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> Its design shines a light on technical skills that researchers didn't think Neolithic people possessed. It seems these kinds of discoveries -- people were mo

by aggie 7y ago

> Its design shines a light on technical skills that researchers didn't think Neolithic people possessed. It seems these kinds of discoveries -- people were more advanced at some point in time than previously believed -- happen quite frequently. It makes me realize I have a much too linear view of the development of technology and civilization. There have been many stops and starts and backtracking along the way, of course with plenty of uneven distribution across single points in time as well.

cheese4242 7y ago
To take it even a step further, there could have been advanced industrial civilizations on earth before us: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-know/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-f... I don't think it likely, but like the article says, we wouldn't have any clue if there were. Likewise, if our civilization collapsed, and in the far future another advanced civilization arose on earth, they wouldn't have a clue about us if enough time had passed.
- lmilcin 7y ago
  I am pretty sure there were no industrial civilizations and the reason is pre-industrial availability of raw resources. Things like coal, oil, tin, etc were basically lying around on the surface of the earth.
  - fosk 7y ago
    Wouldn't that make an ever stronger case for a previous civilization? An advanced civilization would build things, use them day to day, and eventually they would just collapse again on the surface of the Earth.
    - cheese4242 7y ago
      That's a great question and google hasn't yielded any useful answers. Would the materials we have extracted and refined such as metal, return to some sort of easily mineable state in a million years? lmilcin raises a great point that many surface deposits of material that help "jump start" a civilization would have been consumed, but would the decay of our civilization return those same materials back into the surface, ready for the next round of civ to extract it?
      - lmilcin 7y ago
        So how do you exactly propose that pieces of coal materialize themselves along with prints of plants that vanished hundreds of millions of years ago? Or how the oil materialized from thin air. I think any industrial civilization will not hesitate to use things that are lying on the ground. It is the definition of "industrial" to be efficient with what you are given. It is possible we had other "types" of civilizations the way we had a dozen ancient civilizations exist akin to false jump starts like some kind of experiments but never reaching industrial level.
      - antepodius 7y ago
        Even today, most of the iron we produce is recycled. I could certainly imagine that a post-apocalyptic civilisation would get basically all of its iron by scavenging from the giant hulks of rust we'd leave behind. I'd imagine elements that end up being used in very small quantities would be trickier. Reclaiming materials from phones isn't economically viable even with our tech today.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Toilets! Ceramic toilets can last for millions of years in the geologic record. Our midden heaps will contain billions of them. That could be enough to ensure our place in archeological history.
  - chadlavi 7y ago
    The Porcelain Throne culture. I wonder what sort of mystical/religious purpose they'll think we might have used them for!
    - lostlogin 7y ago
      Too right. If future archeologists are anything like current ones, toilets will be described as a “ritual object”.
    - n0rbwah 7y ago
      It probably had something to do with collecting the blood of all our animal/human sacrifices.
kragen 7y ago
Probably colonialism is partly to blame; to justify colonialist policies, Europeans engaged in motivated reasoning exaggerating the technological advantages they did in fact possess over other cultures (many of them Neolithic, despite existing up to the present day), and using them to justify claims of superiority not merely material but also intellectual and genetic. (A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them.) It's to be expected that such politically-motivated claims wouldn't hold up as our knowledge deepens. There's also the issue that, as long as our research isn't too shoddy, it's sort of unidirectional. Once you have found an example of Neolithic groove joints or whatever, you've established that at least some people at the time could make groove joints, even if you didn't think they could before. Going in the other direction would require showing that the original research was Piltdown-Man-style fakery or something.
- lostlogin 7y ago
  > A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them. What do you suggest is done with them?
- speedplane 7y ago
