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Terr_ 2 hours ago [-]
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.
plufz 1 hours ago [-]
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.
adrianN 1 hours ago [-]
Who is underestimating the importance of food and clothes in history? Certainly not the historians. Agricultural output is literally what made and broke empires.
kqr 5 hours ago [-]
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.
Honali 2 hours ago [-]
This really reinforces the idea that cordage was less a single invention than a general-purpose mechanical primitive
kqr 25 minutes ago [-]
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.
lukeify 12 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
INTPenis 1 hours ago [-]
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.
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
card_zero 53 minutes ago [-]
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.
rinconrex 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
Honali 2 hours ago [-]
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
aa-jv 44 minutes ago [-]
Time to start trying to delineate the Rope Age?
cubefox 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.