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Re:Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Sto... by greggsy on Monday September 14, 2026 @06:33AM (#49694643)
Language. writing and maths are the main ones that come to mind for me.
Re:Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Sto... by achenet on Monday September 14, 2026 @08:09AM (#49695507)
Given that there is evidence [0] to support the idea that (spoken) language is hard-coded into the human DNA, I think language might, like dancing, be something 'innately human' and not a learned technology :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

As in, if we had a total disappearance of all humans on Earth, and then put some new humans on the depopulated Earth, they'd quickly develop a common language, if they were genetically similar to modern humans, but would take a while to start writing.

Arguably, things like counting and geometry could also be viewed as something innate in humans - our mammalian brains view the world as a 3-dimensional real vector space, and so we will instinctively have the ability to understand the concept of a 'circle', or 'seven', or a square, or even multiplication ('three groups of three people each'), but the act of writing down those thoughts, and the literate culture focusing on those concepts which stretches from Euclid to Wikipeda, Library Genesis, and Terry Tao's blog, is obviously a developed technology.

Re:Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Sto... by hdgvhicv on Monday September 14, 2026 @06:49AM (#49694783)
Writing and maths are certainly technologies to discover in Civilization.
Re:Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Sto... by throw0101a on Monday September 14, 2026 @10:23AM (#49697381)
> Language.

Technology is generally considered to be something that is invented: there's a debate in whether language is invented/created or whether it is innate to humans (you wouldn't say sight or hearing are technologies).

Also a debate on whether math is created/invented or discovered (IMHO hard to argue that pi (π) is invented).

Re:Rope, twine and thread: Invisible technologies of the Sto... by 1718627440 on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @12:04PM (#49714629)
Electricity also isn't invented, yet an electricity network uses a lot of technologies. This is kinda true for everything. Invention is a discovery, so I fail to see the dichotomy.