  > to justify colonialist policies, Europeans engaged in motivated reasoning exaggerating the technological advantages they did in fact possess over other cultures ... and using them to justify claims of superiority not merely material but also intellectual and genetic. (A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them.) Nice try equating colonists with conspiracy debunkers, but the analogy does not hold up. The problem with colonists wasn't their arrogance or personal sense of superiority, it was their violent exploitation of others for their own benefit. Sitting in an armchair smugly looking down on others isn't very nice, but it's far better than getting up from your armchair and murdering/enslaving/exploiting the people you look down upon. People who debunk conspiracy theorists use argumentation, humiliation, and appeals to authority. Sometimes they do so improperly. But they aren't colonizing anything.
tzs 7y ago
> It seems these kinds of discoveries -- people were more advanced at some point in time than previously believed -- happen quite frequently. I think part of it is that we operate on a different timescale now. We are used to being able to build big things quickly, or make things that require precise machining quickly. And so of course we can also build small things, or make less sophisticated things, even quicker. If it would take a lifetime to build something or make something, we don't do it. Pretty much everything we need can be done way quicker than that. We forget that for many of these things what makes them difficult is the doing them quickly part. If you are willing to take decades or even lifetimes, those things can be done with much simpler technology than we are using. For example, I remember reading about some sort of geared mechanism from a couple thousand or more years ago. I don't think it was the Antikythera mechanism, but I don't remember for sure. Anyway, it had gears to a precision that was not seen afterwards until something like the 15th or 16th century, and so many people wonder how such ancient people could have produced such a thing. But precise gears aren't hard if you have time. All you need is some kind of fine file that can work on the metal you want to make your gears out of, and someone who can spend a lot of time doing a "file a little bit/check the fit" loop. You might need a workforce of 100 apprentices working for a lifetime to make something this way, and so those things are are. We see the scarcity of such items in the archaeological record, and unjustly assume it is because they didn't know how to make them.
- rebolek 7y ago
  Precise gears are hard, as you need a metal that is good enough for your gears and tools to craft that metal. It's not just about time.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    They only need to be hard if you intend them to last a long time under high loads. Plenty of watches and clocks managed to keep time with gears that are butter compared to tool steels.
  - kragen 7y ago
    There are lots of clocks made with wood gears, including almost all clocks made in what is now the US from 1600 to 1850 or thereabouts. Wood has some significant advantages in precision — although it unavoidably swells and shrinks substantially across the grain, as humidity and temperature rise and fall, its variation in length along the grain is much smaller, in the 1ppm/° neighborhood of Invar, an order of magnitude smaller than brass or steel. This makes clocks timed with a wooden pendulum an order of magnitude more precise than clocks timed with a plain metal pendulum; this knotty problem evaded generations of clockmakers until finally falling to legendary horology hacker John Harrison and his gridiron pendulum. Imprecise gears don't keep bad time; what they do is increase friction and wear out. Your gear ratio isn't going to change from 51:20 to 51:21 because the gears are soft, flexible, and vary in size with humidity, unless they vary by so much that the gears come out of mesh. As long as they're in mesh, each tooth on one gear is followed by precisely one tooth on the other. Rather, what will happen is that the depthing of the gears needs to include extra backlash to allow for the imprecision, and that imprecision causes deviations in the pressure angle and the like. This is a terrible problem if you are gearing down a steam engine to pump water out of a coal mine, but at the much lower loads encountered in horology, it just means you need to wind the clock more often. Chris on Clickspring has convincingly shown that even the primitive triangular tooth form used in the Antikythera Mechanism is quite adequate. The cycloidal tooth form used in modern clocks was only invented in the 1600s to 1700s, while mechanical geared clocks built in the 1300s still exist today, like the one in the Sarum Cathedral, which is iron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbJb92H5gy8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbJb92H5gy8 — the clock uses a square tooth form with rounded corners on the large gears, meshing with smaller pinions whose "teeth" are round dowels. (This part of the mechanism is believed to be original, but the escapement has been replaced.) By contrast, the tooth form depicted in the 1364 Il Tractatus Astrarii is triangular, like the Antikythera Mechanism. The clock at Chioggia, also from 1386, seems to be made in precisely the same way from what I can make out from these photos: https://www.adjora.it/altro/curiosi/vari/orologio-antico-Chioggia.html https://www.adjora.it/altro/curiosi/vari/orologio-antico-Chi... Note that the Sarum clock is held together with tusk tenons like those in the 7000-year-old well discovered in 2012, but in wrought iron rather than wood. That's because in 1386 the screw was about 2000 years old but not yet in use as a fastener.
