ASBeans (well, grasses) from the future
I would have thought most efforts to teach people in a simple society inventions that take a more complicated society with greater specialisation and a greater concentration of population and more security to maintain would be doomed to failure, but why is that's what's coming to everyone's mind, trying to teach people things they're inevitably going to forget and abandon?
Wouldn't it be better to dump huge quantities of hardy, productive seed from the future on a river basin somewhere and let people congregate and multiply there, developing agriculture by themselves? Remaining there for the time the stuff is edible would be natural. People would start trying to store the grain at some point, and they'd become sedentary in time. Skipping domestication (or half-skipping it) would be weird, but they should learn it elsewise.
Or was there some rule I missed where you can't take things back with you?
I would have thought most efforts to teach people in a simple society inventions that take a more complicated society with greater specialisation and a greater concentration of population and more security to maintain would be doomed to failure, but why is that's what's coming to everyone's mind, trying to teach people things they're inevitably going to forget and abandon?
Wouldn't it be better to dump huge quantities of hardy, productive seed from the future on a river basin somewhere and let people congregate and multiply there, developing agriculture by themselves? Remaining there for the time the stuff is edible would be natural. People would start trying to store the grain at some point, and they'd become sedentary in time. Skipping domestication (or half-skipping it) would be weird, but they should learn it elsewise.
Or was there some rule I missed where you can't take things back with you?