5 ms·

Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age

118 points by knowablemag 29d ago

kqr 26d ago
Not mentioned in TFA: cordage is a critical component in slings, an early, powerful ranged weapon. With some sort of pulley, rope allows a single human to excert large amounts of force trough leverage, often in ways more convenient than other forms of mechanical leverage. (Such as actual levers.) Rope can also be used for 1:1 power transfer.
- Honali 26d ago
  This really reinforces the idea that cordage was less a single invention than a general-purpose mechanical primitive
  - kqr 26d ago
    Indeed. I maintain a mental list of underrated conceptual leaps throughout history and rope is in there. Also on the list is writing, statistics, and the world wide web. The wheel is overrated. It isn't that innovative (having been invented many times throughout history by various cultures) and to be properly useful it needs environmental adaptations. Controlled fire is neither under- nor overrated, I think.
    - lukeify 26d ago
      > I maintain a mental list of underrated conceptual leaps throughout history and rope is in there One has to wonder how many times they had to be a conceptual leap too. Rope could've been "invented" hundreds of times over the last 100,000 years, depending on how lossy knowledge was.
    - dotancohen 26d ago
      I think that a huge conceptual leap was the realisation that sex leads to pregnancy. The earliest surviving texts talk of hereditary - implying this was known before writing. This realisation has been the basis of transfer of power and resources, laying the ground for formation of empires and generational blood fueds.
      - bjourne 26d ago
        Isn't the sex => baby causation well known even among monkeys?
      - sokoloff 26d ago
        I expect this would be readily learned from observation (of humans [changes in menstruation relating to puberty and during pregnancy would give a faster-acting conceptual connection] and/or of livestock). The exact mechanism might easily be misunderstood and subject to all kinds of wrong theories, but the causal linkage would be hard to avoid learning. Is it not the general consensus among anthropologists that this practical knowledge would long predate writing? Surely, if ancient humans could understand and then predict the seasonal movement of the stars to plan agriculture, they'd be able to work out that there is a linkage between sex and pregnancy.
    - mrguyorama 26d ago
      I feel like even in this thread people are missing a huge one: Pottery. Can't have soup without pottery. (nit: you can use some sort of leaf bowl but like, eh)
- MengerSponge 26d ago
  > early, powerful ranged weapon Indeed, we've largely missed the point of the "David and Goliath" story. David rolled up to a sword fight with a handgun.
Honali 26d ago
We tend to picture prehistoric technology as a progression of increasingly clever stone tools because stone is what survives, but rope may have been closer to infrastructure
- cubefox 26d ago
  Stone age peoples still existed until fairly recently in Africa and Australia, so stone age technology isn't prehistoric at all. What's prehistoric is stone age technology from other parts of the world.
  - Ekaros 26d ago
    Being from later developed part of Europe that is Finland. It is fun to consider that Iron age ended in 1000-1300 CE... So whole "ages" thing is really location dependent...
  - bluGill 26d ago
    Problem is all those people likely have had various contacts with other cultures and it is unknown what impact that had.
- aa-jv 26d ago
  Time to start trying to delineate the Rope Age?
Terr_ 26d ago
There are certain bodies of human knowledge and practice which aren't usually referred to as "technologies", and I think that leads us to underestimate their complexity and importance. In particular, I'm thinking of textiles and agriculture. It's no coincidence that both were prime targets of industrial mechanization, occupying a huge proportion of all human labor.
- plufz 26d ago
  You don’t have to be a scholar in gender studies to wonder why textile has been a bit overlooked when looking back at human development.
  - noosphr 26d ago
    By who? The cotton gin and spinning jenny are front and center in any history of the early industrial revolution.
    - schrectacular 26d ago
      The development of dyes was the genesis of the chemical industry, but no one really talks about that.
      - tyho 26d ago
        I googled "history of the chemical industry" and synthetic dyes were mentioned prominently by each of the first five results returned.
      - usrusr 26d ago
        It's just the A in BASF. But yeah, that entire IG Farben episode might have toned down their enthusiasm for identifying with dyes a little. Same for their peers up and down the Rhine.
    - bluGill 26d ago
      That a technology to develop the spinning wheel should have been around a lot sooner, but it seems to have not appeared until relatively late in the history. Now yes, we are talking probably a thousand years before, but the idea is simple enough that you would think that the ancients who knew all the different pieces such as the lathe could have made that work. Spinning Jenny? Yeah, that's complex enough that it couldn't have appeared much sooner. I'm not sure if the cotton gin would have been possible sooner or not.
INTPenis 26d ago
With just wood and rope they could probably accomplish amazing things. I'm convinced on a personal level that stone age people had cranes to lift boulders with.
- card_zero 26d ago
  Stone age when? 40,000 years ago or 4,000 years ago? Göbekli Tepe is from a mere 11,000 years ago. I mean cranes for ziggurats, sure. Cranes for megaliths I dunno about. Maybe you just got a lot of beefy men to push the giant rock into an upright position, maybe brute force was the point. Giving them simple machines is a slippery slope (which is itself a more plausible paleolithic/neolithic technology) to a kind of paleo-punk where you retrofit them with Flintstones cars and apartment buildings and production line belts, all made from hide and rope and mammoth grease.
