Abadoned Technologies

Cook

Banned
I just got a reply from a mate in the state’s anthropology department who has a few interesting details concerning the Tasmanian Aborigines:

  • They stopped eating fish. No good reason has ever been determined and seems to be entirely a cultural tradition. Given that the rivers of Tasmania teem with fresh water fish and giant crayfish it is extremely odd.
  • They didn’t have composite tools. It isn’t know if they ever did have them.
  • They lived alongside glaciers (and yes, had and could make fire)
  • Did not have dingos to hunt with. Since dingos are belived to have been brought to Australia as a hunting dog about 5000 years ago this does not constitute a lost technology.
  • Were the longest isolated group in history, being cut off from the rest of the world for 12,000 years.
 
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I just got a reply from a mate in the state’s anthropology department who has a few interesting details concerning the Tasmanian Aborigines:

  • They stopped eating fish. No good reason has ever been determined and seems to be entirely a cultural tradition. Given that the rivers of Tasmania swarm with fresh water fish it is extremely odd.
  • They didn’t have composite tools. It isn’t know if they ever did have them.
  • They lived alongside glaciers (and yes, had and could make fire)
  • Did not have dingos to hunt with. Since dingos are belived to have been brought to Australia as a hunting dog about 5000 years ago this does not constitute a lost technology.
  • Were the longest isolated group in history, being cut off from the rest of the world for 12,000 years.


They didn't eat fish? Wow, that is an odd one
 
Borosilicate glass, like Duran, is indeed stronger than ordinary glass, and its rate of thermal expansion is about a third. Lab-glass is usually borosilicate glass.

It would, however, break if hit hard enough, and a borosilicate beaker I dropped on our garage floor did indeed break, while a similar beaker held when dropped upon a wooden floor. It certainly wouldn't dent...

I actually dropped that beaker mere seconds after I had used it to boil down sulfuric acid, had to pour chalk and sand on it...Ah, childhood.
 
Muskets were abandoned (or rather, delegalised) in Japan because it was clear that they offered some lowly peasant a very good chance of killing a samurai.

Within decades of their introduction to Japan, the Japanese had more muskets than any other nation on the planet, and usually, they were more advanced and superior to the ones brought by the Portuguese.

China and innovation is something of a myth. The Chinese liked to invent things, but they didn't really have to urge to take it further.

For instance, Zheng He had brought his magnificent fleets to the East African Coast in a show of power, and demanded some form of tribute. He got giraffes.

The emperors of the time were not really interested in subjugating these people, rather so long as they acknowledged the superiority of the Chinese, they would be left alone. This is unlike the Europeans whereby technological development went hand in hand with colonial expansion and the means with which to subjugate the local populations was through innovation.

Then of course, China turned in on itself and wallowed in isolation, which just about ended any chance of them expanding overseas like the Western Europeans did.
 
The Mesoamericans gave up the wheel. The Japanese famously abandoned the musket.
Mesoamericans had wheels? Aside from toys? If not, how could they 'give them up'? If so, I've never heard of them.
...
And the Japanese musket thing was a very deliberate piece of social engineering.
The Japanese did not "abandon" muskets. They just didn't value or develop them, considering the bow to be superior.
Agreed, AFAIK Mesoamerica never had the wheel. And samurai deliberately suppressed the musket because it meant any commoner could kill a samurai...:eek::eek: It wasn't that the bow was better...tho as a matter of fact, had Wellington had Welsh longbowmen (& they were in the main Welsh, not English, contrary to the myth:rolleyes:) at Waterloo, he'd have inflicted more casualties than with muskets: the bows were more accurate & faster-firing.:eek: (Also longer-ranged IIRC.:eek:)

As for China, there was a social issue at play. Commerce was considered "uncool", so it was deprecated (not unlike ancient Greece, where slaves were supposed to do work, not citizens), & innovation was thus not valued. Also, a lot of places where there was invention, it was in a royal monopoly & designed to solve a particular problem (salt extraction comes to mind), but not made available for other use. The famous example of Zheng, overseas exploration, & ships had more to do with internal court politics than being Chinese...

