I’d be thinking along the lines of “keep heating different rocks up a lot, you’ll eventually get really useful stuff for building things out.”
This is assuming we get fire pretty easily (so we don’t have to transmit that knowledge) but reflecting the millenia before our tech included metal.
Wow, I’m missing the more important surplus: “find the plants you can eat and figure out how to grow them yourself in one place.”
I’m not enough of a prehistorian to know which came first: metal or agriculture. My principle in choosing one of these is to skip thousands of years of a low level of subsistence, of pushing tech ahead by thousands of years by concentrating our successors in an area of great value.
My theory is that economic surplus will produce science and knowledge more surely than anything we can ever communicate to our successors. Best get them jumpstarted on producing.
I’d be thinking along the lines of “keep heating different rocks up a lot, you’ll eventually get really useful stuff for building things out.”
This is assuming we get fire pretty easily (so we don’t have to transmit that knowledge) but reflecting the millenia before our tech included metal.
Wow, I’m missing the more important surplus: “find the plants you can eat and figure out how to grow them yourself in one place.”
I’m not enough of a prehistorian to know which came first: metal or agriculture. My principle in choosing one of these is to skip thousands of years of a low level of subsistence, of pushing tech ahead by thousands of years by concentrating our successors in an area of great value.
My theory is that economic surplus will produce science and knowledge more surely than anything we can ever communicate to our successors. Best get them jumpstarted on producing.