Stone-age laboratory

[vger]

So... yeah. Doing a bit of research for a possible story I'm writing. A human medical student from the modern age finds himself in a stone-age society, trying to deal with an infection that is wiping out the populous. I have it figured out, generally, how he can solve the dilemma, but I want to push human ingenuity to the max here. What kind of equipment could be built that would be analogous to a modern med-lab? Yes, I'm assuming a "tech tree" could be involved here; if something had to be constructed for rudimentary fabrication, that's fine, but there are only a couple of months available in which to do all of this. Mortar and pestle is easy enough. How about a glass lens? How hard would it be to create a robust microscope with 5x magnification? In a nutshell, I'm looking for boy scout solutions to advanced scientific instruments. Nothing too fancy required. Anything from the 18-early 1900's (penicillin discovery) would be sufficient, but that's still a huge leap forward.

Edited August 3, 2018 by vger

[StrandedonEarth]

Just bring MacGyver along. He’ll figure something out 

[Steel]

I'm going to say getting clear glass of any kind would be almost impossible, let alone of high enough quality to make lenses.

Edited August 3, 2018 by Steel

[HebaruSan]

59 minutes ago, vger said:

How about a glass lens?

What about using the lenses from fish eyes? It may not be strictly plausible, but you could set it up by having the other characters fret that the hero is going fishing when there's important work to be done.

[Streetwind]

The problem with glass lenses is twofold: one, the purity of materials available; two, the amount of energy available.

5x magnification is fairly easy; a single lens can do more than that. Make two or three lenses, and you can easily do multiple times that by assembling them in a tube. But the higher your magnification gets, the more problems you're going to get from impurities. Now, you're not going to need high-tech glasses to do do the job; simple quartz glass does the job. Lead glass is even easier, but is likely going to be unsuitable for optical lenses because it isn't completely clear. So the question is, how can you tell if you have the right kind of quartz sand available to you, and how pure is it? You'll probably need to test sand from different sites all over the place, and develop washing techniques to make sure that the stuff you're processing is as pure as possible. Once you have it, you'll want to mass-produce glass lumps and then polish them with hide (or better, tanned leather, if available), which hopefully gets you nice and clear surfaces. Select the best, most clear ones out of your whole batch, and put them aside. Then take all the other ones you don't need, and practice grinding them into lenses on stone surfaces. Once you feel confident you know how to get the shape you need, it's finally time to process the best pieces.

Energy is the primary technology driver. Melting glass, for example, takes more energy than a neolithic society can manage. Thankfully, the reason is more that they never had a reason to try before, rather than it being hard. The answer is simply: charcoal. Making high purity charcoal is surprisingly easy with even the most primitive of methods; your bare hands are enough, in fact. Though tools certainly make it faster and easier. Once you have charcoal, a clay kiln with a manual blower and a lot of patience will get incredibly hot. Hot enough to process glass, and most common metal ores. Iron is within reach, in fact, though getting it right requires skill and good conditions. And once you can make iron, steel is not far off either - because steel is just an iron/carbon alloy, and if you have one element in high purity and unlimited abundance, then it's carbon. The trick is controlling the mixture, because you have a relatively narrow band between 1% and 3% carbon content where the alloy takes on the right properties to be called steel. Given modern knowledge, primitive furnances could be rigged up that can do it, but unless you're a trained metalworker you're likely going to have to invent your way there from scratch, with a metic ton of trial and error. If the right mixture can be achieved, you can try adding chrome, if available (identifying ores will be a huge problem). Chrome steel is the simplest form of a rust-free tool metal that there is. In other words, it would give you the closest thing to surgical steel that is possible with primitive technology. Something quite useful to a doctor, I imagine. But given the sheer amount of effort and reliance on certain ingredients (that need to be identified and purified first) probably means you're going to have to make do with less.

Thus, consider copper. Much easier to process and shape than iron, it may not be as hard or as rust-free as chrome steel is, but it does have a curious property: it's a microbicide. In other words, it kills germs on contact. Medical equipment made from copper would not require sterilization - though perhaps occasional polishing will be in order.

