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by pagekicker 980 days ago
This article is not very good, notably, it is almost all guessing, no evidence.

An explanation that I would have found plausible: building stairs clockwise is cheaper somehow.

1 comments

The irony is that you would have found the original proposition of the hypothesis, by Theodore Andrea Cook in 1903, to be exactly the same thing. Cook presented zero evidence, clearly was originating the hypothesis, and made it up from whole cloth.

Xe was a sports writer and art critic, not a historian, moreover.

It's a half-paragraph aside in a book entitled _Spirals in Nature and Art_, using words like "would" and "probable". And after 120 years of uncritical repetition and amplification, here we are.