Archaeologists Are Reconstructing the 'Invisible' Technologies of the Stone Age

Good thing you can just cover it with a blanket or something in winter

it's a good thermal insulator! next time you are at the beach with hot sand, try digging down a few cm with your toes.

And lots of small rectangular silicon dioxide thingies.

UV and oxygen are plenty strong enough to deteriorate paper over time even without water. Never mind the occasional fire as what happened with the Library of Alexandria.

There is enough humidity around the Nile, that is, the places where people actually lived, to rot papyrus. We have some remaining papyrus archives, but those are exceptions, not the rule. There is absolutely nothing like the library of Ashurbanibal.

Papyrus was amazing material for the time, but it was also a curse on future archeologists. The Achaemenid Persians went from being illiterate, to writing on clay, to capturing Egypt and writing on Papyrus, in one human lifetime. We have more surviving Persian writing from the short time they wrote on clay than we have of the two hundred years of their history after that.

You take short fibers, and twist and splice them together to get longer fibers. And you repeat until you get the desired length, or thickness...

Lots of videos of how to make it on the Internets using nettle, or some other plant (flax is still used to make clothes today though through industry methods).

It’s the trick where people would take two phone books and if you interleave every page you can literally have two cars going each direction and can’t rip them apart. Ropes are this on a smaller scale.

The fibers don't need to be long. About 1 inch is enough for any purpose. The trick is to twist each fiber individually in one direction (fe. clockwise) while twisting them around each other in the opposite direction (fe. counter-clockwise). This creates internal tension that makes the fibers push against each other with substantial force, creating sufficient internal friction for them to bind against each other. And now you have string, and you again switch twist direction to bind multiple strings together to make thicker string, a switch again to bind multiple of those together, etc, until you get to proper rope thickness, which is basically always substantially thicker than the length of the fibers that make it.

It's a bit magical when you figure out how to do it, it doesn't seem to make any sense yet it works.