Elvin's equilibrium trap seems not to take account of the issue of primogeniture, which both enabled major projects for private profit & provided profit... It wasn't practised in China.
 
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Cushitic peoples have a taboo against fish as well, Somalis in particular. OT, but this is why so many fisherman resorted to piracy; there's no internal market for their product in Somalia, they relied on selling south to Kenya or to India, etc. But with no one willing to invest in boats or take risks on shipments, it just isn't profitable enough in the region to sustain. It's also contributed to their current famine; while fish would hardly solve the problem and many poor and desperate Somalis would eat anything they could, there's plenty just off the coast that could be exploited if they had any sort of native fishing industry. But they really don't have much. It just compound the issues there, very sad.

I just got a reply from a mate in the state’s anthropology department who has a few interesting details concerning the Tasmanian Aborigines:

  • They stopped eating fish. No good reason has ever been determined and seems to be entirely a cultural tradition. Given that the rivers of Tasmania teem with fresh water fish and giant crayfish it is extremely odd.
 
...Roman concrete...
The explanation for the former seems to be the lack of volcanic sands else where in the empire
The Roman concrete was actually better than the modern because of something else they put in it: volcanic ash. This has recently (well, in the last 20 or so years...:rolleyes:) been rediscovered. Adding ash makes it more durable.:cool: This was learned by accident,:rolleyes: when roadbuilders used ash from incinerators, when the incinerator operators couldn't figure out what to do with the ash.:eek::rolleyes:
 
And samurai deliberately suppressed the musket because it meant any commoner could kill a samurai...:eek::eek: It wasn't that the bow was better...tho as a matter of fact, had Wellington had Welsh longbowmen (& they were in the main Welsh, not English, contrary to the myth:rolleyes:) at Waterloo, he'd have inflicted more casualties than with muskets: the bows were more accurate & faster-firing.:eek: (Also longer-ranged IIRC.:eek:)
But using a longbow requires years of training and muscle building. Any damn fool can pick up a musket and fire in the general direction of Frenchmen.
 
China seems to have been better than Europe at having elites in a position to, um, interfere with natural progress. Not necessarily in bad way:

On one hand we get great governmental projects.

On the other, independent merchants and overseas enterprise?

There were a whole lot of independent Chinese merchant communities in South-East Asia. You don't see overseas enterprise on the scale of Europe simply because there wasn't much demand for goods from overseas. In secotrs where there was demand (e.g. spices) you found Chinese merchant communities engaging in trade.

The same is true of a lot of Asian countries- the Indian states were in the same condition. There just wasn't much they needed to trade externally for.
 
There were a whole lot of independent Chinese merchant communities in South-East Asia. You don't see overseas enterprise on the scale of Europe simply because there wasn't much demand for goods from overseas. In secotrs where there was demand (e.g. spices) you found Chinese merchant communities engaging in trade.

The same is true of a lot of Asian countries- the Indian states were in the same condition. There just wasn't much they needed to trade externally for.

Which really doesn't change that the Chinese government did more to interfere with that and block that from developing further than say, France.

Yes, I picked France intentionally. The Netherlands and England are too extreme as an example of "Europe was interested".

When a given country is looking at the rest of the world as irrelevant barbarians, and discouraging or outlawing overseas trade, it becomes rather difficult to develop a commercial economy.

There's not much of an equivalent even to the herring industry in such a situation, or at least not while the anti-merchant forces are interfering.
 

Incognito

Banned
I think nuclear-power will be/is moving into “Abadoned Technologies” category.

Too bad – AFAIK despite recent events it has a lot of potential to be “green” technology :(.
 
No-one's quite sure how Damascus Steel was produced (numerous attempts have been made to replicate it, but so far none have managed it).
 
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