> Looking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze age job.
Is related at all to this sentence:
> How come we call mobile phones progress?
Human sophistication and intelligence is not the same a technological advancements.
Progress in fundamental materials science tends to unlock whole new technology paradigms.
You can do city planning with sod and stone. Mobile phones, on the other hand, require a nearly incomprehensible level of materials innovation. It is everything from the battery to conductive touch screen glass to plastic casing to silicon microchip... Not to mention all the science of satellites and rockets and radio waves that make them useful...
By the way, the show "Connections" by James Burke is brilliant. A must-watch for any tech curious nerd.
It doesn't matter if someone has a PhD in steam engine engineering, if they went back in time to the Roman empire there still would be no steam engines because there are only a handful of examples of accidentally good enough steel in the entire world, which you don't even have a way to identify yet other than buying 10000x extra and spending years testing every sample to find the good stuff, not to mention you need even more of that high quality steel just to make the tools required to cut good steel into a capable boiler design.
If you can't bang something together with wood, stone, and dirt, it requires advanced material science and entire industries behind it to produce and be worth the effort. Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans, but not if it took 5,000 men working for years and dumping endless amounts of money into it to find just the right ore source and smelting procedures just to produce a single engine that only replaces the labor of 50 guys with buckets.
> Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans
According to Devereaux it wouldn't be useless for the Romans. They didn't pump water from coal mines, and when they pumped water they'd need to move fuel from somewhere else to feed it into a steam engine. It was not an an easy or a cheap task to do, because they had no railroads.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
Most materials up to the 1900s were readily available in Roman times, though.
The metal of choice for the first Roman steam engines would be slightly expensive copper and they built highways in cobblestone connecting their whole empire so they wouldn't shy away from some forward-thinking investment given a working demo.
The first application for them wouldn't be pumps, either. It would be trivial to have charcoal factories around the roads to quickly carry priority goods and military with even a rudimentary steam engine.
The cobblestone roads could be adapted to tram use with a few thousand guys equipped with standard width sticks and picks.
A random Roman maybe not but a Roman with connections could do it.
Hindu, then Greek then confuscian theologian-philosophers laid the foundations for the idea that their group had left behind simply being “animals” and sought out to distinguish human form (in their specific form) from all other forms of life.
Humans also approach things linearly and it fights intuition that regression is not just possible but the norm.
Heinrich Schliemann was probably the first to connect the myths with tangible proof through archeology in late 19th century. While Lévi-Strauss work was much later and more political and polemical rather than scientific.
If you read the actual Polybius you’ll see that there was no ideas of evolution or that we’re in the same category as other living things
Ancient peoples were fully as intelligent as us.
Maybe even smarter as there was no lead poisoning their brains!
It's somewhat different from "smart", isn't it? Since it includes everyone.
Regarding sanitation, there is evidence that they understood the corruption of the flesh and many Bronze Age cultures had topical treatments that were quite effective antiseptics. So, while not understanding what bacteria are, they still knew the effect.
How about: ancient people had brains that were physically similar to anyone modern, and sometimes they came up with one or two good ideas, but they were generally poorly informed and full of misconceptions by modern standards.
How can you possibly call yourself an intelligent person if you cannot speak Cantonese?
(I don't like tonal languages because they interfere with tone of voice, and Cantonese has extra tones.)
Being able to read Chinese could be advantageous, and then I'd be less of an idiot, it's true.
It's a good guess the people who made these artifacts (the bronze ones particularly) suffered from lead poisoning: lead was a primary alloying metal for bronze. You can even look up elemental analysis for BMAC bronze artifacts specifically: "...contain appreciable amounts of arsenic (up to 3%) and lead (up to 4%), as did bronzes of the preceding chronological horizons"[0].
The early smelting techniques simply released everything into the open atmosphere, as fine particulate fumes. Environmental samples going back 5,200 years show regional-scale lead pollution[1] from Bronze Age metals smelting.
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/... (under "3.1.3 Bronzes of the Late Bronze Age II")
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01921-7
("The smelting- and cupellation-related release of Pb into the environment is predominantly via the fine-particle fraction and, as such subject to large-scale atmospheric transport, resulting in a supra-regional to hemisphere-wide distribution9,10,11,20,21,22,23")
With better imaging, tooling, and archaeological funding, I'm sure we'll find much more evidence like this
So many countries bronze and ancient ages are underexplored
I think part of the reason people tend to underestimate ancient civilizations is because there is only so much preserved, especially because so much of their culture and knowledge was passed on orally, rather than documented in writings. Even if we come up with more archaeological findings or new technology to analyze it, there’s a limit to how much we can know.
But another culprit in this underestimation is supremacist thinking. For example, there is a tendency to elevate the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) above others. The older cultures and religions are often described with pejoratives like “pagan”. In many countries, the history that is “worth studying” is seen as only starting a couple thousand years ago. Another aspect is racial supremacist thinking - I think this is still vast even though progress has been made on the issue of race. For example, textbooks and classes tend to not spend much time acknowledging the mathematical and scientific discoveries of the ancient world.
I hope it improves but I also think there are serious social/tribal problems today that will prevent people from exploring all this with genuine curiosity.
But there is much to learn from other philosophies. China is the worlds oldest continuous civilization. Surely there were some great thinkers besides Konfuzius. Same with India. I attended last week a lecture about the Upanishads. And so much of the wisdom in there can be mapped, more or less specifically, to wisdom from Western philosophy. There is an interesting field of study emerging: Comparative Philosophy. ith the aim to bring it all together. (See for instance, https://studiegids.universiteitleiden.nl/courses/133662/comp...).
No one is reposting findings that confirm exactly what archeologists already knew on HN.
Every archeologist wants to be the one that has the dig that revolutionizes the whole field.
The idea that historians and archeologists aren’t curious about the stuff they’re dedicating most of their life to simply doesn’t add up and match with what we know about human beings.
The reason we think what we do (with adjustments for normal human errors), is because that’s the evidence we have.
None of the evidence is secret. If there was some evidence that is being misinterpreted due to Abrahamic biases, there are as many if not more archeologists ans historians from non Abrahamic countries like China, India and most African nations, that have access to the same evidence and could write a paper today about how the evidence is being misinterpreted.
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