Sean Kelly wrote:
Walter Bright wrote:
Sean Kelly wrote:
Walter Bright wrote:
Even writing has its problems. What are you going to write on? Bark?
Animal hides? How are you going to make paper? Ink? A
hunter-gatherer tribe may find it not worth the effort, and so the
writing will not "take".
The Maya wrote on treated Birch Bark, which apparently worked great
until Spanish Missionaries burned all their libraries :-) Sumerians
used fired clay tablets for writing, and treated animal hides were
pretty popular until relatively recently (Vellum, for instance).
Vegetable dyes would make decent ink, if needed.
It's the "treating" that's the problem. Do you know how to treat
animal hides? I sure don't! I saw the process once on TV and it looked
rather involved.
I know that hide can be tanned using urine, which I suppose is why
tanneries were reputed to smell so horrible. It would have to be
scraped clean without wrecking it as well, perhaps with a Clam shell?
Either way, charcoal on cave walls would definitely be easier :-)
Could you even recognize iron ore?
Or dig it up? Some of the earliest chapters in the Bible mention Iron
so I imagine the knowledge has been around for some time, but definitely
not before agriculture.
(EG, Goliath had an iron spear, in the middle of the bronze age).
Most of the early iron came from pure-iron meteorites -- they knew about
iron, but finding it was pure luck.
