This is fantastic. I'm reminded of the Samo Burja thesis that civilization is actually a lot older when we think and ancient civilizations including the Bronze Age were much more advanced than we think.
With better imaging, tooling, and archaeological funding, I'm sure we'll find much more evidence like this
So many countries bronze and ancient ages are underexplored
> ancient civilizations including the Bronze Age were much more advanced than we think.
I think part of the reason people tend to underestimate ancient civilizations is because there is only so much preserved, especially because so much of their culture and knowledge was passed on orally, rather than documented in writings. Even if we come up with more archaeological findings or new technology to analyze it, there’s a limit to how much we can know.
But another culprit in this underestimation is supremacist thinking. For example, there is a tendency to elevate the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) above others. The older cultures and religions are often described with pejoratives like “pagan”. In many countries, the history that is “worth studying” is seen as only starting a couple thousand years ago. Another aspect is racial supremacist thinking - I think this is still vast even though progress has been made on the issue of race. For example, textbooks and classes tend to not spend much time acknowledging the mathematical and scientific discoveries of the ancient world.
I hope it improves but I also think there are serious social/tribal problems today that will prevent people from exploring all this with genuine curiosity.
> that will prevent people from exploring all this with genuine curiosity.
No one is reposting findings that confirm exactly what archeologists already knew on HN.
Every archeologist wants to be the one that has the dig that revolutionizes the whole field.
The idea that historians and archeologists aren’t curious about the stuff they’re dedicating most of their life to simply doesn’t add up and match with what we know about human beings.
The reason we think what we do (with adjustments for normal human errors), is because that’s the evidence we have.
None of the evidence is secret. If there was some evidence that is being misinterpreted due to Abrahamic biases, there are as many if not more archeologists ans historians from non Abrahamic countries like China, India and most African nations, that have access to the same evidence and could write a paper today about how the evidence is being misinterpreted.
I see the same thinking in philosophy. We know a lot about the great thinkers of the West, from Plato to Aristoteles, to Jesus, to Thomas van Acquin, to Descartes, to Kant, to Hegel, to Nietsche, to Heidegger, to Foucoult, and so on... Its one western-european based lineage. And many of the western philosophers were supremacists indeed. They saw western philosophy as the pinaccle of human thought. The most advanced way of reasoning and understanding . This mindset obviously got them trapped.
But there is much to learn from other philosophies. China is the worlds oldest continuous civilization. Surely there were some great thinkers besides Konfuzius. Same with India. I attended last week a lecture about the Upanishads. And so much of the wisdom in there can be mapped, more or less specifically, to wisdom from Western philosophy.
There is an interesting field of study emerging: Comparative Philosophy. ith the aim to bring it all together. (See for instance, https://studiegids.universiteitleiden.nl/courses/133662/comp...).
This is the right book for a beginner on the bronze age, because it tells you the importance of tin and who was supplying it (and horses) to the large and well-known cities like Mesopotamia. There are a lot of comments today about, "wow, the ancients were more advanced than I thought," but this book will have you understand that steppe pastoralists were much more advanced than you thought.
Is this the culture referred to as BMAC? I've recently heard that both them and the Indus Valley Civilization remain fairly unresearched, which was surprising to me.
> "Maybe even smarter as there was no lead poisoning their brains!"
It's a good guess the people who made these artifacts (the bronze ones particularly) suffered from lead poisoning: lead was a primary alloying metal for bronze. You can even look up elemental analysis for BMAC bronze artifacts specifically: "...contain appreciable amounts of arsenic (up to 3%) and lead (up to 4%), as did bronzes of the preceding chronological horizons"[0].
The early smelting techniques simply released everything into the open atmosphere, as fine particulate fumes. Environmental samples going back 5,200 years show regional-scale lead pollution[1] from Bronze Age metals smelting.
("The smelting- and cupellation-related release of Pb into the environment is predominantly via the fine-particle fraction and, as such subject to large-scale atmospheric transport, resulting in a supra-regional to hemisphere-wide distribution9,10,11,20,21,22,23")
Sorry if you were offended, I was just making a joke. I don’t believe the ancient aliens theories, but a lot of people do, and that’s what I was poking fun at.
They didn't know about equality, bacteria, electromagnetism, fallibilism, evolution ... so you must mean a kind of "fully intelligent" that includes extremely ignorant people with bad ideas.
While they may not have known many things we know today, they had a better grasp of masonry, pottery, and metallurgy than most people today. Likewise, these are people who understood human experience quite well, and understood the animals and plants around them better than most of us today.
Regarding sanitation, there is evidence that they understood the corruption of the flesh and many Bronze Age cultures had topical treatments that were quite effective antiseptics. So, while not understanding what bacteria are, they still knew the effect.
And many of those ideas are quite old. People have been dealing with their own minds for quite some time, and the past had far fewer distractions from facing one’s self. Things like mindfulness, CBT, theory of mind, and most philosophy are built upon quite ancient traditions, observations, and beliefs.
How about: ancient people had brains that were physically similar to anyone modern, and sometimes they came up with one or two good ideas, but they were generally poorly informed and full of misconceptions by modern standards.
You didn’t know about those either. You were taught it by someone else, who learned about it from someone else, and so on. Sure some people discovered things along the way but you specifically don’t get credit for their progress. Does that make you ignorant? What about all the things that those people did discover or invent - surely you can see how the progress they made at that time, with so few resources and advancements, was truly revolutionary. Some of those advancements were far harder and significant than the stuff we like to point at in modern times like rockets.
Credit? Screw credit, that's not what I'm talking about. By accident, good ideas wander into our minds and make us smart. OK, there's some amount of positive feedback in this process (ideas about how to accumulate more good ideas). But "ignorance" means being uninformed, that is, not lucky enough to be inhabited by many of these good ideas in the first place. And there's a lot more of them floating around in modern times, and so it's harder to be ignorant, and easier to be lucky, and well-informed, and since ideas help with being a smarty-pants, it's easier to stumble into being smart. Thus ancient people were stupid, in a manner of speaking.
Looking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze age job. How come we call mobile phones progress?
There is a reason we name eras after materials - the bronze age, iron age, etc. Currently we're living in the silicon age.
Progress in fundamental materials science tends to unlock whole new technology paradigms.
You can do city planning with sod and stone. Mobile phones, on the other hand, require a nearly incomprehensible level of materials innovation. It is everything from the battery to conductive touch screen glass to plastic casing to silicon microchip... Not to mention all the science of satellites and rockets and radio waves that make them useful...
By the way, the show "Connections" by James Burke is brilliant. A must-watch for any tech curious nerd.
Yeah, so many people like to point at specific inventions and ask why it wasn't done sooner or such, but 99% of the time it was because of a lack of material science that made production near impossible.
It doesn't matter if someone has a PhD in steam engine engineering, if they went back in time to the Roman empire there still would be no steam engines because there are only a handful of examples of accidentally good enough steel in the entire world, which you don't even have a way to identify yet other than buying 10000x extra and spending years testing every sample to find the good stuff, not to mention you need even more of that high quality steel just to make the tools required to cut good steel into a capable boiler design.
If you can't bang something together with wood, stone, and dirt, it requires advanced material science and entire industries behind it to produce and be worth the effort. Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans, but not if it took 5,000 men working for years and dumping endless amounts of money into it to find just the right ore source and smelting procedures just to produce a single engine that only replaces the labor of 50 guys with buckets.
I think it is a little more nuanced than that. Bret Devereaux wrote about steam engines[1] in Roman Empire, and the conclusion is there was no economic stimuli to kickstart steam engine. For the first half-century (or so) of steam engines they were atmospheric steam engines and they sucked (in a very literal way: they sprayed cold water into a cylinder to condense water vapor to create a (sort of) vacuum that will suck a piston into a cylinder). I don't believe that these steam engines required especially good steel. I think the biggest issue was corrosion due to a contact with water, but there was no need to keep really high pressures.
> Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans
According to Devereaux it wouldn't be useless for the Romans. They didn't pump water from coal mines, and when they pumped water they'd need to move fuel from somewhere else to feed it into a steam engine. It was not an an easy or a cheap task to do, because they had no railroads.
I agree with the sentiment in the sense that technology doesn't scale when you're like that Australian guy making everything from one-use mud and sticks. Some of it does but not a lot of it.
Most materials up to the 1900s were readily available in Roman times, though.
The metal of choice for the first Roman steam engines would be slightly expensive copper and they built highways in cobblestone connecting their whole empire so they wouldn't shy away from some forward-thinking investment given a working demo.
The first application for them wouldn't be pumps, either. It would be trivial to have charcoal factories around the roads to quickly carry priority goods and military with even a rudimentary steam engine.
The cobblestone roads could be adapted to tram use with a few thousand guys equipped with standard width sticks and picks.
A random Roman maybe not but a Roman with connections could do it.
