Re: How Early Could It Have Happened?
Fermented brewsky no doubt goes way way back in time, tens of thousands of years before the time of the Pyramids. Seemingly every primitive tribe in the world knew how to do it, even under hunter-gatherer Stone-Age style conditions. All kinds of fruit-eating animals have been known to get drunk - monkeys, birds, fruit bats, even coyotes. Just this past summer I saw plenty of coyote inebriation because they couldn't reach the wild plums up high on the limbs, so ate the over-ripe ones fallen on the ground instead.
Distillation requires specific gear; but even possums in Appalachia know how to do that. The Egyptians fermented agricultural grain, mainly barley, I believe. The Indians in my old neighborhood used manzanita berries and elderberries (the latter horribly laxative), often fermented in dugout canoes. Distilled hooch took over after the Gold Rush, then mass-produced fortified wines, and the average lifespan plummeted 75%.
One device I find interesting is the "invention" of the "first water pump" by Archimedes, called the Archimedes Screw. He simply saw them in action in Assyria and got credit for it in the Greek world. They had been in use in Nineveh hundreds of years before his time. Cordless drills have existed for tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of years, and were better than the ones we use today because they didn't even require batteries!
Re: How Early Could It Have Happened?
How did we make those pyramids, must have had some darn good surveyors, tools with smart workers
and now we find a whole lot of Maya with Lidar
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/08/s...idar-maya.html
Re: How Early Could It Have Happened?
Strings, sticks, and shadows did it all. Primitive geometry combined with non-union labor, heh heh. Seems like the bean counters have always been in charge. But they got their bowl of barley or millet long before modern men got their bowl of Wheaties or Corn Chex. The Maya had certain other incentives, sometimes more sanguine, it seems.
Re: How Early Could It Have Happened?
Archeologists can make a career out of dating the first fermented beverages. I cited the Egyptians because there is documentation of their process carved in stone. My wonder is that a pot-still can be made from coiled clay pieces. Copper tubing is not absolutely required. The one I saw at the Jamestown exhibit looked much like an alchemist's retort without a condensing coil (the moonshiner term is "Worm").
Fired and glazed pottery pre-dates farming by . . .well a lot.
I just picked distillation as another example of a technique or process that became common well after the technology to do it was available. This is a really easy one.
gunpowder and firearms' were also possible (in my view) for the Bronze Age Egyptians, and more likely for the technology available to the Romans of the 1st Century AD, but a little more involved. The key is knowing to treat wood ashes with urin to get the oxidizer, Potassium Nitrate.
Photography as a Daguerreotype is interesting to think about and relavent to this forum. The controlling technology seeming to revolve around Iodine and Sulfuric Acid . . .Considerably more involved than boiling beer and condensing the steam. Maybe the Romans could have done that. The Byzantine Greek more probably could have.
The Byzantine Greeks managed the so-called "Greek Fire" which is well documented as a real weapon, not mythology. Kept as a state secret, today the complex process of making it is lost. So is the mechanism for projecting it. There have been serious attempts to recreate Greek Fire but no success.
We can make an Atom Bomb but not Greek Fire. Surely we have the technology to do that . . .we just don't know how.
Re: How Early Could It Have Happened?
The Alcoholics of the Animal World
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...orld-81007700/
Many critters get high besides humans
It's Natures Way https://youtu.be/YsTK2LHZKPQ
Re: How Early Could It Have Happened?
Greek Fire was a sort Byzantine napalm they could shoot over the water. It no doubt had something like paraffin in it, among other things, allowing it to float atop the water while still violently burning. It's what kept their capitol protected for nearly a thousand years from invasion by sea. What it couldn't protect them from are there own sports riots, which once almost ended their civilization from within after a contentious chariot race when the Empress lost a lot of bet money and had the winning team executed. Nothing really changes. More people died in that riot than were killed fighting Goth Invaders outside the city walls at the same time.
Re: How Early Could It Have Happened?
While researching making glass filters, I found
World’s oldest glue used from prehistoric times till the days of the Gauls
https://www.cnrs.fr/en/worlds-oldest...ting%20objects.
turns out our ancients were NOT dummies
Duh!
Re: How Early Could It Have Happened?
There is no evidence that suggests the ancients, 'primitives', and others were any less intelligent then the species is now -- and some indication maybe more than now. :cool:
Re: How Early Could It Have Happened?
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Vaughn
There is no evidence that suggests the ancients, 'primitives', and others were any less intelligent then the species is now -- and some indication maybe more than now. :cool:
Take Caesar. When he had to have his army cross a very wide and rough part of the Rhine he had his engineers build a bridge that could withstand the fast current and be wide and strong enough to March his army, their wagons, horses, etc. over. And then once across to show the native Germans how strong his army was, marched them back across the bridge and destroy it.
Re: How Early Could It Have Happened?
OK . . .we are waaay off topic now, but here is my BS input on the ancients.
If space aliens (see the "History" Channel) did help the Egyptians build the Pyramids, why didn't they teach them how to make a stone arch . . .or distil ardent spirits? I don't think that pyramid-period Egyptians had the wheel yet either; not for another 500 years or so. Al;l are ideas ideas, concepts or techniques that were well within the abilities of the existing Egyptian culture around 2,500 BC.
Two thousand years later, the Greeks of the classical period still were not using the arch in architecture. . . .or distilling brandy from wine.