rhacker 7y ago
I definitely agree (I mean in general - not that you specifically have a narrow view). As a people we keep deciding that ancient life = stupid / moronic. If we were alive back then, would we not consistently have that same critical thinking, technical solution oriented brain when confronted with the problems of the day. Isn't it possible too that the percentage of people that had to come up with innovative ideas was much higher than it is today? So we may have had a population that was more adept at solutions, working together, and creating than we do now. It's just that the toolkit and problem set was different. Now we still have members of society that share in this innovation, but I am curious if we're down to 0.00001% of society that really thinks through things vs just being handed bread and work.
- bluGill 7y ago
  I think of it the opposite way: most of the easy stuff has been invented already, so 99.99999% of the population needs to work before there can be a new invention.
- 6510 7y ago
  In the generalized sense people got a lot dumber and less creative over the last few decades. If we assume linearity our ancient ancestors must have been brilliant renaissance men. It makes good sense too! Like this we are much more dependent on technology and on others. Most of us cant grow crops and our [specialized] schedule is so full we need others to make simple things like pizza. Socially we are now lacking but in productivity we are [as-if] one giant tightly knitted organism.
  - jhoechtl 7y ago
    > and our [specialized] schedule is so full we need others to make simple things like pizza Well put! The past two years I made a home made power generator of mostlY scrape parts of all sorts. Took me a long time on the internet, various forum, etc. to find out about the vasics of mechanics, transmission, chemistry, etc. At one german speaking forum of electrical engineering I got particularly upset because instead of explaining me things like how three phase power etc.works, all I got was stop it, it's to dangerous, you are about to violate rule number xyz. I honestly believe we would no longer be able to fly to the moon or build the pyramids.
ivanbakel 7y ago
You can take something philosophical from it, but I think these discoveries are common largely because they are the only kind of discovery you could make. "Neolithic peoples behave as expected" is hardly a good headline - and though I don't know much about archeology, it seems like archeologists would be scientific enough to not attribute behaviours and technologies to Neolithic cultures for which there was no evidence. Considering as well that the past is poorly documented (especially wood), discovering something not already known may be easier than we think.
- aggie 7y ago
  That's a good point about what is a form of survivorship bias in science and journalism, but there are not just cases of "we hadn't seen this technology until later" but also cases of "we had seen a lack of this technology later". I'll admit my thinking on this is very seat of the pants. I'm sure historians, archeologists, etc. think about this plenty.
- mjw1007 7y ago
  There's often some poor journalism involved too. If archaeologists have only come across tool X in cultures which engage in (say) year-round agriculture, they'll fairly naturally come to a weakly-held belief along the lines of "cultures which invent agriculture tend to also invent tool X soon afterwards". Then evidence comes along of hunter-gatherers with tool X, and someone trying to make a rather dry press release into something more exciting writes "archaeologists are stunned because they previously believed that hunter-gatherers were foolish primitives who couldn't possibly have invented tool X".
londons_explore 7y ago
The thing that interests me is why these people decided to use their carpentry skills at the bottom of a well like this. Normally, one uses advanced carpentry techniques to look nice, or to make it strong and light. None of those are a restriction at the bottom of a well - Why not just use a thicker bit of wood and a basic unpinned miter joint held in place by soil? When you're carving wood by hand, why go to the extra effort of fancy complex joints for no gain?
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  >When you're carving wood by hand, why go to the extra effort of fancy complex joints for no gain? Because a bunch of complex joints are likely less labor intensive than using larger material. Remember, these "planks" were made by hand. It's the difference between spending an afternoon shoveling dirt or spending an afternoon fixing a tractor to shovel the same amount of dirt in 5min.
  - zbobet2012 7y ago
