How did people discover certain things without the help of science and technology?

I am talking about in ancient times . An example: quenching metals . Anything that would require a non simplistic process to create. Did humans perhaps do an almost infinite amount of testing to discover things ? Another example would be anything smokable. Did humans honestly try to burn and inhale every plant to decide if it gives a desired effect or what?


Edit: there are hundreds of other things I could probably name but I am sleepy at the moment....

reply to post by fordrew


It's an interesting question, one that has been asked thousands of times before, and one that will likely only have speculative answers. We were not present when said materials/products were discovered. Our great historians may be able to give you an answer, but everything we know about ourselves is based on speculative studies from ancient books.

I wouldnt assume that the ancients were "primitive". WE are the dumbed down flouride heads we are now and a pale shade of our ancestors. Modern man is so "advanced"... as in an advanced state of mental de-evolution. Science and Tech was alive and well in "ancient times" ( astronomy, geometry, engineering, medicine, etc etc in ancient egypt, mesopotamia, etc) much moreso than now, we didnt invent it in the 20th century. We are usually just to arrogant to realize and accept it.

reply to post by fordrew

Did humans honestly try to burn and inhale every plant to decide if it gives a desired effect or what?

Yes they did.

the same way it happens today, through research and development, through observation, or purely by accident.

an accidental fire could heat metal which was then doused with water in an effort to extinguish the fire. someone then observed that the metal was now stronger. put 2 and 2 together, give it a name, and BAM, quenching.

just the same an accidental fire burns something smokable and produces certain effects on an inhaling bystander. he says to his friend, "duuuuude, we can smoke this."

in the thousands of years of human existence, i'm sure these situations have occurred a few times, minus the stoner talk.

a bigger mystery to me is how ancient people could discover things that require technology that they didn't have. example, the dogons of west africa who knew precise information about a star they couldn't even see.

The best answer, I think is observation and accidents.

If you used tobacco in a fire, or were standing next to a burning field filled with tobacco, you would have noticed after one or two coughs that you were feeling light headed and high. So from an accident, you would have made an observation.

Then someone would observe that you could observe in a more controlled way and develop by trials and errors, basic tools and systems, and so on, until today.

The method hasn't changed, the tools simply refined the possibility of observation.

EDIT: I hadn't seen the above post! As above, so below!

I don't know, I always thought the answer to that is:
No different than we do today pretty much.

The human brain's need to explore, research, experiment, and discover is still exactly the same... the only thing that's different today is how we go about doing it. You don't need a lab to find out if an unknown plant will make a person sick. You eat it, you get sick.

Today, instead of using ourselves as guinea pigs, we utilize science and technology to find out what components/chemicals are in the plant first. Less of us are dropping dead from a mushroom feast in today's world.

One look at ancient architecture is enough to blow anyone's mind.

Just because the cavemen didn't have a Harvard education, doesn't mean they didn't have the brain capacity to analyze or imagine or create.


"Necessity is the mother of invention."

You need something better to wipe your butt with than a leaf due to neverending irritation ?
You'll figure out a way.

Without science? What is science? Experimentation and observation. The human race has been doing that since the first human picked up a rock and smacked it against another harder one, and saw the one in their hand shatter. You don't need a scanning electron microscope to do this, just an inquisitive mind.

Before the modern age of distraction people had an enormous amount of time on their hands.

Successful people grew bored and invented games like tossing rocks and when they tossed flint it sparked and Wallah!

Or some one squashed fruit and left it sitting to long and Wallah!

Or a forest fire burned thru an area and animals that were burned by the flames tasted Wallah!

Boredom, forgetfulness and natural events played their part as well.

reply to post by CranialSponge


Exactly! You know how those safety pins tend to bend out of shape and become useless?



This is what the ancients did to solve the problem.



They added a bulb to restrain the compressed tissues it was to hold. And you can see it was solid.

The difference is they didn't have industries to maintain as they are now defined in the modern world. Consumerism was not invented yet, for the masses... aside from religion. :/

Let's see;

Our ancestors were quite a bit smarter than us. One notable example in the recent past is Thomas Jefferson, a man that could write with both hands at the same time two different things simultaneously.
He was, of course, exceptional, but, the kind of intelligence, adaptability, and ability to do such wasn't completely unique, and other similar manifestations of intelligence beyond what we currently classify as intelligence shared a higher degree of latency in the general population than now.

Going further back to Rome and Greece, I'm sure you've heard of Homer's Odyssey and Iliad.
These stories are more than stories, but also epic poetry, and our Geek ancestors could recite these stories, word for word in entirety just as easily as you'd mimic your favorite song off your ipod.

The intelligence and ability of our ancestors was quite a degree greater than history gives them credit for.
Alexander the Great dammed the river Euphrates just to be able to sneak his soldiers through the river gates of Babylon where by he then conquered, much smarter than head on attacking a fortified city from the outside with thick walls.

The intelligence and ingenuity of our ancestors is woefully underestimated given what they had and knew at the time.

how about the flip side of that coin. the thousands who probably died doing stupid like eating poison berries.

reply to post by nineix


You're taking the intellectual anomalies and treating them as if they were the norm. They weren't, much like how Einstein and Hawkins aren't representative of the norm of modern times.

reply to post by fordrew


So many knowledge of the past is lost to us. There are so many things people could do way before we could. I think a lot is 'accedental' discovery of certain properties. And using trail and error afterwards they could create many htings.

Alchemy was big back then, they tried everything to get wonder cures. They would discovery a lot just by pure luck. And then keep testing and improving until it was just rught. They wrote everything down so they know how to recreate it.

We dismiss to much of our past, but we can very well learn a lot from it.

Just my 2 cents

I really think it would be fascinating to figure out some of the answers. I definitely do reckon that such discoveries were found by accident.

I guess they had the essence of time :p they had god knows how much time to either "accidentally" stumble across answers or study them. only problem was if you said anything that contradicted the bible it wasn't aloud and you were sent to a prison/ thought of mad or something worse (Darwin) 0_o

Either through trial and error, or complete accident I would presume