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> The engraver did not maintain alignment of the letters or uniformity of their size. In the first row that he wrote, the letters become progressively smaller and lower.

Some things never change.

My grandmother had one of these combs, made from plastic or some kind of hard resin. It was used for the exact same purpose and had the same basic design, fine teeth on one side and coarser teeth on the reverse. Here is an example: https://www.3p.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/SB424.jpg

It's interesting to think humans used and evolved these objects for millennia before they got rich enough to practice modern hygiene. Worldwide prevalence of lice infestation can still exceed 60% of the population in some regions: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2603110/

My grandmother too!
Often on such artefacts they use "I" to refer to the thing itself, but it appears that the author did not do that here?

I wonder if it says something about how comfortable they were with writing: how strange was it to them that you could make a lifeless thing "speak", and carry words? The stranger it was to them, I would think, the more they might think of it as magical and let the item speak in an "I" voice.

Maybe there are some parallels to that in how we make large language models talk to us. We feel it as something unsettling and almost magical that we can make the models talk to us as if they were people, but when you think about it, objects carrying words on their own at all was an even bigger leap.

One theory about the development of writing goes as follows:

- always take inventory by counting stuff in the warehouse

- make clay tokens (1:1 with warehouse items) and keep them in the office (now you know when things in the warehouse get legs and walk away)

- keep the tokens in the office in sealed clay balls (so someone can't five finger discount out of the warehouse and pilfer the right number of office tokens)

- make marks on the clay balls (1:1 with the tokens) so you don't have to keep making new clay balls each time you break open the old ones to check how many things they represent.

- realise that, by transitivity, the marks are 1:1 with things in the warehouse

- refactor the legacy system and just make marks on tablets (which, as a bonus, are more easily filed than balls!)

Wow, and it's such an old artifact that the researchers discovered multiple new historical forms of letters in the engraving. This is an extraordinary find.

The message is tentatively translated as "may this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard".

What actually put an end to prevalence of lice? Routine bathing?
Things like this make me happy to be alive now.
In Montaillou, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie notes how the removal of lice was like a somewhat intimate routine. People would take the opportunity to gossip and chat and all that lol
So what is it, intimate or social? Sounds social from what you say, like monkeys picking bugs out of each others' fur.
It can be both, and is easily compared to some hair stuff today.

I remember women in my family spending hours talking while doing hair. "Doing" meaning things like home perms, haircolor, and highlights. I'm guessing similar things happen with braids.

Realistically, none of these women would trust a stranger to do this process. If it wasn't a close friend or family, you'd go to a trained professional. The process itself is intimate, and the setting - with its boredom and sheer amounts of time it takes - lends it to be social.

Similar to combing lice. You are probably going to need to do it, it is intimate because they are touching your head, and that need alongside setting provides for a social opportunity.

To be clear, lofatdairy means "intimate" in the sense of "involving close personal interaction", not as in "sexual".