How high up on the tech tree could a civilization climb without ever, technically, leaving the stone age?
How high up on the tech tree could a civilization climb without ever, technically, leaving the stone age?
How high up on the tech tree could a civilization climb without ever, technically, leaving the stone age?
Depends. Do you want the real world physics answer or the cartoon magic answer?
Leaning towards former.
The Late Neolithic era.
Anything pre-metalworking that can be made with stone is qualifiable "stone age". The instant someone finds out you can heat copper and bend it to make different things is the instant you have left the Stone Age.
This.
OP is a moronic homosexual.
Scarcity of material has kept many people even on earth in the "stone age" even to this modern day. People without access to good deposits of copper or other metals really face an uphill climb.
Even though Iron is relatively abundant, good iron ore isn't, and figuring out how to process iron ore requires a lot of effort and knowledge.
>and figuring out how to process iron ore requires a lot of effort and knowledge.
For sure.
The Primitive Technology guy makes iron from random bog water he happens to know has unusually high iron content...but he needed millennia of knowledge on how to refine the ore, and to know that that kind of soil even was "ore" in the first place.
He had to figure out how to make charcoal, and that's not an easy step, especially because the main benefits of charcoal in smelting isn't really that readily apparent, and it takes a lot of extra effort (and knowledge) to process wood into charcoal.
Even just telling someone that fire, the hottest thing they know, isn't hot enough is already a tricky subject. Figuring how how to make a furnace hot enough requires a lot of knowledge that we often take for granted.
Or in the spirit of this thread, for granite.
True. Iron smelting is extremely unintuitive. The biggest advantage that copper age gives you is the knowledge that smelting is even possible. Making the jump to iron smelting is huge. It's not very easy to convince people that don't know some types of rock can melt that if they make a double plus extra hot fire they can melt different kinds of rocks. It's all progression. We modern humans can probably figure out how to smelt iron from scratch because we've got that knowledge, but you can't ask a Sentinelese to do it because they don't even know what metal is.
>sentinelese to do it because they don't know what metal is
When Indian fishermen are shot by Sentinelese archers, the arrowheads removed from their bodies while at the hospitals are made of Iron.
Fascinatingly, as far as I understand, the Sentinelese only entered the iron age because some ships wrecked on their island and they took them apart for materials
It's wild. The equivalent of us finding a crashed alien spacecraft and fricking around with the advanced materials it's made of because the actual tech bits are so far beyond our understanding that they're practically useless.
They did this in Fallen Skies I think. They used alien metal for bullets since it worked better
That first season was kino
Would it work in GURPS?
Anything would work in GURPS. That's its whole point.
I kinda did the opposite in my setting - the primitive people retroengineered the psionic alien weaponry/vehicles, creating full blown AI agents.
It would be like if the sentinelese managed to build an actual working ouija board from helicopter tech, proving the existence of ghosts.
The bigger element is that Primitive Technology guy doesn't need to forage for his own food. Higher tech needs food production so you can have settled communities and specialists. You can be sitting on top of massive copper deposits but as a hunter-gatherer you're never going to be able to exploit it.
The earliest known metalworking (of copper) appears right around the same time as the earliest known agriculture, and it isn't clear which came first.
Hunter-gatherers tend to have a surprising amount of free time, actually.
The development of larger, more hierarchical societies with designated crafters definitely helped metalworking progress (as with most specialized tasks), but I'm not sure it was a prerequisite.
It's not so much the free time. It's that even if your band is staying in one place for a time, are you really going to have enough time to smelt then fashion metal into something potentially useful? Any stone-age hunter gatherer can see the value in a copper axe head as opposed to a stone one, but fashioning one takes time.
I could absolutely see hunter gatherers finding how certain substances like copper and gold can be melted down. But until you have settled communities and specialists that can turn that interesting goop into something useful, all it is is an interesting aside around the camp-fire of an evening. Which may be exactly why it happened so quickly with the rise of agriculture; some of the knowledge was already there.
It probably didn't help how easily a particularly enlightened group could be wiped out by happenstance and their discovery lost.
There's no such thing as a "stone age" or a "bronze age" or an "iron age".
Those terms were shit 19th century museums came up with to split up archeological finds from European and Middle Eastern sites before actual archeological dating methods became a thing. They're not actual technological stages all societies moves through linearly. The entire concept of a ""tech tree" is dumb for the same reason
is a good illustration of how asinine it is. You're basing an entire model of "technological advancement" based on a single aspect of society when in isolation it doesn't mean much. There were plenty of "iron age" or Classical or Medieval societies that had simpler societies or less complex infrastructure then some states in the Bronze age or who only used stone:
As an example, There were some tribes in Medieval Africa that never developed Bronze at all, but independently invented steel, but still lived in simple villages. On the flip side, even before the region developed ANY metallurgy, even of soft metals like gold and silver, you had cities in Mesoamerica like Teotihuacan, which had 100,000+ denizens, a massive planned urban grid covering ~20 square kilometers (plus less dense/planned suburbs around that), with nearly all of it's denizens living in fancy palace compounds with dozens of rooms, courtyards, painted frescos, toilets and plumbing systems, canalized rivers running through the city's grid layout and plazas which would be ritualistically flooded for ceremonies, and which had political connections to and may have conquered Maya city-states 1000km away.
