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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
Human sophistication and intelligence is not the same a technological advancements.
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.
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.