Let me suggest a nonsensical idea just for fun: let's found a scientific institute (staffed with volunteers and funded with donations, obviously) purposefully limited to conduct all their tasks (actual science, administrative chores, living) with stone age tools only. Or perhaps also with medieval and whatever they manage to build themselves using such.
It would be very curious to see what modern, educated, exclusively high-IQ (implied from them having managed to graduate in science) humans can achieve in a stone age setting.
Ideas of outcomes possible, experiments conductable and apparata buildable this way are welcome :-)
As soon as somebody volunteers to serve this way. Of course there can be a hierarchy of a sort and specialization like in any other institute. Some do more science, some do more chores, depending on what they can and feel like doing.
Although, he doesn't recreate past technology - I think he researches what technology could have existed, given the knowledge of our time. Things like his blowers, and his iron smelting processes.
Of course, there's only so much you can do with rocks & sticks, so most of what he makes ends up being pretty similar to historical tools & buildings.
There was one fellow who smelted copper ore and tin ore, made copper wire and a vinegar battery, and made a working telegraph that could have been built any time since 3000 BC.
Weird how that list doesn't include the state, coinage, or farming. Or animal domestication. Or smelting iron. Or steam engines and machine tools.
Computers are basically irrelevant but networking would be huge - being able to communicate near-instantly across large distances was possibly the single biggest limiting factor for the size of empires in agrarian societies (other than food).
Writing doesn't do as much as you'd think for long-term fixed preservation of knowledge. It sure helps, but 1) oral teachings exist and useful practices are passed down whether or not they're written, and 2) at the end of the day books need to be constantly rewritten as they wear out, and ancient libraries burned down all the time.
In terms of building a civilisation in the first place, animal husbandry is vastly more useful than writing because writing is something scribes do (i.e. your non-farming elite - in medieval times, more than 9/10 of the population were farmers, and prehistorical farming was likely far less efficient than medieval farming what with the lack of iron etc), and animal husbandry improves your agriculture dramatically and are a major factor in providing the food-surplus for those scribes to exist in the first place.
In fact, particularly food-poor empires tend to be conquered by more food-rich empires that can field larger armies, so if your hypothetical has-writing empire fought my hypothetical has-animals empire then I expect mine would win. Especially since your army wouldn't have cavalry or charioteers.
>being able to communicate near-instantly across large distances was possibly the single biggest limiting factor for the size of empires in agrarian societies
Seemingly, yes, but this hasn't been proven quite yet. The American empire appears to be losing dominance since the proliferation of the internet, for example. However, the American empire certainly gained tremendous power from broadcasted electronic mediums.
I would argue that convincingly unfaked communication is more important than fast communication.
America gained cultural power over the world by making most of the worlds films. But if those films took a year to arrive in Turkmenistan, it wouldn't diminish the power of that culture over the people.
However, if rather than a film arriving, it was a guy on horseback who had heard legend of someone who had once seen an American film, then it would probably have little impact.
The emergence of the state probably could not have happened without writing. Steam engines and machine tools could not have happened without the printing press. Networking (telegraph) was the predecessor technology of computers.
>The emergence of the state probably could not have happened without writing.
Empirically speaking the opposite is more likely - writing emerged from state accountants keeping records of grain etc. Writing was independently invented by several states across the globe, in fact.
>Steam engines and machine tools could not have happened without the printing press.
Why's that?
This is a very hard subject to discuss, because steam engines and the industrial revolution (I mean precisely the shift from an agrarian economy to a mineral economy, i.e. the switch to using non-living energy sources) happened exactly once, in the UK, and spread worldwide from there. It's hard to extrapolate from a dataset of one.
However, from what I understand of the industrial revolution, it didn't strictly require the printing press - the core driver was of needing to extract coal from a deep coal mine that was flooded; because the coal mine produced a bunch of low-grade coal that was disposed of onsite by burning it (because it was too crappy to be worth the transport costs of selling it) the efficiency of the steam engine didn't matter because the fuel was free.
There were a bunch of implicit requirements (the obvious one being the demand for coal) that are extensively debated, and while we could speculate the printing press was helpful in some way, I don't see any reason why a printing press would be a hard-requirement.
>Networking (telegraph) was the predecessor technology of computers.
The Antikythera mechanism predates the telegraph by millennia. Computing was orthogonal to networking for the majority of its history.
Now I wonder whether a rhythm-based writing system could have been developed ahead of pictographic and alphabetic writing if preliterate people had had a telegraph. They might have started off developing rhythm conventions based on particular songs, or something.