Teotihuacan was on par with some of the largest Roman cities of the same time, yet was "stone age".
So, the premise is stupid, but OP's question is actually interesting, because as you can see, you can do quite a lot without metallurgy in terms of developing cities, water mangement systens, art, writing, etc.
1/?
>"Tech tree" is not a linear concept.
Sure it is. Really hot fires --> copper --> bronze --> iron --> steel. One step leads to the next, you can't just leap straight into iron without doing the prerequisites. And each step then branches off to other aspects of technology, hence the tree.
And if you cut off the entire metalworking branch, there's still plenty other things left in the tree to develop instead.
>One step leads to the next, you can't just leap straight into iron without doing the prerequisites
Sure you can. If a civilization had no access to tin, there's no reason they couldn't go from copper to iron.
If a civilization was somewhere iron-rich but copper-poor, and for some reason had very hot-burning fires, they could develop iron without copper or bronze first. For example, as mentioned above in this thread, a civilization with advanced glasswork or that develops very hot fires to make strong ceramics will likely accidentally smelt iron, and may do so without ever seeing copper first. There's evidence that some groups in Africa developed ironworking without using copper.
Steel I'll give you, since steel is basically made by accident while making iron, and it's relatively difficult to make steel consistently before industrial processes.
>you can't just leap straight into iron without doing the prerequisites
Lol, lmao. Of course you can.
>As an example, There were some tribes in Medieval Africa that never developed Bronze at all, but independently invented steel, but still lived in simple villages.
It was probably introduced by arabs, but regardless writing and metal were treated as literal witch doctor magic powers and kept as secrets by the inner castes of unga bunga pastoral tribes.
Go back
Every single thing I said is 100% factual, especially since all the Bantu tribes which cover half the continent practice circumcision because of muslim contact even if they aren't muslim as well as the historical Indian trading contacts with the ancient Azanian coast as recorded in the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, maybe learn some actual african history starting with Ptolemy before attempting to converse.
So you have a core misunderstanding of a lot of things.
Do you know why there is a divide between bronze and copper ages?
It is not only because Iron made tools significantly better and easier to use, but the ability to heat Iron to the point you can work it is significantly higher then the heat for Bronze (copper is technically part of the Bronze age because copper by itself does not make these radical changes it is generally bronze)
As for your example with the Aztecs, the Aztecs didn't make copper or bronze tools but they sure as frick stole them from everyone near them, and were developing their own process for it around the time the Spanish showed up.
You can work pure copper without heating it, the heating is to remove impurities.
Pure copper is also very rare, which is why I think the only people to actually do this were some native Americans around the great lakes who had massive access to pure copper and could cold work it.
>Pure copper is also very rare, which is why I think the only people to actually do this were some native Americans around the great lakes who had massive access to pure copper and could cold work it.
Hell, you can even cold work iron, like the folks in Greenland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_York_meteorite
>You can work pure copper without heating it, the heating is to remove impurities.
Well...less to remove impurities, more to refine it from ore. Copper is somewhat common in the Earth's crust, and there are a remarkable number of minerals that if you just heat them up pretty hot (hotter than an open flame, but any pottery kiln should be fine), metal copper collects at the bottom of your fire. Since native copper only exists in a handful of places, that's actually more likely for how it was discovered.
The same applies to tin, by the way, except that tin is much less common. Bronze was probably discovered by accident smelting copper- and tin-bearing ores together.
Interesting, I had not heard of this.
It makes sense, but damn that must be a lot of effort to cold work iron.
I wonder what the frick they hit it against.
Pottery Neolithic B
The Inca got pretty far without developing the wheel.
They had the wheel. Wheels are easy. But they had no large scale use for it, so they just used it for children's toys.
I never understood that because even if you don't have animals to pull the wheel you have the animal that is a human. And a human with a wheelbarrel or pulling a ricksaw themselves is a force multiplier for carrying shit. And the Inca had shit-tons of roads, too. Honestly I guess they just had more people than need to produce carts but even that feels rather suspicious. I think it's as simple as
>It just werks to use people, why bother.
We don't want to reduce pre-moderns to primitive idiots but we should also remember they're stubborn ijits like we are today. That and there is a fair point to back then manpower was cheap but resources were expensive while today manpower is expensive (in the first world at least) and resources are cheap(er).
There's a theory that it's because the Inca realm was so mountainous. Wheels aren't very useful going uphill, or even downhill if it's a steep slope, since the risk of losing control is so great.
