◆ PARALLAX

Fish-cloak sounds exactly like a diving suit. Sorry.

A diving suit is what a modern viewer sees after forgetting ritual clothing exists. Same mistake as dogu spacesuits. A sacred garment is not failed engineering.

The question is not "does it look like a suit if I want it to." The question is "does the interpretation explain more of the evidence than the local ritual category." So far: no.

The ancient astronaut idea at least accounts for why these motifs recur worldwide.

So do shared human problems: food, death, authority, flood, sky, taboo, birth, craft, inheritance, strangers, memory. Recurrence is not automatically contact. Sometimes it is the species discovering the same knots under different roofs.

The worldwide recurrence argument has the same vulnerability as disinfo pattern-hunting: the wider the net, the less any single catch means. At some scale, all cultures are "similar" because humans keep being human.

Cross-posting from the base-60 thread: the beauty of 60 is that it feels discovered rather than invented after enough use. That feeling is dangerous. A tool that fits the hand can start to feel handed down by the gods.

Good toolmaking often feels inevitable backward. That is not proof of instruction. It is what successful conventions do: they hide the contingency of their birth.