We are saying that paleolithic man made it to us in X number of years starting from Y position on the planet. Pick your starting point in THAT history, and drop the present day humans at THAT time and place… But, if you say Southern California with no animals or crops, humans were already in the Fertile Cresent, were still there, and had migrated past there to get to California. That’s why I say, either Africa or the Fertile Cresent.
For instance, agriculture started in the fertile cresent, what? 10,000 years ago? But, they started moving out of Africa, (modern human intellect,) about 50,000 - 60,000 years ago… You take a paleolithic group and drop them in the fertile cresent, with tools, it takes them more than 40,000 years to develop agriculture. You drop our group there, 50,000 years ago, we start planting seeds the next day.
If you start us at the point they developed agriculture… i.e. there are domesticable crops around that haven’t been domesticated, and they’ve suddenly had the insight to plant them… Then we start with the same physical conditions, (except animal domestication was already underway by then)… Starting anytime after that, they already have better starting plants and animals than we would.
Do we start before or after bows and arrows? etc. Where in our history do we start? All I say is that it can’t be any later than when our human ancestors found the first good place. (The first place civilization actually did develop.) Because, if we were trying to recreate the path, we would stop there.
I’ll start by saying that even though I think humans are pretty damn cool, most of you are being way too optimistic about the chance of survival for the first group, much less advancing technology very quickly. Here’s a limited-scope test case. I’ll drop a group of 10 of you guys in the middle of Alaska, maybe somewhere around Denali — I’ll be generous and do it when food is most plentiful, say late summer — and see if you survive long enough to make it to a place with a telephone. Shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to walk a couple of hundred miles. Easy, right?
I’ve done some survival-type camping before. It sucks. Even if you’ve studied stuff like flint knapping, fire making, building survival shelters, exploiting food sources like local botany and game, it’s not easy to actually do it. I could probably survive, but I know from experience that all of the skills needed to make tools and get food are much, much harder to do in real life than you’d think from just reading about them.
The “Oh, stone-age hunting and gathering. It’s primitive. How hard can it be?” attitude is born out of ignorance. “Cave” men were just as intelligent and curious as we are, and their knowledge base was just as extensive as any of ours, but made of different pieces of knowledge. Quick, how many of you know what a flint deposit looks like, where it might be found in your area, how to pick a good piece? How about edible plants? Know how to make a snare, deadfall, or pit trap? Ever taken a bird with a sling? Know how to make a sling?
Your average Cro-Magnon could probably give the equivalent of a TED Talk on any one of those topics, with a keynote lecture on his area of strength. Your chemistry and physics knowledge — hell, your agriculture and practical engineering knowledge — is worth precisely dick for years, maybe decades.
Run it the other way; kill off 98% of the population and start with scattered groups of people around your target size. Even with all the knowledge available in books, with machines just sitting around all over the place ready to use, I wouldn’t bet on any given community with average citizens being able to maintain most of it. If they were really, really lucky they’d manage to learn enough to keep a hydroelectric dam running and have that as a base at least. And they’d still have a hell of a time making it past the first couple of years, even with loads of canned goods around.
So, let’s grant that they don’t starve, and don’t die of hypothermia, and don’t lose many people to accidents and infection. You’ve got your survival-level village. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is the relevance of technology to everyday life.
Your next generation won’t care. See The Earth Abides and any of Stirling’s displaced people novels for fictional but realistic treatments of this problem. Tales of technology would sound like magic to the next generation, and of no more relevance to their real lives than Middle Earth is to ours. A flashlight is just as mythical as Gandalf’s glowing staff to someone who is 100 technological years away from being able to make a battery and a lightbulb, and who has never seen an electric light before.
In contrast, the kids who grow up in this world will know far more about the food and tool-making resources around and how to exploit them than the adults. The first-gen people would be stuffed full of useless information, or information that at best might be worth something after several generations have passed, but the second- and following generation people would know how to A) not starve; B) not get killed by natural hazards; and C) how to use what is available in their environment for survival, which is a damn sight better than any of the theoretical knowledge carried by the first generation. Yeah, your first group would be competent at all the skills, or they wouldn’t have survived, but their kids would take all those skills as natural, and probably consider the adults to be awkward journeymen at skills they would have mastered by the time they were halfway through puberty.
If you want any of the tech knowledge to stick, you’re going to have to make some cultural values to support that knowledge and certain modes of thinking. And even then, you might end up with a priest class in a surprisingly short time. You can forget trying to teach kids to read unless you can demonstrate a compelling reason to, and I seriously question the odds of keeping such a relatively useless skill alive for the several generations you’d need before it starts really paying off.
Yes, hunting and gathering is more efficient at first. The problem with that lifestyle is that you need to move around with seasonal food availability unless a particular location is extremely rich in resources. Any knowledge repository you build would have to be protected from elements, animals, and probably left unmanned for at least part of the year.
To get to copper/iron age (depending on deposit availability and knowledge) would probably take about a generation or more. This knowledge is pretty useful, so it’s unlikely to die out quickly if you can manage to find and exploit the resources for it, but any industrial level tech would take minimum 3–4 generations. For example, to make decent machines you need good metal for parts, and that means at least reliable and repeatable smelting and casting processes. You’d also need a source of powered machinery, probably a water wheel (Roman-level tech). That takes a minimum level of people and resources to set aside for building these precursors. You need small cities at least for the scale of these projects, which would take a while. In the mean time you’ve got the problem of relevance again.
Excellent point. To give an example from my area of enthusiasm, arms and armor, there are only a handful of people who hand-forge swords now. In only about 200 years since it was last done regularly, with some decent records of the process, most of the practicalities had already been forgotten before the most recent resurgence of the craft in the late 80s. Some seriously fancy metallurgical studies had to be done to figure out why some Wootz steel showed patterns and some didn’t, because the actual process had been forgotten already, even though the most recent production was in the early 19th century (The Key Role of Impurities in Ancient Damascus Steel Blades). The knowledge of the process wasn’t actively destroyed, it simply became irrelevant when more efficient processes like the Bessemer process supplanted it.
What do you seriously think the chances are of preserving the knowledge of any of our completely irrelevant technological processes will be under these conditions? I think that even if you set it in a post-apocalypse world with the rusting monuments of the age before to remind them, the children 4 or 5 generations down the line will have more practical short-term concerns to take care of before they can start to reclaim the knowledge of the ancients.
Would they figure out some things faster? Maybe. You can hopscotch steps in technological development. Knitting and crocheting can be done with wooden tools, but were developed well after looms were, for one example. But technological advancement has almost never followed a straight line of progression and even with a good knowledge of the steps you need to get somewhere, local conditions and bootstrap technologies can create variations in how you get there. In this scenario, you’ve got imperfect knowledge, which means just slightly fewer blind-alleys and missteps than inventing the tech the first time.
Then I realized that the first humans didn’t start from scratch. The hominids they developed from already had a long history of fire and tool use, of sheltering in caves, (and judging from the existence of bone needles and leather scraping tools,) and wearing clothes.
So, are we trying to recreate what they did? And even skeptics have admitted that what they did was create advanced civilization in a few favourable areas. Or are you demanding that we do what they were UNABLE to do? i.e. create advanced civilization in unfavourable areas starting from stone age tools, (as AntiBob suggested.)
[QUOTE=Great Antibob]
[QUOTE=ch4rl3s]
Probably with clothes on our backs and tools in our hands. i.e. moving into harsher environments once we could survive them.
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Sure, but they got to most of those places before the advent of “civilization”, at least as we’re defining it.
Take the following example, then.
Let’s take Earth as it was in 5,000 BC. Except a wizard mystically removes all human beings and their tools and homes.
Our proposed starting colony is somewhere around Southern California …
…There are no domesticable animals nearby. There are no food crops.
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Yes, humans got to harsher environments before the advent of civilization… But they weren’t able to create civilization in those harsher environments. you’re asking us to do what they couldn’t, not to recreate what they did.
[QUOTE=Sleel]
Run it the other way; kill off 98% of the population and start with scattered groups of people around your target size. Even with all the knowledge available in books, with machines just sitting around all over the place ready to use, I wouldn’t bet on any given community with average citizens being able to maintain most of it.
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I wouldn’t bet on being able to maintain high-tech equipment for long with out a high-tech infrastructure either.
But, with scattered groups around the planet, the ones who have a chance to survive and rebuild will be… wait for it… the ones already in the favourable areas.
(emphasis mine)
All good points. All the more importance to get to pre-industrial in the first generation.
If we sprinkle this barren world with scattered groups of knowledgable, present day humans… The ones in the harshest conditions are likely to die… The ones in tough conditions will have to spend all their time surviving, and the knowledge will be lost to the next generation. (i.e. it will take as long as it did the first time…)
So, the only chance to actually break the previously set record for best time from stone-age to advanced civilization would be those who landed in favourable conditions, who can spend some time not just surviving? Is that how you see it? Well, then. Let’s debate that.
Let’s even say that the first year is spent surviving and learning how to make tools and use them.
