We’re having fun showing our most popular blog and photo posts can now be turned in real, shop-ready products thanks to the maker movement. As an example of data-driven social media, we repurposed a popular image from our social media feed into a 3D printed jewelry item available that is ready-for-purchase in 18K gold and other materials. (Separately, we also converted this blog photo into an in-game virtual reality object, permitting a virtual reality fashion shoot.) This caveman design keychain was co-designed and generated in part by an 11,000-year old caveman illustration of a woolly-mammoth in France. (You can read our original blog article with illustration here. Also, check out a cool data-driven social media video we created featuring some of these items, as well as more serious pop-scientific article on potentially de-extincting the woolly mammoth for interstellar space travel someday.)
You can use the Shapeways widget below to manipulate the 3D object and see it from a variety of viewpoints (as well as buy the physical object in a wide-variety of materials, from the extremely inexpensive to the very expensive):
So we can say that this keychain was truly co-designed by a French Cro-magnon caveman living 11,000 years ago. (We’re tempted to say that 3D design on Shapeways is now so easy even an 11,000-year-old caveperson can do it. But… we can’t say that yet because our spellchecker thinks that “caveperson” or “cavewoman” aren’t words in the English language. Guess gender-neutral terminology will have to wait another 11,000 years. If it really was designed by a caveman, does that make this caveman design? Isn’t that a term of derision?)
This keychain shows the caveperson’s depiction of a woolly mammoth. That was part of the caveman diet back then. (Unfortunately, as we previously discussed, our ancestors liked the woolly mammoth diet a little bit too much. They’re now extinct. it’s thought our ancestors played a big role in that. Since no one has seen a woolly mammoth recently, this 11,000-year old drawing is how we know what they looked like.)
The actual cave painting makes clear this elephant-looking creature had an awful lot of hair. For 3D printing, some of that detail got lost. (We said it was caveman design, after all.) Even so, it still looks really cool, and it really was designed by a caveperson.
Our caveman design keychain is available from our shop on Shapeways in virtually every imaginable material from inexpensive plastic to polished silver and 18K gold.
Think how cool it will be to own a prehistoric keychain co-designed by a caveman!