• Quick note - the problem with Youtube videos not embedding on the forum appears to have been fixed, thanks to ZiprHead. If you do still see problems let me know.

Independent discoveries of the same thing

It's interesting that boomerangs and throwing sticks (spear launchers) exist independently around the world.

Would be fascinating to know if there was an original single inventor, and if knowledge of these things spread around the world via trading relationships...

Think of Australia and a boomerang may well come to mind as one of the country's most unique and distinctive emblems.

The fact is that boomerangs were used for many thousands of years in other parts of the world as well. A wooden boomerang found by archaeologists in Little Salt Spring in Florida, USA, was broken and discarded by its owner some 9,000 years ago. In the 1986 excavation of a limestone cave in southern Poland, a complete boomerang, carved from mammoth tusk and about 23,000 years old, was recovered (see reference). Remember, Central Europe was then in the grip of the last Ice Age with a climate similar to northern Siberia or the north of Canada today. Trees were absent and people used bones and tusks of animals to make their tools, implements and weapons.

Few of us associate the boomerang with ancient Egypt in Northern Africa or Sumer at the head of the Persian Gulf. Yet the boomerang was used in these countries. The Sumerians, who invented the first writing system, had the graphic symbol for such an object some three thousand years before Christ was born. In 624 the Isidore of Sevilla, Archbishop and Christian scholar of late antiquity, wrote about boomerangs used at that time around the Mediterranean Sea and possibly in southern Europe. In fact, the boomerang was known outside Australia at least until the nineteenth century. The Hopi people of Arizona, USA hunted rabbits with it. The Indian boomerang, known as valai tadis, was used in several areas of the Subcontinent for hunting hares, deer and partridges. It was also used as a weapon of war.

Reference:
P. Valde-Nowak, A. Nadachowski & M. Wolsan, Upper Palaeolithic boomerang made of a mammoth tusk in south Poland, Nature 329 1987, 436 - 438
Click to expand...

australian.museum

Boomerangs

Discover the diversity of boomerangs in the Museum's collection, and learn about these distinctive cultural objects.
australian.museum australian.museum
 
Also, boomerangs aren't the only things that return when you throw them. A frisbee will do the same if you throw it right.

In fact, most actual boomerangs aren't designed to come back at all. They're designed to hit things. It won't come back after hitting something.
 
Yep - I know it really
novaphile said:
It's interesting that boomerangs and throwing sticks (spear launchers) exist independently around the world.

Would be fascinating to know if there was an original single inventor, and if knowledge of these things spread around the world via trading relationships...



australian.museum

Boomerangs

Discover the diversity of boomerangs in the Museum's collection, and learn about these distinctive cultural objects.
australian.museum australian.museum
Click to expand...
It's a tad like pyramids (man-made hills) - it is the simplest long range hunting tool so it would be very strange if hunting sticks weren't used by most groups of humans, all that would be required to kick start the development would be one person picking up a fallen branch and throwing it at something they wanted to kill and being successful.
 
novaphile said:
It's interesting that boomerangs and throwing sticks (spear launchers) exist independently around the world.

Would be fascinating to know if there was an original single inventor, and if knowledge of these things spread around the world via trading relationships...



australian.museum

Boomerangs

Discover the diversity of boomerangs in the Museum's collection, and learn about these distinctive cultural objects.
australian.museum australian.museum
Click to expand...
About the only continent where somebody didn't independently invent a bow was Australia.
 
School children around the world have independently come up with answers to the question of where they would end up if they dug a hole straight down through the Earth and came out the other side. What is more peculiar is that even though different countries and regions have different answers, and globes were readily available to figure out the correct answer, the answer is almost wrong. The answer instead is almost always the most exotic seeming place that is very far away.

Some of the things mentioned are Jungian archetypes: universal, inherited patterns of thought, images, or ideas that are part of the collective unconscious of all humans. Of course there are substantial critics of Jung. There are things like pyramid structures that are universal because it is the simplest and sometimes only practical solution. And some things that are universal to human thinking.

Pyramid structures are often used for religious based building because people want those buildings to be special in some way and making things taller than everything else is a way to make something special and a pyramid structure is a practical way to make something very tall. There do seem to be some discoveries and inventions that seem inevitable at certain periods in history: the Steam Engine Theory of Development.

I recall that there have been examples of independent behavioral evolution observed in animals. Suddenly animals start doing something new even though they are not in communication. Environmental factors can create new problems that drive animals to look for new solutions and sometimes they find the same solutions.

In human development, we should also not discount how extraordinarily far and fast information can spread. Think of the "Cool S" drawing that school children make. Nobody knows what it means or where it started, but it spread around the world without appearing in print or on television. Just one kid showing another kid how to draw it.

You may be interested in James Frazier's book "The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion". That began as a quest to understand what the golden bough is in Turner's painting of the same name that depicts a scene from Virgil's Aeneid of Sybil presenting a golden bough to Proserpine in order for Aeneas to enter the Underworld. Frazier's attempt to figure out what this golden bough is led down a path of comparing magic and religious ideas that are not only related directly or indirectly to the myth, but also to universal ideas that he found existing in cultures all around the world. That developed into a multiple volume work of categorizing universal concepts of mythology, religion, and magic.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
If you give any credence to the concept of Technological Determinism, then the answer is Almost Everything. Aka as Steam Engine Time.
SET is generally credited to Charles_FortWP

What he actually wrote is;


Full(er) discussion here:
kk.org

Steam-Engine-Time

This long revealing interview with William Gibson is a gold mine. In addition to being a gifted writer, Gibson is one of the best conversationalists I’ve encountered. I could listen to him all day. (This interview in The Paris Review … Continue reading →
kk.org

For proof just Google the history of anything from Abacus to Zero.
Click to expand...
Interesting. Someone mentioned this in a Stephen King novel (Christine), and I thought it was something Stephen King had come up with.
 
Probably the most famous example is Alexander Graham Bell filing his patent for the telephone a few hours before Elisha Gray.
 
Thermal said:
Just a few others: clothing, jewelry, art, music, tools, cooking, social structures... this list might get awfully long.

Eta: no one said gods, religion, marriage yet? And while on that subject, war and murder?
Click to expand...
Not sure we can know if those were invented independently anywhere really. Maybe they were all invented that time when almost all humans were killed off?
Also, Chimps murder each other and there's at least one record of chimps doing something a lot like war.

Gombe Chimpanzee War - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
arthwollipot said:
"Atlatl" is the Mesoamerican word. In Australia it is frequently known as a woomera.
Click to expand...
Funny that in the Us atlatl has completely replaced the english for that device. Atlatl isn't even a word from Native Americans language native the US.
 
ahhell said:
Not sure we can know if those were invented independently anywhere really. Maybe they were all invented that time when almost all humans were killed off?
Click to expand...
70,000 years ago? Predates quite a bit of human civilization by several tens of thousands of millenia, doesn't it?
ahhell said:
Also, Chimps murder each other and there's at least one record of chimps doing something a lot like war.

Gombe Chimpanzee War - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
Click to expand...
Johnny come latelys. We been doing it millenia longer than those copycats.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom