6 ms·

Yeah I agree that the article's explanation seems unlikely. A jump from 11K to 476K years ago just seems too big, one would expect that we would have found plen

Yeah I agree that the article's explanation seems unlikely. A jump from 11K to 476K years ago just seems too big, one would expect that we would have found plenty of other wooden structures in the period in between if people had been manufacturing them all the time.

gcanyon 3y ago
Technology gets lost all the time. The people who migrated to Australia apparently lost several key technologies over the years because the population was too sparse to guarantee the maintenance of knowledge.
- defrost 3y ago
  Do you have any examples of these lost technologies and references to the papers that discuss this? Or is this some Quadrant sourced opinioning?
  - ceejayoz 3y ago
    Greek fire and Damascus steel are fairly good examples. Maybe chuck in the Antikythera device.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
      Roman concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
    - tzs 3y ago
      I don't think I'd count the Antikythera device. My understanding is that the mystery with it is how it was made. The astronomical and mathematical knowledge to design it was well known among the Greeks. If Antikythera devices were common, with say every ship having one, every town and village temple having one, every school having one, and so on we'd have a big mystery because we don't think the Greeks had the technology for mass production of mechanisms with the necessary accuracy and precision. But we've only found one, and we don't know how long it took to build. The Antikythera device could be the work of one builder and his assistants over a lifetime, financed by someone very wealthy and able to supply as many slaves as the builder wanted. It could even have been built over more than one lifetime, if the sponsor was a government. When you are not in a hurry and you have a lot of laborers you can make very precise mechanisms with little more technology than blocks of metal and hand files. As Teller of Penn & Teller once observed, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". Penn has said "The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth".
      - nialo 3y ago
        In case anyone here hasn't seen it, I want to share this very cool youtube series of an Australian clock maker creating a replica of the Antikythera device using only tools believed to be available to the ancient Greeks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4_jDU2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
  - bumby 3y ago
    Are you asking specifically to the Australian examples or examples in general? History is replete with many of the latter, in part because the custom was to keep certain artisans/state technologies secret. Before openly disclosed patents were the norm, technologies like greek fire, damascus steel, or Leeuwenhoek's lens often died with those who knew how to make them.
    - defrost 3y ago
      I was curious about specifically Australian examples as the comment implied they had examples in mind such as losing the use of the bow and arrow or somesuch. The story there is more complex and there's a faction in Austalia that would insist that Australian aboriginals were on the decline when Europeans arrived.
  - alemanek 3y ago
    The entire city of Petra was lost to western society (rediscovered in early 1800s) despite it being a part of the Roman Empire at one point and major trading hub for hundreds of years. We lose stuff all the time.
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    Some people that replied to this comment were saying Damascus steel was "lost", which is mostly a meme. If we're talking about modern times, Damascus steel can be easily forged and replicated by modern hobbyist smiths. If we're talking about being lost at some point between 0AD and, say...1900 AD, then it was probably just not economically viable to make it. Damascus steel is very labor-intensive to produce and does not offer significant structural advantages compared to regular mild or tempered steel. Certainly not in applications where most metal was used in the middle ages (hint: it was warfare). For example, it makes no sense to make a full-plate armor or a musket out of Damascus steel. It would be mostly a status item, rather than a practical tool. Hence when we say "lost", it likely just means people looked at it and decided it wasn't worth the time outside of niche applications. And since it was niche, there is very few historical artifacts, that make it look "lost", when in reality, there just weren't too many of these items to begin with.
    - ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
      I do not know where you've got your version from (especially that it was lost between 0AD and the 20th century, when it actually had been the 19th and 20th and Damascus steel didn't exist before the 6th century), but I know about this one: Many people in Europe saw these steels and tried to recreate the effect through processing. However, they could not discover the secret, and could not make it. Though there was a demand for Damascus steel, in the 19th century it stopped being made. This steel had been produced for 11 centuries, and in just about a generation, the means of its manufacture was entirely lost. The reason it disappeared remained a mystery until just a few years ago. As it turns out, the technique was not lost, it just stopped working. The "secret" that produced such high quality weapons was not in the technique of the swordsmiths, but rather on the composition of the material they were using. The swordsmiths got their steel ingots from India. In the 19th Century, the mining region where those ingots came from changed. https://engineering.purdue.edu/MSE/aboutus/gotmaterials/History/horning.html https://engineering.purdue.edu/MSE/aboutus/gotmaterials/Hist... The actual paper about the impurities: https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.html https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.ht...
      - 3y ago
  - gcanyon 3y ago
    One of the problems of reading digital books (at least for me) is near-completely forgetting where a fact came from, and just remembering the fact. The source was a book on the future actually being likely to be good/improving from where we are now. My memory on the specifics is vague. I remember him saying they had lost fish hooks (maybe just some fishing technique in general?). And that further losses occurred in the migration to Tasmania, leaving the settlers there even further behind. I don't know what "Quadrant" references.
ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
> we would have found plenty of other wooden structures in the period Well, wood is not exactly known to survive for hundreds, much less thousands or hundreds of thousand of years.
- misja111 3y ago
  Sure, but apparently the chance that it survives 476K year is > 0. That would imply that the chance of finding preserved wood anywhere in [11K .. 476K] is > 0 as well. Given such a large period with nothing found in it, and given that in this period wood needed to survive considerable less long than 476K, makes me want to look for other explanations.
  - mysterydip 3y ago
    If it was a burned structure, maybe the burning affected the measurement of the dating.
    - Kye 3y ago
      I like to think the people who date these things can tell the difference between the carbon from burning and carbon-14. I'm not sure it's even used for something this old since AFAIK it only works so far back.
      - Bouncingsoul1 3y ago
        they got 'infinite' for all carbon dating. They derived the age from the sand layer the wood was found. I got this from reading the paper.
        pulse7 3y ago
        Earth's crust is moving. Maybe the sand layers moved after the wood was placed there... and maybe the derived age is all wrong...
      - 3y ago
stubish 3y ago
I dunno. What seems unlikely to me is that hominids and their predecessors had stone tools for >3 million years before they realized they could use them to build a bridge or tent. I would expect simple carpentry to be occurring much, much earlier, and the evidence lost to time.