So I guess people who lived in other highly mountainous places like the Himalayas or the Alps never used wheels.
It is also because some of the paths get so small.
It would be physically impossible to bring a cart without digging out a large chunk of mountain.
Just a wheelbarrow will already do. Allows a man to push a ton or more of whatever. I guess the issue would still be that you'd need to create a level embankment across a mountain's flank.
That was basically the issue yes, or build bridges which the Incans were also very skilled at, but you can't always build a bridge.
If I remember right there were parts of the Spanish travels into the Incan heartlands they had to walk essentially single file to fit, there is no way a cart is making that and probably not a wheelbarrow either if you have to walk with one side touching the mountain.
Wheeled vehicles suck in certain environments because the roads to use them require more maintenance than it takes to just move your stuff by pack animal or by person. Not all roads are built the same or made for heavy loads. As I understand Inca roads, they were built around the idea of foot traffic and would take routes that would be much harder for a wheeled vehicle but just fine for people.
Even today, paved roads aren't always the best choice of road to build. In Arctic places, a dirt road is easier to maintain and use than a paved road due to frost heave. I have driven up the Dalton Highway in Alaska, and the unpaved parts of the highway I could drive much faster and smoother on than the broken paved sections.
Carts take time, knowledge and materials to maintain. If any part of your wheel cracks you're fricked without wainwright, if it cracks mid journey, in the middle of nowhere then you're double fricked.
For that level of risk the investment better be able to compete with the alternatives.
The alternative is just putting your shit on a pack animal. A machine that can graze and heal and that basically maintains itself. Also it saves your men the work of pulling a cart so they're fresh and less b***hy.
You might say: "but I own slaves, I don't give a shit if they're tired and b***hy!"
That may be true but do you want to leave you fancy new cart in the hands of frustrated idiots? Do you trust shit not to go sideways? Are you willing to bet money on your answer?
You can call it being stubborn if you want but the old way is so ridiculously convenient it's sort of hard to justify making the switch if conditions aren't actively pushing for it or you don't have resources to burn.
The biggest reason is that the Andes the Inca lived on were atrocious (and still are) for wheeled vehicles. They built their society around foot traffic because foot traffic worked for where they were at.
As
points out, they did use metal for war. What you're really asking is why they didn't have ironworking, and the answer is that ironworking is extraordinarily difficult to achieve and nobody is going to do it without a real incentive. If you have the easy access to copper alloys that the Andeans had you're not bothering your time with the manufacture of iron because crude iron isn't so much better that it's worth the effort. A well made bronze sword will carry you further than shitty iron one will. We're spoiled by the quality of modern, or even early modern iron. It wasn't until ironworking became relatively advanced, probably around 800-700~ BCE that iron really starts to overtake bronzes as the metal of war. Even that is debatable whether or not it was because the wider prevalence of iron made it more possible to equip larger armies with a wider array of effective equipment or if it was because 8th century iron had just advanced to the point where it was more combat capable than bronzes.
>wheelbarrel
>ricksaw
Why do you hurt me like this?
When you look at the whole timeline of human civilization you'll realize such inventions are diamond dozen.
The Inca weren't stone age though. They had metalworking and were damn good at it too.
Like this guy said, wheels are easy, IIRC it's the accepted theory that the wheel was developed for making pottery before it was used for, you know, making stuff roll. The real difference between a civilization "Having the wheel" as it were has entirely to do with if they have large enough domestic animals to make pulling a cart worth it, which they didn't in the americas.
>They had metalworking and were damn good at it too.
Nta, nor is this meant to be a snarky question, but how could the Inca possibly be considered "damn good at metalworking" while using no metal in their weapons or armor in any appreciable way (jewelry and the like imo doesn't count since it does not improve the function by way of durability or anything else). I am also not well-versed in the Incan empire beyond a podcast detailing it so I'm open to being wrong but it definitely doesn't seem like such a warlike civilization could be considered "damn good" at metalworking they didn't incorporate it in their civilization's capacity for war.
Did they simply not think it was important enough to mine for? Because both Americas have iron, copper, and tin in abundance.
The Inca DID use metal in their weapons and armor. They used copper and bronze for axe heads, mace heads and helmets and such. Basically what they used their metal for in warfare isn't too far removed from what the bronze age cultures in the old world used it for. They were also REALLY good at working with gold but that's not super relevant to your question.
As a second side tangent, the reason that north America never really developed metalworking is cause the largest deposit of native copper ore in the world (IE, copper ore that you can just take out of the ground and use as copper) is almost smack dab in the middle of the continent. The north american natives actually started using copper earlier than most other cultures around the world, but because they had such easy access to copper that could be worked like flint, they never actually developed metallugy. It's why Navajo/Dine silverworking is so unique
They tend to complain and get tired in a way that people can't as easily ignore.
>They tend to complain and get tired in a way that people can't as easily ignore.