I guess signal drums predate writing in many places and successfully use rhythm to convey information over long distances. I'm not sure whether any that don't encode writing have a writing-like ability to represent arbitrary messages rather than just prearranged ones.
We have always had musical notation, though what we have today is much more complex than any surviving records from clay tablets and such of ancient times.
The idea of communicating sounds via physical marks was there, but it clearly lost out- why bother writing a message that needs to be sounded out, then translated to a spoken language, when you can skip the translation step with something glottographic?
Even if there was a working phone network and phones when we were hunter gatherers, this wouldn't allow us to grow cities.
All inventions work off each other, but if we count them without prerequisites:
Agriculture (farming / animal domestication etc), ie being able to quite reliably produce a lot of food, is the most important innovation and invention for humanity.
Next, still not information but the industrial revolution and engines and mass scale production. Without this we would depend on humans and animals to do the work, and I for one do not like the idea of a modern slave industry, but even beyond that we couldn't use economies of scale, which actually allows for absolutely bonkers progress.
> the industrial revolution and engines and mass scale production
This was enabled by the printing press. Immediately prior to the industrial revolution, printers printed how-to manuals on every topic they could think of.
It's not a surprise that the industrial revolution occurred in the area that invented and widely adopted printing presses.
Isn't it true that if we applied today's knowledge it could also be built millions of years ago?
I can understand it means something like: it could be built with tools and materials they had 3000 BC, but isn't it also true that knowledge was able to create different tools and different materials?
Homo sapiens "with the same intelligence as people living today" existed for at least 160,000 years, possibly 300,000...
Some even go as far as argue that invention of agriculture actually made us dumber, because we did not have to fight for our survival as much as before.
It’s crazy to think that fully one 800th of the world is subscribed to this channel. And that’s only the shbscribers, not the number of people that have actually seen these videos.
I’ve found myself infected with a desire to have a machine shop. I don’t exactly know what I’d use it for, but there’s something so cool about making your own stuff.
I’ve been making things for… I probably shouldn’t have calculated it, but it turns out to be 23 years now. They’ve all been digital. Somehow it never occurred to me that you can just make things yourself rather than buy it from Amazon. It sounds stupid to write it out like that, but it’s an easy thing to overlook, because you can go your whole life without thinking about it.
There’s also no limit to the stuff you can cobble together. Here’s someone whose channel averages about 30 views per video, who made a vacuum pump out of a refrigerator compressor. https://youtu.be/4Zg0EXvyD-4?si=f6oB8ScuhDd64T6n (His channel also has hundreds of videos with dozens of projects, including making his own friggin’ laser CNC machine from scratch via arduino and time. https://youtu.be/0z-zXQ2INp4?si=Y0Ao6dwr1YpQVqU7 I have no idea how no one has noticed him yet.)
All of this culminated into an intersection of everything I’ve been interested in recently: 3D resin-printed molds for plastic injection molding. https://youtu.be/wMRSPXt48CI?si=5IeQnSi89byrr0Il You can make practically anything you can think of, and they don’t feel cheap. Not to punch down on normal 3D printers; some people love them, but a larger contingent dismiss most of what they can make as cheap toys. They’re not wrong.
It’s interesting tracing a line from the Stone Age tools to these. The people back then were smart and industrious. If you gave them a lathe, I wonder what they would have made.
If you really want to start from the beginning, get “Build Your Own Metal Working Shop From Scrap” by David Gingery.
Quoting the description from Amazon (link below)…
“[It] is a progressive series of seven projects. Beginning with a simple charcoal fired foundry, you produce the castings for building the machine tools to equip your shop. Initially the castings are finished by simple hand methods, but it is not long before the developing machines are doing much of the work to produce their own parts.”
That’s what Harbor Freight is great for if you’re in the States. They have little milling machines and lots of cheap tools that work well for one-off stuff, at least.
Was lucky to take an engineering machining class in college and got to use a lathe and mill, am more of a welder now. The definition of a “tool” is pretty loose but lots of small things can be made with just a cheap stick welder and grinder.
If you gave them a lathe, I wonder what they would have made.
That confused me because in Spanish, the same word is used for a potter's wheel. Anyway that would be more recent too. But I think that there's a long prehistoric period, between stone tools and stone buildings, that we know very little because they used wood, more than anything else.
I have a lot of respect for our far ancestors thanks to this guy:
He made some awesome documentaries in the 70's showing stone age tribes in the Amazonia and their incredible techniques to make a blowgun, arrows or a hut.
It seems there's much interest here for CNC, did you see this post?
