The progress of technology - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Rome, Greece, Egypt & other ancient history (c 4000 BCE - 476 CE) and pre-history.
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By addem
#14877844
I find the progression of Science and technology interesting, particularly thinking about how a person can stand at the frontier of human knowledge and figure out a new solution to a problem. Marking the first moment when this occurred is hard to impossible, but the nearest demonstrable instance that I know of is the hand-axe. Pre-humans like australopiths used stone tools but they seemed to have been opportunists: finding sharp rocks and using them to carve meat off the carcasses scavenged from the kills of predators like lions. Lions have great teeth for killing, but not for cleaning all the flesh off a skeleton.

Pre-H. sapiens hominids made stone tools, although which was the first is a matter of debate about the interpretation of various sites, and the names we choose to give to certain skeletons. But H. habilis, an early one, made some basic stone tools. H. erectus likely controlled fire even if perhaps he couldn't make it; again, there's the chance of being an opportunist, harvesting fire from forest fires and trying desperately to keep it alive as they travelled. Fire was likely a really big deal for a few reasons. The obvious is that it can keep you warm, which might be the reason it was the first primate to spread from Africa to Asia and succeed in a wide range of habitats. But it also would have possibly allowed them to evict bats and other animals from caves they wanted to occupy.

Probably most important, though, is that H. erectus had a substantially larger and nutritionally costly brain, likely supported by all the extra nutrition gained from cooking meat rather than eating it raw. It's interesting that of all living primates today, humans are uniquely the only ones who aren't blinded with terror in the presence of fire. We ran experiments to see whether chimps prefer raw or cooked food and they prefer it cooked. We checked to see if chimps have the dexterity to control it, and although not quite the dexterity humans have to wield a branch, they can make do. We checked to see if chimps were patient enough to choose to wait for their food to cook or if the would prefer to just eat it raw right away--turns out they're mostly willing to wait. But they are so terrified of fire that the cannot control their emotions enough to approach and manipulate it. If they could overcome all the other impediments to eating cooked food, that one would always stop them in their tracks; but not us.

Well, long story short, there followed H. neanderthalensis and H. sapiens, possibly with some other species in-between these depending on how fine-grained you like to carve the lineage. In that time we made fish hooks from animal bones and atlatls to launch spears with leverage, grafted weapons, processed plant fiber into rope, made traps and temporary huts, and built boats. Pretty late in the game we made bows and arrows at nearly the same time we domesticated dogs and began agriculture.

Ag seems to have independently popped up in the Near East, East Asia, Africa, and Central and South America, in each instant at nearly the same moment in history--one of those great mysteries begging for arm-chair explanations that historians can argue over for decades and never settle on a most likely theory. Around this time we also developed metallurgy, although it may or may not have been the towns people who can claim this one. Some people likely followed a meteorite as it ran through the sky and found where it landed. In the middle of that spot would be some steaming iron that they might have worshipped like a strange figurine from god, possibly eventually hammered into a shape for the religious or political class. Other people might have been playing with malachite rocks because they're pretty green, then dropped it in a fire and found its color turned a mysterious orange as the copper in it separated. In any case, we eventually started monkeying with metals.

Winding as the narrative already is, it feels so incomplete as I now realize I've skipped entirely over the development of language, religion as a primitive way of understanding the world, theories about the stars and sun, early folk medicine, and so on, and we haven't even really got the point where people are living in cities and writing on clay tablets.

Anyway, does anyone else have an interesting construction of a history of Science and tech? Are there particular big moments that you think are interesting or under-appreciated?
#14877886
I really enjoyed the book A Short History of Nearly Everything. It really covers the great overview of human development from archaeology to chemistry and more

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