This wouldn't have bothered any of the American civilizations, which practiced slavery, not that simply using coercion and violence on freemen wasn't sufficient, as
noted. It's very strange for such a developed civilization to have such poor iteration on such fundamental tools and materials. Europeans, Asians, even Africans were more iterative and innovative.
Well there had to be reasons why so few cultures did outside of high status figures, i.e. kings with their slaves carrying their shit. One answer could be is that in pre-modern cultures, the majority of people are involved in agriculture/animal husbandry. Porters have to be more efficient than the food they could generate if they were just farming and they weren't.
Nta. Complex levels of: artisanship, cast-work, and metallurgical metrics/standards etc Much as with several pre-industrial African cultures, high manufacturing prowess can exist before industrial revolutions. The niche uses *are* self-limiting at scale, but that doesn’t denigrate the high standards artisan-class societies can reach. Oral tradition is a surprising durable teaching method when combined with religious mnemonic systems…
…as anons have mentioned, low-tech societies often show remarkable outgrowths in the material-less sciences. The African Ifa is basically octal notation of binary, used as a kind of social/religious divinatory practice. Mandelbrot sets and Cantor’s Dust (a method of proving the existence of infinite sets) were immediately recognized and understood by these religious specialists. I have no fricking clue why diviners recurringly produce high-level abstract math. Nonetheless, many societies show ridiculously advanced formal science applications while living in mud huts or being nomads. Speaking of nomads…
…astronomy deserves a special mention, as you can go quite far at low tech levels and really good logic. Humans have solved mapping and navigation in multiple ways, normally complex and specialized algorithms are needed to solve these in CompSci.
Optical microbiology, and the outgrowths are also very approachable to rock/sand limits — but I’ve yet to see any claims IRL on this. Forms of bio-culture exist independently of microbial knowledge.
Chemistry is all over the fricking map…technically nano-metallurgy appears over and over in low-tech societies. I haven’t see anything deliberate at the theoretical level — so assuming these chemical products happen systematically is some History-Channel-Aliens levels of shit. But…this does make the appearance of bizarrely complex chemistry seem very likely, even among cavemen.
>I have no fricking clue why diviners recurringly produce high-level abstract math.
It's worth noting that a lot of Greek and Babylonian math was also based on basically astrology. I guess divination is the real cause of autism.
Remember that predicting tides, spring, planting moons and so on require math but can seem like magic.
We’re basically stuck with their sense of natural sets & music theory — ideal number theory and Platonists predate Plato and Pythagoras. I wish we’d ripped off the fricking 60-system wholesale, but human voting is ultimately moronic.
The truly disturbing part is that ancient homies had NO reason to explore chaotic systems — all of that stuff only requires conventional math, it’s all periodic. It’s literally the opposite of complexity sci/math, which deals with systems that respond wildly to differences in initial condition. What the frick were they doing with math that is adjacent to quantum science? Religion, ghost stories, social rule computers. Every fricking time. It’s like watching a dog moronically bark at a fire, right before he fetches your beer.
>It’s literally the opposite of complexity sci/math, which deals with systems that respond wildly to differences in initial condition. What the frick were they doing with math that is adjacent to quantum science?
Quantum mechanics largely involves periodic functions. Without getting too much into it, the periodicity is exactly what causes the quantized (and not continuous) nature.
>The truly disturbing part is that ancient homies had NO reason to explore chaotic systems
WTF are you on about? Predicting tides, seasons, planting moons, etc can give your agriculture an edge. They had ever reason to want to perfect those predictions. Also, none of those systems are chaotic. They can all be solved with good observation and record keeping. Aztecs, ancient Greeks and Egyptians, etc didn't have the concept of zero.
>etc didn't have the concept of zero.
Zero is an interesting idea.
In some sense, every culture that has math also had negative numbers and zero. How?
Well, math was always (ALWAYS) involved in keeping accounts, and the idea of debt and settled accounts is basically inherent to the system.
So it's interesting to me that so few cultures were able to make the leap from debts and settled accounts to negative numbers and zero as abstract ideas.
Negative numbers don't require zero. You can get negative numbers with just set theory.
what
>reading comprehension: inferior
Way to shove your ‘novel ideas about zero’ everywhere, gayet.
You don’t technically need zero or negatives for probability either. Hell, inequality comparison allowed Hartley Rogers Jr (iirc) to derive thermodynamics etc w/o using any numbers.
I was referring to quantum computation, which has complex superpositions. Not photovoltaics. But y’all are trolling again…no thanks.
>I was referring to quantum computation, which has complex superpositions. Not photovoltaics. But y’all are trolling again…no thanks.
Dude, you have no idea what you're talking about. I wouldn't have said it except that you accused other people of trolling.
Quantum superpositions are sums of periodic functions.
The waveform of any electron in an orbital (or other constrained space) is necessarily periodic because all non-periodic factors will cancel out from destructive self-interference. This has nothing to do with photovoltaics. In fact, the waveform of a free photon takes the form of a wave packet, which is not itself periodic.
Quantum computers work almost entirely on the interactions between the wave functions of electrons in orbitals which - as mentioned - are periodic.
While it is technically the case that you can have a set with negative numbers if the set operation is multiplication and you allow for fractions, I suspect that you're implying a set where the operation is addition, and thus negative numbers are the inverses of positive numbers (since there's no reason why a set of rational numbers under multiplication needs negative numbers, and it's unlikely that you'd randomly decide to include all of these weird numbers just inherent to the operation; after all, if you're playing that game you may as well use complex numbers or even quaternions or other higher analogs). The problem here is that the identity element is required to be a part of the set.
tl;dr learnu math before you try to say complicated things
The original point was regarding sensitivity to initial conditions. You had to presume that this doesn’t apply at a quantum level to even *continue* your hackney’d ‘argue and derail’ tactics. No way gays. I mean this as kindly as possible: I can’t be bothered with your shit. Y’all are too petty. Coordinated circle-jerking and baiting are a step too far into being...frick if I know, but it’s ungood autism. The occasional shitpost is one thing, but pettiness-by-committee? It’s a bit played out. Too bad that’s all discordhomosexualry is reducible to: petty brigading and circle-jerking…or so anyone would suppose given the prevalence. Ganker is shit, why would you want it in concentrated form? I sure as frick don’t.
>Aztecs, ancient Greeks and Egyptians, etc didn't have the concept of zero.
How sure of that are we? It seems so intuitive that I wonder whether they did get the idea but did not employ it much for whatever reason.
Greeks had a concept of Zero, it was just not used in mathematics because it has no purpose.
You can not add, subtract, multiply, or divide zero.
It has no place in actual mathematical equations.
It is probably similar in the other cultures you listed.
>The truly disturbing part is that ancient homies had NO reason to explore chaotic systems — all of that stuff only requires conventional math, it’s all periodic. It’s literally the opposite of complexity sci/math, which deals with systems that respond wildly to differences in initial condition.
You know a GREEK proved the world was round with two sticks and the sun right?
He also damn near calculated the actual accurate size of the earth.
You know nothing about the things you are trying to act educated on. Go back to watching ancient aliens or whatever pop science hole you crawled out of.
>I have no fricking clue why diviners recurringly produce high-level abstract math.
Well, they do call mathematics "the language of God."
Mike Inel's stuff is so cute.
their splatoon april fools thing was godly
more like language of my ass
>I have no fricking clue why diviners recurringly produce high-level abstract math.
There's apparently an overlap between the way mathematical knowledge is generated and how religious experiences are triggered in the brain.
Mind you, a mathematician will still have to sit down, or have his wife sit down and do all the calculations to demonstrate that he wasn't just high on his own supply.
>Having the wheel" as it were has entirely to do with if they have large enough domestic animals to make pulling a cart worth it,
Do you know what animal is large enough to make pulling a cart worth it?
A human.
I think you guys are missing the key thing - wheels are great when you're on flat, solid land, but when you're up a slope they require constant effort to keep from backsliding and sleds are as good or better downhill. Similarly in mud or heavy undergrowth, you're at a disadvantage compared to just carrying, without some sort of reasonably complex braking system that wouldn't necessarily be useful outside of a wheeled vehicle.
They didn't use wheels because their entire empire was in mountains or jungle, PLUS their biggest domestic animal was the llama. It just wasn't beneficial, particularly as a culture with labor taxation.
The Inca had roads though.
*with steps
You can't process dry wood with stone tools, I understand.
The majority of cultures got pretty far without inventing the wheel.
>The Inca got pretty far without developing the wheel.
The Inca developed the wheel, stop spreading this lie.
They just never used it for transportation because of narrow mountain roads. But we literally have examples of Incan wheels in Incan children's toys.
Watch Primitive technology and stop as soon as he starts working with copper or iron.
You can make a lot of simple machines with wood. Even powered machines if you have consistent water flow.
monster hunter is stone age
Monster Hunter is absolutely not stone age. They have metalworking.
> cannons
> literal weapon trees called 'metal'
Anon the noose is the only answer for your sort of stupidity
Have you considered his only experience is with demos?
???
Aztec at least. They didn't use metal for anything beyond decorative stuff.
The Aztec civilization mostly relied on stone work, not even using wheels in their construction but managing to build massive pyramids and the like the anon said.
Yeah, the Aztecs are a good example of impressive stone age tech.
Biotech works, but it depends what level of biotech you mean.
Natural evolution cannot keep up with societal advances.
Selective breeding is kinda amazing. Just imagine the high performing artificial plant and animals we have bred. The results are mostly always bigger, faster growing and overall more profitable versions of the base plant/animal. But we have also created races with completely new uses (think herding dogs).
Still, to get the really good stuff we usually associate with biotech, you need gene splicing technology that is not really archievable with stone age tech. And I guess you mean this kind of biotech, considering you name it in one sentence with magic.
