Challenge=Agriculture 10000+ years early
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Bavarian Raven
Banned
teach them what i know of metal working. do my best to teach them how to smelt copper and make cure metal tools. that should have some of Butterfly effect no?
teach them what i know of metal working. do my best to teach them how to smelt copper and make cure metal tools. that should have some of Butterfly effect no?
You would, of course, have to teach them to mine it first. You would also have to know where veins of copper and iron were in order to achieve that, also.
That's probably more than a year's worth of teaching, but if dogs weren't already around they would be a good start. There is a theory that dogs were domesticated a really long time ago--like 100,000 years or so. I'm skeptical--probably slightly less than half that.
Stephen
Banned
Every culture in the world has martial arts I would not be surprised if they had them 40,000 years ago either. And the showy cool ones with back flips are not very combat effective.
No tribal culture has or had anything even close to a serious martial art, because you need a high specialization of professions to allow them to develop. There's also a clear tendency for martial arts to develop over time. Unarmed combat, for one, has come a long way in most parts of the world as recently as the last hundred years.
They certainly had a basic understanding of wrestling, punching, et cetera, but did not have anywhere near the same level of technique. Understanding of the use of an opponent's momentum in unarmed combat still does not exist in tribal cultures.
I'm not talking X-Men Orgins: Wolverine sideways flips here. It's judo flips - using a person's momentum, body below their center of mass as a pivot, and launching them over you. Quick and easy to teach, very effective in itself and as a step to creating more dangerous moves, funny to watch (actually important if I'm teaching it to kids), and unknown in most cultures to the modern era.
Valdemar II
Banned
Because it really aren't very beneficial to survival, spear, axe and club beat martial art 99 time out 100.
Stephen
Banned
I once had a guy try to Judo flip me, he got an elbow to the back of the head KO.
Back to the topic, the Ice age climate was quite variable so I dont think horticulture is viable longterm. So as they will be more used to nomadism anyway I will try to develop pastorialism. As they will be lactose intolerant I will teach them how to make cheese and yughurt, cheese can be preserved a long time porviding them with a food store for winter in areas without permafrost. Show them how to make sadles and bridles and hitch up oxen to wagons which they can use to carry around other new technologies such as pots, spining wheels and looms for wool and maybe even iron and bronze tools.
Back to the topic, the Ice age climate was quite variable so I dont think horticulture is viable longterm. So as they will be more used to nomadism anyway I will try to develop pastorialism. As they will be lactose intolerant I will teach them how to make cheese and yughurt, cheese can be preserved a long time porviding them with a food store for winter in areas without permafrost. Show them how to make sadles and bridles and hitch up oxen to wagons which they can use to carry around other new technologies such as pots, spining wheels and looms for wool and maybe even iron and bronze tools.
Uhm, so what?
Within a hunter-gatherer group a great deal of the physical conflict will be unarmed and not to the death. Those with these skills will tend to win, ensuring that the skills spread until most of the (male) tribe has them.
Hunter-gatherer groups usually exist in larger communitis of several closely-related tribes or groups that shared a local area, periodically meeting and intermarrying. Within these larger units, violence often did and does stop short of to-the-death conflict.
Even when dealing with complete aliens or when otherwise fighting armed, the skills are quite transferable. Knowing how to use your opponents weight, momentum, or strength against them doesn't lose utility when you pick up a weapon.
This isn't Kung Fu we're talking about here. It's the combat equivalent of teaching someone to floss properly. If I'd said basic fighting skills - and spent this much time specifying what I meant - I suspect I'd not be dealing with a succession of ninja cynics. But alas, here we are.
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Ayup, beginner stuff. But teaching elbow knockouts to paleolithic children?
Not a good way to make friends with their parents.But you can't tame the requisite animals in a year, much less domesticate the things. It'd take a good amount of time to catch, say, a small aurochs, and then what? You really think you can impress on them the utility of holding a huge wild animal captive, accumulate large quantities of the otherwise useless food, periodically grabbing its sensitive bits to get the milk, and then going through a long process to get substances that will set off their lactose intolerance? It's still tens of millenia before domestication of cattle caused tolerance to begin to proliferate. Everyone is lactose intolerant.
