Here's the premise...

You are 21. In 6 months you alone will step through a door with a small backpack into prehistoric earth. Other people there know nothing of today's technology and likely do not speak your language. The world is completely unspoiled and functionally equivalent to prehistoric earth.

The question....

What do you learn\do in the next 6 months and what do you plan to take with you? You only have private resources - you're not a superhero or superspy.

What would your plans be?

- Sigurd

Pottery, Physics, Chemistry, food preservation, brewing, basic gardening, botanics, first aid. Sign language/ figuring out unmistakeable gestures.

There's too much important to learn for only six months. You will get nowhere with that. Likely, you'll get eaten by the brutes.

Funny, on Radio Paradise 'Monkey to Man' by Elvis Costello is playing as I write this. Struck me that this fits...

_________________
"The purpose of the game is to entertain the players and the GM. The rest is just semantics."
-by Munin from the forum-

Kind of how I felt when I reading this, Your knowledge may scare them and labeled as
a witch. Or to try gain your knowledge they knock you in the head while you sleep
and eat you.

Prehistoric earth? I would learn metalworking and take with me the basic tools and know-how to mine, smelt and temper high-grade iron and steel. Give my new people advanced weaponry and we'd rule the world.

PaladinSix

Portable computer (hardened if possible) with solar charger, and as much practical documentation and reference material (things like Diderot's encyclopedia) on it as is possible; some litterature too in case you get bored or need inspiration, etc.

A powerful air-gun or other low ammo weight ranged weapon, and lots of ammo.

Survival/camping gear, i.e; survival blanket, survival knife, fire-starting kit, a few illumination flares, a 30' rope, mosquito netting, first-aid kit, a hand-cranked electric lamp, etc. This will be needed before you pick up more locally sustainable methods and techniques.

But shopping isn't the only thing to do in those six months, a good physical preparation, courses in self-defence, survival, field anthropology, etc, could seem lke a good idea.

Anyway I have to wonder if there's any particular need for outsiders to come and found civilisations...

_________________
«Fair is what we see, Fairer what we have perceived, Fairest what is still in veil.»
—Nicolaus Stenonius

Pleasant Sophistry - Prime directive be damned.

The prep time is to narrow your focus onto core essentials. You'd also need to be young, healthy, and fertile to win a family.

Metal working was my first consideration as well. My thought had been that you need one or two really good metal working hammers - if you have the hammer to break up iron blooms you can make a surprising number of things. Rocks can be anvils but there is no replacing a hammer.

Seeds - I can't think of anything that would go further for stability than freeze dried or preserved seeds.

And then books. I thought about the computer thing too but realistically I can't think of one lasting long enough and I don't think there would be that much that I could teach, assuming is wasn't "eaten by the brutes.

So much would be nice, but what would actually work?

I like the answers so far... Any others?


Sigurd

I am not sure if metalworking is such a good idea. If you have no idea of it, six months is nothing to get a notion how to do it. A lot of it is experience from actual work that you won't find written down anywhere.
Also, I have doubts, if you should begin with the end of the evolution of civilisation. You have to care for the basics first and that is providing enough food for the miners, smelters and smiths, who will have no time to forage or hunt.

_________________
"The purpose of the game is to entertain the players and the GM. The rest is just semantics."
-by Munin from the forum-

Learn to make soap. Boiling animal fat and the ashes of burned plants in water? I can't do it, but I guess in 6 months I could learn.

If there was spare time - antibiotics of any kind. I don't know where to start there, but it'd make more of an impact than anything else I can think of.

a fully staffed aircraft carrier

_________________
Ken Snellings
CHMP Member
Fredericksburg, Virginia, United States of America

To try to get someone else to go in my stead.



if that should fail:
some rifles, shotguns and revolvers, a lot of hiking equipment, lots of knives. Medical equipment. some horses, with sadles.
as much tools as i could mannage, and lots of nails.
... and books.. lots of books.

_________________
"Ofnær nefi" kvað karl, var skotinn í auga."

(To close to the nose, he said, when he was shot in the eye)


www.stridshest.no

I would find out how to prospect for coal and iron and take equipment needed for this.

_________________
Plots and schemes are the same thing..

Funny how some people will try to cheat, I'm afraid neither horse nor aircraft carrier will fit in the one-man gate (or small backpack for that matter) alluded to in the initial premise.


It's just that, given the great opportunity to give a new start to civilisation, I'm a bit amused by the unanimous "let's immediately start a new iron age" reaction. Old habits die hard.

Anyway, I think for more precise answers, you should give us more details; human prehistory spans tens of millenia, what kind of society ("brutes" to some enlightened 21st century posters here) is expected on the other side of the gate? Peaceful hunting&gathering Earth-Mother worshippers or violent pastoral War-God cultists? And what of the terrain, climate, etc?

