Old techniques that we could not improve

Old techniques that we could not improve

We modern humans like to believe that we are superior to riding, leech-using, not-hand-washing the humans who came before us. After all, we walked on the moon, and they mostly just wander in piles of their own garbage.

But despite all our advances in science and medicine, there are ancient techniques that we still can not do better than our ancestors. Of course, we have antibacterial soap and recycling centers, but they invented the wheel, and the wheel is the reason why today we can travel through once-impossible distances in a matter of hours, and also drive four blocks of Work homes at the grocery store because it seems like it could rain and we would not want to get any water stains on our shoes or anything.

The elders can not have done something as big as inventing Starbucks, but he was back in the eleventh century when someone realized that if you boil coffee beans in the water, you can stay awake all night dreaming of new ways to treat patients with blood-sucking LEEC Hes. Put it in your Starbucks cup and drink it.

1 Despite all the promises of SCI-FI, the wheel is still king

Hovercraft arrive! Said every science fiction mute magazine since the 1960s. In fact, after all this time, it seems hovercraft may not be coming, and the only tremendous technological progress related to the vehicles we are likely to see in the supposedly the age of space (which, according to all those Sci-Fi magazines of the 1960s is right now) is the super-boring self-driving car.

In spite of all our Jet-Packs and hovercraft-induced fantasies, humans have still not been able to improve the good old wheel, which the Smithsonian has been around for at least 5,500 years. And the first wheels were used to make pottery, which means that your set of casseroles made a longer history than the wheels of your Prius. Thus, baskets, flutes and boats. Yes, humans had to find a lot of pretty sophisticated technology before it had ever appeared to anyone that you could make a trolley move faster if you put a few circular objects under it.

About 300 years after the pottery wheel was invented, someone finally took the leap from making pans to making trolleys, and so humanity's need for terrifying speed was born. Today, the wheel makes long-distance trips, not only possible, but routine, is responsible for the deaths and injuries of millions of motorists, and helps casinos to collect millions of dollars from people who think that it might actually be possible to win roulette.

2 When all else fails, make a hole in her skull

Archaeologists dig up all sorts of weird and confusing things, but one of the most bizarre and confusing of all is the trepanned skull, a quirk that actually seems to be quite common to prehistoric societies from ancient Greece to South America.

If you are not familiar with the term "trepanned," it is a transitive verb meaning "to bore or otherwise make a hole in (the skull)," and it was generally done on a living patient. Anthropologists do not really agree on its purpose, although based on some cultures where trepanning was still practiced as recently as the 20th century, it was done to treat pain. Which is perfectly sensible, really, since who among us has not dreamed of migraine relief involving a hammer and a sharp object?

Although we can not say with certainty that the ancients used the procedure in the same way as modern doctors, there are some common medical ailments that are still treated by trepanation. According to an article in Patient Care, people who have Subungual hematoma experience severe pain caused by pressure buildup inside the skull, and the easiest way to relieve the pressure is, you guessed it, to break through a hole in the person's skull. So while you probably would not want to travel back in time for the top-of-the-line prehistoric medical care, as it turns out that the ancients did not know a few things that modern doctors do, too.

3 And you did not think trigonometry could suck more

Trigonometry is a word that makes most people break out in a cold sweat and remember all the Sines of high school, and also bows, Versins, excesses, dry, and cosecs. If you do not really know what these things are, then count yourself lucky for escaping one of the most heinous forms of the modern world of torture.

Modern trigonometry is supposed to have been invented by the ancient Greeks, which should not surprise you as they also invented the "bull of bronze," which was a torture and execution device that involved slow roasting someone in a cauldron in the shape of a bull.

But according to the Independent, the story of tormenting humans non-mathematically inclined with angles and measures actually predates the Greeks by about 1,000 years. A clay tablet known as Plimpton 322 suggests that the Babylonians not only used the equation of Pythagoras' right-angled triangle for centuries before Pythagoras used it, but they also used a version of the so sophisticated trigonometry that a mathematician says he was "in some ways ... superior to modern trigonometry."

So the lesson here is not that we should be seduced by the mathematical realization of the people who lived 3,700 years ago, but that we should be grateful that we have never had to study an even higher version of the mathematical torture that still haunts our nights.

4 The culture that reigned in the preservation of corpses was also good enough to treat body wounds

Here's a tip: The next time you pilot your drone into your child and then go to EMERGENCY to have that gaping wound stitched up, and the doctor offers to stick it shut with "Skin Adhesives," you should laugh because, besides the words "maybe you should go try the drone" he w ll be the stupidest thing you hear all day.

We still have not been able to improve sutures as the best way to repair wounds. Adhesive glue works sort of on an adult with an injury in a "low tension" part of the body, but it is hopeless for an active child, and the scar tends to look uglier than if you had just opted for the points of suture.

From what we know, the first people to suture the wounds were the Egyptians, about 5,000 years ago. The first doctors used cotton or hemp, silk, or tendons and arteries of animals. According to the flushing hospital, doctors still today use silk and "catgut," which is actually made from the intestine of a sheep. Silk and catgut are both "absorbable," which means they do not have to be removed after the wound heals. Thus, although doctors also use various other man-made materials, suturing is still the preferred and best method for stitching up serious injuries and ensuring that hospital patients stay where they belong afterwards. surgery.

5 We predict that this earthquake just happened

If there was a way to accurately predict earthquakes, it would solve a lot of problems, including giving Californians more free time because they will not always answer questions about why they choose to live in California when there are so many earthquakes. Yet modern geologists can not do much more than say, "Well, we're pretty sure there will be a pretty big earthquake somewhere in this part of the world in the next few decades," which is not very useful.

The best we can do so far is to use technology to detect earthquakes as they occur-seismometers can tell us when and where an earthquake occurs, as it happens.

So, imagine the geologists of the world and their collective consternation about learning that the Chinese had an earthquake detection machine that was just as accurate as the modern Seismometer. According to ancient origins, an astronomer and mathematician named Zhang Cheng invented an earthquake detection machine in 138 A.D., which would have detected an earthquake in a nearby town shortly after its introduction. When scientists recreated the device in 2005, they were able to prove that it could detect simulated earthquakes with the same precision as modern equipment. Unfortunately, Zhang's camera was remarkably accurate, but not good enough to spare Californians from having to answer this stupid quake question. New.

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6 The elders were better at making things shine

The human love of brilliant things is only surpassed by our love of pizza and self-taught. Long ago, at a time before pizza and self-taught, humans had only bright things to keep us happy, and those who did not have bright things were generally sad.

Because brilliant things were super important to our ancestors, they developed some really sophisticated processes to make things shine. According to everyday science, craftsmen who lived in gold and silver-loving societies 2,000 years ago had a process for gilding objects with precious metal sheet that we still can not duplicate Even manufacturers of solar cells and DVDs can not apply thin film with quite the same perfection. The researchers believe that some early craftsmen used Mercury sort of as a glue, which probably also means that early craftsmen did not really live long enough to enjoy the loot of their golden retreat.

Sometimes these techniques were used to add real gold and silver leaves to the objects and sometimes they used them to create expensive-looking forgery, which meant that in addition to loving the bright things the old ones had Talented crooks and criminals, just as we do. Some things never change.

7 How to reduce agricultural production in a modern way

People have been farming for most of human history. Of course, there has been great progress in technology-farm equipment and machinery has made some of the work faster and has increased our ability to cultivate on a much larger scale. But much of the work has yet to be done by hand, while some aspects of the agricultural industry have progressed, others have remained pretty much the same.

According to the Smithsonian, some modern farming techniques are actually inferior to the techniques used by the ancients. The Inca, who lived in the Andes, cultivated in rather hostile conditions, so they had to be innovative as a matter of survival. They built canals and cisterns to move the water around, and they built terraces so they could cultivate steep slopes. They selectively grew crops such as potatoes and corn, which could withstand harsh conditions. By the 1400s, the Inca cultivated more than one million hectares.

Then one day the Spaniards came and went, "your way of cultivating stinks.You must do it our way." And then half of the Inca population is dead and the rest of them mostly forgot how their ancestors have worked the land. Today, the Andes adopt the old farming methods because they are just more productive than the methods set up by the conquistadors. The moral of this story: the conquistadors were idiots.

8 Rome was not built in a day, but they had better concrete

Modern concrete is not usually considered an architectural wonder-concrete constructions are mostly just uninspired, the ugly slabs of human indifference. But concrete is still the most ubiquitous building material in the world. According to US News and the World Report, around the world about 19 billion tons of concrete are manufactured and used each year, accounting for a whopping 7 percent of all carbon emissions in the world.

The problem is that modern concrete is not very durable. Back in the early 1900s, engineers thought they were building structures that lasted for 1,000 years, but as it turns out, most modern concrete buildings have a lifespan of something like 50 to 100 years . One of the main factors in the deterioration of concrete buildings is the strengthening of steel - steel rust, which affects the structural integrity of a building in a way that is difficult to stop or even to diagnose .

The Romans, on the other hand, knew how to make concrete-the concrete Pantheon has been standing for 2,000 years. Modern concrete is made from limestone and clay, but the Romans made it from lime and volcanic ash. The result was not only more durable than the modern "Portland Cement" formula, it was also more environmentally friendly. Roman concrete bakes at much lower temperatures than the modern formula, which means it emits less carbon dioxide. Of course, the Romans also wore these mute helmets with brooms on them, so they were not superior in every way.

9 How Archimedes screwed with agriculture

Humans need water as much as we need bright things, pizzas and self-taught things. For centuries, obtaining water has been a fundamental problem - early humans had to either understand how to carry large amounts of water or just settle beside lakes, rivers and streams, and even then it was difficult to cultivate anything on a large scale because no one had really solved the problem of irrigation.

Then this guy, Archimedes, has arrived. Archimedes was a Greek scientist who (supposedly) was faced with the problem of removing a large amount of water from a ship's hold, although some suggest that his invention was just improving on an already existing design .

An Archimedean screw is basically a screw inside a pipe that, when turned, draws water. In Egypt, the device was used to irrigate the Nile Delta. The device allowed people to get large amounts of water without having to carry a bunch of buckets around all the time, which was great for efficiency but probably terrible for bucket sales.

It is a very old technology, but it is so effective that Archimedes screws are still used today in irrigation and sewage treatment, and to move around cereals or plastic pellets. This is a great example of technology that is so simple and brilliant there is really no need to play with it.

10 It was probably only aliens

Concrete, steel, and good old wood may be America's building materials of choice, but nothing compares quite to stone in terms of beauty. Humans have been building stone things for millennia-the stone is used for walls, buildings, sidewalks, and countertops and remains one of the most expensive modern materials. This is because every stone must be individually cut and shaped, and we still can not do better than our ancestors could.

The Egyptians had stone cut to a precise science-according to ancient origins, archaeologists are still not sure how they did it because their work is as good or better than what we can do today. Egyptian craftsmen could cut and shape the stone without modern tools or measuring devices, which is quite remarkable when you consider how difficult it is to perfectly align the edges on something as simple as a paper plane. Huge boxes of granite found at Serape, which were meant to hold the mummy's remains of priceless bulls, have perfectly flat surfaces, parallel construction, and sharp corners, far beyond what you'd expect a craftsman could create with primitive tools.

The ancient origins stop by saying that Egyptian stone cutters were strangers, but nine out of ten conspiracy theorists are almost sure that's how all the precision can be explained. We are more in the "artisans who really cared to produce quality work despite limited resources" camp but hey, you never know.

الوسوم: history