Saddles and bridles are out. The wild horses were too small and nasty for riding until they were bred up to a useful size. That's why chariots pre-date cavalry.
Wagons are an argument, though. Certainly they'd be a good fit for nomads.
But again you have a year's effort just getting the animals and building the cart. Then they have a set of wild animals and a cart. It'll be ludicrously difficult to get anywhere until some tame animals are available, and that's at least a couple years after you leave. At first they'll also have little incentive, because they won't have those things to carry yet.
Spinning wheels, looms, and metal require a level of skilled craftsmanship to create and maintain that can't be gotten across in a single year.
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Stephen
Banned
Tribal men tend to be armed 100% of the time.
Hence why they tend to be armed all the time.
I thought you were trying to teach them these things specifically so that they have an advantage over other alien tribes and spread.
Ah I see just a bit of play fighting, wrestling, blunt weapon sparing with a few hints, tips and tricks from the elders and veterans. That would be useful, but I would bet they probably already do that as a lot of tribal societies do to the present day. Often with a vigor that many modern martial artist would consider unsafe. You really think you have much to teach about clubbing people to men from an era when that is the leading and majority cause of a mans death.
Get a bunch of men around without a TV and play fighting seems to naturally result and hunter gatherers have a lot of such time. Ever see a cage match usually it ends up as a wrestling match, none of the fancy stuff seems to work outside of the dojo.
Stephen
Banned
Ayup, beginner stuff. But teaching elbow knockouts to paleolithic children?
The funny thing is it just sort of hapened as I was twisting my arm out of his grasp, as he was trying to throw me over his back at the same time it landed on the back of his head neck area with all my wait. He was demonstrating the move on someone on another aquaintance before but I said "well he didn't struggle did he"
There is no lactose in cheese its all fermented away, and besides its not like an intolerance is an allergy, it just creates a bit of wind.
Children tend to do a lot of the herding in pastoral societies anyway they can fit on the ponies.
It will be crude to a professional smithies taste to be sure. But your right 1 year is not enough time for any of these plans to work.
Um, clearly being lactose intolerant doesn't keep you from consuming milk/products, since people developed lactose tolerance IOTL, mainly from being in cultures where milk/products were widely consumed.
Interesting question...
First I would pick a place that would be ideal for early settlements and farming, based on todays knowledge of the climate 40000 years ago India comes to mind. Alternatives would be China or East Afrika, but those areas would be to "closed off" for my ideas to spread. Plus in India copper an coal are very easy to mine - important for later on.
Then I would introduce as some had already posted, medicine (antiseptics, aspirin, anaesthetic). And than alcohol and curing with salt.
But most of all I would teach basic greek philosophy with logic as headliner.
If I get "my tribe" to understand that everything in the universe is explainable, that - if they have a religion - god or the gods themselves work with logic that everyone can learn , that, if you do not know how something works you should look and think harder, in other words that there is no "magic", civilisation is on the way in no time.
Settlments and Citys would follow without me having to give them the concept as I gave them the tools to "think them up".
First I would pick a place that would be ideal for early settlements and farming, based on todays knowledge of the climate 40000 years ago India comes to mind. Alternatives would be China or East Afrika, but those areas would be to "closed off" for my ideas to spread. Plus in India copper an coal are very easy to mine - important for later on.
Then I would introduce as some had already posted, medicine (antiseptics, aspirin, anaesthetic). And than alcohol and curing with salt.
But most of all I would teach basic greek philosophy with logic as headliner.
If I get "my tribe" to understand that everything in the universe is explainable, that - if they have a religion - god or the gods themselves work with logic that everyone can learn , that, if you do not know how something works you should look and think harder, in other words that there is no "magic", civilisation is on the way in no time.
Settlments and Citys would follow without me having to give them the concept as I gave them the tools to "think them up".
For a given definition of armed.... maybe I can agree with that. Although you can certainly find enough modern tribal peoples who spend a lot of their time equipped with things that could better described as tools.
They spend all their time armed because conflicts between their neighbors are usually not to the death? I think you misunderstood me.
You don't seem to be taking my meaning. Immediately before this quote I explained why the skills would be useful in intertribal conflict whether or not weapons were involved.
