Technological decline

Via Not Even Rocket Science: some interesting notes on Tasmanian technological decline.

Summary of the situation: after rising seas separated Tasmania from Australia, they lost, according to the archeological record, the skills required to make clothing, fire, composite weapons (i.e. putting a stone tip on a spear), fishing boats--in fact they stopped eating fish. Wrapped in a skin and smeared with grease to keep off the cold, they used clubs and sharp sticks. Yet their ancestors back in 6000BC knew better; even in 1000BC they still had bone tools.

The theory proposed is that the populations were small enough that there were not enough apt pupils to maintain the more complex technologies. Knapping takes either instruction or a lot of trial and error. In their models teaching is lossy, and only a few pupils better their master. I'm not sure there's always a best way to attach a spear-point--more likely several good ways that you adapt depending on details of the wood and the point.

Henrich explicitly assumes that human intelligence averages are universal, which is known not to be the case, but it may not matter much for this argument. The information loss model is easily illustrated in the loss of native technologies and stories when European technologies arrived in the Americas. The reason differed, but the operation was the same--not enough people to learn the old ways, and sometimes even the language dies out. The Forgotten Revolution (I'm still reading it) describes how the Hellenists reached heights of scientific understanding not regained for two thousand years--but when political purges scattered the Alexandrian Greeks the knowledge died out. Without a large enough pool of scholars the chances of getting someone with the intellectual horsepower to understand Eratosthenes, much less carry on his work, are poor. You're lucky to be able to teach a little pre-algebra. I assume everybody has read A Canticle for Leibowitz.

That may be the solution, but I wonder if that's all. You can imagine a Tasmanian PETA that persuades the rest that fish are bad. After a while you forget why--but in the meantime you don't need fish tridents or nets, and you forget how to make those too. Disease or poor nutrition (famine) will drop the average IQ of a cohort of youngsters. Their kids may be OK, but in the meantime information gets lost.

It isn't pleasant to think that the things I've worked with will evaporate without a trace--knowledge is supposed to be cumulative--but it has happened before, and can easily happen again. I suppose we need to be "Faithful in his generation", even if those who come after lose it all.