Sunday, April 21, 2019

Who Invented Anything? Collective Primacist Claims

It's a good question why there is any "orthodox" pre-historic ancient history. Nobody knows what happened with any clarity. Cultures that maintain an oral tradition from 10,000+ years ago have imbued it with poetry and distortion. Archaeological records are scanty and end up as fodder for wild speculation. Even modern studies of DNA as surveys of populations aren't conclusive and end up as more speculation fodder.

One fairly common trope in ancient histories is "this group invented the ______", whether it's writing, the wheel, bronze, pants, or whatever. The claim to primacy of that invention is often associated with a "We Rule, You Drool" supremacist claim. "Oh look, we invented pants."

It's probably more accurate to say ancient technologies like bronze, the wheel, and weaving were discovered by accident or copied from natural analogs and then slowly perfected over many generations of men. Even recent "inventions" of the industrial age are similar, and even today, where technology is abstruse, and far removed from natural analogs, new inventions are completely dependent and derivative of prior inventions.

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