> Whenever someone talks about how smart we are genetically, ask yourself if this is the kind of smart we were 10,000+ years ago.
You want a more shocking thought?
Imagine how much knowledge spanning the 400,000 years since this specimen is forever lost to us because it was limited to oral tradition.
These people didn't had a wealth knowledge available one click-away to build upon, but I see no reason to believe they dramatically less intellectually capable than us because of genetics. They certainly possessed a lot of empirical knowledge about the things around them, necessary for survival.
Considering how some tribes knew for eons about the uses of medicinal herbs which are today used on our modern drugs, it's fascinating to think about what we might be missing. If even relatively recent knowledge (300 BC) gets lost [1], imagine how much science will "rediscover" things our descendants might have already known.
There's a relevant book from 1715, which I discovered while researching the existence of "ever-burning lamps": The History of Many Memorable Things Lost Which Were In Use Among the Ancients - https://openlibrary.org/books/OL6961227M/The_history_of_many...
I believe it does refer to Damascus steel, as well as many other lost Classical through Dark Ages inventions. It digresses into talking about bygone social customs in places, but many of the descriptions are excellent and illustrative.
You're welcome! It did take me some hours to get through most of it. The content is unique enough to make it worthwhile. I was especially intrigued not only by the excellent breakdown of "ever-burning lamps", which are a more or less real thing, but by a mention of ancient Greek water organs, a musical instrument which involved water inside some sort of tubes.
You want a more shocking thought?
Imagine how much knowledge spanning the 400,000 years since this specimen is forever lost to us because it was limited to oral tradition.
These people didn't had a wealth knowledge available one click-away to build upon, but I see no reason to believe they dramatically less intellectually capable than us because of genetics. They certainly possessed a lot of empirical knowledge about the things around them, necessary for survival.
Considering how some tribes knew for eons about the uses of medicinal herbs which are today used on our modern drugs, it's fascinating to think about what we might be missing. If even relatively recent knowledge (300 BC) gets lost [1], imagine how much science will "rediscover" things our descendants might have already known.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel