So I was thinking that there's this saturation where almost everyone in so-called "Western civilization" has seen countless images of skeletons, but by the same token, probably the majority of us (maybe a vast majority) have never seen a real one. What would it have been like in previous generations? I wonder if you go back far enough, if having seen real human bones, or even a real whole skeleton, might not have been a lot more common. Maybe there's a period in between a time when people often had seen the real thing, and when people had seen them on TV, where most people would not know what they looked like.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Have you seen a skeleton?
So I was thinking that there's this saturation where almost everyone in so-called "Western civilization" has seen countless images of skeletons, but by the same token, probably the majority of us (maybe a vast majority) have never seen a real one. What would it have been like in previous generations? I wonder if you go back far enough, if having seen real human bones, or even a real whole skeleton, might not have been a lot more common. Maybe there's a period in between a time when people often had seen the real thing, and when people had seen them on TV, where most people would not know what they looked like.
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2 comments:
That's odd. I've seen probably 3 or 4 in my lifetime. We had one at my high school, and the others were in various museums. The one we had at my high school was cool, the way it was preserved, I used to always touch it. But then, who doesn't think touching skeletons is cool?
Maybe it was just that my school district was on "austerity budget" my entire school career.
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