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Generations
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2026
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The greatest difference between us and our distant ancestors isn't intelligence. It's the knowledge we've inherited. Education is humanity's greatest achievement.
We all stand on the shoulders of those who came before us. I'm grateful to those who lifted us up, and I'll humbly do my part to lift those who come after us.
It's society & available materials.
If you took all your knowledge 10k years ago the daily life would still fairly resemble the lives they had.
10k years ago you can legit skip to making steel by making a charcoal furnace with bellows. Steam engine is also straight forward, animal husbandry could get you way more food per animal in a generation, and basic hygiene makes lives way longer.
I can go on but in short there's loads of knowledge pretty much anyone can bring to 10k years ago that changes lives significantly.
I'm a bit skeptical about the stream engine just because it requires not just metal working but precision metal working where a piston needs to form a seal with the tube it's in not just at one place but anywhere it moves in that tube, to spin a shaft without wobbling to the point that it comes apart at the intended speed. Even more difficult if it needs to be hardened, since a bit of warping is common during a quench.
I think it's easy to take a lot of things for granted and miss that modern (or even just industrial age) things aren't just the result of advancing a single tech tree but multiple tech trees coming together at the same time. Like I didn't even go into the lubricants and gaskets a motor requires.
My dissertation chairman was involved in a research project in India back in the 1960s. Some agricultural extension folks had gone there because they had assessed Indian cattle as "weak" and "sickly" and were trying to introduce American breeds as a substitute. The locals wanted no part of these animals and eventually the researchers tried the radical approach of asking them why not. Turns out that while these cattle could plow 50% more land in a day, they ate twice as much food as the Indian breeds.
The light went on in their heads and they set about attempting to cross American cattle with Indian cattle and breeding the most efficient animals. Turns out they couldn't get any more efficient than the original Indian breeds.
How do you get iron ore in quantities that would allow to build anything worth building & maintaining?
(And what would you possibly use a resource-extremely-hungry steam engine for that needs to be fed that a wooden watermill couldn't do? You would need to build up society/economy even to justify a usecase for a watermill, otherwise you just build a monument.)
You could build an electric battery 10k years ago, but what for?
Where do you get species directly suitable for animal husbandry?
Or ppl to produce & use higiene products?
I absolutely agree with that.
Between what the people 12k years ago knew and what just about any person today knows, you could start agriculture, building houses, at least the idea of digging wells, hygiene, the wheel, writing, and probably some others. A decently educated person in history, technology, or science (and I don't mean university-level) could add metalworking, astronomy, and animal domestication. The biggest limits to what you could do up to the industrial age would be megafauna and dieing before you accomplished it. If you passed on education, scientific theory, and the knowledge you had, there's a fair chance those things could be continued after you died.
As far as society goes, there is good evidence chimps have society, as well as early homonids. I'm pretty sure we had that 12k years ago, too.
I don't think you would have much impact. Even if we assume you are extremely good at learning new (i.e. old) languages, extremely popular (everything you suggest is done), and you have a rich benefactor who houses and feeds you, you are still lacking the giant supply chain stack that is absolutely required to get anything done in the modern world.
The only thing I could maybe get done is making some extremely bad and extremely expensive soap. Concrete or metals would be so far out of reach, I might as well work on a perpetual motion machine or try to transform lead to gold. Just go into the woods and try to mine some iron and you see what I mean.
The average modern person knows probably less about agriculture and building houses than the average person 12k years ago, and those are pretty intuitive.
The wheel isn't some complex contraption that needs to be improved over generations. It's probably the most simple tool imaginable, but it's also useless unless you have roads.
I'm always amazed how modern people have no idea how useless they would be just a few hundred years ago.
The guy on the primitive technology channel smelled iron from orange bacteria. He used 3 different methods with his most complex tools being stone and clay. Copper and tin are generally easier, and are exposed on the surface in many areas. The only thing stopping people from figuring out bronze earlier was location and luck. I think the bronze age starting 7000 years earlier would have had an impact.
I know how to make black powder, and generally know how to source it. Between that and bronze, you could have guns over 11000 years earlier than we did.
I've built houses.
