JessLlama

My friend said “the typewriter is urs if u can fix it”

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Minecraft Players:

In reality, technologies are frequently discovered, lost and rediscovered, often multiple times, and frequently in parallel. A Dark Age in one region may be a time of rapid technological development in another region, and it’s not uncommon to encounter evidence of ancient civlisations using technologies a thousand years out of whack with the “proper” order of discovery… where “proper” is defined in terms of the order in which those technologies were discovered in Western Europe - there’s that Eurocentrism again.

I mean, just to give you an idea of how flexible the order in which technologies are developed can be and how ultimately wrong-headed the notion of linear technological progress is, there are Central American civilisations that had indoor plumbing, central heating and hot and cold running water before inventing the wheel. Some of the First Nations in what is now Eastern Canada had sophisticated climate models and reliable weather prediction - including functioning barometers and other simple meteorological instruments - before they figured out metallurgy.

We still aren’t 100% sure how the Romans made their (damn-near-everlasting) cement, or the exact composition of original Damascus steel, iirc. And often Roman houses belonging to the wealthy would have heated floors, as well. Plus, there was that…whole little thing with the Roman Aqueducts, when they just…decided to move several hundred thousand tons of water, several hundred miles, over valleys and mountains. You know. Like you do. 

The Romans had heated public baths! Everyone loved soap and perfume! The soap was apparently fantastic! You could go anywhere there was a market and buy body oil and even food from vending machines–in ancient Greece! 

Your average European house in the 1900s, supposedly at the “peak” of their ‘exploratory’ (imperialism) boom, were cold and drafty, with no plumbing, and no heating. Sanitation amounted to literally shitting in a fancy pot and then throwing it out into the yard, or the street. 

There were no sewers, so when this happened, the shit would just…chill there, until it rained, and then things got ugly.  

The Minoans, hundreds and hundreds of years before, had complex city-wide plumbing systems, and flushing toilets. 

The River Thames was so polluted with literal, actual human fecal matter that in the 1800s, the English government had to pass a law banning people from dumping shit directly into the river.