...have just time travelled to 30000 B.C, Stone age.
Human beings live in small groups of 30-60. They wear animal skin and yield clubs, very primitive bows and stones. They are hunters. Most valuable resource is flint, which makes quite sharp weapons, yet is rare and hard to find.
They have no buildings to speak of and live in caves or lean-to's. When there's prey, they hunt and eat till there's food. If it ends, they go back hunting. They don't grow anything and rarely store any food for difficult periods. If game gets rare, they relocate to better hunting grounds, moving around often. They haven't domesticated dogs yet.
Most valuable thing is fire, which is guarded day and night and tied with beliefs of hunting luck of the tribe.
So, you arrived. An educated, advanced human from distant future. You've seen planes and TV's, internet and other planets.
They greet you kindly and are amazed by your clothing. You see how primitive and badly organized their life is. Your knowledge will surely prove useful.
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This is kind of thing i've been wondering sometimes. To be honest, I personally could do very little with all my space-age knowledge to provide practical help. Their tools would be way too primitive to build or mine anything, I wouldn't recognize crops or know how to grow them, I don't know how to build a crossbow or recognize most of ores.
* If we'd came upon iron-rich clay, I probably could handle building a little smelter and introduce them to metals.
* I do know a bit about basic principles of taming a horse.
* I could give some very basic tips about building a hut and introduce them to oven
* I can make fire with sticks. It was one of greatest discoveries and in this age, still very little known
* Fish nets can be made of animal intestines or strips of fur
* I know where and how to build a well
Still, coming from our time, this sounds like nothing.
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How could you help them?
I mean, so it would be really doable?
What?!?!
Is anyone as confused as I am?
I think the primary goals would be, first of all, fitting into this new community yourself, and the first step towards that is communication.
Expanding their communication skills would probably be the first and most important step towards advancement. The better beings can communicate their needs, the better they can work together towards a goal.
Assuming that the learning capacity of primitive man is roughly on par with our own, it would be possible to at least teach them an understanding of their environment and a more robust language than they currently possess.
With this higher understanding you could then move on to applications, like improving their quality of life through more effective hunting equipment, food preservation (salting meat would have been unknown to them at the time but is rather easy to do), and constructing housings for fire to provide for the winter.
If you can take care of their Hierarchy of Needs (food, water, shelter) and improve them, you allow their numbers to grow. This, in turn, provides more potential workers.
Also, having children with some of the able females will allow you to teach them from an early age how to think more like you do, which will leave a legacy to continue after you are gone.
Personally, I think it would be very difficult for one person to accomplish much. For one thing, primitive man might not even recognize you as being like them; they may see you as a God, or worse, as an enemy and just kill you outright. I imagine challenges and tests of strength were a daily affair in primitive mans' existence, much as they are a part of animal life. Early man would be far more interested in the fittest male and females, so if you arrive there and look fat and unsightly, chances are you wouldn't be able to win a mate anyway.
No, I think about this stuff too. I tend to think more about Medieval times and the 1950's and pulling a Back To the Future Chuck Berry guitar solo thing.
I'm sure it's possible to communicate ideas with people, I'm just not sure how well they can comprehend those ideas. If you went back 100 years ago and tried to describe the internet or computers to someone, they'd have a really hard time understanding.
This question was addressed in THHGTTG (or however you wish to abbreviate it) when Arthur found himself in some sort of backward society, far from the rest of civilisation. As he prepared to boast with his high-tech thinking and advanced knowledge, he realised he didn't even know how a ballpoint pen worked. It turned out that the only thing he could impress these cavemen with was how to make really good sandwiches. So he became the sandwich god.
Ha! I totally think of Arthur and the sandwiches every time I pretend I'm giving a lecture explaining modern sciences to primitive societies in the shower. (Yes, I really do, once every few months. :) ) I think we give ourselves a lot less credit than we deserve at that...think of all the simple things you can show them about health, hygiene, simple medicine and first aid, and cooking their food alone that would improve their life span. And what foods to avoid, dangerous berries and so on. I'm sure it would be way, way different and far less recognizable in 30000 BC, but still.
If I could find reliably sharp and strong rocks or some other way of cutting down trees, I think one of the first things I'd show them would be log cabins. :)
I would NOT teach them about money, coins, etc...
if anything I would try to change history so that the idea of money was never considered...
Money is the main cause of nearly all of the problems humans have ever faced.
Money is the only logical path we can take from barter, which becomes more complicated the more things there are to trade. It's not really something society could just avoid, unless you'd like to go back to trading like 1000 eggs for an xbox or 20 bars of soap for a bottle of cologne...
You're probbaly right, but I like to envisage a world where we paid for things in favours, services and trust rather than just swapping goods... It's very far fetched and sissy idealism, I know, but just imagine if money just hadn't occured, yet science and technology still developed... I just wonder how we would be paying for our Xboxes and cologne.
Well... the fact that I just use the word 'paying' probably proves that such a world could never exist, so I'll shut up... just thinking out loud really.
Yeah, spot on, Andail.
What I'm thinking with this thread is that we could know things, but to even survive with them for a week, we need lessons from them first.