I know the basics of making paper. Even if I didn't, clay tablets are easy. Writing 4000 years earlier would necessarily advance knowledge if nothing else happened. Throw in some math and the concept of zero and you could advance knowledge in those areas by thousands of years. Math isn't relevant? Some of the oldest structures we have around use math and astronomy. Imagine if we had those 5000 years earlier.
One of the bigger reasons people don't learn more languages is because they don't have the time or interest. One of the best ways to learn is immersion. Being in a situation where you have to learn a new language if you want to communicate with anyone else would certainly be a motivator to put in the effort.
The iron from Primitive Technology is maybe enough for a small piece of jewelry like a ring, and that's from many runs of very time consuming and labor intensive smelting. I'm not a metallurgist, but it also looks pretty bad. Even if it was modern tool steel with no impurities, 20g of iron pellets is pretty useless if you don't have a forge.
Your knowledge and skills are impressive, but I very much doubt that's common, and you most likely use modern tools to build houses. I'd be surprised if you could build better houses with sticks and stones than the stone age people who have been doing it for generations.
I've seen videos of people who make paper traditionally, and I remember that knowing the basics of it is about as useful as knowing the basics of making a rocket. Unless you have actually made paper and gun powder from scratch without any modern tools, I will not believe that you could do it.
I have to agree with you regarding writing and math. Also social sciences like philosophy, ethics, psychology, education, etc. Any tool you can use with only your brain would be be very helpful.
But I think the biggest issue would be convincing people to try new things. For all I know, photovoltaik could be a gift from a time traveller, but there was (and is) much opposition to it because many people are so conservative. If you started explaining electricity to people in the stone age, I wouldn't be surprised if you'd be banned or worse.
That's why I said tin and copper are easier. There were locations with native copper deposits, much like finding gold in streams. Copper is easier to work, tin is pretty easy relatively speaking, and the two give you bronze, which allows proper tools. That's part of why it took about 2000 years after bronze before we had iron. The guy from Primitive Technology is working from a very poor ore source (and is actually doing trial and error). That said, I doubt you could get much more than the idea of iron accepted by a Neolithic culture in a lifetime.
Sure, I've built houses using modern tools, but I'm also aware of the techniques used in older wood buildings. I could be an adequate apprentice for the first house I built, and could build a second on my own.
I didn't say gun powder, I said black powder. It's far simpler and safer. I made some before I was a teenager. The hardest part is finding saltwater and the only tool you need is a mortar and pestle. If they didn't exist by 10000 BC, then I could "invent" that, too.
How easy is it to find a copper deposit? What do they look like? How much should one expect to find? What would you do if you found a significant amount?
I'm sure they had adequate house building apprentices back then. We're talking about uplifting stone age people, not fitting in.
Wikipedia says gunpower and black powder are the same thing, wut whatever. How do you make it? I knew you need saltpeter, but I wouldn't have a clue how to find that, and even if I found some by chance, I wouldn't even know what it looks like. And even if I did, I wouldn't know what to do with it. I know almost nothing about black powder, but I feel like I know more the average person.
Native copper deposits would be green copper seams in exposed rock faces or red or green nuggets in streams or on the ground. I'm sure it wasn't easy, but it's how we historically started using copper. Having charcoal and learning how to produce a reducing fire or other methods of reduction allows you to smelt basic ores. After that, real chemistry kicks in.
The first step in changing a society is surviving. The second step is fitting in. The easiest way to do that without animosity is getting a job, and manual labor was a big thing 12000 years ago. No matter how good a carpenter you are, hauling around giant wooden beams isn't a one-man job. Likewise for hauling stones or bricks. Having done plenty of manual labor in my day, having someone who is eager to work and eager to learn usually makes it easier as an employer.
Gun powder can refer to black powder or smokeless powder (as well as some less common versions that were used for cannons and such). Black powder starts relatively easily, and is still reasonably stable. Good for flintlocks, but makes a mess of your barrel, so it requires more cleaning. The production of serpentine is basically grinding separate elements and stirring/grinding in the right ratios. It's very hard to ignite while making, unless you're reckless, but gets old relatively quickly. Corning will make grains of black powder, but the better methods can be quite risky. I don't imagine there were many amateur gun powder corn-makers. The process itself can ignite the powder if not done correctly.