Do not bother trying for bronze, unless you literally find tin ore right at your doorstep; the stuff was insanely hard to get back in the day, with the entirety of the bronze age society spanning europe, north africa and the middle east relying on a single source. By contrast, copper and iron are nearly everywhere. Bronze, if well made, is a better tool metal than pure iron, and easier to melt as well, but it comes at the cost of being finnicky to handle. You cannot forge it properly, because its melting point is incredibly close to the point at which it starts being malleable. It will need to be cast, which is more limited than forging.

 

Look up the channel Primitive Technology on youtube for tutorials on how to set up charcoal production and blower kilns from literally scratch (the guy walks into the wilderness with nothing on him but a pair of shorts). Research the history of metalworking and glassworking. Also research primitive chemistry, because your character is going to have to do a ton of it.

Edited August 3, 2018 by Streetwind

[Shpaget]

Why even bother with glass? You're just wasting time building a microscope. Not to mention that a medical student would probably lack almost every skill required to build one.

And even if you had a microscope, so what? You can't see a virus under an optical microscope, and even if you could, you're not going to develop a specific anti viral medication in a few months in a cave. Your best bet is a hope that whatever the disease is, that it's bacterial, that you can produce enough penicillin and that your diy penicillin is effective on the bacteria in question.

But even then, a cave made penicillin will be full of other mold and likely an unhealthy dose of aflatoxin and other nasties molds produce.

Final note, not all types of penicillin can be administered orally. Some have to be injected, which brings a new hurdle to your cave medical student. Making of a syringe (conceivably a trivial task compared to making large batches of penicillin, but try to convince a caveman to allow you stick something in his butt). Also, hope that your penicillin is effective against whatever new stuff you're infecting your patient with by sticking a hollow twig in his butt.

[Scotius]

Yeah, you are not going to build useful medical laboratory in a cave. Best your character can do, is to improve hygiene, quarantine victims of disease, eventually introduce natural medicine - like willow bark which contains useful amounts of good old aspirine. Convincing your cavemen to not dump rotting remains of food and excrements just beyond entrance to their dwelling would go a long way, i'd think

[YNM]

4 hours ago, vger said:

A human medical student from the modern age finds himself in a stone-age society, trying to deal with an infection that is wiping out the populous.

(It's probably the time traveler's own disease. Just a caution to anyone trying to replicate this.)

That aside, such epidemics is nearly impossible without any overcrowding (linky link). So the group they met would probably die before they was able to make any medicine, and so would the strain dies. (in fact, the time traveler might become the sole vector.)

 

And even if time wasn't the problem (let's say the disease never kills the victim), you still hit a fairly hard wall : the available technology level vs. what was being taught to the time traveler (modern pharmacy) is heavily out of sync. You're left with 2 choices :

1. Learn from the "stone age people"s own elders (herbs and whatnot)

2. Bring the technology level up and available.

1st choice makes the time traveler barely any help to them, the 2nd choice means it'll take him quite a while. And you really should send not just a doctor, but also an artisan as well.

3 hours ago, Streetwind said:

Primitive Technology

Still very well used in less developed parts of the world, nothing too primitive or special.

[kerbiloid]

A shaman's wand and quarantine.
Explain to the chieftain that everybody ill with this sickness is a damned sinner, as well as all his kind is. 
They are unclean because unholy, and must sit at least two weeks in a cave or a tent.
Everybody speaking with them gets unclean, too, and must be sitting with them, otherwise local deities will punish the people.
Throw food to them, as everything they have touched gets unclean.
If somebody of these uncleans dies, burn the body with fire because it's obvious that spirits of fire caused his fever and want him back.

Of course they can't pray or something, as 1) gods may take offence; 2) who knows what these jerks will ask for, intentionally on in fever.

Wait... Haven't I read this somewhere already.

P.S.
And obviously beat rakes with stones (or at least expel them), as you don't have antibiotics against Venerian gifts.

P.P.S.
Laboratory? Come on, are you immortal?

[Green Baron]

Stone age archaeologist here.