You start by acquiring of basic hand operated ones, then there is a whole set of tools for construction that you can probably use for garden furniture carpentry, then come the tools that you can use to create furniture proper.
I believe material wise it is a similar journey. From soft construction wood to hardwoods, that require different tools and techniques...
Metal processing is a challenge of it's own. One set of tolling while you do aluminium grade of metals and then tooling becomes more or less cost prohibitive.
Consider the workshop space. It is a lot of tools for this journey...
It is sort of same as software development. You do spend a lot of time to prepare infrastructure to craft repeatable parts that will stick together and align on a certain angle, etc.
The feeling when it works is magical. Fighting your tool to get things done (it is time for upgrade :)) is dreadful...
I remember an old Amateur Scientist article from Scientific American way back which showed how to build a gas liquifier with a refrigerator compressor. I tried to build a couple of the AS projects, but my fab skills as a kid were sorely lacking.
I’m on the same boat, currently working on making my own multi tools. I reckon it can be a rabbit hole as I see all that’s involved in knife making and blacksmithing.
I think there's really a modern disconnect for a lot of people (myself included, a lot of the time) between needing/wanting "a thing" and the idea that you don't always need to buy that thing as a product from someone else. That creating, modifying, or even repairing something yourself to serve whatever purpose is really not that far out of an idea. My partner and I have been infected by the same desire and have been starting to acquire various tools and machines over the years, and even now I find myself still defaulting to searching for something on amazon when I run into a problem/"a thing" that I want without even considering if I could DIY it myself. Obviously its not always better or even cheaper to DIY something, especially considering tool and material accessibility and cost, but I think at large a lot of folks don't even consider it an option. It is one of those things that when you first realize you don't _have_ to buy the thing off of amazon, it feels incredibly obvious and that you should've known that from the start, but I really thing it is a somewhat uncommon idea nowadays. (There's probably a conversation you could have about the millions of reasons why that's the case re: modern consumerism, less emphasis on "blue collar" skills and the general perspective that they're "lesser" skills/pathways than their "white collar" counterparts, etc. But that's a whole nother topic :) )
I do think there's some resurgence here with a lot of the modern "maker" movement, which is awesome! But at least in the content bubble I live in, it seems there's still _a bit_ of a disconnect between the newer, more digital "3D Printing, Code, Electronics etc." spaces and the more analog "Wood, Metal, Paint, Clay, etc." spaces. (I think this gap is slowly closing, though!)
Re: Injection molding, you might be interested in a few videos from Evan Monsma's youtube channel [1] where he makes an incredibly cheap injection molding machine out of a drill press[2], and explores super inexpensive mold making materials like steel epoxy putty[3] (also highly recommend checking his channel out in general, it's recently been becoming one of my favorite smaller channels!)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/EvanMonsma
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kovD-FPOVlo
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JwbxNOAg3Pc
I'm off topic, but can you imagine that in the future there could be an electronic device and through advanced studies on material, atoms and quantum, they could recreate all the information that said device once had? I imagine they could study the Internet of the past even if the backups were lost.
The archaeologist Leonard Woolley discovered a room in the Ur temple complex containing items which were far older than the ~530 BCE expected. They were organized and labeled in three different languages, leading Woolley to conclude they were an archeological museum now referred to as Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna%27s_museum
I don't think so, for the future it would be easy to recreate what the situation was, I could determine that they are tools recreated by scientists from the past.
I recently had to “fix” my company-appointed laptop by opening it up and re-seating the battery. A co-worker made a comment: you’re not a software engineer, you’re a computer engineer. To which I replied: nah, I was just a kid who really liked taking things apart so I could learn how they worked.
Somebody watching lava flows, slag, and wondering if they can recreate that heat.
Metal work also started with softer easier to melt metals from much purer near surface veins and worked outwards toward harder less pure more deeply buried metals.
I think metal work started with gold. It naturally occurs in a 'ready for use' form of nuggets. You don't need to melt anything and nuggets are very soft and easy to form into any desirable shape. Most likely it's initial use was the jewelry because shiny!
Significant metal working and mining appears to have started at least 7,000 BCE with copper and lead - both (once) appear in surface | near surface deposits that can be chased back and are relatively easy to smash out and cold work when (near) 'pure'.
Ready to work gold nuggets are what they are and are rarer to find.
Metal work evolved with mining, chasing surface veins back, and this started in a significant way for first lead|copper, then tin, then other metals.
There's a recognised pre Bronze "Copper Age", then Bronze, then Iron.