  - INTPenis 26d ago
    When we start erecting megaliths, that's when I believe we had basic counterweight cranes.
    - defrost 26d ago
      Well before those (pun intended) there were many variations on counter weighted water lifters - from source (well, or lower channel) to buckets or to irrigation channels.
      - card_zero 26d ago
        So you raise the water, lowering the counterweight, and the balance makes it easy. Then you need to get the counterweight up again, so you ... haul it up with great effort? Or lower the water back down the well? I think I've seen pictures of this type of thing for use with irrigation channels: like a giant spoon that pivots on a post, with a weight opposite the bowl. Still unclear how the return motion with no water isn't just as hard as lifting water with no counterbalance. Here it is, the shadoof! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof Doesn't seem to explain though. "The bucket can be lowered by the operator using their own weight to push it down; the counterweight then raises the full bucket without effort." So then, raise the water using your own weight, don't bother with the counterweight? Oh, I suppose the point is to have a bucket of water conveniently stationary at shoulder height, but held only tenuously in place when it's empty in the depths of a well, rather than the other way round. Right.
rinconrex 26d ago
The TFA mentions wood, along with string, twine, rope, etc. Soft technologies surely would also include leather, and other animal products as well. Cordage can be a force-multiplier as well, in addition to what others have said about pulleys and slings. One could tie many strings/ropes to a tree or animal and pull with multiples of a singular force.
HelloUsername 26d ago
Apes together strong
avadodin 26d ago
They were still more likely swinging off crude cordage like Tarzan than driving off in their 5nm-process torsion-battery-powered car, but still.
alexpotato 26d ago
Knots and lashings were one of those things that "just made sense" to me as a child/teenager. So much so that even though I never took pioneering merit badge as a Boy Scout, people who were taking it had me double check their project knots before they were submitted for final evaluation. Had a similar experience with SQL e.g. I finished a 3 hour exam in <45 minutes for a DB class in grad school. I've always wondered if the "3d modeling" aspect of both skills overlapped and why this was easy for me (I once tested very highly in mental 3d rotation skills on an aptitude test so maybe?)
- _def 26d ago
  Thanks for putting words to the concept, "mental 3d rotation skills" describes exactly what I feel I lack to a degree where it noticable impacts other fields, I assume.
jongjong 26d ago
Sometimes I take up the most obscure hobby imaginable and then somehow it comes up on HN months later. I discovered a plant near where I live which has really strong, thin, long leaves and I started twisting them together and it makes strong, shiny green twine. I made a 3 meter long twine and then wove it into a tiny basket. It works with only 2 strands and you can do it by yourself without any tools; just your fingers. Though I found some 3D printed plastic parts online which have a component which looks eerily similar to the one in the article.
m3kw9 26d ago
The state of the art tech back then has to feel like state of the art tech today.
throw0101d 26d ago
Bloomber's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on rope a little while ago, "How the Invention of Rope Gave Us Modern Civilization": > Rope is easy to take for granted. It seems obvious and straightforward. But of course, it had to be invented. Early humans discovered that by twisting fibers around each other, the resulting structure would be something durable and strong. Without rope, all kinds of things aren't possible, from lifting objects into the air to whaling or modern bridges. So how was rope developed and what were the big breakthroughs in its history? On this episode, we speak with Tim Queeney, the author of 'Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization.' He walks us through the history of the technology, and its ongoing evolution, including how it might one day allow us to build elevators into outer space. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JThQIaluXPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JThQIaluXPg * https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-the-invention-of-rope-gave-us-modern-civilization/id1056200096?i=1000770303215 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-the-invention-of-r... * https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PWgwDb3lHUJFBOUDln5yN https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PWgwDb3lHUJFBOUDln5yN * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/how-the-invention-of-rope-gave-us-modern-civilization https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/how-the-invention-of-rope-gav... Schooner Association interview: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4n92rHkXzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4n92rHkXzA Interviewee / author: * https://timqueeney.com https://timqueeney.com

118 points by knowablemag 29d ago

kqr 26d ago

Not mentioned in TFA: cordage is a critical component in slings, an early, powerful ranged weapon. With some sort of pulley, rope allows a single human to excert large amounts of force trough leverage, often in ways more convenient than other forms of mechanical leverage. (Such as actual levers.) Rope can also be used for 1:1 power transfer.

