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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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