SOME PROPOSED EXPLANATIONS FOR WHY IT TOO SO LONG TO INVENT ROPE.

SOME PROPOSED EXPLANATIONS FOR WHY IT TOOK SO LONG TO INVENT ROPE. Katja Grace received a large number of proposed answers to her question. She summarized them here three days after she posed it (link via Marginal Revolution). The first set elaborates on the theme that inventing is hard, especially when you have never seen anything analogous to rope. The second set of reasons elaborates on the theme that people fifty thousand years ago were not really behaviorally modern. Their brains may have been biologically less effective. They had less practice in abstract thinking and may have had little experience in changing things in their world. Grace lists a number of other interesting suggestions about the practical difficulty of making fundamental inventions. Two other broad groupings of explanations are that we don’t have good records of what happened and there were very few people and therefore very few potential inventors 50,000 years ago.