And, I forgot that in my last post, I'll add a couple kg of salt if there was still room in that backpack and the dropping point was far from the sea. A supply of concentrated Vitamin C might be a good idea too.

_________________
«Fair is what we see, Fairer what we have perceived, Fairest what is still in veil.»
—Nicolaus Stenonius

Prehistoric earth is so far back I wonder what good one could achieve.

If dropped into a later time I might think to bring engineering and medicine, democracy, courts and human rights to an existing country and posiably reduce hundreds of years of human suffering.

"Prehistoric" is a much bigger jump and dealing with smaller tribes I can't conceive of an effective way to communicate with. My first thought would be to try to avoid the trip and after that to bring modern body armor and weapons and enough synthroid to keep me alive for a few years just in case I make it that long. If there is any room left: antibiotics and the means to make more.

_________________
Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

While there aren't any "unspoilt" areas of the world to go to anymore, there are still enough areas that are barely beyond stone age technology which one could go to and test out how much of a difference one person could make. Just look at all of the volunteers that go to the most remote places of the third world to try and help out. Even with external funding and modern accouterments, their impact is worthy, yet small and all to often overshadowed by larger forces. Going back through time all alone would be that much harder.

That being said, I would take knowledge of steam power and engineering.

I still would try to get the horses trough the door. In prehistoric times. Horses was to small to be used for anny work. even in "ancient" egypt, they could not be used to ride on... I think a breeding stock of modern horses would make a great impact on the culture.

If I only could take knowledge: then Shipbuilding perhaps...

_________________
"Ofnær nefi" kvað karl, var skotinn í auga."

(To close to the nose, he said, when he was shot in the eye)


www.stridshest.no

Sadly, antihistamines would probably be #1 on my list.

After that, penicillin. A good knife and a cast iron pot would also probably be very useful. Some modern insulating clothes - hat, gloves and jacket. Then my glasses. Possibly a good axe as well.

I'd learn to build a fire without matches, learn bow making and fletching (archery practice wouldn't hurt either). Spruce up on my knowledge of edible wild foods. Learn to make jerky.

_________________
Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE! -- Agatha Heterodyne

Following up on something Nichola said, I think I'd also want as many pairs of my glasses as I could carry, and a pistol to shoot myself when the last pair breaks.

PaladinSix

LOL - ditto!

_________________
Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

It's the "great man" myth of invention. Inventions like metalworking don't arise because one man has a brilliant idea. They arise through multiple confluent events. The society has to be ready for the invention or it can't take advantage of it.

Suppose, for a moment, that you were an expert metallurgist in this scenario. Suppose you even brought with you some samples of iron. What would the locals think? "Too hard. Can't make anything out of it. Flint is much more versatile. See, I can make any tool I need in a matter of minutes."

And when you set to making more iron, you find you need ore - pray that you can find it locally - and a furnace and bellows and pottery and charcoal. That's a lot to get organized and built. You'll need quite a payoff to make it worthwhile for your confederates.

But what will you make? A plow to put behind the non-existent draft horse, to plant non-existent crop varieties? Nails and a saw to build houses no better than what they already have, or ships they don't know how to sail? Weapons for a war they aren't organized to fight?

It is ironic that iron is a recurring choice, because the ability to make iron predated the iron age by about a thousand years. That's how long it took for other developments to occur that made iron worthwhile. But the principle applies to pretty much any great technology.

So what am I bringing in my knapsack. Maize, rice, wheat. If I'm heading to a rain-sodden island off the northwest coast, potatoes. If I have a choice in the matter and my goal is truly to plant the seeds of civilization, I'm heading to a warm, wet, mountainous land, and I'm bringing modern rice varieties for paddies. With luck I might knock a thousand years or so off the timeline.

Animal husbandry, crop rotation, antibiotics, sanitation, medicine, chemistry, archery, some modern staple crops.

Lots of things that are useful that don't need lots of preparation. Some very important things are only an idea or a knowledge. But you are right that not everything is that way.

You don't need R-22 to make a basic refigerator. Bread mold is penicillin but the breakthrough for penicillin came with the discovery of the moldy cantaloupe in 1943, and the results of fermentation on corn-steep liquid produced 2.3 million doses in time for the invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1944. Bad sanitation proceedures may have killed more people then all the wars in history.

You don't need a brilliant man when you can start with the right answers that are useful.

_________________
Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

No, but you do need some good quality metal tubing, which requires metallurgical skills not achieved until the Industrial Revolution. I'd happily wager that under the terms of the OP, even Gilligan's Professor couldn't make a practical working refrigerator.