gcanyon 3y ago

Technology gets lost all the time. The people who migrated to Australia apparently lost several key technologies over the years because the population was too sparse to guarantee the maintenance of knowledge.

defrost 3y ago
Do you have any examples of these lost technologies and references to the papers that discuss this? Or is this some Quadrant sourced opinioning?
- ceejayoz 3y ago
  Greek fire and Damascus steel are fairly good examples. Maybe chuck in the Antikythera device.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - TedDoesntTalk 3y ago
    Roman concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_concrete
  - tzs 3y ago
    I don't think I'd count the Antikythera device. My understanding is that the mystery with it is how it was made. The astronomical and mathematical knowledge to design it was well known among the Greeks. If Antikythera devices were common, with say every ship having one, every town and village temple having one, every school having one, and so on we'd have a big mystery because we don't think the Greeks had the technology for mass production of mechanisms with the necessary accuracy and precision. But we've only found one, and we don't know how long it took to build. The Antikythera device could be the work of one builder and his assistants over a lifetime, financed by someone very wealthy and able to supply as many slaves as the builder wanted. It could even have been built over more than one lifetime, if the sponsor was a government. When you are not in a hurry and you have a lot of laborers you can make very precise mechanisms with little more technology than blocks of metal and hand files. As Teller of Penn & Teller once observed, "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect". Penn has said "The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth".
    - nialo 3y ago
      In case anyone here hasn't seen it, I want to share this very cool youtube series of an Australian clock maker creating a replica of the Antikythera device using only tools believed to be available to the ancient Greeks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPNsHnyxfygxA0to4RXv4_jDU2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ML4tw_UzqZE&list=PLZioPDnFPN...
- bumby 3y ago
  Are you asking specifically to the Australian examples or examples in general? History is replete with many of the latter, in part because the custom was to keep certain artisans/state technologies secret. Before openly disclosed patents were the norm, technologies like greek fire, damascus steel, or Leeuwenhoek's lens often died with those who knew how to make them.
  - defrost 3y ago
    I was curious about specifically Australian examples as the comment implied they had examples in mind such as losing the use of the bow and arrow or somesuch. The story there is more complex and there's a faction in Austalia that would insist that Australian aboriginals were on the decline when Europeans arrived.
- alemanek 3y ago
  The entire city of Petra was lost to western society (rediscovered in early 1800s) despite it being a part of the Roman Empire at one point and major trading hub for hundreds of years. We lose stuff all the time.
- antisthenes 3y ago
  Some people that replied to this comment were saying Damascus steel was "lost", which is mostly a meme. If we're talking about modern times, Damascus steel can be easily forged and replicated by modern hobbyist smiths. If we're talking about being lost at some point between 0AD and, say...1900 AD, then it was probably just not economically viable to make it. Damascus steel is very labor-intensive to produce and does not offer significant structural advantages compared to regular mild or tempered steel. Certainly not in applications where most metal was used in the middle ages (hint: it was warfare). For example, it makes no sense to make a full-plate armor or a musket out of Damascus steel. It would be mostly a status item, rather than a practical tool. Hence when we say "lost", it likely just means people looked at it and decided it wasn't worth the time outside of niche applications. And since it was niche, there is very few historical artifacts, that make it look "lost", when in reality, there just weren't too many of these items to begin with.
  - ReleaseCandidat 3y ago
    I do not know where you've got your version from (especially that it was lost between 0AD and the 20th century, when it actually had been the 19th and 20th and Damascus steel didn't exist before the 6th century), but I know about this one: Many people in Europe saw these steels and tried to recreate the effect through processing. However, they could not discover the secret, and could not make it. Though there was a demand for Damascus steel, in the 19th century it stopped being made. This steel had been produced for 11 centuries, and in just about a generation, the means of its manufacture was entirely lost. The reason it disappeared remained a mystery until just a few years ago. As it turns out, the technique was not lost, it just stopped working. The "secret" that produced such high quality weapons was not in the technique of the swordsmiths, but rather on the composition of the material they were using. The swordsmiths got their steel ingots from India. In the 19th Century, the mining region where those ingots came from changed. https://engineering.purdue.edu/MSE/aboutus/gotmaterials/History/horning.html https://engineering.purdue.edu/MSE/aboutus/gotmaterials/Hist... The actual paper about the impurities: https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.html https://www.tms.org/pubs/journals/JOM/9809/Verhoeven-9809.ht...
    - 3y ago
- gcanyon 3y ago
  One of the problems of reading digital books (at least for me) is near-completely forgetting where a fact came from, and just remembering the fact. The source was a book on the future actually being likely to be good/improving from where we are now. My memory on the specifics is vague. I remember him saying they had lost fish hooks (maybe just some fishing technique in general?). And that further losses occurred in the migration to Tasmania, leaving the settlers there even further behind. I don't know what "Quadrant" references.

ReleaseCandidat 3y ago

> we would have found plenty of other wooden structures in the period Well, wood is not exactly known to survive for hundreds, much less thousands or hundreds of thousand of years.

misja111 3y ago
Sure, but apparently the chance that it survives 476K year is > 0. That would imply that the chance of finding preserved wood anywhere in [11K .. 476K] is > 0 as well. Given such a large period with nothing found in it, and given that in this period wood needed to survive considerable less long than 476K, makes me want to look for other explanations.
- mysterydip 3y ago
  If it was a burned structure, maybe the burning affected the measurement of the dating.
  - Kye 3y ago
    I like to think the people who date these things can tell the difference between the carbon from burning and carbon-14. I'm not sure it's even used for something this old since AFAIK it only works so far back.
    - Bouncingsoul1 3y ago
      they got 'infinite' for all carbon dating. They derived the age from the sand layer the wood was found. I got this from reading the paper.
      - pulse7 3y ago
        Earth's crust is moving. Maybe the sand layers moved after the wood was placed there... and maybe the derived age is all wrong...
    - 3y ago

stubish 3y ago

I dunno. What seems unlikely to me is that hominids and their predecessors had stone tools for >3 million years before they realized they could use them to build a bridge or tent. I would expect simple carpentry to be occurring much, much earlier, and the evidence lost to time.