I dunno, they’d bump their heads a lot less…
Or, more seriously, why? There’s no minimum height you’d have to be to crack rocks or operate crushing hammers. Never mind that most early mining wasn’t hard rock mining (except the mining of rocks themselves, of course).
It’s not just about swinging a pickaxe, I doubt a mining technique like fire-setting would scale down very well.
Then there’s the issue with smelting the ore, would that process scale down?
How much force is required to create a stone axe or flint arrowhead? Would a tiny human have the strength needed? They’d have to get past this stage before thinking about space ships.
I wonder if weaker metals (tin, for example) would suffice for the one-foot-tall people.
Or to successfully hunt with a atlatl. Could we have even made to the top of the food chain with tiny weapons?
Why does it have to scale down? Are 1ft tall people incapable of building big fires? Or running a bucket chain?
Of course - you can smelt ore in small units very easily. That’s basically how ore assaying used to work.
I’ve seen a 7yo knapping stone. Not quite 1ft tall, but not an adult human. The hammerstone does all the work. Knapping’s about precision, not brute force.
Would we still have fire?
Pretty sure yes since all you really need to do for fire is pull some off of naturally burning brush from say a lightening strike and keep it going. But could tiny people take down a Mastodon and hunt them to extinction? Would they need to if they didn’t need that much meat?
Apples would be frikkin’ huge!
Incapable? No, but it is more difficult and would require more manpower if* you have to build fires that are five times the size of what was done historically, relatively speaking. Granted the relative yield would would also be larger, but the mines wouldn’t just be scaled down versions of our Big Folk mines.
*If it’s actually needed, I don’t know how hot and how long a fire would need to burn for it to be effective.
In the interest of fighting ignorance(my own!), do you have a cite? It’s not that I don’t believe you, I would just like to know more on the subject.
Assuming six inch humans that are just as smart as six-foot humans. I can think of two issues:
Intrinsic scaling of technology. Some things are easier and some things are harder at 1/12th scale. It’s easier to build ten 8-inch stories than to build ten 8-foot stories (generally, things get weaker as they get bigger). But, it’s harder to heat the smaller building. Easier to float small ships, but harder to make them move (and of course much harder to make them survive storms). Off the top of my head, I agree that maybe fire is the biggest obstacle to developing 1/12th technology. Smaller fires are just intrinsically harder, because they lose heat much faster compared to how much heat they make, so it’s harder to keep them going. No fire, not much of any other technology.
Size relative to ecological surroundings. Six inch humans, even with steel tools, would be hard-pressed to harvest mature oak trees. On the other hand, lots of tiny seeds become reasonable food sources. One issue is the size of predators. Real humans are just big enough that, with spears and in a group, they can fight off the biggest predators around right now. One man alone should be scared of a lion or bear, but a village doesn’t have to worry about a lion coming along and tearing all their houses open. Six inch humans might not be able to build permanent structures, as something hungry would soon come along and open them up. And it’s hard to imagine technology getting even to iron age without reasonably permanent structures.
Six-inch human ancestors would probably resemble marmosets rather than chimpanzees, so you might find them building homes in trees to avoid predators. This would make any path to high technology significantly different.
I’m pretty sure I’ve been called a12-inch beaver rider before. Or something like that.
Mandatory reading for this would include On being the right size by J. B. S. Haldane.
I knew there was a joke in there somewhere.
Ohh, is that the origin of “A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes.”? Live and learn!
We build fires orders of magnitude bigger than our “normal” fires all the time - Nov 5, for instance.
A hole in the ground is a hole in the ground - and like I said, in any case most ancient mining was not hard rock mining. The first coppper, tin, iron and gold were all native, placer or open deposits. I think a 1ft person can sift through riversand or dig ochre as well as a 6ft person.
Sure - for precious metals, the process is called cupellation and is fairly well-documented. For an idea about smelting base metals, you can check out the slideshow at the bottom ofthis page (click the image)
But they’d be fantastic at whistling.
In many trees branches only start at about 4-5 feet off the ground so I imagine climbing a tree, let alone cutting down a tree, would be pretty hard. The great redwoods of California went unmolested until the 19th century when they made massive saws.
But then one would need less wood.