Honali 26d ago
This really reinforces the idea that cordage was less a single invention than a general-purpose mechanical primitive
- kqr 26d ago
  Indeed. I maintain a mental list of underrated conceptual leaps throughout history and rope is in there. Also on the list is writing, statistics, and the world wide web. The wheel is overrated. It isn't that innovative (having been invented many times throughout history by various cultures) and to be properly useful it needs environmental adaptations. Controlled fire is neither under- nor overrated, I think.
  - lukeify 26d ago
    > I maintain a mental list of underrated conceptual leaps throughout history and rope is in there One has to wonder how many times they had to be a conceptual leap too. Rope could've been "invented" hundreds of times over the last 100,000 years, depending on how lossy knowledge was.
  - dotancohen 26d ago
    I think that a huge conceptual leap was the realisation that sex leads to pregnancy. The earliest surviving texts talk of hereditary - implying this was known before writing. This realisation has been the basis of transfer of power and resources, laying the ground for formation of empires and generational blood fueds.
    - bjourne 26d ago
      Isn't the sex => baby causation well known even among monkeys?
    - sokoloff 26d ago
      I expect this would be readily learned from observation (of humans [changes in menstruation relating to puberty and during pregnancy would give a faster-acting conceptual connection] and/or of livestock). The exact mechanism might easily be misunderstood and subject to all kinds of wrong theories, but the causal linkage would be hard to avoid learning. Is it not the general consensus among anthropologists that this practical knowledge would long predate writing? Surely, if ancient humans could understand and then predict the seasonal movement of the stars to plan agriculture, they'd be able to work out that there is a linkage between sex and pregnancy.
  - mrguyorama 26d ago
    I feel like even in this thread people are missing a huge one: Pottery. Can't have soup without pottery. (nit: you can use some sort of leaf bowl but like, eh)
MengerSponge 26d ago
> early, powerful ranged weapon Indeed, we've largely missed the point of the "David and Goliath" story. David rolled up to a sword fight with a handgun.

Honali 26d ago

We tend to picture prehistoric technology as a progression of increasingly clever stone tools because stone is what survives, but rope may have been closer to infrastructure

cubefox 26d ago
Stone age peoples still existed until fairly recently in Africa and Australia, so stone age technology isn't prehistoric at all. What's prehistoric is stone age technology from other parts of the world.
- Ekaros 26d ago
  Being from later developed part of Europe that is Finland. It is fun to consider that Iron age ended in 1000-1300 CE... So whole "ages" thing is really location dependent...
- bluGill 26d ago
  Problem is all those people likely have had various contacts with other cultures and it is unknown what impact that had.
aa-jv 26d ago
Time to start trying to delineate the Rope Age?

Terr_ 26d ago

There are certain bodies of human knowledge and practice which aren't usually referred to as "technologies", and I think that leads us to underestimate their complexity and importance. In particular, I'm thinking of textiles and agriculture. It's no coincidence that both were prime targets of industrial mechanization, occupying a huge proportion of all human labor.

plufz 26d ago
You don’t have to be a scholar in gender studies to wonder why textile has been a bit overlooked when looking back at human development.
- noosphr 26d ago
  By who? The cotton gin and spinning jenny are front and center in any history of the early industrial revolution.
  - schrectacular 26d ago
    The development of dyes was the genesis of the chemical industry, but no one really talks about that.
    - tyho 26d ago
      I googled "history of the chemical industry" and synthetic dyes were mentioned prominently by each of the first five results returned.
    - usrusr 26d ago
      It's just the A in BASF. But yeah, that entire IG Farben episode might have toned down their enthusiasm for identifying with dyes a little. Same for their peers up and down the Rhine.
  - bluGill 26d ago
    That a technology to develop the spinning wheel should have been around a lot sooner, but it seems to have not appeared until relatively late in the history. Now yes, we are talking probably a thousand years before, but the idea is simple enough that you would think that the ancients who knew all the different pieces such as the lathe could have made that work. Spinning Jenny? Yeah, that's complex enough that it couldn't have appeared much sooner. I'm not sure if the cotton gin would have been possible sooner or not.

