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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 12d 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 12d ago
  When we start erecting megaliths, that's when I believe we had basic counterweight cranes.
  - defrost 12d 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 12d 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.
mathieuh 12d ago
https://www.youtube.com/@wallingtonw https://www.youtube.com/@wallingtonw There's a channel on YouTube where the guy demonstrates how they might have built Stone Henge and the Egyptian pyramids using only technology that they would have at the time

card_zero 12d 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 12d ago
When we start erecting megaliths, that's when I believe we had basic counterweight cranes.
- defrost 12d 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 12d 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.

mathieuh 12d ago

https://www.youtube.com/@wallingtonw https://www.youtube.com/@wallingtonw There's a channel on YouTube where the guy demonstrates how they might have built Stone Henge and the Egyptian pyramids using only technology that they would have at the time