There was one fellow who smelted copper ore and tin ore, made copper wire and a vinegar battery, and made a working telegraph that could have been built any time since 3000 BC.
1. reading & writing
2. paper
3. printing press
4. computers & networking
Note that they're all about preserving and sharing information.
Computers are basically irrelevant but networking would be huge - being able to communicate near-instantly across large distances was possibly the single biggest limiting factor for the size of empires in agrarian societies (other than food).
The value of being able to have a book you distribute which describes how to do all those other things, is immense.
In terms of building a civilisation in the first place, animal husbandry is vastly more useful than writing because writing is something scribes do (i.e. your non-farming elite - in medieval times, more than 9/10 of the population were farmers, and prehistorical farming was likely far less efficient than medieval farming what with the lack of iron etc), and animal husbandry improves your agriculture dramatically and are a major factor in providing the food-surplus for those scribes to exist in the first place.
In fact, particularly food-poor empires tend to be conquered by more food-rich empires that can field larger armies, so if your hypothetical has-writing empire fought my hypothetical has-animals empire then I expect mine would win. Especially since your army wouldn't have cavalry or charioteers.
Seemingly, yes, but this hasn't been proven quite yet. The American empire appears to be losing dominance since the proliferation of the internet, for example. However, the American empire certainly gained tremendous power from broadcasted electronic mediums.
America gained cultural power over the world by making most of the worlds films. But if those films took a year to arrive in Turkmenistan, it wouldn't diminish the power of that culture over the people.
However, if rather than a film arriving, it was a guy on horseback who had heard legend of someone who had once seen an American film, then it would probably have little impact.
Empirically speaking the opposite is more likely - writing emerged from state accountants keeping records of grain etc. Writing was independently invented by several states across the globe, in fact.
>Steam engines and machine tools could not have happened without the printing press.
Why's that?
This is a very hard subject to discuss, because steam engines and the industrial revolution (I mean precisely the shift from an agrarian economy to a mineral economy, i.e. the switch to using non-living energy sources) happened exactly once, in the UK, and spread worldwide from there. It's hard to extrapolate from a dataset of one.
However, from what I understand of the industrial revolution, it didn't strictly require the printing press - the core driver was of needing to extract coal from a deep coal mine that was flooded; because the coal mine produced a bunch of low-grade coal that was disposed of onsite by burning it (because it was too crappy to be worth the transport costs of selling it) the efficiency of the steam engine didn't matter because the fuel was free.
There were a bunch of implicit requirements (the obvious one being the demand for coal) that are extensively debated, and while we could speculate the printing press was helpful in some way, I don't see any reason why a printing press would be a hard-requirement.
>Networking (telegraph) was the predecessor technology of computers.
The Antikythera mechanism predates the telegraph by millennia. Computing was orthogonal to networking for the majority of its history.
I guess signal drums predate writing in many places and successfully use rhythm to convey information over long distances. I'm not sure whether any that don't encode writing have a writing-like ability to represent arbitrary messages rather than just prearranged ones.
The idea of communicating sounds via physical marks was there, but it clearly lost out- why bother writing a message that needs to be sounded out, then translated to a spoken language, when you can skip the translation step with something glottographic?
Even if there was a working phone network and phones when we were hunter gatherers, this wouldn't allow us to grow cities.
All inventions work off each other, but if we count them without prerequisites:
Agriculture (farming / animal domestication etc), ie being able to quite reliably produce a lot of food, is the most important innovation and invention for humanity.
Next, still not information but the industrial revolution and engines and mass scale production. Without this we would depend on humans and animals to do the work, and I for one do not like the idea of a modern slave industry, but even beyond that we couldn't use economies of scale, which actually allows for absolutely bonkers progress.
Then perhaps writing and reading, and networking.
This was enabled by the printing press. Immediately prior to the industrial revolution, printers printed how-to manuals on every topic they could think of.
It's not a surprise that the industrial revolution occurred in the area that invented and widely adopted printing presses.
Isn't it true that if we applied today's knowledge it could also be built millions of years ago?
I can understand it means something like: it could be built with tools and materials they had 3000 BC, but isn't it also true that knowledge was able to create different tools and different materials?
Some even go as far as argue that invention of agriculture actually made us dumber, because we did not have to fight for our survival as much as before.
But also Lewis Dartnell (The Knowledge: How to Rebuild our World from Scratch) https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-make-a-telegraph-from-scr... -- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuil... -- "a great read, even if civilization does not collapse"