Gold is shiny, beyond that it has a limited utility until the age of electronics; it's a bit soft for weapons or armour, a bit rare for sealing pipes, a bit non reactive for easy chemisty^H Alchemy, etc.
Nitpick: Bloomeries generally don't melt iron. They are just hot enough to reduce iron oxide to iron. Melting iron is a relatively young technology. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomery):
"Inside the furnace, carbon monoxide from the incomplete combustion of the charcoal reduces the iron oxides in the ore to metallic iron without melting the ore; this allows the bloomery to operate at lower temperatures than the melting temperature of the ore."
and
"As a bloomery's size is increased, the iron ore is exposed to burning charcoal for a longer time. When combined with the strong air blast required to penetrate the large ore and charcoal stack, this may cause part of the iron to melt and become saturated with carbon in the process, producing unforgeable pig iron, which requires oxidation to be reduced into cast iron, steel, and iron. This pig iron was considered a waste product detracting from the largest bloomeries' yield, and early blast furnaces, identical in construction, but dedicated to the production of molten iron, were not built until the 14th century."
It's a fair point but pragmatically a nitpick indeed - for a full four thousand years people have worked iron into tools without melting it through the wonder of a chemical reaction that sidesteps the issue.
While we're here I guess we should also point out that glass blowing furnaces don't melt silicon, they dissolve it into a flux of other stuff to make a gooey glob we call molten glass.
The original question posed was "who first decided to melt the rocks and get the iron" .. technically the rock was smelted not melted in order to remove the rock and get the iron.
The first quibble was that iron isn't melted out, my response was that a bloomery is used instead, my bad for not clarifying that they are used to smelt and not melt.
I just wanted to make sure that it's clear for everybody. People seem to think that melting iron is easy. All the time I see smiths in movies and TV shows running around with molten iron in a medieval setting and even casting swords. It drives me nuts.
Reminded of the 2013 Ignoble award[0] where someone ate a shrew to determine what remains would be available for study.
ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE: Brian Crandall [USA] and Peter Stahl [CANADA, USA], for parboiling a dead shrew, and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days — all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system, and which bones would not.
I live near an experimental archaeological centre with roots going back to the 60's. I read a book by one of the founders, where he relates making his first flint axe at approximately age 16 and being so excited he went straight to the garden and cut down a tree - without asking for permission first... thankfully he had very supportive parents.
Would have been better had they gotten machinists or rural people that otherwise work with their hands to do this. A bunch of scientists playing make believe chopping wood and scraping bone doesn’t convince me much. We would have been just as specialized back then as we are now. And don’t we have 30,000 year old jewelry with intricate carvings? Why the amazement at “wow, this pointy stone chops wood, man?”
Your first couple sentences really confuse me. The scientists playing make believe are playing make believe with years of knowledge and experience studying stone age tools. They are seeking to accurately make believe how the tools are made and used by investigating tools in various states of assembly and wear. Machinists would be playing make believe with a bias toward modern manufacture, materials, and design, and rural people would be playing make believe without any tool making experience because they just buy axes from the hardware store instead of knapping stone and wrapping string. Their input would absolutely be useful, especially with regards to situational use, and I think more fields need cross-participation for this reason, but these scientists aren't less qualified than anyone else for studying prehistoric tools
> We would have been just as specialized back then as we are now.
Can you please cite some evidence for this? My understanding is that specialization into trades was an outcome of the agricultural revolution, which happened quite a bit later than 30,000 BC.
Spear fishing hunter gatherers, for example, are out there but they've moved on to using steel rebar for barb points over stingraytail barbs, wire wrap for binding over chewing just the right branch fibres, and iPhones over smoke signals.
Papua New Guinea, Northern Australia communities, also cattle herders in Africa.
That covers pure traditional hunter-gather | slash and burn agrarian | herding, etc as traditional lifestyles that are still mostly practiced in mostly traditional forms by some parts of communities but also supplemented with tourism, children going to school to learn law and other skills, FiFo mine work, etc.
Thanks for the story and the video. They're both interesting, but had no tech-specific information. If anyone has anything like that, I'd be interested in seeing it.
I had read a bit about Masaai keeping track of each other and their herds with mobile phones. Thank you for reminding me about that.
There's got to be some miscommunication between the researchers and the journalists as to the contribution. I know anthropology undergraduates who years ago had whole courses where they had to make and use their own stone tools.
It would be very curious to see what modern, educated, exclusively high-IQ (implied from them having managed to graduate in science) humans can achieve in a stone age setting.
Ideas of outcomes possible, experiments conductable and apparata buildable this way are welcome :-)