The most bizarre thing here I'm not Sherlock Holmes with deductive reasoning... What I mean is-
I know what mining and refining is, how steam engine works or how magnets make electricity in generators. But being dropped into Stone Age, i could build a steam engine, but I would need nails, iron, a hammer, a drill, etc. I don't know how to acquire them! I'm not really sure where to find a magnet or how to forge a copper nail or wire using tools of the age.
Like, we know the result, but not the path to the result, not the progress.
Look around in your room. Pick an item. Now, you're in the woods and have a stone hammer. How would you proceed to make that item you picked?
Thinking this way makes me feel really dumb... :(
Thinking about it again, so that's what elementary school is for! Writing, reading and basic maths would benefit any civilization in any age.
Yay,Arthur.. he could make the best swich out of a Perfectly Normal Beast...
I would draw them a picture of Vampira, hoping to create an alternate timeline where Maila Nurmi is worshipped as a deity and her shows archive tapes don't get destroyed.
Apart from that... I think I could probably learn more from them than them from me. unless they REALLY wanted to know how to bleed a radiator.
Quote from: InCreator on Mon 22/12/2008 15:59:19
Like, we know the result, but not the path to the result, not the progress.
This reminds me of a short story by Heinlein where some contemporary scientists (21st century) build a time machine and transport a man from the future (4502) into their holy halls. He's not even surprised because in his time, time travel is a total standard. With bright eyes he tells them about all the cool stuff they have, and when they ask him how to build it, or how these miracle machines work, he admits that he has no idea, since he never really cared. He's just a janitor, after all.
But ProgZ and Stupot have some good points: Very, very far in the past even the most "basic" guy (or gal) could them them homo sapiens several important lessons. Things we did as kids like building a dam, a slingshot. Basic food preparation. I daresay today's "average guy" knows much less than he thinks and likes to admit, but also a lot more than maybe one, two centuries ago.
Knowledge, at least technical knowledge, transfers quite well though. It would've been possible to build a grammophone with the technical knowledge of, say, ancient greek. Clockwork, rather simple. You could, however, never do it *on your own*.
I had the chance, I'd teach the man-monkeys not to make Deus Ex 2 and to hate the idea of a Teletubby.
Ooooo- and I'd encourage a whole frikkin' TRIBE to work on Duke Nukem Forever.
Forever.
It also depends what kind of authority we'd have. If people were forced to listen to us and follow our recommendations, I think we could accomplish quite a lot. Like the importance of eating c-vitamin (and with this we would save entire fleets from scurvy), and hygienic stuff like cleaning your hands before you perform surgery on your patients...
The problem with above ideas is that they're really hard to explain and persuade people into, since you need to introduce the idea of germs and other invisible stuff. Consider the hard time Semmelweiss had convincing the doctors that if you first perform autopsys on dead bodies, you might want to wash your hands before you deliver babies over at the maternity ward.
And the idea of bringing fruit juices on board ships has been suggested several times through the history of seafaring, by really acclaimed physicians and scientists, but the skepticism and carelessness among the powers that be always made it hard to implement changes.
With that in mind, it would be easier to impress with tangible contraptions and dangerous weapons.
I fail to see how the knowledge standard dude from modern time could actually kickstart Stone Age civilization.
See, they're living in caves. They eat only if thrown stone actually manages to hit a game and injure it enough to catch.
I see how basic knowledge of CPR and medicine, food & water preservation and simple pottery would benefit here. But...
Suggesting them to eat more C-Vitamin or wash on daily basis (they wouldn't anyway, grease, mud and dirt repels mosquitos) really won't protect them against mountain lions or hunger... And they don't have time to do numbers while they're starving. So,
How to make clothes out of cotton or sheep wool?
How to build a crossbow or longbow? (AFAIK, projectile based weapons are absolutely highest point of any civilization, dividing human and danger)
How to build a motte-and-bailey or any other defensive structure while stone ax is your only tool?
How is paper made? Using tools of this age? Or parchment or anything to write on?
I would still feel so dumb...
I could do clock though. Sundial! I'm into wilderness survival stuff, so I can read sun well enough to locate north and south (billion ways here), predict time and so on. Basic navigation too.
you dont do anything to change history simple as that if i was sent back so i didnt do anything detremental to the time line i would run away find somewhere secluded and curl up and die.
Quote from: InCreator on Mon 22/12/2008 15:59:19
I know what mining and refining is, how steam engine works or how magnets make electricity in generators. But being dropped into Stone Age, i could build a steam engine, but I would need nails, iron, a hammer, a drill, etc. I don't know how to acquire them! I'm not really sure where to find a magnet or how to forge a copper nail or wire using tools of the age.
Basically, you learn how things work, not how to manufacture them. You know what a nail is, how it works, and that's it. No one teaches you how to manufacture things, because the mechanics how it works is pretty much enough for you to know if you want to have a wider horizon of knowledge. You know a toothbrush very well. But do you know how it's made? I didn't 'till I saw it on Discovery. But that brought me nothing. I only discovered it's made using a very advanced mechanizated assembly line.
Everything is made that way today. No one takes a pen and writes a newspaper. They are printed in millions of copies.
In our age, you basically know what a thing is, how it works, but NOT how it's made.