@vger, your case is constructed so that the brilliant mind of the future can heroically do it. As such, there is nothing one can do put in on somewhat realistic feet. The future guy can only order the people to do things at his command. But why should they do it ? The shaman knows what's good for the individual and the society. It probably would be the other way round, another mouth to feed by the tribe. Hope you're not a vegetarian ;-)

@kerbiloid got a point. The guy from the future would have to adapt to the conditions he/she is in. And do not underestimate the art of the healers/shamans/whatever. They probably cure the thing before the futuristic hero has learned their language.

As material you have horns, bones, skin and leather (it's hard to work), stone and bone tools, fibre from plants. Try to scratch a fresh bone with your pocket knife. The knife will probably break. They know how to work them, you don't. So they would teach you how to survive. You cannot build an oven with let's say upper paleolithic tools that is able to heat quartz enough.. Let's say, you are stranded with a sailing boat on the Salvage Islands (right around the corner here :-)). The two rangers that usually guard the nature reserve are dead, the radio out of order, next ship expected in 2 months. You probably weren't even able to make a fire (idk, maybe you are) or make some garment to warm you overnight.

So, i'd rewrite the story. Poor guy gets stranded 30.000bp and has to make contact with the folks to learn how to survive. The night temp drops below 0°C, will he make it ?

Says a friendly

Green Baron

Edited August 3, 2018 by Green Baron

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Scotius said:

Yeah, you are not going to build useful medical laboratory in a cave. Best your character can do, is to improve hygiene, quarantine victims of disease, eventually introduce natural medicine - like willow bark which contains useful amounts of good old aspirine. Convincing your cavemen to not dump rotting remains of food and excrements just beyond entrance to their dwelling would go a long way, i'd think

This, you might want to look into desertification, you can always boil stuff, that would be an no brainier. For disinfecting  wounds wine, mead or other fairly strong alcoholic beverage would work. 
With cave I assume hunter gatherers so to few people for plagues.  (other commented this) 

And yes iron would be an insane jump start but unlikely you have done it before, more realistic domesticating animals useful for them, wolfs is an obvious one. 

[kerbiloid]

Another spoon of tar into the barrel of honey:

Until XVIII they don't see difference between infections and poisons.
And poisons happen in their life more commonly.
So, first you should get experienced in local venoms (which they more or less know themselves, so beware of laughters).
Otherwise they will be disappointed: he shows to us some strange moving bulbs in his glass, but we lost time asking him to heal a poisoned  guy. Is he really a shaman? Don't gods dislike him?

P.S.
Also this skill is required to replace the previous shaman.

Edited August 3, 2018 by kerbiloid

[Scotius]

Animals, yes. Wolf\dog, horse, auroch\cow, sheep and goats, pigs\boars. Agriculture is a bit more complicated, because useful plants (like cereals, lentils, tubers) took quite a bit of time to become more than wild grasses\weeds. Beekeeping would be quite useful trade to teach people too. So would be pottery, but that would be really helpful for a non-nomadic society

[sevenperforce]

A stone age settlement would be far better off with a couple of combat trauma surgeons and a bunch of nurses than general med students.

Medically, the first things to get into operation are:

• Sanitation
• Hydration
• Quarantine

That is all.

If your community keeps sick people separate from healthy people, if you keep fecal matter away from consumables, and if you have clean water that everyone in the community can access, then your community's life expectancy is easily twice that of the average...up to, like, 1300 CE or so.

Everything else (trauma surgeons who can extract foreign objects without severing arteries or perforating organs, nurses who can keep people comfortable and keep wounds dressed and clean) is gravy. 

Anything that you couldn't implement in a battlefield tent is wishful thinking.

[Snark]

25 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:

Medically, the first things to get into operation are:

• Sanitation
• Hydration
• Quarantine

^ Pretty much this.  The most you can hope for is to convince people to do what you recommend, e.g.:

• People get sick from other people who are already sick.  So the healthy people should try to avoid coming in close contact with the sick ones.
• Be especially careful not to touch any substance that comes out of a sick person's body, especially if it's something that comes out because they're sick.
• Poop (even from healthy people) is dirty and makes people sick.  Make sure wherever you poop is downhill from wherever you get your drinking water from.
• Fire kills the stuff that makes people sick.  If you boil water, it becomes safe to drink.  If you put an object in boiling water, it's safe to touch afterwards.
• Give a sick person lots of clean water to drink, and keep them someplace warm.
• Many kinds of sickness can only be caught once by a given person.  So if a bunch of people are sick with something your tribe has seen before... the best person to tend to the sick would be someone who already had that, and survived it.