But even if he could, it still would not be meaningful to the development of civilization. It's what I call the "man on the moon" fallacy. You've heard it before. "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we make a tennis ball that you can use in the rain?" If you throw unlimited resources as a problem you can usually succeed once or twice. But it's orders of magnitude more difficult to invent something that you can mass produce and change society with.

So even if you were able to build one or two refrigerators, those initial referigerators would soon be out of service because of poor materials and lack of parts. The only way you could prevent that would be if the value of the refrigerators was so huge that society would dedicate large portions of its resources to maintaining them. Chilled beer isn't enough.

(This phenomenon is very well known to international development agencies.)

As for penicillin - again assuming you could isolate, purify, and store the stuff. And assuming you had a working hypodermic to deliver it. It would take tremendous resources to maintain the infrastructure to product it. And where is the payoff? Sure, it cures lots of infectious diseases, but in a pre-modern society infectious disease is much less of a problem than simple war and starvation. Would your subjects set aside the resources required for that payoff?

(Hint: Today penicillin costs pennies per dose, yet there are places in this world you can't find it.)

--

In the spirit of the original post, I add another idea. Glassmaking and especially glassblowing. Requires few precursor technologies. Useful for lots of things, and enables many other inventions. Like distilling . . . the perfect use for the grains I brought.

you don't need glassmaking nor metalworking skills to make a working still. Pottery can do that for you and it is a lot easier to manage than the aforementioned.

_________________
"The purpose of the game is to entertain the players and the GM. The rest is just semantics."
-by Munin from the forum-

Actually, in a pre-modern society, infectious disease is a huge problem, much bigger than war and likely larger than starvation. Penicillin, once introduced with a feasible production method, would almost certainly persist, if only available to the wealthy.

I would also note that the only places in this world that are short on penicillin are locations where one group of people is actively trying to destroy another. Everywhere else, it is readily available for those who can afford it.

_________________
Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from SCIENCE! -- Agatha Heterodyne

The usefulness of Penicillin vs the cost would probably make it worth making a extra money for. Even the poor could afford it if given a reasonable chance. Even the rich taxing the poor would find they got more money from living taxpayers then it cost them to provide Penicillin when necessary. It can be grown in vats of water and corn syrup - not a complicated or expensive process.

Crop rotation and higher yield crops, animal husbandry, medicine would increase the production of food, nutrition, survival etc. With higher production the poor get less poor, the rich get to tax more and get more rich. It is what has powered the modern era but it could be introduced effectively much earlier.

Something as simple as the Black Plague: "stop killing the cats! Kill the rats you idiots!", don't live in your own sewage, drink clean water, get more protein. Government cheese and grainaries, elementary education.

There are lots of low cost high value changes that can be introduced.

I'm pretty sure basic refrigeration would be easy to do with air as refrigerant, a bellows pump and lead piping run off a windmill or water wheel. Add copper wire and a load stone and you've got a generator instead. You don't need a refrigerator in every house - even a single cool room in the castle would be useful.
There are lots of low cost high value changes that can be introduced.

But I feel to have a major effect these ideas have to be introduced in a society with written language and existing in at least a basic farm economy. Bringing "magic" to a prehistoric tribe is posiably useful to the tribe but oral history is not a good means of conveying knowledge from generation to generation and if it never spreads past the tribe then it's good is extremely limited.

Dependable advances in science and knowledge come with written language and ideas shared across times and distances - one idea building on another.

If you want to have an idea work you just need to show the rich how they benefit from it. If well fed, healthy, educated peasants means the king gets richer then it shall be (and make sure the church gets their cut also).

_________________
Member of the CoE (Council of Elitists)

Key words: "feasible production method". A little googling gives us this link with explicit instructions.

http://eschatonmanagement.blogspot.com/ ... tasty.html

A quick list of things we need:

Penicillum culture. We'll assume you bring that with you. Note that any impurities may be fatal.
Sterilizable tanks.
Aerators.
Purified water.
Lactose, sodium nitrate, dipotassium phosphate, magnesium phosphate, calcium carbonate, phenyl acetic acid. All must be pure and sterile.
Filtering material, such as parachute silk
A weak acid and a weak base
Amyl acetate or ether
Aluminum oxide powder or asbestos
Freeze drying equipment
Microscopes and slides (for testing the activity of the penicillin)

I think you'll find just getting purified water will be challenge enough to derail your ambitions.



If only that were true. Drug shortages are endemic in most of Africa, due not to war but corruption, bad governance, and lack of trained medical personnel.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articl ... id=1906855

We're flirting with thread highjacking here, so I'll just finish with this point: If penicillin was really that valuable and that accessible, the Malawians noted in the link would surely make their own. The fact that they are familiar with the benefits and yet are content to have access to it only occasionally indicates that Malawian society has other priorities. So to, I expect, would our prehistoric subjects.