You have to remember this is rediscovering the past in ways that previous cultures only had mythology around. The fact that this paper is basically “Stone Age people aren’t less sophisticated” is a relatively new idea since levi strauss reinvented anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s
Hindu, then Greek then confuscian theologian-philosophers laid the foundations for the idea that their group had left behind simply being “animals” and sought out to distinguish human form (in their specific form) from all other forms of life.
Humans also approach things linearly and it fights intuition that regression is not just possible but the norm.
Ancient Greeks attributed Mycenaean remains to the “Age of Heroes”. They were amazed by the scale and engineering quality of the work and thought it was done by gods and mythical creatures such as Cyclopes. They didn’t approach progress linearly or mono-dimensionally.
Heinrich Schliemann was probably the first to connect the myths with tangible proof through archeology in late 19th century. While Lévi-Strauss work was much later and more political and polemical rather than scientific.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251119171014/https://archaeolo...
Strangely this gets caught in an infinite refresh loop for me. I assume it's the result of some JS on that page not liking the new domain it's on.
I was able to interrupt the issue with a regular 'esc' key.
This is fantastic. I'm reminded of the Samo Burja thesis that civilization is actually a lot older when we think and ancient civilizations including the Bronze Age were much more advanced than we think.
With better imaging, tooling, and archaeological funding, I'm sure we'll find much more evidence like this
So many countries bronze and ancient ages are underexplored
> ancient civilizations including the Bronze Age were much more advanced than we think.
I think part of the reason people tend to underestimate ancient civilizations is because there is only so much preserved, especially because so much of their culture and knowledge was passed on orally, rather than documented in writings. Even if we come up with more archaeological findings or new technology to analyze it, there’s a limit to how much we can know.
But another culprit in this underestimation is supremacist thinking. For example, there is a tendency to elevate the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) above others. The older cultures and religions are often described with pejoratives like “pagan”. In many countries, the history that is “worth studying” is seen as only starting a couple thousand years ago. Another aspect is racial supremacist thinking - I think this is still vast even though progress has been made on the issue of race. For example, textbooks and classes tend to not spend much time acknowledging the mathematical and scientific discoveries of the ancient world.
I hope it improves but I also think there are serious social/tribal problems today that will prevent people from exploring all this with genuine curiosity.
> that will prevent people from exploring all this with genuine curiosity.
No one is reposting findings that confirm exactly what archeologists already knew on HN.
Every archeologist wants to be the one that has the dig that revolutionizes the whole field.
The idea that historians and archeologists aren’t curious about the stuff they’re dedicating most of their life to simply doesn’t add up and match with what we know about human beings.
The reason we think what we do (with adjustments for normal human errors), is because that’s the evidence we have.
None of the evidence is secret. If there was some evidence that is being misinterpreted due to Abrahamic biases, there are as many if not more archeologists ans historians from non Abrahamic countries like China, India and most African nations, that have access to the same evidence and could write a paper today about how the evidence is being misinterpreted.
I see the same thinking in philosophy. We know a lot about the great thinkers of the West, from Plato to Aristoteles, to Jesus, to Thomas van Acquin, to Descartes, to Kant, to Hegel, to Nietsche, to Heidegger, to Foucoult, and so on... Its one western-european based lineage. And many of the western philosophers were supremacists indeed. They saw western philosophy as the pinaccle of human thought. The most advanced way of reasoning and understanding . This mindset obviously got them trapped.
But there is much to learn from other philosophies. China is the worlds oldest continuous civilization. Surely there were some great thinkers besides Konfuzius. Same with India. I attended last week a lecture about the Upanishads. And so much of the wisdom in there can be mapped, more or less specifically, to wisdom from Western philosophy. There is an interesting field of study emerging: Comparative Philosophy. ith the aim to bring it all together. (See for instance, https://studiegids.universiteitleiden.nl/courses/133662/comp...).
Interesting book on this topic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1831667.The_Horse_the_Wh...
This is the right book for a beginner on the bronze age, because it tells you the importance of tin and who was supplying it (and horses) to the large and well-known cities like Mesopotamia. There are a lot of comments today about, "wow, the ancients were more advanced than I thought," but this book will have you understand that steppe pastoralists were much more advanced than you thought.
What would be a good intermediate level book? It's okay if it's academic, doesn't have to be popular science.
Is this the culture referred to as BMAC? I've recently heard that both them and the Indus Valley Civilization remain fairly unresearched, which was surprising to me.
Wow their art was fantastic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bactria%E2%80%93Margiana_Archa...
Those are indeed some very nice photos, though it is clear that a couple of them were made by aliens.