INTPenis 26d ago

With just wood and rope they could probably accomplish amazing things. I'm convinced on a personal level that stone age people had cranes to lift boulders with.

card_zero 26d ago
Stone age when? 40,000 years ago or 4,000 years ago? Göbekli Tepe is from a mere 11,000 years ago. I mean cranes for ziggurats, sure. Cranes for megaliths I dunno about. Maybe you just got a lot of beefy men to push the giant rock into an upright position, maybe brute force was the point. Giving them simple machines is a slippery slope (which is itself a more plausible paleolithic/neolithic technology) to a kind of paleo-punk where you retrofit them with Flintstones cars and apartment buildings and production line belts, all made from hide and rope and mammoth grease.
- INTPenis 26d ago
  When we start erecting megaliths, that's when I believe we had basic counterweight cranes.
  - defrost 26d ago
    Well before those (pun intended) there were many variations on counter weighted water lifters - from source (well, or lower channel) to buckets or to irrigation channels.
    - card_zero 26d ago
      So you raise the water, lowering the counterweight, and the balance makes it easy. Then you need to get the counterweight up again, so you ... haul it up with great effort? Or lower the water back down the well? I think I've seen pictures of this type of thing for use with irrigation channels: like a giant spoon that pivots on a post, with a weight opposite the bowl. Still unclear how the return motion with no water isn't just as hard as lifting water with no counterbalance. Here it is, the shadoof! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadoof Doesn't seem to explain though. "The bucket can be lowered by the operator using their own weight to push it down; the counterweight then raises the full bucket without effort." So then, raise the water using your own weight, don't bother with the counterweight? Oh, I suppose the point is to have a bucket of water conveniently stationary at shoulder height, but held only tenuously in place when it's empty in the depths of a well, rather than the other way round. Right.

rinconrex 26d ago

The TFA mentions wood, along with string, twine, rope, etc. Soft technologies surely would also include leather, and other animal products as well. Cordage can be a force-multiplier as well, in addition to what others have said about pulleys and slings. One could tie many strings/ropes to a tree or animal and pull with multiples of a singular force.

HelloUsername 26d ago

Apes together strong

avadodin 26d ago

They were still more likely swinging off crude cordage like Tarzan than driving off in their 5nm-process torsion-battery-powered car, but still.

alexpotato 26d ago

Knots and lashings were one of those things that "just made sense" to me as a child/teenager. So much so that even though I never took pioneering merit badge as a Boy Scout, people who were taking it had me double check their project knots before they were submitted for final evaluation. Had a similar experience with SQL e.g. I finished a 3 hour exam in <45 minutes for a DB class in grad school. I've always wondered if the "3d modeling" aspect of both skills overlapped and why this was easy for me (I once tested very highly in mental 3d rotation skills on an aptitude test so maybe?)

_def 26d ago
Thanks for putting words to the concept, "mental 3d rotation skills" describes exactly what I feel I lack to a degree where it noticable impacts other fields, I assume.

jongjong 26d ago

Sometimes I take up the most obscure hobby imaginable and then somehow it comes up on HN months later. I discovered a plant near where I live which has really strong, thin, long leaves and I started twisting them together and it makes strong, shiny green twine. I made a 3 meter long twine and then wove it into a tiny basket. It works with only 2 strands and you can do it by yourself without any tools; just your fingers. Though I found some 3D printed plastic parts online which have a component which looks eerily similar to the one in the article.

m3kw9 26d ago

The state of the art tech back then has to feel like state of the art tech today.

throw0101d 26d ago

Bloomber's Odd Lots podcast had an episode on rope a little while ago, "How the Invention of Rope Gave Us Modern Civilization": > Rope is easy to take for granted. It seems obvious and straightforward. But of course, it had to be invented. Early humans discovered that by twisting fibers around each other, the resulting structure would be something durable and strong. Without rope, all kinds of things aren't possible, from lifting objects into the air to whaling or modern bridges. So how was rope developed and what were the big breakthroughs in its history? On this episode, we speak with Tim Queeney, the author of 'Rope: How a Bundle of Twisted Fibers Became the Backbone of Civilization.' He walks us through the history of the technology, and its ongoing evolution, including how it might one day allow us to build elevators into outer space. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JThQIaluXPg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JThQIaluXPg * https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-the-invention-of-rope-gave-us-modern-civilization/id1056200096?i=1000770303215 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-the-invention-of-r... * https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PWgwDb3lHUJFBOUDln5yN https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PWgwDb3lHUJFBOUDln5yN * https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/how-the-invention-of-rope-gave-us-modern-civilization https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/how-the-invention-of-rope-gav... Schooner Association interview: * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4n92rHkXzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4n92rHkXzA Interviewee / author: * https://timqueeney.com https://timqueeney.com