>Still, to get the really good stuff we usually associate with biotech, you need gene splicing technology that is not really archievable with stone age tech. And I guess you mean this kind of biotech, considering you name it in one sentence with magic.
Not exactly. You can have fictional flora & fauna which allow for tech shortcuts without needing genesplicing, but it all results in handwavium like magic.
As an example, you could have electric conducting vines which self insulate naturally occurring in a setting which are them harnessed & bred by people to do anything from simple power distribution, to replicating neon signs from transparent tube fibers, lightbuds, etc.
You could have stone wheeled "electric" cars serviced by florists in a fictional setting without it being magic but still a fictional shortcut.
>Natural evolution cannot keep up with societal advances.
What if a sapient species operated like the octopus? Rather than depend on natural selection, they throw modified mRNA transcripts at the wall and go with whatever sticks in a particular situation.
In Children of Time that's how an uplift retrovirus works. It adds knowledge and skills to the host genetically as instincts. These are heritable and added genetically. The spiders who are uplifted make active use of it to breed specialists. It also encourages hosts to work cooperatively as a social species, basically the only reason a spider society could form.
You could definitely make large ships without metal. Probably no industrial revolution, but almost anything before it should be doable. I just can't imagine any way to make all the machine parts that need to be tough, strong, and durable at high temperatures without metal.
Could even theoretically make single use firearms using bamboo and flint.
In real life, Inca did have bronze working, but it wasn't fundamental to anything they have accomplished, as water management, understanding of cleaving points, high altitude freezing, experimental agriculture and pragmatic imperialism were the basis for their civilization.
Had they lived in the lowlands, they would need metal to work stones, instead of using water that froze during the night within precisely chosen cuts.
Theoretically, one could have children-guided black powder rockets without any metal, only good pottery. Good enough to win against Age of Sail fleets, but not quite equivalent, as rockets, specially at this level, are harder to replace and have short shelf life.
Next question.
>large ships without metal
India and Austronesia had ocean-going ships without a single nail. Djong-type vessels used wooden pegs.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Jong_(ship)
fairly certain Viking warships used wooden pegs. they certainly employed shaped wood to craft the boats. maybe the figurehead at the front could have been metal.
What do you mean by "tech tree"?
Anyway, without metal tools, you can still do arbitrarily advanced buildings, and excellent bows, and...that's about it. Large-scale agriculture will be difficult (though not impossible) without metal plows.
The late Romans in some places were still using wood and flint to plow fields. Metal would have been better but you work with what you have.
Thus "difficult but not impossible".
it's a Ganker thing: games with a turn based strategy progression based around playing a civilization will lock progression around tech-trees, a bracketed net with skills or resources along its lines that determines what resources you can use and how you can use them. metal working is often a low-mid range tech that allows for lots of other tech unlocks, and often signifies advancing in "age" or "era"
It's not like there's a level of technology that is a prerequisite for Lorentz transformations, and pi was first calculated by pre-civilization aboriginals. So outright cavemen could in theory have math as advanced as ours. They could even have arguments about computer science, like the division between P and NP.
>It's not like there's a level of technology that is a prerequisite for Lorentz transformations
That's a weird particular example, given that it's only relevant to a civilization with spaceflight, which seems like it does require metal.
Depends how high fantasy we're getting. A lot of Lovecraft's weird guys didn't need any tech at all to fly through the aether.
Probably still outside OP's scope, though.
Arguably in case of Lovecraft that's all Clarketech ie. technology so advanced that it's indistinguishable from magic.
Still technically not metal. It counts.
You can do a lot of weird stuff with Lorentz transformations, like data compression or signal analysis.
Speaking of signals, you can do a lot of physics without metal. Double slit experiment, calculating the speed of light...
I took an EE class in college, it was mandatory for all MEs and all we did was circuit analysis. I have PTSD about it to this day, god I hated that professor
Finding evidence that some cavemen passed the time coming up with their own version of calculus would be very funny.
For starters, I think you'd be looking at a world where metal is incredibly scarce for that to happen, since figuring out at least copper tools is fairly easy.
That said, the lack of copper tools slows down a lot. I think you'd probably want to look towards Polynesia for some of it, at least in regards to seafaring, and a lot of what native American cultures pulled off should also be more than possible with only stone.
You could potentially get things like roads, aqueducts, and other advancements that you'd expect from Bronze age societies. The thing is though that worse tools makes agriculture harder, slowing down population growth and efficiency, and generally mean you have less people, less geniuses, and less scholars/inventors pushing progress forward.
A society that actually discovers the advantages of metal tools is going to have a big advantage over their neighbors, have a higher population, and thus discover more things faster.
This does stretch a bit further if there are reasonable magical substitutes, like some sort of glue or mortar that works better than iron nails, or if the bones of large magical animals could be used for axes, scythes, plows, or other farming equipment.
