Historical Tech Tree
35 comments
·August 7, 2025sizediterable
Highly recommend the Dr. Stone anime if you're interested in a story with the premise of starting civilization from scratch but armed with the sum total of modern human knowledge about science and engineering.
RHSeeger
I watch this with my daughter and we love it. I love shows with "narration", talking about the context/details of things, and Dr Stone really nails that (I know the main character isn't really a narrator.. but it accomplishes the same thing).
pavel_lishin
I'd also recommend the Destiny's Crucible series - the basic premise is that a chemist from our world is transported to another planet of humans at a much lower technological level, and some moderately standard isekai hijinks ensue.
I read five of the books, and really enjoyed them; if you like the "competence porn" genre of novels, this is a pretty good one.
RHSeeger
> "competence porn"
See... now, I love that type of show/comic/book/etc. And now that I have a name for it, I want to search for more. But I very much do _not_ want to search for that term. Lol
pavel_lishin
I think a similar genre is "humanity fuck yeah" - HFY - so you can search for that as well.
emeraldd
I'd also recommend the "How to Make Everything" YouTube channel.
Nition
This is really cool but hard to view well on a PC. I'd love to have a simplified version of this on a big A2 poster.
fudged71
Its a great start! Bound to have bias and blindspots. It would be cool to run an agent that could incrementally enrich this knowledge graph. Take some modern day technologies and backtrace the components and their development.
mikewarot
My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears that the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was off by about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to this work. I've let the folks at Wikipedia know.
mitthrowaway2
Interesting. On that note, Da Vinci's design (which I was fortunate enough to see a replica of at a local museum) was also very clever, being suited not only for screw cutting but also screw origination, as it could make new screws more accurately than the two leadscrews in the machine itself, and swap them out to improve its own accuracy. But I suppose it doesn't extend that date even further back because it wasn't a general purpose lathe, it could only cut screws.
sampton
1760000 BC: StoreTool 3. This is our greatest model yet. You are going to love it.
dang
Discussed just a little:
Historical Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44104243 - May 2025 (1 comment)
Difwif
Looking forward to the new Civilization mod that uses this.
mwkaufma
I'd expect something things like Chinese Writing to be a big upstream dependency, but here it's a terminus. Detecting a western-bias in the sourcing.
macote
Source code found here : https://github.com/etiennefd/hhr-tech-tree
abeppu
It's interesting that prior to the industrial revolution there are still some periods where it seems like innovations arrived relatively fast, and others where it was comparatively slow. E.g. a lot more entries are in the 500 BCE - 200 BCE period than the 200 - 500 range.
Orbital_Armada
Although the idea of a "Dark Age" is mostly debunked these days, the slow unraveling of the Western Roman Empire led to a real and sustained change in material conditions. Notably, population density and urbanization both decreased, along with the labor specialization that accompanies them. I'd expect most 'inventions' to happen when and where people have the most hands on time to make them! (I can't really speak to Indian and Chinese civilizations, but they have also had integration and disintegration periods)
throwanem
Beautiful! I wonder if Jimmy Maher's heard about this; he wanted something like it for The Analog Antiquarian back ages ago before he kicked that off, as a way of reflecting the span of history in the structure of the index/TOC, but we never could figure out really how to get it to go anywhere we liked. It's a surprisingly tricky problem, and this is an impressive realization!
Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science".
This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology