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

knowablemagazine.org

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

#31

Post by bluGill »

adrianN wrote: post #9
Terr_ wrote: post #6

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.

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.

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

#32

Post by bjourne »

dotancohen wrote: post #20
kqr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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?

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

#33

Post by achenet »

greggsy wrote: post #24
Terr_ wrote: post #6

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.

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

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.

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

#34

Post by sokoloff »

dotancohen wrote: post #20
kqr wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

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.

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

#35

Post by tyho »

schrectacular wrote: post #27
noosphr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#36

Post by usrusr »

schrectacular wrote: post #27
noosphr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#37

Post by jongjong »

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.

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

#38

Post by bluGill »

dotancohen wrote: post #19
Terr_ wrote: post #6

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.

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.

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

#39

Post by bluGill »

cubefox wrote: post #5
Honali wrote: post #3

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.

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