The Error of Techno-centricity

While we (as a society) are seemingly making progress in getting over especially European biased Ethno-centric views, it seems that there is an area where we are still falling behind in understanding our own past. The popular image of people in ancient ages as unwashed, ignorant masses ruled by superstition have, for the most part, as much validity as the same image as it has been applied in past years to non-European peoples.Just because a people lived in a time before the invention of technology X we seem to feel that anything monumental they accomplished was done through the use of thousands of slaves employed in brute-force labor.

So it may come to many as a surprise that something as massive as Stonehenge could have been built with a much smaller number of individuals than previously thought, and that stones as large 22,000 have been moved, and raised, by one man using nothing more than rope, stones, wood and, of course, physics.

So, is it our ill-conceived idea that the ancients didn’t have rope, stones and wood, or that they somehow were incapable of observing the physics of the world in which they lived? It sometimes seems as though there is an idea that before Newton physics didn’t even exist, or no one had the intelligence to figure out the influence of gravity. Not having a name or a formal set of mathematical figures for a thing is not the same as totally not understanding its influence. Do you have to do (or even understand) all the calculus involved in figuring out the trajectory of a thrown ball in order to catch it? Not even. But you do understand that the ball is going to travel in a continuous path (an arc, actually) and not do something ridiculous like suddenly take a sharp turn.

So take a look at www.theforgottentechnology.com and see what may have been the answer to how things like Stonehenge and the pyramids are possible for people, even in small groups, with just a little understanding of the world around them.