You can have cannons made from wood without any metallurgy involved.
Variety of mechanical engines (cranes, mills, etc.) are also possible with just lumber, pegs, and rope.
Ceramics, glass, boats, fairly advanced achitecture (just no skyscrapers), crop rotation agriculture, animal husbandry, germ theory, variety of chemicals.
One of John Harrison's clocks was made entirely out of wood, so that's also in.
IIRC in some desperate times mortars were made outta dirt.
Like they just dug a frickin' hole and that's the Mortar.
Called a fougasse
They tend to complain and get tired in a way that people can't as easily ignore.
Maybe modern people; lots of historical societies have had no problem ignoring the complaints of laborers, even when they weren't slaves.
Chinese literally had prefabricated fougasses at their armories. One-use cannons made of carved rock, whose ammo would be whatever you had. They liked using ceramic hollow balls, because those can have toxic loads and shatter so the enemy can't reuse them. Sometimes used as traps around the city, triggered by timed fuses, cords...
And I guess stone balls for the cannons?
Yeah, even in our timeline the early cannonballs were made of stone. Or you can get creative...
Admiral checking on his men: Holy frick, are you okay?
Man pulling a shard of cheese out of his chess: Yeah, it's just really sharp.
I mean, today we still use tools and things made from "stone"
diamond tipped tools, ruby fittings
do industrial diamonds count as stone? does glass count as stone? does ceramic and concrete and toothpaste count as stone? does paper count as wood? etc.
What game?
what
who
Merchant ships made of papyrus reeds with wooden cannons, loaded with glass objects, wheel-thrown pottery jugs of wine. carbolic acid for wound treatment, and woodblock printed books sounds plausible.
Not sure about blown glass, might be able to use a ceramic blowpipe instead of metal.
>Not sure about blown glass, might be able to use a ceramic blowpipe instead of metal.
It's very likely that a civilization regularly making glass would accidentally smelt some metals.
I agree. It is extremely unlikely that metallurgy would never be discovered unless the culture was in a place without metal ores. Bermuda might be a good example.
I understand that you're going to produce glass from silicate sand with a simple campfire already, putting the tech approximately on the same level as properly fired ceramics.
I watched the Flintstones movie before Hollyrock-a-Bye Baby so I mentally associated the throw away line by Wilma (It isn't the stone age anymore) with the events of the end of the movie.
Whatever the Aztecs were at in 1491.
I just finished Children of Time and the answer is pretty high.
The novel partially follows a race of uplifted spiders through their development. And the big breakthroughs they have are all biotech. A lot of their society by the end is supported by specialized breeds of ant colonies, which themselves were affected by the virus that uplifted the spiders, just not into sentience, but more like biological learning algorithms using the whole colony.
I suppose they aren't truly in the stone age. They have limited metalworking, mostly done by their ant colonies.
They have programmable biological computer colonies. They have automatic control system colonies. They build cameras by having an array of ants signal what they see. They have a space program based on glass and chemical propellant launched from balloons, followed by an orbital ring of silk. They culture muscle tissue to propel gondolas along silk lines. A huge part of the story is the usage of crystal based radio, since spiders are sensitive to vibration.
Besides the fact that they're uplifted in the first place this doesn't count because of their impressive biotech is coat-tail riding on the retrovirus which uplifted them in the first place and is still present in their genetic makeup. Add to that the narrative shortcut that because of how the poorly explained device of the retrovirus they apparently just get to instinctively understand how it guarantees the passing on of generic memory and therefore learn how to manipulate said inheritance even in their pre-history, they are given a significant leg up.
It'd be like giving a tribe of monkeys a flamethrower, but then said monkeys also somehow attended and understood a fire safety class, lessons in the use and maintenance of them flamethrower, and an instruction manual for making more flamethrowers as well as the supplies and fuel to make as many flamethrowers as their descendants could ever possibly need.
Not too high unless you dodge the issue with domestication of animals to extreme degrees (they aren’t cars they’re horses with higly efficient locomotion and digestive tracts so you only need to feed them 1 pound of liquified corn per 200 miles) probably not too far. You can get for example any style of wooden ship, sails and construction being semi-reaonsably buildeable with pure stone, and you can build pretty tall with stone or mud bricks even if it takes often pointless amounts of effort. Overall standards of technology might vary between 18th and bronse age technology in some places.
If you can come up with flintstone tech that solves the following problems, you could have kingdoms beyond the size of the city state, advanced social structures, sophisticated arts and literature, and so on.
>latency of communication (allowing governance structures that operated beyond dunbar numbers)
>increased efficiency of agriculture allowing division of labor
>force multipliers in war (eg chariots) that allow a small expert class of warriors to dominate/pacify/protect large populations
So clearly you need pterodactyl riders spotting weather formations at great distances, acting as shock troops, and providing a pony express style communication network.
If you can find another easy conductor than metal, you can pretty much have modern tech. Crystals can be very useful
You could go biotech, but that can be grizzly, or magic.
