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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:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3129/
Could you theoretically do actual research on new techniques for doing ancient things? Like if in the comic the man actually did find a way to use copper and it was realistic for stone-age people
This kind of happens accidentally sometimes. Like it turns out you can use pond scum as a very basic medium for some very shitty but functioning solar pannels, we could have invented solar power as soon as we could work copper and tin if it werent for the whole needing to know all the reasons why you would even want to do that.
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.
There are some great patterns for electric looms available specifically to make really old weaves. That's basically a super modern way to do something medieval. Similar pattern exist for embroidery machines, since old-timey embroidery is generally not a thing modern machines do (well).
I'm sure there's similar things available for a knitting machine
If you want to do modern loam, you're basically buying laboratory-made, specifically mixed loam. It's very hightech really, compared to "guy walking through field to spot OK-ish loam".
Sounds like what Jorge Spräve (the slingshot guy on Youtube) did. He developed a mechanism that could be attached to any bow, with multiple arrows stored for rapid fire, draw assist, holds the string back at full draw, and has a trigger mechanism. Apart from the draw assist (which used slingshot bands), everything was theoretically producable during the middle ages, it just was never invented
This sounds suspiciously like a crossbow.
Repeating crossbows are abaolutely a thing though. There's examples from ancient China. That being said, they tend to suck because they're really low powered to make them easy to shoot rapid-fire
more like it attaches the quiver to the side of the longbow as a magazine to make the bow repeating. he did make one for the crossbow that is a lot more weildy though
edit: inventor and review/historical analysis. decide for urself what the wacky thing is
The invention in question is called the "Instant Legolas" for reference
It's possible for someone to have made one as an experiment and it not being found, but it's also not very practical for war. Warbows needed to have 100-200lb draw weight to be particularly effective in battle. Trying to rapid-fire 5 shots from those bows would have been exhausting, and reloading the Instant Legolas was slow and would likely have reduced the total number of arrows you could fire throughout a battle. And having an extended period of time where you're unable to fire back when attacked is a major drawback. In modern firearm training, reloads are taught to minimize the amount of time the gun is incapable of firing, as a modern example.
Another big drawback to the Instant Legolas is that the ammunition needs to be shorter, reducing its overall weight thus further limiting its effectiveness against armor. While this does have the benefit of limiting your opponent's ability to collect your ammunition and fire it back against you, your side is then similarly limited unless your archers take the time to remove the Instant Legos from their bows in the middle of battle
The Instant Legolas would also have doubled or tripled the cost of bows and would have made them more difficult to store, which were significant problems with even extant equipment. There's plenty of example of soldiers abandoning or selling armor in favor of something less protective aimply because said equipment made marching too hard.
"prepared-core flake-based tool-making" is probably funnier than the comic imo