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this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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But... none of those things actually contradict "stone age". It might be better to point out that an advanced civilization isn't necessarily defined by metalworking.
So many things are just ideas. It's really fascinating how some ideas can snowball and give incredible power to those in possession of them, while others can be very advanced, yet have minimal effect in the culture's spread or influence.
Austronesian peoples discovered the fire piston - a very useful tool that necessarily utilizes concepts of air pressure and localized temperature - nearly three thousand years ahead of Europeans. Yet some Austronesian peoples who used this tool were quite literally in the stone age, not working metal.
Ideas are incredibly arbitrary things.
Europeans were using roman numerals and an abacus for accounting until the 1200s. In fact, the number zero was initially banned out of concern for fraud. The Medici Bank was an early adopter of the IndoArab numeral system we use today and it helped them become one of the wealthiest families in Europe.
From the 600s to 1400s we can draw a fairly clear line from Aryabhata, Brahmagupta, Fibonacci, Pierro della Franchesca to Leonardo da Vinci.
In the old world it could take centuries for ideas to travel, even if they're foundational to modern mathematics, physics etc.
A similar story can be told of sugar which was first refined in South Asia, the engineering process travelled through and was further developed in the Arab world during the Islamic golden age and then went to Europe.
Italian merchant republics—primarily Venice—began managing sugar production in Mediterranean colonies like Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily. However, sugar is a land-hungry and wood-hungry crop. By the 1400s, the Mediterranean was running out of timber (needed to fuel the massive boiling vats) and space.
Christopher Columbus lived in Portugal and married the daughter of a sugar estate owner. When he sailed for the Americas, he brought sugarcane stalks from the Canary Islands on his very first voyage, knowing the Caribbean climate was a perfect match for the "white gold."
The Caribbean offered vast land, tropical rain, and timber. Because the process of cutting, hauling, and boiling cane is so physically punishing and dangerous, European powers scaled up the enslaved labor system to a level never before seen in the Mediterranean, turning the islands into "sugar factories" to meet the soaring demand in Europe.
The profits from sugar were unlike anything seen before. At its peak, a successful sugar plantation could see annual returns of 20% to 50%, far outstripping traditional agriculture or local trade. This led to the founding of institutions like the Bank of England, Barclays and Lloyds. Sugar also provided a cheap source or energy and made caffeine based beverages more palatable to maximize the productivity of human capital in operation of early machinery during the industrial revolution.
"Also, you can just make sugar out of beets."
Europe, having spent the past ~300 years importing sugar cane as a specialized tropical crop: 😬
Ideas are worth more than gold!
Absolutely. Napolean and trade barriers had an important role in that evolution
It's remarkable how much of human history (if not all of it) is adapting to the circumstances around us.
And also uncomfortable how many inventions came about due to a war...
The ancient greeks had early grammophones, and they ditched the idea because what the fuck you need that for.
I've never heard that before, do you know what the device was called or what to look up for it?
Uh, what?
Yeah, they invented typesetting in China long before Europe, but they had to prepare characters for each run because of amount of possible characters, the letters were pottery, and it didn't seem like very useful thing so it was abandoned after the inventor's death.
At least that's what I heard, it might be a retcon for PR purposes
Not a retcon at all! Though use of moveable type in China did continue past its inventor's death, it didn't acquire the same prominence or revolutionize printing the way that it did when invented in Europe.
This reminds me how setting prints letter-by-letter was time consuming, so the printers had common words or even whole phrases ready too. It was called stereotype.
In France they called it cliché...
Well, TIL, still I think it really highlights that some ideas need specific circumstances to create an impact
This reminds me of Connections with James Burke (i only saw the reboot), that explores how breakthroughs have depended on other semi-related ideas and technology.
They also had metalworking, it just wasn’t iron and in many cases it made no sense to use metal instead of naturally occurring materials with many of the same properties, like obsidian (you can actually make it sharper than a scalpel). It has disadvantages of course, but so does iron; it rusts and requires a ton of energy to create.
The idea that metalworking is somehow a ‘peak’ of civilization was derived from 1800s anthropology trying to divide societies according to how ‘advanced’ (read: similar to European technological development) they were. In many ways some Indigenous American technologies surpassed European ones: ex, land management. When Europeans were destroying every old growth forest they had, some Indigenous American nations were so adept at land management they managed to have settled hunter-gatherers (coastal PNW). As in, these hunter-gatherers didn’t need to move constantly about the landscape to hunt because they maintained it to be bountiful, and still managed to have population centers of similar size as many European ones.
You’ve also got terra preta in South America, which transformed poor quality soil into soil that made horticulture possible. And as long as we’re in Central and South America, one of the first nanotechnologies is believed to be a paint made by the Maya called Maya blue.
Daily reminder that no one is illegal on stolen land.
It's mind boggling how many teachers and professors in my life are still all aboard the "they were savages until we showed up" train.
Build me a musket out of obsidian.
Grow a garden that can feed an extended family in nutrient poor soil with a musket. You’re looking at it the wrong way if you’re viewing one as better than the other and not just different technologies.
