Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Stone Age | Hacker News Reader

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

knowablemagazine.org

118 pointsknowablemag57 comments

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.

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.

By who? The cotton gin and spinning jenny are front and center in any history of the early industrial revolution.

The development of dyes was the genesis of the chemical industry, but no one really talks about that.

I googled "history of the chemical industry" and synthetic dyes were mentioned prominently by each of the first five results returned.

But have you heard anyone _talk_ about it? It's common knowledge that the industrial revolution was mills and steam engines and mechanization. In my experience almost no one knows about the other piece of the textile industry that drove industrialization.

It's not hidden, but I don't think it's commonly known.

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.

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.

If you want to dive deeper, this looks at exactly that question:

https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/out-of-whole-cloth

I didn’t mean industrialization but more articles like this one https://www.gu.se/en/news/textile-production-a-driving-force...

You don't have to be a materials science Ph.D to know that stone and metal last a bit longer than cloth.

The irony of the comment you're making is that you are the one drawing from a gender stereotype that is ambiguous with respect to its immutability across time and culture

Who is underestimating the importance of food and clothes in history? Certainly not the historians. Agricultural output is literally what made and broke empires.

Modern historians, yeah, but ancient historians, they tended to ignore both. Ancient kings were aware that starvation was a problem and had some interest in agriculture, but the textiles seems to have not appeared much in history.

Vending luxury clothing is what ancient tradesmen got rich from, kinda like the Elon Musks of their time.

I think that agriculture and textiles are generally among the first recognized technology. I've never seen them overlooked, quite the opposite.

Today by modern historians. Real the ancient historians and you will see these are often overlooked.

Didn't the people that we today call ancient historians mostly just write about their own time? The very few who wrote about events that preceded their time were not using archeological methods.

They did, but they were not writing about clothing production for the most part. This we lack insight into what they did except what we can make educated guesses on.

We can date archeological finds accurately enough the the word guess is not appropriate. I know that sewn clothes have existed something like 20,000 or 30,000 years. And I think I read recently about woven fabrics dating back maybe 8 thousand years or so. I tend to think in round numbers so go ahead and call that a guess, but archeologists have this stuff dated pretty accurately. And new finds sometimes push the dates back even further.

What I mean is that today "technology" connotes activity in certain fields (and not others), and this leads us (normal people, today) to discount large less-in-vogue fields of human endeavor as... just stuff that is done, but not, y'know, like, technology-technology.

Suppose someone leads with: "I'm investing in new technological improvements to my farm". Most people are going to think that means robots, GPS tractors, or special pesticides... Rather than a new procedure allows legumes to be planted more-densely and harvested more quickly. So even when the context is literally a farm, somehow "technology" means electronics/genetics/chemistry rather than agronomics.

Give the average person a booklet with an algorithm for toxic-vs-edible mushrooms developed over generations of careful study and experiment. "Is it technology?" Probably only once you port it to a minimally interactive phone-app.

Language. writing and maths are the main ones that come to mind for me.

Writing and maths are certainly technologies to discover in Civilization.

Given that there is evidence [0] to support the idea that (spoken) language is hard-coded into the human DNA, I think language might, like dancing, be something 'innately human' and not a learned technology :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

As in, if we had a total disappearance of all humans on Earth, and then put some new humans on the depopulated Earth, they'd quickly develop a common language, if they were genetically similar to modern humans, but would take a while to start writing.

Arguably, things like counting and geometry could also be viewed as something innate in humans - our mammalian brains view the world as a 3-dimensional real vector space, and so we will instinctively have the ability to understand the concept of a 'circle', or 'seven', or a square, or even multiplication ('three groups of three people each'), but the act of writing down those thoughts, and the literate culture focusing on those concepts which stretches from Euclid to Wikipeda, Library Genesis, and Terry Tao's blog, is obviously a developed technology.

> Language.

Technology is generally considered to be something that is invented: there's a debate in whether language is invented/created or whether it is innate to humans (you wouldn't say sight or hearing are technologies).

Also a debate on whether math is created/invented or discovered (IMHO hard to argue that pi (π) is invented).

Electricity also isn't invented, yet an electricity network uses a lot of technologies. This is kinda true for everything. Invention is a discovery, so I fail to see the dichotomy.

I like to think of technology as packaged-up knowledge intended to solve a particular problem.

> 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.

“Technology is the active human interface with the material world.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology

Another quotation I ran across semi-recently:

> Reputation is a technology. We solve a lot of problems in the economy by turning one-shot games, in which people literally take the money and run, and turn them into repeated games, in which people have an incentive to behave well in this period so that you will trust them next period, and so on, into the future.

* Paul Krugman, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_IYGeZLLhI&t=10m30s

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.

This really reinforces the idea that cordage was less a single invention than a general-purpose mechanical primitive

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.

> 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.

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.

Isn't the sex => baby causation well known even among monkeys?

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.

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)

> 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.

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.

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?)

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.

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.

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://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-the-invention-of-r...

* https://open.spotify.com/episode/5PWgwDb3lHUJFBOUDln5yN

* https://omny.fm/shows/odd-lots/how-the-invention-of-rope-gav...

Schooner Association interview:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4n92rHkXzA

Interviewee / author:

* https://timqueeney.com

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.

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.

When we start erecting megaliths, that's when I believe we had basic counterweight cranes.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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...

Problem is all those people likely have had various contacts with other cultures and it is unknown what impact that had.

Time to start trying to delineate the Rope Age?

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

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

Apes together strong

Reply on news.ycombinator.com