Retracing the steps from neolithic to industrial age

Factual Questions
1

Even though the basis of this question is fantasy, I placed this in GQ because I believe there is a factual answer or answers. So, fantasy part first. Enter futuristic dystopian storytime:

Earth is a mess. Aside from humans, every species of animal is extinct or so close to extinction that acquiring one is prohibitively expensive. There are a reasonable number of plant species left, but the edible ones are unable to bear the load of the current ecological pressures and their numbers are dwindling fast. Vat-grown food can substitute for a great deal of that, but the right nutrients can’t be produced at such a scale. Humanity’s end is assured. At least, it would be assured except for a recent discovery.

It seems there are parallel Earth-like planets where evolution took a slightly different course and humanity never came into existence. In addition, there is a limited form of transportation to those worlds. The limitation is this: only living things or recently-living things can make the journey. So you and your epidermis can make the journey, but metal, plastic, or minerals are right out.

A candidate planet has been found and select group of humans have been chosen to be an advance team to prepare it for an eventual influx of the remainder of humanity. The people have been psychologically profiled for compatibility as well as examined to assure their mental and physical fitness for the effort.

That’s the backstory. The question is: what steps do they need to take, starting from nothing, to get to a reasonably modern technological level? What chemical processes need to be instantiated to produce these products and what kind of dependency tree exists for getting them off the ground? As a follow-up question, how quickly this can get done?

I’m thinking that a reasonable level would be about industrial-age technology – good steel as well as factories to turn it into useful items, electricity production, some antibiotics and maybe some vaccines, too. Food won’t be an issue initially – enough plants can be sent over to sustain the settlers for a good amount of time, but the hope is for some kind of food storage technology to be built up as soon as possible.

2

We’ve done this umpteen times as a post-apocalyptic scenario. Yours differs only in the small detail of getting a fresh planet.

You can’t say “food won’t be a problem”. In fact food will be by far the biggest problem for the first few centuries.

You can’t even start on creating even primitive tech until you have enough agriculture to enable some folks to do something besides spend all day raising enough food for today. And you can’t get started on even primitive agriculture until you have enough people to enable some of them to work on starting agriculture while the others gather enough food for today.

You may by some miracle be able to fill your colonist’s heads with the complete knowledge of humanity to date. But they’ll spend the rest of their life scratching at the ground with sharp sticks trying to get agriculture going so they can raise enough kids to have a couple of them learn how to break draft animals & tan hides. Their great grand children might be numerous enough to put one or two on the task of trying to find ores to smelt into metals. If any of those great grandkids somehow ever learned what a “metal” was.

The real danger is all the colonists’ Earth knowledge dies of old age before more than a tiny fraction of it can be recreated by the colonists. Yes they know how to read & write, but neither paper nor pencils occur naturally. Nor do you have the spare production capacity to feed scribes sitting around all day recording it, nor teachers sitting around all day teaching the young ones. Everybody is too busy avoiding starvation to do much of anything else.

The rate of human progress from the first H. sapiens to 1900CE is roughly equivalent to the excess productive capacity of our agricultural economy. That’s the Iron Rule of Progress.
Compared to most post-apocalyptic scenarios, yours has away to improve the situation. Start the colonization early enough in the unfolding disaster that every 20 years or so for the next thousand years the Earth is still together enough to send a “refresher” batch of colonists along to rekindle the knowledge of the colony and boost it ahead of its own natural rate of (re-)development.

The social challenges of this would be huge. Imagine being a 7th generation locally born-and-raised colonist. You’ve been told the legends of old Earth as filtered and distorted through 200 years of oral tradition. But you grew up in a mud hut and have been doing subsistence agriculture from age 10. Suddenly a bunch of clean well-fed folks in strangely perfect clothes appear and start trying to tell your tribal elders how to run things.

That won’t go smoothly.

Etc.

3

Also, much of our agricultural progress was a fairly long-drawn process of breeding plants to suit our needs. Primitive wild wheat or rice will not be the stuff we grow today. Plus, they are scattered. Wheat, IIRC, is from Mesopotamia. Horses from the Ukraine.

