xkcd #3129: Archaeology Research
Title text:
The academic archaeology establishment is suppressing my breakthroughs because of the disruption it would bring to their prepared-core flake-based toolmaking industry.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: xkcd.com/3129/
milk@discuss.tchncs.de 6 days ago
Could you theoretically do actual research on new techniques for doing ancient things? Like if in the comic the man actually did find a way to use copper and it was realistic for stone-age people
mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
Sounds like what Gorge Spräve (the slingshot guy on Youtube) did. He developed a mechanism that could be attached to any bow, with multiple arrows stored for rapid fire, draw assist, holds the string back at full draw, and has a trigger mechanism. Everything was theoretically producable during the middle ages, it just was never invented
AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 6 days ago
This sounds suspiciously like a crossbow.
ryannathans@aussie.zone 6 days ago
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 6 days ago
This kind of happens accidentally sometimes. Like it turns out you can use pond scum as a very basic medium for some very shitty but functioning solar pannels, we could have invented solar power as soon as we could work copper and tin if it werent for the whole needing to know all the reasons why you would even want to do that.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 6 days ago
There are some great patterns for electric looms available specifically to make really old weaves. That’s basically a super modern way to do something medieval.
I’m sure there’s similar things available for a knitting machine
squaresinger@lemmy.world 6 days ago
The concept, while interesting, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Prior to the industrial revolution (and also all throught the beginning of it), most inventions weren’t all that difficult to make. With just a handful of techniques, you could go quite far when starting out with stone-age technology.
If you take the information from a handful of Wikipedia pages to the stone ages it would take maybe a few years or decades to go from stone-age technology to steam engines.
Up until the early industrial revolution the limiting factor for technological innovation was mostly information.
So when going back with the knowledge of all the innovation that happened since the stone ages it’s quite easy to make basically anything happen from there.