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Old 17th November 2012, 04:47 PM   #28
StankApe
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Join Date: Oct 2012
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Originally Posted by HansMustermann View Post
Several reasons, chief of which being the communication problem. You can get to the next level by standing on the shoulders of giants before you. You have to have lots of people learning what was already invented before them, before get them inventing the next great thing. So you need not just a way to preserve what was discovered before, but also a way for it to circulate among a lot of other people. E.g., continent-wide trade routes.

All that just wasn't in place for primitive tribes. They had neither the number of people doing research and scholarship, nor writing to put that information down for other people. So anything you can discover are rather simple stuff that you can do by yourself, and often accidentally. And because you don't have a market for just knowledge, any theoretical observations, anything that isn't a directly usable tool, will be forgotten by the time someone else could have used it.

Basically there's a reason technology picked up the pace in Europe after the printing press, you know?

The second is not as much a reason why it couldn't have happened, but a reason why we're sure it didn't actually happen. Inventions in this time spread slowly, and sometimes not so slowly among tribes. E.g., the bow and arrow spreads explosively. Within a very short time -- by species timeline scale -- it spreads all across Europe, Africa and Asia. The better stone tools in Neolithic spread at incredible speed too. Etc. Some of the stuff even starts being used by Neanderthals.

Where technology didn't spread, it was because there was a non-trivial problem to it being used somewhere else. E.g., the Romans and Greeks had ploughs for hundreds of years, but they didn't work on the northern European soil at all. So you see those barbarians up north oblivious of agriculture simply because they CAN'T copy the tools of the guys down south. But as soon as a plough is invented that works at all on the soil up north, lo and behold, the Germanic tribes copy it almost immediately.

The idea that some tribe could keep all the stuff leading to even advanced metal working a secret for thousands of years, while being surrounded by people who live in the same conditions, is a bit absurd. If someone had invented all that, you'd find copies from the neighbouring tribes.

Furthermore, ancient people were not nice people. Which is the whole reason to exist of this thread, after all. When someone had a technological advantage, they went and conquered their neighbours with it. For example the guys who first made iron swords pretty much razed and replaced whole civilizations which were still using bronze. Even if they may not want it at first, as soon as they overpopulate and start starving, guess what happens?

So you wouldn't have some quaint technologically advanced city by the seashore, but a great empire. And all the infrastructure that goes with it. The ruins from that empire would be everywhere, and their wares found over an even wider area via trade.
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it was a Stephen J Gould type simple explanation of a complicated concept that any laymen could understand! well done
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