You can make a list of progressive civilization needs - metal - copper, tin, iron, ceramics, coal, oil. To start, they need basic tools and the originals were flint flaked off bigger chunks to provide straight edges for working wood and cutting meat off hunted prey. If your earth is truly parallel, you can make a good list of where to find these and set your people down in the ideal location to find a good source of each nearby. (Next question - where’s the best location?)

Never underestimate the value of energy - before coal, large-scale iron making with wood was know to denude the forests for miles around. Digging soft rock to burn beats chopping down trees by hand.

The first people will get a lesson in how to make and use flint knives and home-made bows, sinew bowstrings and snares, rope, etc. This gives them a good start in finding food, but a decent population will quickly kill off all the local big game.

Shelter - there are some amazing stone-age dry stone construction in Britain; that would be a good start, although knowing how to make mortar is a good step toward reliable construction; good housing that does not have to be rebuilt every year removes one drain on labour.

To me, the imperative would be to find iron and get started making hard metal tools. This provides the means to chop down forests to practice agriculture, thus kick-starting the civilization route.

They should also find the local goats or sheep, something small and manageable that can be a source of meat when the game runs out - and so would need lessons (if we have them) on domesticating animals.

You don’t specify if there’s a continual feed of people. if so, the later people can come along with more specialized knowledge.

But the colony would definitely have a head start by knowing some basic goals and how to achieve them - ironwork, domestication of plants and animals, what minerals do what, even something as simple as how to tan hides or what a bow and arrow is.

4

About as good an approximation as can be for such a broad topic. I am curious about what element(s) you think the rate of human progress is roughly equivalent to after 1900.

5

To not die pretty much immediately your advance team will need to be in a location where there are stones suitable for making tools and weapons, clay for making pots, and appropriate wood for making fire. Otherwise the local apex predators will have them for lunch or they’ll contract diseases from the water. Most likely the latter then the former. It would seem from the OP that you can send seeds, livestock, and paper (or vellum if not paper), so once the basic locale has been positively established, follow-up groups and supplies can be rapidly sent.

Since these are alternate Earths, we already know where the geological deposits will be. Tin, copper, lead, iron, clay, and coal. This makes SW UK with its generally mild climate the ideal place to send your settlers as tin, copper, and clay are all available in Cornwall and Devon, and coal and iron across the river in South Wales. Plus the waters have abundant fish. You can make bronze from tin and copper, alleviating the need to find iron so quickly, and you’ll need the tin later when you want to make glass in significant quantities (glass floats on molten tin).

There’s another, grimmer, alternative: just use this to remove the population problem. Just gather up a group of random people and send them somewhere random. Repeat millions of times. If they survive, good; if not, it doesn’t matter as the population problem is still alleviated.

6

I assume the OP is going for a Terminator-style transport. However, that doesn’t prevent livestock from being sent, which gives a good head start. Originally needles were made from bone, IIRC. Bowstrings were made from animal sinews. etc.

7

Once ag employment gets down to a couple percent of the population it ceases to be the limiting factor.

After that point the pacing factor is total accumulated productive capital, both financial & human.

Note that both wealth and human capacity can be deployed in unproductive and counterproductive ways. It’s only the net productive amount which drives capital-p Progress.

8

@md2000: I had overlooked the idea of Earth sending supplies such as plants, animals, or products therefrom. Which, if done in bulk, certainly changes the growth & progress equations a bunch.

Depending on how far behind the sustainable level Earth is already, there may not be many spare plants or plant products to send, at least not without great controversy. And by the OP, sending animals is right out. Other than maybe a single breeding pair of something. But not too many somethings.

9

Yeah, a couple of trained dogs would be an immense help with hunting and habitat protection.

10

There are food crops that can be sent through. Lack of draft animals, fertilizer, and draft animals will be a problem, though. I bet that Earth can supply a good set of dogs, though.

11

Documentation can be sent through, as long as the ink comes from some organic process. As far as colonists writing, I’m thinking the easiest solution initially is clay tablets.