Nitrate crystals will form in manure, bat guano, or urine. You would have to compete with the farmers for manure and the tanners for the urine, but if you have crystals you're close to the right thing.
12k years ago is the stone age and before agriculture. The ice age would just be ending. You don't have the calories to do much beyond exist.
There are papers talking of indications of cultivation starting around 10000 BC in Egypt, and 9000 BC in India.
I absolutely agree (I didn't say it wouldn't change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn't be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.
For everything you need a willing society bcs one individual can't do it all - it's either you dig/build one well & others feed you or you do the efforts communally. Same with metalwork, that's a whole specialisation in the most basic sense (you need a workforce & resources for them to gather ore, work it, and forge anything of useful size - metalwork to produce a few grammes of metal per year isn't worth it, so you need a city-sized community at your disposal, and you need to get to that point ... unless maybe as an expensive way to just pass the knowledge for later gens to put it to good use, which might be successful, unless forgotten or the community doesn't survive).
Animal domestication can take generations too in some cases (bovids), you need to first focus on docile females, and once they stay in a designated area (either like a valley or even fenced fields), you need the resources (food) to keep them alive there. So you need to build up agriculture at scale first. That why we found the first real domestication evidence around ancient cities, not random villages.
Yeah, if I was going to jump start domestication, I'd start with chickens or sheep/goats. Chicken and goats can eat just about anything, so can be fed scraps and quickly become a net positive. They're also smaller and easier to manage than cows. Goats can be troublesome, but their risk is limited by their size.
Domestication on both those species started about 10000 years ago, so it would only speed things up by 2000 years.
Smart, but you would need to be in specific area to get chickens (south Asia?) & goats (middle East?) suitable for domestication, which would still take several human generations to achieve - so in your lifetime you would just pass the knowledge (in case someone was interested) but otherwise live your life without seeing the results.
It's not like livestock domestication didn't start about asap after there were conditions for it (cities, stable food production, some bureaucracy/specialisation/trade, etc)etc.
If you went back 10000 years you definitively would have become an inventor or philosopher of sorts (assuming you could speak their language)
Well, I guess it depends on your education, but we get taught things in elementary school that wouldn't have been invented or discovered for thousands of years back then. And some technologies you likely could make without many pre-requisite technologies themselves
If the average person went back 10k years they would be regarded as insane or heretical. Even assuming communication wasn't an issue, way too much of your knowledge is built upon things you don't understand and don't exist. You can't do anything with electricity until you can refine metals and make copper wire. No average person knows the precursor plants for medicine. Brick making is beyond the average person and you wouldn't have a kiln anyway. Working without metal tools makes most processes the average person would know impossible.
You just start with math, there's plenty of math the average person learns in an average school curriculum that you could re-"invent". After that people would start taking you more seriously
Now they might consider you heretical or blasphemous still. If you played your cards right you could try to present yourself as a messenger from god although I personally really wouldn't want to go that route
Have you ever read “Lest Darkness Fall”? It’s a great exploration of these concepts. Dude gets isekai’d back to the Roman Empire. All of his ideas fall on deaf ears because “obviously the Roman Empire is the peak of all cultures” and there’s no room for improvement. Except for his idea for an optical telegraph system, they really fuck with that. Honestly an amazingly realistic book haha.
Math is probably the least useful at that age, maybe later in the bronze age it gets more useful as society can support some knowledge work. 10k years ago people don't have time for math, the majority of people are focused solely on survival. That's stone age and the very beginning of agriculture.
I absolutely agree (I didn't say it wouldn't change things), but the first decades/generation would still be pretty basic, much of the knowledge wouldn't be applicable until you build your tools, get basics sorted, build safety nets, etc.
I'm trying to make the distinction between the ability to just 'make' as a proof of concept & actually apply that knowledge at scale that makes any difference in that accident context. Like metalwork - without (smol-)city-sized communities (labour, and accumulated resources like winter food & shelters) it doesn't make sense bcs you don't end up with enough use-cases.
(Ofc immediate location is a great factor in what knowledge is more applicable and what not - surviving in the Arctic circle would be much different to the some savannah).
I do agree with that!
That's a beautiful way of thinking about it!