the flakes that were assumed to be removed from them on a historic worksite, and test knapping procedures for themselves to find out what recreatable methods give results consistent with the evidence. Cueball seems like he might be initially pursuing this approach, but has skipped to an entirely different set of materials and processes. And, although there were indeed copper arrowheads in subsequent pre-history, with no sign that he is even trying to match and recreate what he is doing now with what the more relevant artifact evidence indicates was being attempted then; it might as well be an entirely modern (albeit 'artisan') production process that does not even have a misplaced historical value to it.

The title text claims that his 'discoveries' are unappreciated not because they are useless (in a completely different context, they might be an exciting academic pursuit), but because the academic 'establishment' has a stranglehold on the arrowhead industry and too many vested interests in flint-knapping to allow the disruptive innovation that this new change to copper weaponry might herald. This is a humorous mashup of two classes of conspiracy theories, those of academia suppressing "the TRUTH" (according to pseudo-historians) and of oil, pharmaceutical, or other industries suppressing "free energy" or other such "innovations". In addition, "industry" is a term used in archaeology to describe specific types of tools made with the same methods; Cueball's technique would, technically, be its own new industry.

It also opens up the alternate interpretation that the comic instead depicts a historic presentation, as a counterpart to how others depict future ones, set in the actual later-Paleolithic age, where this depicts the actual innovation of previously unknown metalworking techniques, leading up to the actual disruption of society that occured and potentially very real resistance by the traditionalists of the time. Though the existence of a a pull-down screen/displayboard in this period of history would be an entirely different level of anachronism.