12

Vellum and charcoal ink might be more portable.

13

See [THREAD=638073]What if we had to restart technology from scratch, but with all the knowledge we have?[/THREAD]

Being able to start with cultivars and domesticated animals is certainly a significant benefit, but having to recreate mechanical and electronic technology from scratch, even assuming you can convey and sustain the theoretical underpinnings, is going to be a matter of having to recreate a lot of essentially lost intermediate and precursor technologies just to get to the point of being able to make things like glassware, refined metals, high temperature furnaces, et cetera that are needed to reproduce modern chemical, manufacturing, and energy production processes, and is going to require a lot of labor-intensive processes to produce both food and mineral resources at a level of essentially serfdom or slavery. Modern industrial civilization won’t be rebuilt in a generation, or indeed, a human lifetime, and conveying theoretical knowledge without immediate application, such as discrete math, electrodynamics, or high energy physics would be nearly impossible unless ways were found to durably encode the information in a manner that wasn’t observed as just ritualistic, e.g. the scenario in A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Stranger

14

The colonists will have a head-start (compared to earth’s long history) because they will have been armed not only with a lot of our accumulated knowledge, but they will also have been schooled in the tenets of science and rational thought. They won’t be holding themselves back with dark ages, witch trials, or that sort of nonsense. They will be able to rapidly acquire and utilize knowledge about their new world; they will know that certain plants need water and sun and soil chemistry in particular amounts, and they’ll know they need to observe and document how their crops perform this season in order to know how to get them to perform better next season. They’ll know about heritability and breeding, useful for both plants and animals. They’ll know the germ theory of disease, something we didn’t start to figure out until the sixteenth century - and they’ll implement basic sanitation far earlier in their history than Earth did.

Whether they will have the spare time to advance technology with any rapidity will depend on what sort of environment they settle in. If they’re squeaking by in some sort of arctic tundra, things are going to advance slowly; if they’re somewhere more tropical where edible plants and prey are more abundant, then the state of the art should advance more quickly.

If new knowledge-bearers arrive every 20 years, it shouldn’t freak out the locals too much. Especially if they speak the same language and aren’t arriving with the goal of conquest. Especially if your oral history is supplemented with libraries of clay tablets and/or scrolls that tell you to expect these sorts of visitors from time to time, and that they’re generally beneficial and know what they’re doing.

15

Why would you want to repeat the strife of human history anyway? Just chill out in nature, herd the nerfs, and find something good to put in the peace pipe, man.

16

My understanding is that hunter-gatherers had far more leisure time than early farmers. Agriculture only became necessary once there were more people in an area than hunting and gathering could support. And on a virgin planet with a small group of colonists, that might be a long time.

I think you could easily have half your landing party gather and hunt for the rest, who could then focus on further technological development. You might be able to get to a technological point where a few people efficiently grow crops for the rest without passing through the point where everyone has to be a subsistence farmer.

17

If there were no humans on parallel earth, then it will be extremely easy for hunters to make a living. Walk up to a antelope and bash it on the head with a stick. They won’t recognize humans as dangerous. And even those that are skittish can be hunted easily with bows and arrows, cliff jumps, and all the other tricks humans have that animals that are used to regular predators have no defense against.

Humans won’t have to become agriculturalists for generations. They won’t be scratching in the dirt for a few mouthfuls of grain. They’ll just hunt.

Can we assume this is a one-way trip? Like, the mechanism for crossing dimensions would have to be rebuilt on the other side from scratch. Otherwise the teams sent across would be tasked as foragers to send food back to Earth-Prime, not colonists.

The other variable not mentioned in the OP is how many people are being sent across? And how expensive is it to send a person across, given the economy of the ruined Earth-Prime? How many people are surviving on Earth-Prime, and how are we holding onto technology? If it costs a million dollars per person, then we send a few hundred colonists over. If it costs a thousand dollars per person, well, half the remaining population of Earth-Prime is going to move to New Earth. And the other half will be extinct in a few generations.