    This is true, but it also discounts "how" knowledge tended to be conveyed in ancient times. One day someone discovered that a mortise and tenon joint (I believe that is what is described here) is stronger than a miter or butt joint. This gets conveyed as "here is how you make a strong joint". The knowledge of "strong enough", or "this thickness and a miter joint" is stronger than a "thinner joint but with a tenon" implies a rigor in the way knowledge would have been passed on and organized that we know largely didn't exist. This sort of thinking and understanding is often apparent in medicine practiced in primitive tribes. There generally isn't a systemized, unified theory or understanding of dosages etc. in medicine but instead "scraps" of knowledge and facts. In short, I wouldn't expect that a builder sat down and said "here are my four joints, which should I use" when constructing this, but instead said "I know a mortise and tenon is the strongest joint so we will use that" because the analysis of "is it strong enough" both wasn't practical and wasn't understood.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      >This gets conveyed as "here is how you make a strong joint". The knowledge of "strong enough", or "this thickness and a miter joint" is stronger than a "thinner joint but with a tenon" implies a rigor in the way knowledge would have been passed on and organized that we know largely didn't exist. The knowledge of "strong enough" is something that anyone building without a desk reference on safety margins and the material wealth to build to those margins will learn to understand very well. You don't need a system to pass down that kind of knowledge because everyone will live their lives around it. >In short, I wouldn't expect that a builder sat down and said "here are my four joints, which should I use" when constructing this, but instead said "I know a mortise and tenon is the strongest joint so we will use that" because the analysis of "is it strong enough" both wasn't practical and wasn't understood. It wasn't consciously understood but whoever built it likely took stock of the situation (task that needed to be accomplished vs available materials and labor) and concluded that how they did it was the best way which is basically a less formal version of what you're describing.
radu_floricica 7y ago
For example we were pretty close to the industrial revolution 2000 years ago. It was easily at an 1800s level, before it collapsed.
- deleted 7y ago
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- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  No. The Romans never would have allowed an industrial revolution. They knew all about aqueducts, but they didn't even bother using water power to mill grain, because that would have undermined too many powerful people whose economic might was backed by the slave economy. The whole "Dark Ages were backwards after Rome collapsed" story overall is a historical meme pushed by motivated reasoning and poorly backed by facts. Even "collapse" is dubious. If Rome was really on the cusp of industrial revolution, why didn't Byzantium bother to finish the job any time in the next 1,000 years?
  - radu_floricica 7y ago
    A link I managed to google quickly: https://phys.org/news/2019-05-roman-polluted-european-air-heavily.html https://phys.org/news/2019-05-roman-polluted-european-air-he... Sure, there was progress after the roman times, and sure, Dark Ages weren't really that dark, I totally agree. Scientific progress in particular kept going forward. But as a whole, the sheer quantity of civilization went down when the roman empire split, in measurable ways.
  - usrusr 7y ago
    > but they didn't even bother using water power to mill grain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills Slave labor may have caused a massive employment problem for the lower tiers of the non-slave population, but it sure did not cause Romans to skimp on water powered grain mills.
  - bertr4nd 7y ago
    I just read Bryan Ward-Perkins’s “The Fall of Rome” and it argues pretty persuasively that the era after the fall was materially worse off than during the Roman Empire. Specifically the quality and quantity of manufactured artifacts and dwellings in the archaeological record appears to fall off substantially. Not to mention there’s some evidence (eg graffiti fragments) that indicates literacy also declined in this period.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
kazinator 7y ago
Just one clever person can invent a lot by themselves.
Spooky23 7y ago
I think that the big thing that is hard to fathom is how many fewer people were alive in those days, and how that smaller scale impacted life. US Census estimates that there were 5-20M people 7,000 years ago. People tend to settle in similar places, so the stuff left over tends to disappear in normal circumstances.
mc32 7y ago
I’m not sure that’s wrong. I think it’s prudent to only assert what we believe we have enough evidence to assert with commensurate certainty. Surely that means we’ll underestimate historic abilities and skills but it’s better than presume things based on “no-evidence” because then it’s speculation without ground facts.
imtringued 7y ago
The modern reader also makes the assumption that technological progress is global. It is very possible that the top 10 "cities" are centuries ahead of rural communities but they do not leave as much evidence because of their smaller numbers. It's easy to see that this is still true today. Not everyone is living a first wold life. India may have a billion people but they aren't anywhere close to the living standards in USA or Europe.

