I think prehistoric and post-apocalyptic games alike are pretty

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>>50453794
This plant grows in a long string. I can use it to bind together my stuff. This is useful. My hair already is little strings, I'll twirl it so it is a proper string.

This rock I used to make my fireplace got distorted... hm got a neat sharper edge now. Can I do this again?

What will happen when I smelt these metals I got together? Let's try.

Grog ate the tasty looking plant and died/got sick. Better not eat those.

>>50453794
Incremental improvement and trial and error for the most part. People would figure out how to do something and then slowly improve their methods and techniques.

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>>50454187
And when one thing is learned, people share through demonstration and language. So nothing has to be invented all at once or by one person alone

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>>50453794

>>50453794
Smelting iron, specifically, apparently involves so many steps it was invented out of whole cloth only once (by the Hittites). Everybody else apparently got at least a part of the idea from somebody else.

>>50454184
That last one worries me, though. Because there are a lot of plants where the line between medicine and poison is just the slightest change in dosage. The thought of figuring that out through trial and error, and all the people who had to have died for that to make sense, is utterly terrifying.

>>50453794
People back then were about as smart as we are now, they just didn't have as much accumulated knowledge to work with. It understandably took a great deal of time for them to get the ball rolling with regard to technology.

>>50455153
It's almost like people ingest toxins for amusement or something.

I also imagine people having a sick relative or something, then the local herbalist gives them anything they could find and hopes it works. Having human intellect, someone would make a connection between certain substances and more effective recovery. That would easily get mixed in with mysticism, believing that speaking certain words or having certain symbols also helps.

For hazardous materials, they probably would have started with small dosages and worked their way up, rather than the other way around. Even a caveman could do that. Maybe someone fucked up and ate some, then noticed it actually helped, then told an herbalist who worked to confirm the idea.

>>50455923

wrt plants, don't forget that we also likely learned things by both watching animals ingesting them but also through our own history of genetic evolution stretching back before we were human.

>>50455153
Have you ever heard of Variolation?

It's a method of treating smallpox which is no longer practised (having been supplanted by vaccination.)

Basically it involved infecting yourself with a small dose of smallpox, such snorting powdered scabs, so you could fight it off and hopefully wouldn't get reinfected.

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>>50456595
Of course this was followed up by vaccination, which takes its name from cows.

Specifically because a British physician named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids didn't get smallpox.
This turned out because they got cowpox, early on in their career, which wasn't fatal.

So Edward did the smart thing and took a scraping from the pustules of a milkmaid with cowpox, and used them to inoculate the son of his gardener.

But hey, it worked, he got cowpox, but recovered. And then later they tried to variolate him, and he was immune.

After testing and such, this eventually became accepted... mostly, as this picture from 6 years later shows, he had some detractors.

But in 1840, Variolation was banned and Vaccination became free of charge, and that's why we don't have to deal with small pox any more.

Well, until you get idiots again.