If millions and millions of colonists are moving over, then we really will need agriculture as soon as possible. But modern plant cultivars will provide a huge advantage to the colonists, assuming there are enough of them surviving to make a difference. A few surviving stocks of modern wheat, corn, rice, potatoes, plantains, soybeans, sweet potatoes, cassava, and so on can make a huge difference if the colonists don’t have to domesticate wild plants. A few surviving modern breeds of dogs, cats, chickens, cows, sheep, or horses would make a huge difference, not having to domesticate wild animals.

Smelting iron won’t be a huge problem. The colonists would have detailed geologic surveys, and can find iron ore and coal (or use charcoal) easily. Furnaces don’t have to be complex, see Bloomery - Wikipedia. Once you’ve got enough metalworking going you can switch to the Bessemer process, which is the foundation of modern steel making, and what turned steel from an expensive luxury to an industrial product so cheap you could build a house or a boat out of it.

Iron tools–especially cheap iron tools–are a huge advantage. Cutting down trees with stone axes is a pain in the ass. Steel axes and saws let you mow down forests. Even if your colonists stay as hunter-gatherers for generations they’re going to see the advantage of steel tools, and the infrastructure needed to produce them is not impossible.

What we tend to forget is that we’re already living in an ecologically devastated planet. The vast herds of animals that once roamed the Americas and Europe and Asia are long gone, the vast flocks of birds are gone, the giant schools of fish, the vast numbers of whales and seals, all long gone. We’ve eaten them all, and converted their former habitat into cities and farms.

So the initial colonists are going to have it very easy, the amount of animal life would be shocking to a person from 2015, let alone from post-apocalyptic Earth-prime. Hunting, fishing, shellfish gathering, hunting birds, trapping, will be nearly as easy as reaching out your hand and waiting for a meal to fall into it.

Modern hunter-gatherers, or rather hunter-gatherers of 100 years ago, lived in extremely marginal habitats, because the most productive areas of the planet had been taken by agriculturalists, and later industrial civilizations. Neolithic people 10,000 years ago in ancient China lived in the most productive land on Earth. And even there the animals had been living side-by-side with deadly human or prehuman predators for a million years.

18

So I take it from your dismissive comments about the ease of survival in a pre-intensive agriculture and pre-industrial culture that you have extensive personal experience in hunting with primitive tools, smelting iron and producing steel, lumberjacking, and foraging for edible flora and fauna?

Stranger

19

I’ve thought about this a fair bit, and here’s the trick (I’m assuming that you have a fair number of years to plan and train for the expedition):
(1) Plan stuff out ahead of time as much as possible… figure out a technology tree, practice all the individual steps and perfect/simplify them
(2) Pick a destination location carefully… you want somewhere without dangers, with lots of food, and with quick access to whichever natural resources are necessary to begin the technological advancement in step (1)
(3) Get a ton of very very fit young people (probably more girls than boys) and train the living shit out of them. Then split up bunches of human knowledge, and have them memorizing overlapping sections (obviously you can’t remotely get all human knowledge, but you can pick and choose the important bits)
(4) Ensure that within a reasonable lifespan for this first wave of settlers the technology tree can result in some kind of fairly reasonable paper, so that the first wave can record their precious knowledge

20

IMO, a few folks here are taking liberties with the OP. The OP did *not *posit there was an identical Earth’ planet with all the same flora & fauna and with continents, oceans, climate, and mineral distributions exactly as Earth was, say, 10,000 years ago at its peak of hospitability for primitive H. Sapiens.

In other words our scientists have located a set of Star Trek Class M planets. Other than determining that they lack advanced sentient life that’s the end of our detailed knowledge of each planet. There is certainly no subsurface survey calling out the locations of iron ore and oil deposits.

The OP implicitly assumes that the OP’s magic teleporter somehow will avoid depositing the passengers in (or under!) the oceans, nor high in the atmosphere, nor beneath the planet’s surface. IMO all we’re guaranteed is that the colonists will arrive on land (or ice) solid enough to stand on. After arriving intact, further survival depends on their wits & luck. Go!!