Doing the above requires no technology whatsoever (unless you count "fire" as a technology), nor does it require specialized training.  It could be applied to any stone age tribe; the only limiting factor is the charisma of the person trying to convince them to do these silly-sounding things. 

And as simple as they may be... they're huge.  If you could convince a tribe to do the things described above, then from a public health perspective, they'd be well ahead of 18th century Europeans.

[sevenperforce]

Keep in mind that sanitation, hydration, and quarantine are concepts that still don't exist in portions of Africa, Indonesia, and South America.

 

[HebaruSan]

Suggestion, he's not just a med student, he's a pharmacy student. His internships had something to do with looking at herbal remedies for pharmaceutical companies. And what a coincidence, some of those plants just happen to be available when the time machine drops him off. Etc., etc.

[kerbiloid]

So, H&H = Herbalism and Hygiene.

[Green Baron]

In a nutshell:

Hygiene was no problem during most of the paleolithic, we have enough evidence of that. It became more evident in the neolithic, when people and animals lived together and the life style of wandering around ceased. That had over hundred thousands of years helped controlling birth rate. In the neolithic, otoh, there was no necessity any more of only having one child at a time, which caused new problems like women dying giving birth, population pressure, fights over resources ... blabla :-) And, of course, peaceful together over much of the time.

---

If you transport the guy into the early neolithic instead of what i first assumed paleolithic, he'd rather get recruited for field work, herd the stock and to clean up stuff, after being stripped of his/her fancy stuff. No talking old about "do this/do that", time and work force is limited and people are already struggling enough for their upkeep and to have enough for the winter. You can't bring them solutions from our world of plenty (solely based on depth for the future) when they have to care about every day stuff. There is no shop to buy a pot, someone has to make it and it takes time and effort. There is no mall to buy a t-shirt, you have to kill a beast, skin it, work the skin (that is hard work, guys !), prepare it, mend broken or torn things, etc. Corn and crop must harvested, new patch prepared, trees felled (now, it'll rain tomorrow) corn must be dried and flailed, milled and stored away dry (construct and maintain a dry place in a clay hut). All these things, where we push a button today or pay a buck or two, had to be done manually and it was a days work or more. The early neolithic guys didn't sit around, waiting for a saviour.

Now imagine someone breaking in that romantic scenery where everybody is occupied to the limit, but the number is going down because of some disease, causing even more work/individual. Still want to intervene ? If they listen at all you'd probably make things even worse, killing the rest because they didn't have enough to eat for the winter and the life stock died of starvation or thirst.

------

A package is needed that gives people enough freedom to do things besides the obvious and directly necessary every day work. Once that package of division of work, more effective agriculture, spare time for some, etc. blabla is available you can start filling in their minds with modern stuff. Maybe then they listen.

Edited August 4, 2018 by Green Baron

[kerbiloid]

1 hour ago, Green Baron said:

Hygiene was no problem during most of the paleolithic, we have enough evidence of that.

Stone washclothes?

[Green Baron]

Levis & Co., eh ?

e.g. traces of infections on skeletal remains, more dental abscesses with the change in nutrition, age and cause of death, way of living in general ... i think you get it ;-)

Edited August 4, 2018 by Green Baron

[KG3]

I think what would be interesting in this scenario is what these stone age people might get (got) right from the perspective of the time traveler.   They were probably well adapted to and aware of their environment.  People were able to cultivate yeasts, make stuff like cheese thousands of years before the germ theory or discovery of the atom.  I'm sure there are things a time traveler would learn from these people.  They might only need a few tweaks from what they are already doing to help them out.

  Also read up on Otzi, the 5000 year old mummy.  His gear was quit sophisticated!      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ötzi

  Also a good read might be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.  It's about an engineer who works for Colt Arms Manufacturing Co. in Hartford Connecticut who goes back in time to King Arthur's time.  It's hilarious and a great read... up until the last few pages!  