This modern day chauvinism needs to die.
Ancient peoples were fully as intelligent as us.
Maybe even smarter as there was no lead poisoning their brains!
> "Maybe even smarter as there was no lead poisoning their brains!"
It's a good guess the people who made these artifacts (the bronze ones particularly) suffered from lead poisoning: lead was a primary alloying metal for bronze. You can even look up elemental analysis for BMAC bronze artifacts specifically: "...contain appreciable amounts of arsenic (up to 3%) and lead (up to 4%), as did bronzes of the preceding chronological horizons"[0].
The early smelting techniques simply released everything into the open atmosphere, as fine particulate fumes. Environmental samples going back 5,200 years show regional-scale lead pollution[1] from Bronze Age metals smelting.
[0] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/... (under "3.1.3 Bronzes of the Late Bronze Age II")
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01921-7
("The smelting- and cupellation-related release of Pb into the environment is predominantly via the fine-particle fraction and, as such subject to large-scale atmospheric transport, resulting in a supra-regional to hemisphere-wide distribution9,10,11,20,21,22,23")
Sorry if you were offended, I was just making a joke. I don’t believe the ancient aliens theories, but a lot of people do, and that’s what I was poking fun at.
They didn't know about equality, bacteria, electromagnetism, fallibilism, evolution ... so you must mean a kind of "fully intelligent" that includes extremely ignorant people with bad ideas.
While they may not have known many things we know today, they had a better grasp of masonry, pottery, and metallurgy than most people today. Likewise, these are people who understood human experience quite well, and understood the animals and plants around them better than most of us today.
Regarding sanitation, there is evidence that they understood the corruption of the flesh and many Bronze Age cultures had topical treatments that were quite effective antiseptics. So, while not understanding what bacteria are, they still knew the effect.
Some modern ideas are about thinking.
And many of those ideas are quite old. People have been dealing with their own minds for quite some time, and the past had far fewer distractions from facing one’s self. Things like mindfulness, CBT, theory of mind, and most philosophy are built upon quite ancient traditions, observations, and beliefs.
Some modern ideas about thinking are modern.
How about: ancient people had brains that were physically similar to anyone modern, and sometimes they came up with one or two good ideas, but they were generally poorly informed and full of misconceptions by modern standards.
You don't speak Cantonese.
How can you possibly call yourself an intelligent person if you cannot speak Cantonese?
Well, Cantonese is a bad idea anyway.
(I don't like tonal languages because they interfere with tone of voice, and Cantonese has extra tones.)
Being able to read Chinese could be advantageous, and then I'd be less of an idiot, it's true.
You didn’t know about those either. You were taught it by someone else, who learned about it from someone else, and so on. Sure some people discovered things along the way but you specifically don’t get credit for their progress. Does that make you ignorant? What about all the things that those people did discover or invent - surely you can see how the progress they made at that time, with so few resources and advancements, was truly revolutionary. Some of those advancements were far harder and significant than the stuff we like to point at in modern times like rockets.
Credit? Screw credit, that's not what I'm talking about. By accident, good ideas wander into our minds and make us smart. OK, there's some amount of positive feedback in this process (ideas about how to accumulate more good ideas). But "ignorance" means being uninformed, that is, not lucky enough to be inhabited by many of these good ideas in the first place. And there's a lot more of them floating around in modern times, and so it's harder to be ignorant, and easier to be lucky, and well-informed, and since ideas help with being a smarty-pants, it's easier to stumble into being smart. Thus ancient people were stupid, in a manner of speaking.
Huh? Knowledge/education and intelligence aren’t equivalent. Is English your first language? Seems a very basic error to make otherwise.
That's fine, I was just confirming that that was what you meant by intelligence.
It's somewhat different from "smart", isn't it? Since it includes everyone.
The BMAC is pretty far from Kazhakastan. It’s likely that they traded with these folks though
Or making it better
The good things we are rewriting system
The use of "has" in the title instead of "had" caused to imagine that this was about a modern community like the Amish
[dead]
Do you think it’s because some blocking my requests
Looking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze age job. How come we call mobile phones progress?
I have no idea how this sentence:
> Looking at properly aligned buildings I realized school never prepared me into thinking city planner might have been a bronze age job.
Is related at all to this sentence:
> How come we call mobile phones progress?
I think u/noiv might be saying that ancient cities were better than ours.
If humans were so advanced to have city planning at that point, how do we only have mobile phones by now?
There is a reason we name eras after materials - the bronze age, iron age, etc. Currently we're living in the silicon age.