[QUOTE=Sleel]
Yeah, your first group would be competent at all the skills, or they wouldn’t have survived…
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I’m not going to say I’m an expert, either. Just assume competence. The first thing I’m going to do with my free time is build a water wheel. Something that is possible with the tools to hand and that is emminently practical.
[QUOTE=Sleel]
You’d also need a source of powered machinery, probably a water wheel (Roman-level tech).
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And let’s say that Mangetout can find iron ore. We build a furnace and have iron tools and weapons. I’m going to downgrade my earlier estimates because of the need to make more tools when the old ones break. Let’s say it takes 5 more years to get the water wheel up and running. Less, if we have iron tools for a good portion of the time. And the fact that having irrigation and power, (not electric power yet. I just mean horsepower. The ability for one person to do more work than one person could do with their hands alone,) is so beneficial for the entire colony, most people should probably be spending their spare time working on that. That should cut down the time. (how big is our group anyway? 50 people minimum?) Well, then. i’m going to design a larger wheel than I was planning to build by myself. I’ll double the size of the wheel I was planning to build, (from 5 feet across to 10.) And Let’s say that makes it 10 times more complex to build but we have 50 people working on it… 5 years, times 10, divided by 50. Comes to 1 year. (So far, we’re at year 2.)
So, at minimum, we’re going to have flowing water, a stone grinding wheel, and a saw attachment, (just need a saw blade now.) I’d also like a belt drive, or probably simpler a winch, (winding a rope so we can apply power outside the mill building.)
Well, we still don’t have very profitable crops, so the next thing I would want is a greenhouse, and a directed pollinating project. We need glass. We’ve got a furnace, (or two.) We’re making charcoal, iron, (copper if we’ve got it, and stockpiling it.) I’ll just add glass to the list. And like I said before, I’m not making fancy flat glass on molten tin. Just flat enough to put in frames, clear enough for a good deal of light to come through, and polished up some. Some one else can handle the animal domestication project. We might have some animals tamed by this time.
… This all sounds very familiar… I still think we could do this.
If we make it just about to the start of the industrial revolution in the first generation, not only will all that knowledge be on the verge of relevance, but the second generation will have seen us ramping up to there from practically nothing. Reading will be relevant, as the books will have the designs of not only what we’ve already built, but industrialization designs, and beyond. they will have seen how we built one thing that led to the next, and knowledge we’re passing on will continue that. It will be clear how each step leads to the next, so the chance of them forgetting would be minimal. But, once again. It’s critical how far we get in the first generation.
Ooooh. Right. Looms. We can have those in the first generation, too. Another tech that isn’t going to be lost…
(And one that will lead straight to child labour in the textile mills of our nacent industrial revolution. What? Don’t cringe so much. Having children doing the jobs children can do has been important at certain stages of our development. It will expand the workforce at a crucial time, and we’ll put some practical limits on it. After all, they still need to learn their calculus. :eek: . All thanks to Sleel who just reinvented child labour for us. I joke because I know some people will be horrified at the thought. But, it really is a practical and workable idea. Tell me, how long did hunter gathers let their children go without helping. How long did farmers let their children go without pitching in?)
And I think this is a tech we will largely by-pass if we can, too. We’ll start with stone spears, (nothing more is necessary for the prehistoric time period.) Move on to metal points. Bows and arrows. Then, with steel production, we’ll skip swords and move straight to fire-arms.
(edit) I mean, we’ll pass on the cool knowledge, make some for recreational use, and write down all the swashbuckling stories. But that’s about it.
I don’t think the greenhouse is an absolute necessity. Crop development can be done just by intensive selection from more-or-less open pollinated candidates - and if you need to isolate flowers after hand-pollinating them, a cloth bag will suffice.
Making glass is quite energy-intensive. In the first instance, that energy would be better applied to the production of metals.
The biggest problem with recreating crop plants is that (assuming this is the parallel Earth with no humans scenario), the ancestors of the best crops might be on a different continent - for example, if I get dumped back in the Alternate-England, there are no potatoes, no maize, no citrus fruits, no rice, no gourds or squashes, etc. I’d have to work with a couple of cereals, carrots, beets, parsnips, a selection of brassicas, apples, pears - and the rest is pretty much nuts and berries.
Having said that. a greenhouse is useful for extending the growing season - but only if you build one at production scale.
Every candidate plant you have to work with is endemic to the climate zone you’re in anyway, so a better strategy is careful selection/management of planting microclimates (terrace a south-facing hill, for example, and you’re at less risk from late frosts)
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
I don’t think the greenhouse is an absolute necessity. Crop development can be done just by intensive selection from more-or-less open pollinated candidates - and if you need to isolate flowers after hand-pollinating them, a cloth bag will suffice.
