Amazing photo! Sweetie looks so suave and stylish with their chest fur collar

My cheeks clap when I walk so yes, I expect princess treatment

More accurate:

Metal guys: “Hey cool shirt”

All your underwear is crotchless? u nasty

Because it would look much more weird to walk around naked, except for your butt?!

Isn’t that just Valhalla?

Yeah, they didn’t shoot in black-and-white. Everything was recorded in full color, but Nintendo blocked the release due to the similarity. So a bunch of interns had to manually take a screenshot of every frame, save it, import it into a cracked Photoshop copy, export that, and re-import it into the video editor.

Just like this house isn’t a lie!

You won. This is the single most stupid response I’ve received all year. Congratulations - almost a photo finish!

And creating an actual useful, popular product from an item is strong evidence for it’s purpose. If we found an old cart with four wheels, and we could start it and drive it, we would rightfully conclude that it was a mode of transportation, and the guy standing back and saying that we still don’t know what it is, until we find some operation manual, is flatly silly.

The only issue with your analogy is that the wheel hadn’t been invented yet, so all you found is a wooden plank. “But guys, they MUST have also invented wheels, it makes the most sense!” right?

They have found over 130 of them, scattered across Europe. Presumably many HAVEN’T been found (and never will). Many may have been made of cheaper material like wood, that has deteriorated since then, leaving only the better quality metal ones. That is not a few, in a few places, that is widespread.

No, that’s still very few, in few places. Why didn’t we find anything in the main areas of the empire?

As for the products not being around: So what? ALL clothing of the time were natural materials, no synthetics, and they simply didn’t survive the cold, damp European climate. Very little textile has survived from the Roman era.

So what?! So you can’t claim “these things were definitely used for this purpose”, since we have never found any evidence for this!!

House building back then would have been done by tradespeople who were mostly illiterate, and while they all knew about the shoe-in-the-wall thing, nobody was writing down their day to day activities and customs. So while we have no written explanations, it was clearly a widespread custom.

And that means I can come up with an explanation that makes sense to me today, and decide that it must be the correct explanation, even if surrounding requirements aren’t fulfilled, right? After all, we need neither evidence, nor for the necessary techniques to have been developed.

That’s just how history is - often infuriatingly unsatisfying.

Exactly! And we should leave it at that instead of making it satisfying by settling on a solution, regardless of missing evidence.

When you have an explanation that works, and it produces a product that everybody would have needed on a daily basis (at least during part of the year), it has more credibility[…]

First: we’ve only found a few of these objects, in a few areas. Why weren’t they more widespread? Either 99.999% of Romans had gloves made some other way, or they didn’t have gloves. Why didn’t they share this development? Why didn’t it spread when it was so obviously better?

Second: why can’t we find any evidence of the required type of stitching, or of gloves being produced this way? Either they must have discovered a new type of stitching and then discovered these things and never mentioned them to outsiders, or nobody saw the obvious advantages. Which of these makes sense to you?

It’s completely fine to simply admit: we don’t know. The glove hypothesis makes sense, but it’s simply wrong to determine it as the correct solution without any actual evidence.

Just because an explanation fits well doesn’t mean it’s the best one, or even correct. According to the Wikipedia article there have been 50 proposed explanations. Did you read through all of them and evaluate them in the historical context, reaching the conclusion that the glove explanation is by far the most likely? Or did you hear that story and think “yeah, that sounds vaguely correct”, so now it must be the one explanation you’ve heard?

Did you even try to look up why we think that kind of knitting hadn’t been invented yet?