Is there any skill that humans have completely lost with no possibility of ever re-learning?
Not to include extinct languages.
No one has known how to make Greek Fire since sometime before the fall of Constantinople.
Or maybe we have, but we gave it a different name.
I’m sure there are countless specific crafts and recipes that have been lost to time. Any indigenous tribe living in the rainforest, has a huge amount of knowledge about their environment and how to get by in it.
We’ve only recently been able to analyse roman concrete and figure out how it was made. Mystery of 2,000-year-old Roman concrete solved by scientists | The Independent | The Independent
Then there are skills which would be useless to a modern human. Mammoth hunting for example.
No matter what skills might have been lost, there is probably nothing that could not be re-learned or re-discovered.
But one specific skill which (I think) remains unknown is how the medieval cathedral builders made the stained glass windows.
There are two different kinds of “we don’t know how they did it”. The first is “we can’t think of any way to do this”, and that’s incredibly rare. I don’t know of any specific examples of it, though there might be a few.
The second is “We can think of lots of ways to do this, but we don’t know which of them they used”. This is quite common, but it certainly doesn’t mean that the ancients were smarter than us. We probably have stumbled on the method they used, but just don’t know it.
But there’s many ways to a skin a cat … in the past humans may have copied animals or other natural occurences more than trial and error and consultation with other humans.
How to kill a mammoth with a spear. Well we can understand that there are ways, but who is actually demonstrating a skill in that ?? We still have spear throwers , but rarely is someone killing a large beast with a spear.
Pyramid-building using technology and methods available 4000 years ago, as well as quarrying and transport of the stones. There are theories, but no definitive answers, and no one is willing now to try a full-scale replica of the process.
Open-ocean navigation using whatever methods the Polynesians used (a combination of constellations, currents, observations of animals, who knows what else). They were able to repeatedly return to islands thru-out the Polynesian triangle, which is in the middle of a vast ocean.
The Easter Island (Rapa Nui) heads (moai) also have many theories surrounding their construction and transport, but no one knows for sure how they did it. Altho, if someone put enough time and effort into it, it may be possible to recreate the techniques.
Wootz steel is probably in this category. We don’t know what was the original method for making it, but modern methods can produce very similar results.
Doubtful because the general characteristics are pretty well known and anyone duplicating them in the past 1,200 years would have bragged, “Hey! I’ve reinvented Greek fire!” rather than, “Look at this nifty, horrible weapon I’ve invented.” On its Greek fire page, wiki mentions,
I’m thinking that research has been limited in personnel, time, and money but even if some rich guy bankrolls a team to look into it, we might never know all of the details. After all, trebuchets are pretty well known, but The Grey Company, a group of Australian medieval reenactors with several of them, mentions the frustration of duplicating a historically accurate treb trigger.
Actually, that one isn’t quite true. The traditional techniques were almost lost, but were recovered and put back into use just in time. As a matter of fact, a group of people from Hawaii just completed a trip around the world using Polynesian navigation methods.
http://www.hokulea.com/worldwide-voyage/
Or even better, how to most safely and quickly kill a glyptodont or giant ground sloth–we still have things pretty similar to the mammoth around to try killing. Not so for the other two.
I’d answer “yes” four times to your query:
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We cannot purposely re-learn or reproduce anything our ancestors knew or did that we don’t know anything about. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t re-learn or re-invent the skill, but, for us, it’d appear to be a new one.
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If a resource within our environment is not present any longer, we can’t reproduce its result. We might reproduce its function but not the thing itself, not perfectly.
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If the skill/result/product is of a nature that a reduction to its components is not sufficient knowledge to reproduce it, we’d need the recipe/schematic/manual/etc. to do so. If that doesn’t exist any longer, we are out of luck.
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We might also nowadays lack the ability to re-learn or reproduce a skill, either because the circumstances have changed (society, environment), or we have done so, as a species. Depending on your definition of human, we could include other branches of the genus homo (who likely had abilities that we don’t share) or only the ancestor of Homo sapiens sapiens, and that is Homo sapiens idaltu.
Making a humble apology …
At least one anthropologist did it, Thor Heyerdahl, ca. 1955. He demonstrated that given enough manpower and minimal tools, the heavy statues could be moved across the plain on their backs and erected. He used the principle described by a local man, “Mayor” Pedro Atan, supposedly a distant descendant of the tribe that originally carved and erected them. Heyerdahl’s experiment is described and well-illustrated in his 1958 book, Aku-Aku.
Of course, we don’t know if that is the way used by the original islanders, but it certainly could have been the method. It doesn’t require any supernatural force or exotic tools, just care, manpower, and patience.
And of course we now know not to think of our evolutionary past as a path from one single species or population to another. It is quite likely that all those species of Homo were, to some extent, our ancestors. One recent anthropologist put it, I think, very astutely by saying something like: It’s best to think of those fossils (of Homo) as representing a population of interbreeding groups that eventually left us only with “us”.
They could also have been walked. (A method I once used to move a chest freezer several hundred feet–without the ropes, of course.)
Oh yes, it’s not just reasonable to expect that our ancestors screwed each other - or one another (to each his own) - wherever they met, we know they did …
Nomenclature shows differences that might not have been apparent to the species of our genus that lived along-side one another or they might not have mattered or made the other one even more attractive. They were … human, after all.
Grasping tree branches with our opposable big toes.
Cursive handwriting may be well on the way.
Candidate for Ken Ham’s next big project!