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Yes, i knew you could just use a bag to isolate. I was specifically thinking of extending the growing season. We would obviously be using isolation until greenhouses were available anyway.
[QUOTE=Mangetout]
Making glass is quite energy-intensive. In the first instance, that energy would be better applied to the production of metals.
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So, I will accede to your suggestion to put the effort into making metal. (Sigh. But glass means light bulbs, (useful, but ho-hum,) and vacuum tubes, (joy. can you tell I want that computer?) sigh.)
Then again, if we concentrate on being able to separate the elements of the periodic table, metals and semi-conductors, we might skip vacuum tubes and go straight to transistors. Oh, well. I will just dream, and wait for the industrial revolution to bring me mass produced tubes or transistors to play with, which ever comes first.
Bottles and test tubes first - we need medicine (Anaesthetics, antibiotics and antiseptics at least) and basic surgery before computers.
Once again these are two separate scenarios.
Are we trying to create technology in places where it never developed the first time.
Or are we trying to recreate what our ancestors did, just faster.
Just re-read the op, Which suggests specifically Northern California. I don’t know if he realized that would mean no draft animals or cereal grains or just thought it was a mostly favourable climate. I thought we would only need draft animals for 3 generations, but without them, we’re really going to need our own machines for power generation.
Once again, I agree.
Sure, except it was a really vague suggestion “…in a place that was like, say, Northern California but without human habitants…” - so it’s not even really clear whether this means Alternate-California, or just somewhere that’s similar in very general, non-flora/fauna-specific terms. And we’re now on page 3 - and have tossed around a number of different scenarios now.
In any case, the problem exists whatever the region - not everything we currently rely on will be locally available, even in raw/unprocessed/ancestral form, but the existing knowledge of the candidates is bound to be localised. Drop me in Alternate-Europe and I’ll stand a greater chance of survival (and of being useful to the group) than I would on a different continent.
Most of the skills, tools, approaches and mental attitude are general enough to be applicable anywhere, but the odds are stacked higher against you if you don’t know what to eat, and where best to look for it.
Vacuum tubes are not necessary for computers. I’m pretty sure you could build a logic engine using water, tubes and valves. Or just clockwork. OK, so they’re not going to be running *Skyrim *any time soon - could you perhaps satisfy yourself with a nice game of *Pong *while we get the basics of herding out of the way ? 
That’s exactly my point: the OPs own assumptions may be faulty.
From my reading of it, part of the debate is figuring out exactly what conditions are needed to re-build civilization if the only advantage conferred is knowledge - not even clothes.
I don’t think the OP even realized staple crops and domesticable animals would be necessary starting points. The implication seems to be that the OP thought any place with reasonably arable land, natural resources, and mild climate would work. That’s something other posters seemed to also assume. That was the line of reasoning I was particularly arguing against.
So, the basic answer still stands: it may not be possible in any short time period because civilization cannot spread until this proto-group of colonists finds a suitable launching point for civilization. Maybe they get dropped in the Fertile Crescent, but that would amount to a best-case scenario.
I do love how some people blithely assume all resources are located right at hand, energy and fuel are freely available, and we’ll have all the food and comforts to survive quite nicely.
Let me point out a few historical analogues. Colonies were developed all around and in the Americas. These took a long time - a century or more - to turn into viable societies, even with support, strong economic draws, colonists with many more practical skills, similar environments, conquering existing nations. Even then, the Thirteen Colonies faced numerous problems during the Revolutionary War, simply because didn’t have enough industry to make enough weapons for themselves. The weapons themselves weren’t hard to make. They had all the tools and knowledge available. Despite this, they couldn’t do it, not easily and not swiftly. In fact, it was a problem even in the War of 1812, though industry was rapidly building.
So allow me to suggest that the difficulties of Plymoth and Jamestowne imply that things aren’t going to be easy. And they were far more capable, knowledgeable in practical ways, had more people, and not going for nearly as high a technology base (and not forcibly isolated, either)
Vacuum tubes are not necessary for computers. I’m pretty sure you could build a logic engine using water, tubes and valves. Or just clockwork. OK, so they’re not going to be running *Skyrim *any time soon - could you perhaps satisfy yourself with a nice game of *Pong *while we get the basics of herding out of the way ?
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Yes, it’s possible with water, clockwork, etc. But the reason Charles Babbage wasn’t able to build one of those in the 1820’s is that they take a very high degree of precision in their mechanical parts. They would have been just possible then, but they aren’t easy to build now. It’s easier to make vacuum tubes and wire them together. But I’d be willing to make a mechanical calculator. We could use one of those eventually.