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Yes I would be interested in that, I wrote a paper on an early time line depicting defensive mechanisms of early Scotland back in the late 80s. The earliest fort and bailey I remember while reading was well within 70 life times. I could have sworn I read that book, but even so I will have to reread it again since I don't remember it.
I was hoping you would bring up some other interesting things that are under constant debate. One could be Stonehenge. It's birth is right on the cusp of the timeline in question, so one may wonder what research and technology led to it's construction. But look at our own life time, it only took 20 years to go from a world without personal computers to a world where we touch one, hundreds of times a day, in one form or another. And if you go back to the turn of the 21st century, telephones, automobiles and flying machines were a rare oddity. Man can achieve marvelous things in a single life time, and without written language those things would have disapeared forever. Even in modern times there is evidence of a single culture destroying all that is known about previous occupants. Great achievments do not neccessarily demonstrate a long standing history of communicated knowledge, they can happen in an isolated single lifetime by unusual intelligence.
Oh you do realize, that depending on the context, "Neolithic" can range into the Bronze age - you have to be careful at what specific timeline is in question. Once in a while I run into someone talking about the Neolithic and refering to the millennia just before Christ was born. And even in the correct context it falls around 20 percent within 70 lifetimes.
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fair enough...a lot of this debate depends on the definition of a "life time", generaly i considered neolithic to mean new stoneage going form a purely archeoligic stand point.
Nor have i argued that writeing is necessary to pass knwoladge from one soceity to another... it basicly is, but knowladge can be passed down with out writeing very easily inside a society. Hell writeing dosn't even gaurenty a retention of knowladge, look at what happened at alexandra...if that city held the greeks would hae had a working steam eengin imagin the industrial revolution launching a thousand years early.
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Yes, given the knowledge had not been destroyed - perhaps the Romans would have landed on the moon. :) Or our generation wouldn't be suffering from diseases that use our own ability to replicate cells against us.
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I doubt the romans would have ever concured the macadonians..im sure military applications of the steam engin would have happen ratehr quickly after they figured out how to scale it up