by aggie 7y ago

cheese4242 7y ago

To take it even a step further, there could have been advanced industrial civilizations on earth before us: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-first-industrial-civilization-on-earth-would-we-ever-know/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610886/if-we-werent-the-f... I don't think it likely, but like the article says, we wouldn't have any clue if there were. Likewise, if our civilization collapsed, and in the far future another advanced civilization arose on earth, they wouldn't have a clue about us if enough time had passed.

lmilcin 7y ago
I am pretty sure there were no industrial civilizations and the reason is pre-industrial availability of raw resources. Things like coal, oil, tin, etc were basically lying around on the surface of the earth.
- fosk 7y ago
  Wouldn't that make an ever stronger case for a previous civilization? An advanced civilization would build things, use them day to day, and eventually they would just collapse again on the surface of the Earth.
  - cheese4242 7y ago
    That's a great question and google hasn't yielded any useful answers. Would the materials we have extracted and refined such as metal, return to some sort of easily mineable state in a million years? lmilcin raises a great point that many surface deposits of material that help "jump start" a civilization would have been consumed, but would the decay of our civilization return those same materials back into the surface, ready for the next round of civ to extract it?
    - lmilcin 7y ago
      So how do you exactly propose that pieces of coal materialize themselves along with prints of plants that vanished hundreds of millions of years ago? Or how the oil materialized from thin air. I think any industrial civilization will not hesitate to use things that are lying on the ground. It is the definition of "industrial" to be efficient with what you are given. It is possible we had other "types" of civilizations the way we had a dozen ancient civilizations exist akin to false jump starts like some kind of experiments but never reaching industrial level.
    - antepodius 7y ago
      Even today, most of the iron we produce is recycled. I could certainly imagine that a post-apocalyptic civilisation would get basically all of its iron by scavenging from the giant hulks of rust we'd leave behind. I'd imagine elements that end up being used in very small quantities would be trickier. Reclaiming materials from phones isn't economically viable even with our tech today.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Toilets! Ceramic toilets can last for millions of years in the geologic record. Our midden heaps will contain billions of them. That could be enough to ensure our place in archeological history.
- chadlavi 7y ago
  The Porcelain Throne culture. I wonder what sort of mystical/religious purpose they'll think we might have used them for!
  - lostlogin 7y ago
    Too right. If future archeologists are anything like current ones, toilets will be described as a “ritual object”.
  - n0rbwah 7y ago
    It probably had something to do with collecting the blood of all our animal/human sacrifices.

kragen 7y ago

Probably colonialism is partly to blame; to justify colonialist policies, Europeans engaged in motivated reasoning exaggerating the technological advantages they did in fact possess over other cultures (many of them Neolithic, despite existing up to the present day), and using them to justify claims of superiority not merely material but also intellectual and genetic. (A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them.) It's to be expected that such politically-motivated claims wouldn't hold up as our knowledge deepens. There's also the issue that, as long as our research isn't too shoddy, it's sort of unidirectional. Once you have found an example of Neolithic groove joints or whatever, you've established that at least some people at the time could make groove joints, even if you didn't think they could before. Going in the other direction would require showing that the original research was Piltdown-Man-style fakery or something.

lostlogin 7y ago
> A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them. What do you suggest is done with them?
speedplane 7y ago
> to justify colonialist policies, Europeans engaged in motivated reasoning exaggerating the technological advantages they did in fact possess over other cultures ... and using them to justify claims of superiority not merely material but also intellectual and genetic. (A modern form of this is making fun of flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, creationists, Apollo conspiracy theorists, Juggalos, and 9/11 truthers, and occasionally engaging in more violent rhetoric toward them.) Nice try equating colonists with conspiracy debunkers, but the analogy does not hold up. The problem with colonists wasn't their arrogance or personal sense of superiority, it was their violent exploitation of others for their own benefit. Sitting in an armchair smugly looking down on others isn't very nice, but it's far better than getting up from your armchair and murdering/enslaving/exploiting the people you look down upon. People who debunk conspiracy theorists use argumentation, humiliation, and appeals to authority. Sometimes they do so improperly. But they aren't colonizing anything.