Okay, build me a diesel powered tractor with tiller attachment out of obsidian.
The other answer:
Okay. points musket at brown people Start tilling.
I'm extremely confused by the thesis of your argument here. What is the point you're trying to make?
That your hippy dippy "different technologies" take is kind of naive. You sound like a kindergarten teacher handing out participation trophies.
These two peoples with these two "different technologies" fought. Who won?
Might makes right ey?
Seems very uncivilized.
Edit:
So i guess in your world the most advanced creature is a Malaria mosquito.
Technology alone doesn't win wars. Hernan Cortez only subdued the Aztecs thanks to managing to get several other native groups to join in on an assault against Tenochtitlan. Diseases that were new to the Americas also killed many natives, way more than any direct confrontations. On an funny note, the Australian army technically lost a war against emus, which are large, flightless birds.
Keep in mind that colonial powers always used local groups to keep things "in order". This was no different to how they did it in African and Asian colonies: find a group that you can bully or buy and ensure they stay in power, for a price.
I'll grant...just about all of that. Though my understanding of the "emu war" was like three dudes in a truck with a box of bullets.
Let me ask you this though: Why isn't that what would have happened if they landed in ancient Egypt? Indulge the sci-fi scenario a little bit, 11 ships carrying 600 16th century CE Spanish Conquistadors land in the Levant circa 2600 BCE. Why would it go any different for Khufu than it did for Montezuma? Would Cortes not win some early victories against some small coastal tribes, capture him a woman that speaks a couple local languages, learn who the major power in the region is, start gathering allies among the locals who've lived under Egypt's thumb and would like to get a piece of that highfalutin pharaoh, and then march his combined army on Memphis? All the while the natives are dying of all the diseases that the 15th century has that the -25th doesn't?
Yes
This is where things break. Do you know enough about the different people living under the Pharaoh's rule in the era you're talking about? I don't. Thus, I cannot say whether Cortez would manage to find enough support to march to the capital, be hailed as the incarnation of some god, or whether the translator would try to warn everyone that the conquistadors are a bunch of pillaging pirates that should be killed, with them being none the wiser. When you're a stranger in someone else's land and everyone absolutely hates you above all else, you can't even breathe without fear of being ambushed. Sure, they have these frightening tools that are louder than thunder, create foul smoke and kill people from a distance, but those things won't protect your back from being shanked
Or, let's throw a more recent perspective: USA vs. Taliban, 2001-2021. One side has drones, aerial supremacy, satellite imagery, smart missiles, aircraft carriers. The other has mostly just small arms, weapons that at most, need to be mounted on a pickup truck, no tanks, no planes, it was a bunch of fanatics using guerilla tactics. USA never managed to fully beat the Taliban and, after the end of the withdrawal, it didn't take 2 weeks before they seized power.
Was the United States trying to kill all the Afghanis, raise the Stars and Stripes over Afghanistan and start mining and farming the place for goods to ship back home? Not sure it's a fair comparison given the differing goals. I'm pretty sure we were using Afghanistan as the Military Industrial Complex's cum dumpster.
No, that's what a quirass is for. That's why they wore those.
I'm sure they spent 24/7 with a cuirass in the Central American heat. Also, not every Spaniard in those expeditions had the money to buy one for themselves.
EDIT:
No, neither was Spain in America, since the natives could be captured as slaves
Pretty sure that ended up being one of the things during the occupation, yes.
Don’t sit here and act like you don’t live as the beneficiary of thousands of years of selective breeding of Mesoamerican staple crops, not even to touch on the medications you take that come from the Americas. I’m talking about them as different technologies because they are, and recreating things like terra preta is an active area of research for current day use. Because, guess what, our current technology that you’re jacking off about sucks ass and relies on dumping a metric fuckton of nitrogen and phosphorous in the form of fertilizer runoff into waterways, creating enormous dead zones.
‘Who can kill the most people with it’ is a very American way of understanding the past or technology in general. You can’t kill anyone with a telescope, that doesn’t mean it’s not a technology.
Well, not with THAT attitude.
(I really have been enjoying your posts here, please do not take this as anything but me shitposting.)
That just shows that we never evolved past ‘the one who is stronger is the one who is right’, and I really wish we would
That's adorable.
Why bother doing any of that shit when you can maintain a productive environment and slit that asshole’s throat while he sleeps?
Might be possible with bronze, since some cannons were made of bronze
Interestingly enough, I just finished watching The Lost Metallurgy of the Ancient Americas video, and not only were some cannons made of bronze, but apparently the Conquistadors did actually have some Mesoamerican Natives make some artillery for them using native metallurgy techniques and the locally mined copper/bronze the Natives were already making.^1^
^1^ Copper alloyed with arsenic forms a sort of bronze, and copper-tin alloys were also used for the bronze best known nowadays.
Wow, that's a really interesting find!
Ironic. I wouldn't be surprised if more parts of their technological superiority also relied on imports
Then they were in the bronze age, at least technically
Although it's nice to have.
I'd prefer to live in a just, egalitarian society on the plains still, don't get me wrong, it'd just be nice to have metal working if you know what I'm sayin.