Progress in fundamental materials science tends to unlock whole new technology paradigms.
You can do city planning with sod and stone. Mobile phones, on the other hand, require a nearly incomprehensible level of materials innovation. It is everything from the battery to conductive touch screen glass to plastic casing to silicon microchip... Not to mention all the science of satellites and rockets and radio waves that make them useful...
By the way, the show "Connections" by James Burke is brilliant. A must-watch for any tech curious nerd.
Yeah, so many people like to point at specific inventions and ask why it wasn't done sooner or such, but 99% of the time it was because of a lack of material science that made production near impossible.
It doesn't matter if someone has a PhD in steam engine engineering, if they went back in time to the Roman empire there still would be no steam engines because there are only a handful of examples of accidentally good enough steel in the entire world, which you don't even have a way to identify yet other than buying 10000x extra and spending years testing every sample to find the good stuff, not to mention you need even more of that high quality steel just to make the tools required to cut good steel into a capable boiler design.
If you can't bang something together with wood, stone, and dirt, it requires advanced material science and entire industries behind it to produce and be worth the effort. Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans, but not if it took 5,000 men working for years and dumping endless amounts of money into it to find just the right ore source and smelting procedures just to produce a single engine that only replaces the labor of 50 guys with buckets.
I think it is a little more nuanced than that. Bret Devereaux wrote about steam engines[1] in Roman Empire, and the conclusion is there was no economic stimuli to kickstart steam engine. For the first half-century (or so) of steam engines they were atmospheric steam engines and they sucked (in a very literal way: they sprayed cold water into a cylinder to condense water vapor to create a (sort of) vacuum that will suck a piston into a cylinder). I don't believe that these steam engines required especially good steel. I think the biggest issue was corrosion due to a contact with water, but there was no need to keep really high pressures.
> Yeah a steam powered water pump would be useful to the Romans
According to Devereaux it wouldn't be useless for the Romans. They didn't pump water from coal mines, and when they pumped water they'd need to move fuel from somewhere else to feed it into a steam engine. It was not an an easy or a cheap task to do, because they had no railroads.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
I agree with the sentiment in the sense that technology doesn't scale when you're like that Australian guy making everything from one-use mud and sticks. Some of it does but not a lot of it.
Most materials up to the 1900s were readily available in Roman times, though.
The metal of choice for the first Roman steam engines would be slightly expensive copper and they built highways in cobblestone connecting their whole empire so they wouldn't shy away from some forward-thinking investment given a working demo.
The first application for them wouldn't be pumps, either. It would be trivial to have charcoal factories around the roads to quickly carry priority goods and military with even a rudimentary steam engine.
The cobblestone roads could be adapted to tram use with a few thousand guys equipped with standard width sticks and picks.
A random Roman maybe not but a Roman with connections could do it.
Because city planning doesn’t require the same technological advancements that a cell phone does?
Human sophistication and intelligence is not the same a technological advancements.
And sometimes offhand lighthearted comments are not the same as serious questions!
and also not fit for this site! flagged
Maybe they did but became enlightened and destroyed their phones after versions of Facebook and Twitter cause their civilization to collapse?
You have to remember this is rediscovering the past in ways that previous cultures only had mythology around. The fact that this paper is basically “Stone Age people aren’t less sophisticated” is a relatively new idea since levi strauss reinvented anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s
Hindu, then Greek then confuscian theologian-philosophers laid the foundations for the idea that their group had left behind simply being “animals” and sought out to distinguish human form (in their specific form) from all other forms of life.
Humans also approach things linearly and it fights intuition that regression is not just possible but the norm.
Ancient Greeks attributed Mycenaean remains to the “Age of Heroes”. They were amazed by the scale and engineering quality of the work and thought it was done by gods and mythical creatures such as Cyclopes. They didn’t approach progress linearly or mono-dimensionally.
Heinrich Schliemann was probably the first to connect the myths with tangible proof through archeology in late 19th century. While Lévi-Strauss work was much later and more political and polemical rather than scientific.
Yeah, the “Age of Heroes” was just Ancient Aliens for the Greeks: “we can’t do it, so it can’t be human work”
TIL, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_anthropology founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_L%C3%A9vi-Strauss, not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levi_Strauss.
Glorious ancient people of Kazakhstan had internet over wires made of copper and tin, powered by steam energy from the puffs of llamas. Very nice!
Sounds like things really went downhill by the time Borat arrived.
[dead]
Mobile phones generate GAAP revenue for corporations beyond the initial sale; architecture and city planning do not.