Just some examples: take a string, don't bother to measure it, just any length between 1 and two meters or so would do. Take a pencil (or a piece of charcoal if you really want to go native) and a smooth branch. Stick the branch in the ground, tie the string around it so that it can slide with little friction and put the pencil in a loop of string on the other side. Now use this to create a circle. You started off with very rough elements not specifically sized for any purpose and ended up with a high precision representation of a mathematical concept.

Another: take a bunch of roughly cast metal balls. Put them on a sieve and let it vibrate until the balls have all passed through the holes in the sieve. Behold: metal spheres, so precise that you probably can't really measure the degree to which they are not spherical without resorting to instruments that you're not supposed to have in this scenario. Then sort by weight (which is a proxy for size). Now you can make ball bearings.

Yet another example: you can cut a lens for a telescope to within ridiculous precision using very primitive methods (https://www.instructables.com/Grind-and-Polish-a-DobsonianNe... ).

Put another way: it is always possible to increase your precision as long as you don't particularly care about absolutes or temperature effects.

The ultimate reference for this is the Foundations of Mechanical Accuracy, which is available as a PDF[1], the print versions aren't cheap.

One example of precision is the Whitworth 3 plate method (invented in the 1830s), with this method, you can make surfaces that approach precision in the micron range, if necessary.

Leonardo Da Vinici's screw cutting lathe sketches show a machine that uses 2 lead screws to generate another, which averages the values of the other two screws, using careful rotations of threads, etc, it should be possible to use this method to work your way up to a uniform precise screw where each new generation is better than the ones before it.

[1] https://pearl-hifi.com/06_Lit_Archive/15_Mfrs_Publications/M...

The main way is by averaging error terms toward zero.

For example, Da Vinci's machine cuts the new screw blank in the centre of the carriage, which is driven by leadscrews on either side. The nuts would have likely been something like a wide strip of leather clamped over the screw thread, so there's enough compliance to average over a few pitches of thread, and the position of the cutter would be close to the average of the position set by each leadscrew thread.

Imagine the rough-cut screw threads have a pitch vs rotation angle described by p1(θ) and p2(θ). Running the machine then creates a new screw which is nearly a duplicate of the drive-screws in the machine but with pitch p3(θ) = (p1(θ) + p2(θ))/2. You can make two of these screws and swap them for the two leadscrews in the machine (it's built to be easy to do this). The random errors from a rough-cut screw gradually average out. But the cleverness doesn't end there. You then flip one of the screws backward end-to-end, so now you're averaging p3(θ) with p4(L-θ). You can also offset θ by any amount for either screw by offsetting the change-gear and re-clamping the carriage nut. Repeating these actions, you gradually can eliminate all systematic thread errors from the initial rough-cut screws and converge towards cutting a screw with nearly-constant pitch.

(It doesn't end there either; there's really a lot of flexibility with Da Vinci's design. Changing the gear ratio lets you create a fine-pitch thread from a coarse-pitch thread, or vise-versa, or cut a multi-start screw by rotating the blank 180 degrees or end-over-end).

I think a similar genre is "humanity fuck yeah" - HFY - so you can search for that as well.

this is why Mesopotamian and Egyptian writing are upstream of so much.

> Western writing has a very small character set and is thus well-suited to a printing press

This is vastly overstated. This was a widely popularized idea in the west but has largely been debunked by more recent scholarship that is less interested in demonstrating the superiority of the west.

> Western writing has a very small character set

If you include all of the Latin-script characters, Cyrillic, Greek, accent symbols and ligatures, you'd have over 300 characters, and that is a very conservative estimate

I'm a former archaeologist, so my personal definition of technology is extremely expansive.

You don't actually need to nixtamalize maize. It's totally edible without and most americans today don't eat nixtamalized corn outside masa. It's just a process to make it more nutritious and importantly, nearly nutritionally complete. For ancient societies, nixtamalizing had a role similar to things like vaccination do for us today. It reduced malnutrition and the economic/social/political effects of disease. The difference I'm trying to highlight is that it probably wasn't understood as such and intentionally done for that purpose. Nixtamalization was culturally encoded as just what you did. Had they had a better understanding of nutrition, they probably would have made more intentional efforts to include the missing vitamins nixtamalization doesn't provide. We often see signs of those missing nutrients in precolumbian skeletons.

This extends to a surprisingly wide variety of ancient technology. Most metallurgy probably wasn't understood in the technical sense we think of it today until quite late. We see that with early glass, where people simply didn't understand what they were doing. Ingredients from specific areas would have specific effects, but sometimes didn't for reasons no one at the time understood. Craft communities would standardize on very specific, ritualized processes that simply couldn't be changed because they didn't have a good mechanistic understanding of the variables involved. One of the downstream effects of this is that poaching craftspeople is a viable strategy (they had the specific "recipe") and also that resources like sand from specific areas in syria and egypt were effectively non-fungible for centuries. You had to trade with whoever controlled that area even if you had the craftspeople.

On the other hand, it’s basically impossible to have large organized civilization in Mesoamerica without hominy[1]. So should hominy be upstream of anything Mesoamericans invented?

1: For anyone whose Nahuatl is a bit rusty: the English word for nixtmalized corn is “hominy”.

You will end up writing a technology focused complete history of the world. That tapestry would be absolutely fascinating to be able to navigate and it would also be always out of date.

Wikipedia is useless for rebooting technological society, it doesn't show where or how to mine the necessary minerals.

Any post about tech trees sooner or later mentions 'I, pencil', so let's get it over with:

https://fee.org/ebooks/i-pencil/

Rope was around long before the wick. It seems conceivable that rope shavings or pieces or old rope were an easy way to start a fire.

This was then used with oil to make an even better fire starter or means of transferring fire. Eventually someone realises that a rope soaking in oil is easily lit and sustains a flame.

Before wicks, how do you burn oil? It's not easy to just ignite a bucket of lamp oil (putting aside what you might make the bucket out of). Probably you soak other fuel like wood or rags in the oil and burn the result. It's not a huge step from there to accidentally find out that you can make do with one piece of wood or cloth or string for a lot of oil, assuming you have something to put the oil in.

1. Someone dips a rope in flammable oil before lighting it, and sees that it's quite flammable. 2. Some other time, someone tries to use a rope dipped in flammable oil as a fuse to trigger the lighting of the oil once it burns back to the oil 3. They notice that the fuse keeps burning but doesn't burn back - in other words, the wicking effect 4. They shorten the rope and reshape the pot, and that's an oil lamp.

The first oil-lamps were basically a bowl with animal-fat and plant parts as wick. It's not hard to imagine how ten thousands years ago a hunting tribe could discover such a device by accident or on purpose.