Technically the Egyptians were Stone Age until they were conquered by the Greeks. What distinguishes Stone Age from Bronze or Iron Age is how long stone predominates as a primary tool.
Pretty far. IIRC Incans had a pertty advanced empire with stone tools and weapons.
Incans had Bronze tools.
Real question is - can you refine crude oil into plastics without any metallic equipment?
Ignore my previous post (now deleted).
We could do some of them, since we can make ceramics for the necessary temperatures and pressures, but...we use metallic catalysts in an enormous fraction of hydrocarbon refining and plastics production.
>we use metallic catalysts in an enormous fraction of hydrocarbon refining and plastics production.
But are we doing that because it's the most (cost-)effective way? Or because it's the only way?
>But are we doing that because it's the most (cost-)effective way? Or because it's the only way?
There's a long answer with a lot of "theoretically"s and "possibly"s, but in practice it's the only way. There might be other catalysts, but they would also be metallic, just different metals. And yes, it has to be metals - the function as catalysts is related to their metal-ness.
>not using microorganisms which do that for you
>How high up on the tech tree could a civilization climb without ever, technically, leaving the stone age?
The Flintstones heavily relied on animal labor for advanced modern conveniences. The animals were smart enough to understand social contracts, and some speech.
AKA The Flintstones were advanced for stone age technology because they had Pokemon for cheap menial labor.
(proto)Writing is possible
Agriculture and domestication is possible
Pottery is possible
Fermentation is possible
What more do you need?
"Tech tree" is not a linear concept.
Aztecs?
If a civilization decided to climb the tech tree without significant advances to their material sciences then we would just develop a different scale for them.
Like if a group of people understood selective breeding back 3 million years ago and were focused on a careful eugenics program then who knows what we would have bred by today? And so instead of stone, bronze and iron we would probably define a civilization like that in an evolutionary terms.
Reminds me of Harry Harrison's West of Eden, where the big meteor didn't fall and as a result dinosaurs evolved into sapience. All their technology is alive. Boats, weapons, cloaks, all specifically bred and engineered lifeforms.
There's also some dinosaur-on-human femdom sex. You'd like it.
>There's also some dinosaur-on-human femdom sex.
The dinosaur is the female in this equation, right?
Of course.
There's a comics called Orc Stain that gets the idea and pushes it to the extreme.
From the giant tit forum in 2012:
Re: A World Without Metal.
Look up 'Tekumel', or 'Empire of the Petal Throne' for an interesting take on a Fantasy world that doesn't have metal. Another interesting one is Skyrealms of Jorune.
Amongst other things......
'Empire of the Petal Throne' is probably the coolest fantasy world ever created for a role playing game.
>meme ages
How would you record and catalog the history of mankind, then, if not by memes?
ability to produce porn
Most normies are still in the "X age" historical narrative, so unless you're playing with neckbeards, prepare for a doozy of an education.
If you are willing to accept innovations in governance and social organisation as "technology" then probably pretty far in the right circumstances.
Uranium is a rock.
it is inherently hot.
hot makes water & food nicer & cleaner.
big pile of rocks make more hot.
some rocks block heat.
certain shapes make more hot, practice to find right shapes.
boiled water makes steam.
steam pushes things.
push things make go.
push in wood door like a sluice-gate to stop water getting to hot rocks to decrease steam.
remove rock covering & drown in sand to decommission hot rocks.
rocks usually sink.
one time a really wide rock floated.
why don't we try to make rocks float?
carve it hollow.
appearantly, boats can be made from stone.
>it is inherently hot.
Natural uranium is not inherently hot. In fact, even pure U-235 wouldn't be.
Now, if you have uranium that is naturally enriched to levels fissile with natural water (like the Earth had 3 billion years ago), you could theoretically have people invent nuclear reactors by accident.
Or, I guess, say that it's fantasy and have "uranium" with different-from-IRL properties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
Why even use dead materials? If your genetic manipulation is good enough, you could manipulate your species into whatever form you want and travel between galaxies.
there’s no such thing as a “tech tree”, stop being a dumb frick, sid meier and paradox destroyed your brain
paleolithic people regularly utilized technologies too advanced for modern morons to even comprehend, let alone master
Flintstones represent the American dream
Malazan Book of the Fallen has an entire ancient stone age empire of cavemen who initiate a race-wide ritual to become undead so they can wage an eternal genocidal war against basically immortal orcs who create ice ages. Probably not the most on topic, but I think it's dope.
If we're talking game settings, I would suggest going with the bronze age; it's basically the stone age, but people were able to figure out how to shape soft metals, but more advanced methods were yet to be discovered.
It's the transitionary period when tribes slowly became civilizations.
>How high up on the tech tree could a civilization climb without ever, technically, leaving the stone age?
Neolithic was actually impressive. Some of their tools and temples show remarkable craftsmanship.