I vibe coded with gpt-5 and the source json (https://www.historicaltechtree.com/api/inventions) to get this list:

Top 10 inventions by number of direct descendants

1: High-vacuum tube — 13

2: Automobile — 12

3: Stored-program computer — 12

4: Voltaic pile — 11

5: High-pressure steam engine — 11

6: Glass blowing — 10

7: Papermaking — 10

8: Bipolar junction transistor — 10

9: Writing (Mesopotamia) — 9

10: MOSFET — 8

In what sense related?

where is the zoom functionality??

"Control of Fire" is right under 1000000 BC

Yes there is: "control of fire". No knots, but ropes around 50000 BCE.

Although the idea of a "Dark Age" is mostly debunked these days, the slow unraveling of the Western Roman Empire led to a real and sustained change in material conditions. Notably, population density and urbanization both decreased, along with the labor specialization that accompanies them. I'd expect most 'inventions' to happen when and where people have the most hands on time to make them! (I can't really speak to Indian and Chinese civilizations, but they have also had integration and disintegration periods)

Interesting. On that note, Da Vinci's design (which I was fortunate enough to see a replica of at a local museum) was also very clever, being suited not only for screw cutting but also screw origination, as it could make new screws more accurately than the two leadscrews in the machine itself, and swap them out to improve its own accuracy. But I suppose it doesn't extend that date even further back because it wasn't a general purpose lathe, it could only cut screws.

Making sure you've seen this youtube channel, which is excellent: https://www.youtube.com/@machinethinking

Great phrase - fractal improvement. It's kind of the idea of this book [0]

Even more cool: commercial progress trails tech. It takes a long time for companies to figure out how to turn a new idea or a cheaper input into a new product/industry, and then for related companies to grow into an economic ecosystem.

So one would expect to see some spectacular economics over the next couple of centuries.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp...

I'd also recommend the "How to Make Everything" YouTube channel.

I'd also recommend the Destiny's Crucible series - the basic premise is that a chemist from our world is transported to another planet of humans at a much lower technological level, and some moderately standard isekai hijinks ensue.

I read five of the books, and really enjoyed them; if you like the "competence porn" genre of novels, this is a pretty good one.

I watch this with my daughter and we love it. I love shows with "narration", talking about the context/details of things, and Dr Stone really nails that (I know the main character isn't really a narrator.. but it accomplishes the same thing).

I second this. It's the only show I've seen making a semi-realistic attempt at this (ignoring the absurdity of the initial petrification in the first place and Dr. Stone having superhuman knowledge of all human inventions)

Also, if you want even further back precedent for this kind of plot device, I highly recommend reading a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's court by Mark Twain.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Connecticut_Yankee_in_King_A...

https://github.com/etiennefd/hhr-tech-tree/blob/main/src/scr... this is kind of how I expected it. Honestly I would have done https://dumps.wikimedia.org/ and then parsed it.

Additionally I've always wanted institutions to be part of the timeline of technology. Corporations, Nation-states, Universities, Guilds, International Organizations - the ways people innovatively organize make things possible that otherwise wouldn't be.

The higgs boson experiments, for example wouldn't have been possible without the complex international institutions that orchestrated it. Manhattan project, Moon landing, the internet ... the iphone ...

Such as?

They are expecting suggestions for this work in progress.

https://www.historicaltechtree.com/about#contributing

A lot of those things are incremental improvements that build onto each other, like refining an alloy by a few % many times over to end up with something entirely different.

How would one determine what is sufficiently different to deserve a node?

But 100% agree, incremental improvements are the vast majority of advances.

They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list.

The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "invention" in 168k B.P., even though a t-shirt and an arctic jacket are obviously very different technologies. New world agriculture is similarly strange. Nodes appear from nowhere and lead nowhere, presumably because there are implicit "nature" edges they didn't want to represent as technology.

[1] https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/what-counts-as-a-technology