[sevenperforce]

55 minutes ago, KG3 said:

Also a good read might be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain.  It's about an engineer who works for Colt Arms Manufacturing Co. in Hartford Connecticut who goes back in time to King Arthur's time.  It's hilarious and a great read... up until the last few pages!  

A Connecticut Yankee is hilarious, but it's been mocked for 130 years for being a fantastical, aggrandized celebration of "homespun ingenuity" and democratic idealism. There was another novel from the 20th century satirizing A Connecticut Yankee, in which a modern technical expert is punted back to Arthurian times and utterly fails to implement anything more than the barest advances; if anyone remembers what it is, let me know.

The technical implausibility of Yankee is pretty well demonstrated by one of the anteclimaxes, which ties to the very first few pages. The protagonist is introduced in the present day (late 19th century) as he remarks on a bullet hole found in 7th-century chainmail armor, and wryly notes that he made it himself. Later, during the high point of the book, the protagonist is challenged to a duel by an offended knight and ends up shooting him with a revolver that he has constructed using a whole advanced military-industrial complex erected behind the backs of the church and the elite. He is then attacked by a whole squadron of knights and shoots 11 more of them before they are finally routed.

But constructing a pair of accurate, reliable revolvers in the 7th century is simply beyond the pale of possibility. You need a large-scale steel industry with access to fossil fuels. You need heavy machinery to stamp and forge parts; you need access to purified nitric acid; you need to be able to produce large quantities of constant-purity fulminate mercury. Just getting the necessary infrastructure in place would take a couple of generations.

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

Imho the Yankee's adventures in Camelot would finish after the first spoken word.
Because he speaks in Sassenach language.

 

[sevenperforce]

11 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

  Hide contents

Imho the Yankee's adventures in Camelot would finish after the first spoken word.
Because he speaks in Sassenach language.

 

The series is obviously really adult, but from a technical perspective, Outlander is just about the only realistic treatment of potential time travel...well, anywhere. Claire speaks nearly the same language and is able to come up with believable excuses for the differences. She has enough medical knowledge and experience to be of particular assistance but doesn't need to rely on 20th-century technological advances. She knows an appropriate amount of history for her era and the era she travels to.

Reminds me of one of those "Food For Thought" stories I once heard...

Spoiler

Let's say that you had a working time machine and you wanted to go back in time, just for an observational sort of visit. When would you go to? Your options are surprisingly limited. Unless you are some sort of extremely accomplished expert in ancient languages, your ability to arrive and converse with those around you will be pretty much nil for any destination more than a few centuries in the past. Going BCE is right out.

Not only do you need to choose a destination where you can speak the language, but you need a destination where you won't immediately be caught up in the middle of a war, or hanged for being a heretic. It would also be a pretty good idea to make sure that they won't bleed you to death if you happen to fall ill, and they will know enough to clean your wounds if you are injured. The American Civil War was the first time that even basic principles of sanitation became widely applied in medicine, so you probably want to target a time of low or moderate political upheaval some time after the 1860s.

At the same time, you don't want to go to a time period too recent, for a couple of reasons. For one, you should probably avoid a period where having identification and papers and a social security number is assumed. You probably don't want to be caught on video or photographs either.

So if there was a good destination for a time traveler, it would be somewhere around the midpoint between the American Civil War and the First World War. Being able to visit a lot of destinations via rail is nice, so perhaps somewhere between 1880 and 1910?

Well........when does fiction involving time travel first emerge?

In literature, we've long recognized that most themes and devices we use are very old. With little exception, all western fiction has roots in Greek and Roman myth. Basic tropes like human flight, high-speed travel, huge voyages, the discovery and settlement of new frontiers, controlling our environment: t's all there. Except time travel. Time travel as a fictional device doesn't really appear in myth. In fact, there's really no seminal work in time travel science fiction until...

• 1881. Hands Off
• 1881. The Clock That Went Backward
• 1882. The Fortunate Island
• 1888. The Chronic Argonauts
• 1888. Looking Backward
• 1889. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
• 1895. The Time Machine

Somehow, a bunch of different writers living in several different English-speaking countries all suddenly (and independently) got an idea about a mysterious stranger who traveled through time. It's almost as if they all met someone.........