this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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xkcd #3129: Archaeology Research

Title text:

The academic archaeology establishment is suppressing my breakthroughs because of the disruption it would bring to their prepared-core flake-based toolmaking industry.

Transcript:

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Source: https://xkcd.com/3129/

explainxkcd for #3129

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[–] squaresinger@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

The concept, while interesting, doesn't make a lot of sense. Prior to the industrial revolution (and also all throught the beginning of it), most inventions weren't all that difficult to make. With just a handful of techniques, you could go quite far when starting out with stone-age technology.

If you take the information from a handful of Wikipedia pages to the stone ages it would take maybe a few years or decades to go from stone-age technology to steam engines.

Up until the early industrial revolution the limiting factor for technological innovation was mostly information.

So when going back with the knowledge of all the innovation that happened since the stone ages it's quite easy to make basically anything happen from there.

Remember, there's a patent for the crank. That means, we had a fully-fledged patent system before we came up with the idea to put two right-angles into a rod.