tzs 7y ago

> It seems these kinds of discoveries -- people were more advanced at some point in time than previously believed -- happen quite frequently. I think part of it is that we operate on a different timescale now. We are used to being able to build big things quickly, or make things that require precise machining quickly. And so of course we can also build small things, or make less sophisticated things, even quicker. If it would take a lifetime to build something or make something, we don't do it. Pretty much everything we need can be done way quicker than that. We forget that for many of these things what makes them difficult is the doing them quickly part. If you are willing to take decades or even lifetimes, those things can be done with much simpler technology than we are using. For example, I remember reading about some sort of geared mechanism from a couple thousand or more years ago. I don't think it was the Antikythera mechanism, but I don't remember for sure. Anyway, it had gears to a precision that was not seen afterwards until something like the 15th or 16th century, and so many people wonder how such ancient people could have produced such a thing. But precise gears aren't hard if you have time. All you need is some kind of fine file that can work on the metal you want to make your gears out of, and someone who can spend a lot of time doing a "file a little bit/check the fit" loop. You might need a workforce of 100 apprentices working for a lifetime to make something this way, and so those things are are. We see the scarcity of such items in the archaeological record, and unjustly assume it is because they didn't know how to make them.

rebolek 7y ago
Precise gears are hard, as you need a metal that is good enough for your gears and tools to craft that metal. It's not just about time.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  They only need to be hard if you intend them to last a long time under high loads. Plenty of watches and clocks managed to keep time with gears that are butter compared to tool steels.
- kragen 7y ago
  There are lots of clocks made with wood gears, including almost all clocks made in what is now the US from 1600 to 1850 or thereabouts. Wood has some significant advantages in precision — although it unavoidably swells and shrinks substantially across the grain, as humidity and temperature rise and fall, its variation in length along the grain is much smaller, in the 1ppm/° neighborhood of Invar, an order of magnitude smaller than brass or steel. This makes clocks timed with a wooden pendulum an order of magnitude more precise than clocks timed with a plain metal pendulum; this knotty problem evaded generations of clockmakers until finally falling to legendary horology hacker John Harrison and his gridiron pendulum. Imprecise gears don't keep bad time; what they do is increase friction and wear out. Your gear ratio isn't going to change from 51:20 to 51:21 because the gears are soft, flexible, and vary in size with humidity, unless they vary by so much that the gears come out of mesh. As long as they're in mesh, each tooth on one gear is followed by precisely one tooth on the other. Rather, what will happen is that the depthing of the gears needs to include extra backlash to allow for the imprecision, and that imprecision causes deviations in the pressure angle and the like. This is a terrible problem if you are gearing down a steam engine to pump water out of a coal mine, but at the much lower loads encountered in horology, it just means you need to wind the clock more often. Chris on Clickspring has convincingly shown that even the primitive triangular tooth form used in the Antikythera Mechanism is quite adequate. The cycloidal tooth form used in modern clocks was only invented in the 1600s to 1700s, while mechanical geared clocks built in the 1300s still exist today, like the one in the Sarum Cathedral, which is iron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbJb92H5gy8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbJb92H5gy8 — the clock uses a square tooth form with rounded corners on the large gears, meshing with smaller pinions whose "teeth" are round dowels. (This part of the mechanism is believed to be original, but the escapement has been replaced.) By contrast, the tooth form depicted in the 1364 Il Tractatus Astrarii is triangular, like the Antikythera Mechanism. The clock at Chioggia, also from 1386, seems to be made in precisely the same way from what I can make out from these photos: https://www.adjora.it/altro/curiosi/vari/orologio-antico-Chioggia.html https://www.adjora.it/altro/curiosi/vari/orologio-antico-Chi... Note that the Sarum clock is held together with tusk tenons like those in the 7000-year-old well discovered in 2012, but in wrought iron rather than wood. That's because in 1386 the screw was about 2000 years old but not yet in use as a fastener.

rhacker 7y ago

I definitely agree (I mean in general - not that you specifically have a narrow view). As a people we keep deciding that ancient life = stupid / moronic. If we were alive back then, would we not consistently have that same critical thinking, technical solution oriented brain when confronted with the problems of the day. Isn't it possible too that the percentage of people that had to come up with innovative ideas was much higher than it is today? So we may have had a population that was more adept at solutions, working together, and creating than we do now. It's just that the toolkit and problem set was different. Now we still have members of society that share in this innovation, but I am curious if we're down to 0.00001% of society that really thinks through things vs just being handed bread and work.

bluGill 7y ago
I think of it the opposite way: most of the easy stuff has been invented already, so 99.99999% of the population needs to work before there can be a new invention.
6510 7y ago
In the generalized sense people got a lot dumber and less creative over the last few decades. If we assume linearity our ancient ancestors must have been brilliant renaissance men. It makes good sense too! Like this we are much more dependent on technology and on others. Most of us cant grow crops and our [specialized] schedule is so full we need others to make simple things like pizza. Socially we are now lacking but in productivity we are [as-if] one giant tightly knitted organism.
- jhoechtl 7y ago
  > and our [specialized] schedule is so full we need others to make simple things like pizza Well put! The past two years I made a home made power generator of mostlY scrape parts of all sorts. Took me a long time on the internet, various forum, etc. to find out about the vasics of mechanics, transmission, chemistry, etc. At one german speaking forum of electrical engineering I got particularly upset because instead of explaining me things like how three phase power etc.works, all I got was stop it, it's to dangerous, you are about to violate rule number xyz. I honestly believe we would no longer be able to fly to the moon or build the pyramids.

ivanbakel 7y ago

You can take something philosophical from it, but I think these discoveries are common largely because they are the only kind of discovery you could make. "Neolithic peoples behave as expected" is hardly a good headline - and though I don't know much about archeology, it seems like archeologists would be scientific enough to not attribute behaviours and technologies to Neolithic cultures for which there was no evidence. Considering as well that the past is poorly documented (especially wood), discovering something not already known may be easier than we think.

aggie 7y ago
That's a good point about what is a form of survivorship bias in science and journalism, but there are not just cases of "we hadn't seen this technology until later" but also cases of "we had seen a lack of this technology later". I'll admit my thinking on this is very seat of the pants. I'm sure historians, archeologists, etc. think about this plenty.
mjw1007 7y ago
There's often some poor journalism involved too. If archaeologists have only come across tool X in cultures which engage in (say) year-round agriculture, they'll fairly naturally come to a weakly-held belief along the lines of "cultures which invent agriculture tend to also invent tool X soon afterwards". Then evidence comes along of hunter-gatherers with tool X, and someone trying to make a rather dry press release into something more exciting writes "archaeologists are stunned because they previously believed that hunter-gatherers were foolish primitives who couldn't possibly have invented tool X".

londons_explore 7y ago

The thing that interests me is why these people decided to use their carpentry skills at the bottom of a well like this. Normally, one uses advanced carpentry techniques to look nice, or to make it strong and light. None of those are a restriction at the bottom of a well - Why not just use a thicker bit of wood and a basic unpinned miter joint held in place by soil? When you're carving wood by hand, why go to the extra effort of fancy complex joints for no gain?

