https://magiclinen.com/blogs/blog/how-is-linen-made
Ridiculously complicated. And there were oral folk tales passed along for years to keep the cultural memory of it.
Eventually Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm wrote their versions down.
Andersen: https://fairytalez.com/flax/
Grimm: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/175/grimms-fairy-tales/3081/mothe...
There were cultures thousands of miles apart with their own linen stories and games that all encode linen processing. There are more than these if you look for them:
https://ltfai.org/app/uploads/2021/03/Flax-journey.pdf
https://folklorefairytales.wordpress.com/2012/09/16/the-disc...
Like, by the time you have metal you can have scissors, but when you’re still working with flint that’s not really an option.
Flint could make a blade sharp enough to carefully carve your nails back if you really wanted
They didn't. Probably like felids don't cut their claws.
Because that may come with a shift in influence and power. And the current leader may simply kill the inventor to stop change that may threaten his position.
For a fascinating exploration of this anthropological phenomenon through the medium of musical theater, I recommend Team Starkid's "Firebringer".
Innovation is an antisocial act to some extent. By innovating you are saying someone is either wrong or less competent than you in some area. You are also challenging traditional roles and systems of social organization.
Breaking tradition in a tribe requires convincing one or two people that helped raise you from childhood. You seem to expect a Modern Age style religious persecution.
The interference between invention and tradition is because people don't know how to use or replicate things, and there is no formal education, or books, or whatever to spread it.
Exactly. Tradition was this mechanism by which society factory-ized itself. Changes were disruptive because it affected something as simple as another person's ability to repair the "innovated" item. I think people are instinctually sceptical of change because it's deeply ingrained in the evolution of human culture to understand that change can break the socially distributed factory.
Resistance to change is more complicated than this of course. I don't want to get too evolutionary-psychological about it. I think Darwin has a tendency to bring that out in us moderns. Never discount the incredible power that culture has to become self activated and shape human behavior even against our benefit sometimes.
I think this might be a stretch. I think most group dynamics allow for innovation to some extent.
Yea, if you're weird dick and declare you have "innovated the mighty tent and everyone else is inferior" than you should be rightly thrown out of the tribe.
But, if you can just say "hey I had this idea to put a this animal hide on a couple of branches to keep the rain away, and it's lighter than carrying the cave...I think most people would understand.
It's easy and low risk to modify an arrow head a bit, so you see a lot of incremental progress in knapping. But moving the band from cave dwelling to tent dwelling would be a paradigm shift.
It is not that we don't know how to work on those things. We can build things, we can try different approaches. We could perfectly document what has been tried. In stead the proposed work will be shut down by angry emotional responses.
This while in many scientific efforts the useful application of the discovery is unknown. Some efforts look truly nonsensical! Say, what could appear more useless than to document the culture of some primitive unwashed jungle dwellers? That steam engine from Heron of Alexandria! It was completely useless at the time. A seemingly nonsensical effort.
Nothing but emotions is preventing us from spinning up a data center to do astrology. We would all line up to scream how IT MIGHT NOT WORK! which is hilarious if you think about it.
In the paleolithic every bit of information was costly to preserve because humans were the only storage medium. Every technology had an information overhead that had to be maintained in cultural memory. There's only so much RAM in band of 300 hunter-gatherers, so unbounded growth in information (and therefore technology) wasn't even possible.
Progress took so long because these people were up aginst a semi-hard information-theoretic wall on what their culture could process and remember. Not even counting occasional catastrophic loss.
Humans went through a massive cultural and technological transition some 40,000 years ago into what’s called behavioural modernity. This was a transition into complex symbolic and abstract thinking which generated developments including music, tattooing and body painting, decorative artefacts, advanced stone blades, compound technological artefacts composed of multiple parts or features, more sophisticated clothing, etc.
By multiple features I mean things like a bone needle with an eye hole. Such things didn’t exist previously. We did have basic single piece clothing similar to blankets or ponchos with some simple weaving, but everything prior to 40k to 50k years ago was dramatically simpler than later periods.
These developments enabled the colonisation of previously uninhabitable climatic regions, allowing modern humans to finally spread out of Africa and conquer the planet.
The 70k to 80k year mark does seem to be significant. You might find this article below interesting. The cognitive basis for these changes seems to date from around then, but it took time for that to translate into broad societal changes in physical culture.
https://neurosciencenews.com/language-imagination-evolution-...
The near simultaneous development of agriculture world wide 10k years ago is still a conundrum. I think it is a bit easier to accept as a coincidence if you view it as the result of a few tens of thousands of years of fairly rapid development, compared to the previous hundreds of thousands of years.
I think it’s likely to be a combination of factors. Parallel a social and technical developments on the one hand and maybe climate change induced crisis. It doesn’t have to be one single factor.
We take for granted that invention is a clear isolated concept. But previous to the modern age, invention was intertwined with tradition. Creating a society which could even adopt tent life involved developing traditions around how the tent was made, who made it, how it was maintained and how it was passed on. Each new invention and small innovation to the tent had to be integrated through tradition, adopted over generations and in this way mass tested.
What it takes to develop the ability to mass produce a specialized, portable system of shelter without the concept of engineering is thousands of years of tradition. But eventually you end up with this specialized invention, highly attuned to a way of life. Yet to us it is deceptively simple.