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Comment by __void | Hacker News Reader

wtf this fact melts my brain! Man already knew (meteoritic) steel and it is a known fact, but that we could already produce it is absolutely mind f-ck and rewriting the history books, predating by millennia some dynamics that were previously certain

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I mean, while this is certainly interesting, it's worth noting that this is just pushing back the date for steel production _in Europe_. The earliest known steel production is quite a lot earlier (1800BC), but it was in what's now Turkey.

That seems histrionic...what rewrites or dynamics are going to be significantly changed? I mean, it's a fascinating discovery and all and thank gawd our ancestors were so clever. A timeline or two might get updated, but the headline seems to be "culture that left little evidence of their existence figured out how to make steel to make marks on hard rocks; no one else picked up on it for a millennia or two". This isn't by any means the first time we've found some ancient culture figured out something really neat earlier than we expected but it didn't go anywhere at the time.

producing steel requires a huge, huge amount of knowledge, energy (fire) and materials (wood, coal and ores), it took us millennia to maximise the process... to know that someone, even 'accidentally', was producing it eleven centuries earlier is at least fascinating to me;

Actually, I don't know how 'revolutionary' it is in total, but in the meantime my brain explodes!

I think you're generally dating steel production too late (100AD?) As mentioned in another comment, earliest known was nearly 4000 years ago, and there was quite large-scale production in India by about 2500 years ago. Steel didn't really take over the world until later (arguably not _really_ until the Industrial Revolution), but that was more down to the practicalities of making it than anything else.

linearity in history will be seen in our future like newtonian phisics, good enough to describe what we see but "incomplete", the "relativity equivalent" would be outburst of (relatively isolated) civilizations that collapsed without leaving substantial legacy. For example known unknown great ancient civilizations as Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (Oxus) or guatemala cities under rainforest

Newtonian physics is still good enough and used every single day. "Civilizations that collapsed without leaving substantial legacy" are footnotes in academic papers: fascinating and useful if you're in the tiny number of people in the field of research, not so much otherwise. Not the same thing at all.

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