Sean Kelly wrote:
Walter Bright wrote:
Even writing has its problems. What are you going to write on? Bark?
Animal hides? How are you going to make paper? Ink? A hunter-gatherer
tribe may find it not worth the effort, and so the writing will not
"take".
The Maya wrote on treated Birch Bark, which apparently worked great
until Spanish Missionaries burned all their libraries :-) Sumerians
used fired clay tablets for writing, and treated animal hides were
pretty popular until relatively recently (Vellum, for instance).
Vegetable dyes would make decent ink, if needed.
It's the "treating" that's the problem. Do you know how to treat animal
hides? I sure don't! I saw the process once on TV and it looked rather
involved.
The bigger problem with writing is the difficulty in transporting the
books or whatever, assuming a hunter-gatherer culture. Until
agriculture, I can't writing being used much outside of "graffiti" on
cave walls, trees, etc. From your date of 20,000 BC, I believe you
predate agriculture by at least a few thousand years (I recall hearing
speculation about Human settlements in the teens somewhere).
You're right that a settlement is probably a precursor to viable writing.
Even smelting iron has a lot of problems. It may take a lot of trial and
error to get it to work, time you may not have :-) before they spit and
roasted you for dinner!
Could you even recognize iron ore?
But all you really need to produce is a serviceable hatchet, because a
few of those will give your tribe a distinct advantage.
This would all make for a great scifi story!
