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Can anyone recommend a book (I'm imagining sort of 'coffee table' style picture book, but not necessarily) on technological advancements through human history, ideally roughly chronologically but more organised around what needed to happen before the next was possible?
Can anyone recommend a book (I'm imagining sort of 'coffee table' style picture book, but not necessarily) on technological advancements through human history, ideally roughly chronologically but more organised around what needed to happen before the next was possible?
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Also the economic situation it implies: industrial sites with specialists who were heavily engaged in one type of industry, such that they had the chance to notice and develop these sorts of innovations and discoveries.
Go into any restaurant kitchen. You can see in realtime how - half by pure superstition - humans can adopt totally unexplained, unscientific, but highly refined procedures and ingredients that enhance some particular effect in the thing they're working on. It just takes an archaeologist to find the science behind the cooking.
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This discovery is only of interest because the Iron-Age, as per standard-theory, started around 1200 BC. in the Caucuses/Anatolia or the near-East - which fits with another theory which claims that this allowed the "Aryans" to invade India with their technological superiority around this same time and replace the (dark-skinned) natives genetically. (Note: the above is obviously a caricature, but current versions of t…
> This is all a digression from the main claims, so I'd prefer that people don't pull on this thread You want to say your piece and get no back-chat? Romans started to hit people with iron swords at a certain date, influencing the history of Europe substantially, so the origin of that iron age is interesting. Elsewhere, a copper smelting site of 500 BC would be interesting: consider the Moche, in Peru, who independen…
Tutankhamun's dagger, for example, was crafted from iron and was probably a diplomatic gift from Mitanni (modern day Syria/Turkey)
Way before your Roman Empire
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> This is all a digression from the main claims, so I'd prefer that people don't pull on this thread You want to say your piece and get no back-chat? Romans started to hit people with iron swords at a certain date, influencing the history of Europe substantially, so the origin of that iron age is interesting. Elsewhere, a copper smelting site of 500 BC would be interesting: consider the Moche, in Peru, who independen…
Ancient Egypt began to use iron objects centuries before most of Europe, the metal was still rare and prized Tutankhamun's dagger, for example, was crafted from iron and was probably a diplomatic gift from Mitanni (modern day Syria/Turkey) Way before your Roman Empire
there are multiple plausible pathways for the dicovery of iron and other metals, the most prominent bieng through the extreamly ancient discovery of porcelain, and baked pottery indipendently at numerous sites world wide, and there are many types of ores(rocks,dirt) and fluxes, such as sand,or salt...the list is impossibly long. It is always good to keep in mind that basic technological developments predate our species,the key technology is of course, fire. I have been instructed in various methods of exploiting the properties of fire and natural materials to achive a wide range results including smelting ore to getting durable finnishes and experimentation in the hardening of copper. Many people are out there right now,working with found materials and producing metals and other peoducts in startlingly large quantities useing purely ancient manual methods. Current state of the art metalurgical operations are optimised in ways that go way beyond anything imaginable to the casual observer and exploit exotic phenomina that is counterintuitive and invisible to the naked eye.
The tech tree of future games will have us smelt copper to unlock iron.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...
> Sparkly hematite mineral was used as a flux by copper smelters. Its distinctive appearance may have helped to attract attention from ancient miners and prospectors. Every once in a while I pull up some Wikipedia article with idle curiosity of "If I were transported back in time, could I usefully help this get invented?" One result of this is a helpless appreciation for how complicated it can be to even identify wha…
Absolutely. As luck would have it, many epithermal mineral deposits have both sparkly hematite and copper ore in the same structure. This is a well-known motif in mineral exploration. They show up in the same geography but are separated into different layers. You can find many papers on the structure of these ore bodies. These are known as supergene deposits[0]. The most important features of these deposits is that t…
Can anyone recommend a book (I'm imagining sort of 'coffee table' style picture book, but not necessarily) on technological advancements through human history, ideally roughly chronologically but more organised around what needed to happen before the next was possible?
I started reading Josephine Quinn's book "How the world made the west" and I can recommend it. It goes quite into detail and is not of the sort "coffee-table"-style picture book. It explains the origins of technologies, trade between groups and challenges the common view how civilizations evolved.