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.
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.
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 — 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-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.
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.
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.
"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.
I'll admit my thinking on this is very seat of the pants. I'm sure historians, archeologists, etc. think about this plenty.
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".
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
A well back then may have been quite a proud and precious thing you point your best builders at, considering it was the life source for the area village/farms.
Part of the book is a system of points that tracks civilization progress, and it peaks in Roman times but fails to reach exponential.
In what units? I'm curious to see how he managed to fit a something as complex as "civilization progress" into one dimension without pulling numbers and definitions out of thin air.
But it's not necessarily that the system is "correct", it's more like it allows you to make falsifiable predictions. Say you want to track the health of a culture over 1000 years, or of several cultures based on a certain variable (like degree of deforestation, or climate). In order to have anything other than subjective opinions, you need to have an objective measuring stick that can be reproduced by other people independently.
You may chose average lifespan, child mortality, average daily calories, put them in a weighted sum, and track that.
It doesn't make it The correct measure, of course. But it's something that anybody else can try and check independently, and instead of saying "deforestation sucks for health" you'll say "the health index took a steep dive 50 years after the last tree was felled on Easter Island". That's falsifiable - somebody else can do the math and say "no, it's wrong: people lived longer and ate more, with less child mortality".
https://quillette.com/2018/03/27/romans-ever-done-us-discuss...
But did you actually read these books? Some of the Goodreads reviews are pretty harsh.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do you suggest is done with 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.
Yes ...
> (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.)
... no?
On the one hand you have things like aboriginal knowledge that were useful and valid for providing the needs of survival in the context in which they found themselves, but is dismissed simply for being different. On the other you have people who are wrong and in ways that threaten their survival and society.