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
>When you're carving wood by hand, why go to the extra effort of fancy complex joints for no gain? Because a bunch of complex joints are likely less labor intensive than using larger material. Remember, these "planks" were made by hand. It's the difference between spending an afternoon shoveling dirt or spending an afternoon fixing a tractor to shovel the same amount of dirt in 5min.
- zbobet2012 7y ago
  This is true, but it also discounts "how" knowledge tended to be conveyed in ancient times. One day someone discovered that a mortise and tenon joint (I believe that is what is described here) is stronger than a miter or butt joint. This gets conveyed as "here is how you make a strong joint". The knowledge of "strong enough", or "this thickness and a miter joint" is stronger than a "thinner joint but with a tenon" implies a rigor in the way knowledge would have been passed on and organized that we know largely didn't exist. This sort of thinking and understanding is often apparent in medicine practiced in primitive tribes. There generally isn't a systemized, unified theory or understanding of dosages etc. in medicine but instead "scraps" of knowledge and facts. In short, I wouldn't expect that a builder sat down and said "here are my four joints, which should I use" when constructing this, but instead said "I know a mortise and tenon is the strongest joint so we will use that" because the analysis of "is it strong enough" both wasn't practical and wasn't understood.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    >This gets conveyed as "here is how you make a strong joint". The knowledge of "strong enough", or "this thickness and a miter joint" is stronger than a "thinner joint but with a tenon" implies a rigor in the way knowledge would have been passed on and organized that we know largely didn't exist. The knowledge of "strong enough" is something that anyone building without a desk reference on safety margins and the material wealth to build to those margins will learn to understand very well. You don't need a system to pass down that kind of knowledge because everyone will live their lives around it. >In short, I wouldn't expect that a builder sat down and said "here are my four joints, which should I use" when constructing this, but instead said "I know a mortise and tenon is the strongest joint so we will use that" because the analysis of "is it strong enough" both wasn't practical and wasn't understood. It wasn't consciously understood but whoever built it likely took stock of the situation (task that needed to be accomplished vs available materials and labor) and concluded that how they did it was the best way which is basically a less formal version of what you're describing.

radu_floricica 7y ago

For example we were pretty close to the industrial revolution 2000 years ago. It was easily at an 1800s level, before it collapsed.

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fennecfoxen 7y ago
No. The Romans never would have allowed an industrial revolution. They knew all about aqueducts, but they didn't even bother using water power to mill grain, because that would have undermined too many powerful people whose economic might was backed by the slave economy. The whole "Dark Ages were backwards after Rome collapsed" story overall is a historical meme pushed by motivated reasoning and poorly backed by facts. Even "collapse" is dubious. If Rome was really on the cusp of industrial revolution, why didn't Byzantium bother to finish the job any time in the next 1,000 years?
- radu_floricica 7y ago
  A link I managed to google quickly: https://phys.org/news/2019-05-roman-polluted-european-air-heavily.html https://phys.org/news/2019-05-roman-polluted-european-air-he... Sure, there was progress after the roman times, and sure, Dark Ages weren't really that dark, I totally agree. Scientific progress in particular kept going forward. But as a whole, the sheer quantity of civilization went down when the roman empire split, in measurable ways.
- usrusr 7y ago
  > but they didn't even bother using water power to mill grain https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbegal_aqueduct_and_mills Slave labor may have caused a massive employment problem for the lower tiers of the non-slave population, but it sure did not cause Romans to skimp on water powered grain mills.
- bertr4nd 7y ago
  I just read Bryan Ward-Perkins’s “The Fall of Rome” and it argues pretty persuasively that the era after the fall was materially worse off than during the Roman Empire. Specifically the quality and quantity of manufactured artifacts and dwellings in the archaeological record appears to fall off substantially. Not to mention there’s some evidence (eg graffiti fragments) that indicates literacy also declined in this period.

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kazinator 7y ago

Just one clever person can invent a lot by themselves.

Spooky23 7y ago

I think that the big thing that is hard to fathom is how many fewer people were alive in those days, and how that smaller scale impacted life. US Census estimates that there were 5-20M people 7,000 years ago. People tend to settle in similar places, so the stuff left over tends to disappear in normal circumstances.

mc32 7y ago

I’m not sure that’s wrong. I think it’s prudent to only assert what we believe we have enough evidence to assert with commensurate certainty. Surely that means we’ll underestimate historic abilities and skills but it’s better than presume things based on “no-evidence” because then it’s speculation without ground facts.

imtringued 7y ago

The modern reader also makes the assumption that technological progress is global. It is very possible that the top 10 "cities" are centuries ahead of rural communities but they do not leave as much evidence because of their smaller numbers. It's easy to see that this is still true today. Not everyone is living a first wold life. India may have a billion people but they aren't anywhere close to the living standards in USA or Europe.