Yeah, they certainly have something already. How could they not? But wouldn't you agree that someone who studied would probably have some techniques that they could use and don't already know? I mean, do the four elders in a band of people that spend almost every waking hour searching for food really know all the key bits known to, say, a student of Krav Maga?
Let's focus on human progress. Early human cultures certainly had technique in their fighting, but it was neither as sophisticated nor as well developed as most cultures several millenia later. Moreover, even modern (and violent) tribal cultures lack the spare time to practice combat that is available to settled farming societies (or the post-industrial society that offered you the time you've used). That limits what you can teach to such people - anything that takes months of constant practice is useless. But it also limits what they can develop themselves. It's the nature of small populations that they never approach the same sophistication in skills or knowledge as larger societies unless those larger groups have no reason to develop the skills.
Take a look at unarmed fighting styles from most of the world prior to, say, 1800. Aside from a few specialized societies within countries of very high population, all were behind the "modern" best.
You also seem to be following the (admittedly widespread) myth of conflict and violence in early human societies. Wars and fighting certainly did take place, but were nowhere near the intensity we would recognize from modern equivalents. Battles meant to be to the death could very easily end with no one dying. These aren't people that spend all their time battling - a modern Westerner who actively seeks classes would be doing orders of magnitudes more in sparring.
I think maybe we're arguing past each other. I certainly agree, unarmed, unstructured fighting ends up being wrestling very often. But I've also seen someone accidentally do one of these flips. If someone charges you, and is not familiar with the maneuver, it's hard to avoid. Sure, it's not going to make the meek inherit the Earth. But all other things being equal, do you really think it wouldn't make a difference? That it wouldn't confer any advantage? Because if it can help, ever, it will matter.
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Was he very good? I mentioned it specifically because its dramatic, and because I have seen it be effective on people unprepared for it, including some who broadly speaking "knew what they were doing." I also admit that I've seen it done accidentally (!) and was impressed by the potential utility. Sure it's not going to take over all violent combat in the hypothetical tribe, but it's not likely to hurt them or leave them
Hrm. True on cheese, although it does retain (some) lactose. On reflection, yogurt was invented by the Turks precisely because they were intolerant (it's almost totally free of it). That said, the effects in fully intolerant people can go way beyond wind. Bloating, cramps, diarrhea, foul-smelling stools, gas, and in some cases nausea, slow growth, and weight loss.... it won't quite endear dairy products!
Fair enough.
That happens not to be the case. More the opposite.
Lactose intolerance is the genetic norm for humans. The mutation that allows easy consumption of cow's milk has offered a large advantage to humans who have it. It has, therefor proliferated where milk consumption became common. The gene for tolerance has spread to include most of Europe, Africa, and India as cattle herders of Indo-European and Bantu origin have replaced intolerant peoples.
Look it up. Places that only recently had access to cow's milk have upwards of 90% lactose intolerance. That's not an indicator that intolerance comes from being around milk too much! The intolerance is there or it isn't, it just shows up when you drink the stuff.
If that'd work it'd certainly be the best way.
Ever read Earth Abides? The argument's been made that tribal societies would have a harder time maintaining logic-based reasoning systems. Not sure I agree, but hunter-gatherers would have to transmit the thoughts by voice. The incentive to learn and maintain writing is too small. I wonder what such a society would do with Greek logic within an oral tradition....
So what are the simplest things that could be taught that would make a difference?
I would think crude clay dishes or storage devices would be something that could be made with out too much in the way of pre existing supporting tools and that could confer a reasonable advantage to a group.
If you can introduce a reasonable degree of clay working, then you could also try at the same time to develop a proto method of writing, whether that be an alphabet or one of the more common early forms. It would be interesting to see even if a basic written language had any signficant early advantage, say a word or sign that means "this pot has deer meat", or "this pot is for animal fat", or "this pot is for the storage of evil" etc
I would think crude clay dishes or storage devices would be something that could be made with out too much in the way of pre existing supporting tools and that could confer a reasonable advantage to a group.
If you can introduce a reasonable degree of clay working, then you could also try at the same time to develop a proto method of writing, whether that be an alphabet or one of the more common early forms. It would be interesting to see even if a basic written language had any signficant early advantage, say a word or sign that means "this pot has deer meat", or "this pot is for animal fat", or "this pot is for the storage of evil" etc