Stone survives almost indefinitely under a wide range of conditions.

Ceramics, once fired, are durable.

Bone survives in some soil conditions and not others.

Organic material — wood, plant fiber, animal hide, leather, woven textiles, cordage, basketry — almost never survives outside of exceptional preservation environments.

The result is that our picture of every prehistoric period is skewed toward the materials that survived and away from the materials that did not.

This is not a new observation — archaeologists have been aware of taphonomic bias for as long as the discipline has existed as a science.

But the specific magnitude of the distortion is easy to underestimate.