Obviously something of this magnitude will have blindspots. This tech tree seems to be vastly underselling the impact of advances in metallurgy and precision machining. As well as most of what you might call "basic science".
This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
They tried to define what they mean by technology [1], but they seemingly gave up on it partway through. Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list.
The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "invention" in 168k B.P., even though a t-shirt and an arctic jacket are obviously very different technologies. New world agriculture is similarly strange. Nodes appear from nowhere and lead nowhere, presumably because there are implicit "nature" edges they didn't want to represent as technology.
Feel like if you're doing something like this you should just basically maximalize your definition. The fun here is seeing all the nodes, obviously!
Maybe then you get into arguments about whether the dependencies were "required", but there it's more or less resolvable by relying on what "actually" happened rather than the minimal tree (which is its own exercise)
Yes it feels very 'male' centric in a way. Like with clothing, the various stitches that you need to make textiles, each individual stitch method is it's own technology. Like, every knot that gets invented, that's a technology. Knots and stitches and warp and weft, they can only come out of a human mind, they are inventions. But trying to find out the dates there, that's nearly impossible if the data were recorded even. And then most of those textile inventions were done by women who are then again historical dark matter even in the best circumstances.
Still, great project and I'd have loved to see it crowdsourced like wikipedia.
> Had they followed it consistently, they would have excluded certain cultural-practice-based technologies like nixtamalization that made the list.
This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.
Almost all science is tightly bound with advances in material science, often the driving each other in alternating steps like interlocking gears. One engine driving those gears is war, another is population growth and education.
There are obvious exceptions, such as Math, Philosophy (insert all links lead to philosophy here). But even Math is seeing progress in materials science as a component now (computer derived proofs for instance).
Making a really good tech tree is a stupendously hard problem. I once started working on one for a game but gave up once I realized that doing this properly is probably going to take a lifetime or two and there are other things I can do that are more immediately useful.
Even aside from the big advances, look at things like clothing in the past few decades. Outdoor clothing has changed enormously but so have so many other day-to-day things--a lot of which are about electronics but that's materials-related as well.
It's an interesting question. Why couldn't the Romans have invented $X? And the answer is mostly the tech tree. There are probably exceptions around things like germ theory of disease and so forth but it's mostly true.
There is no 'most important' human technology. All of it interlocks, and usually the prerequisite steps all need to be followed before you can progress to the next level. I wonder how long it would take given a paper copy of wikipedia (hopefully printed on acid free paper) to get back to a functional technology society. I'm sure it would go faster than the first time around, but I'm not so sure it would be less than a few hundred years.
A lot of those things are incremental improvements that build onto each other, like refining an alloy by a few % many times over to end up with something entirely different.
How would one determine what is sufficiently different to deserve a node?
But 100% agree, incremental improvements are the vast majority of advances.
Unfortunately, a lot of the reasoning behind omissions is that we have lost the majority of information; what we learned was from luck, inference, and unfortunately (because it produces misleading results), selective durability of some items over others.
My particular interest is in screw cutting lathes, and it appears that the Wikipedia entry[1] (on which this seems to be based) was off by about 25 years (1775 instead of 1800), and thus copied to this work. I've let the folks at Wikipedia know.
Interesting. On that note, Da Vinci's design (which I was fortunate enough to see a replica of at a local museum) was also very clever, being suited not only for screw cutting but also screw origination, as it could make new screws more accurately than the two leadscrews in the machine itself, and swap them out to improve its own accuracy. But I suppose it doesn't extend that date even further back because it wasn't a general purpose lathe, it could only cut screws.
I find this video of theirs the most relevant [0] where they go through how to start on a desert island and build a flat reference plate using the three plate method and the build up from there
Have you ever thought about how alien lifeforms would probably invent screw cutting lathes too? The screw feels like such a "human thing", but what else would serve the rotational wedging purpose in this universe's elements and physics?
It would be funny to think of what might actually be a human thing. Like, our arms are quite weird, right? So potentially another intelligent species even on a rocky planet might not invent throwing spears, right? Even our close relatives, the chimpanzees, can’t use them well at all. Even fairly flighty animals seem to barely have the idea that a creature standing, like, tens of feet away from them might be “in range.”
I wonder what the trajectory (no pun intended) of the development of melee spears would be, without throwing spears.
The spear being a wildly popular a successful weapon for almost all of history, any changes to spears would, I guess, make a big difference.
This 2D map is hard to explore since it's so sparse. I have to follow lines to find each thing, since it's 99% empty void. Is there a snap to next item hotkey? Am I just doing it wrong?
There is a "jump to nearest" button that appears if nothing is visible, but maybe it's too subtle? A hotkey would be a good idea too. I find that the best way to navigate is the minimap
Additionally I've always wanted institutions to be part of the timeline of technology. Corporations, Nation-states, Universities, Guilds, International Organizations - the ways people innovatively organize make things possible that otherwise wouldn't be.
The higgs boson experiments, for example wouldn't have been possible without the complex international institutions that orchestrated it. Manhattan project, Moon landing, the internet ... the iphone ...
Whether a node is a terminus (or root without predecessors) is basically ~never meaningful in the tree, it's almost always just missing data. Here it seems pretty clear I omitted a link from Chinese writing to woodblock printing. Fixed!
(Not an expert but) Chinese writing is hieroglyphic, wheres 'western writing' is phonetic. Western writing has a very small character set and is thus well-suited to a printing press, whereas hieroglyphics have thousands of characters (for thousands of concepts) but aren't fundamentally linked to the language like western characters are.
upstream of what? Did you not look for mesopotamian or egyptian writing, which predate chinese writing by thousands of years. This sounds more like a chinese bias lol.
Found a minor nit — the entry for “shoe” is at 3500 BCE and links to the Wikipedia article for “sandal”. But the Wikipedia article for “shoe” [1] indicates that the earliest shoes (apparently not sandals) were worn around 7000-8000 BCE.
Readit News
This leads to e.g. the Gas Turbine just appearing out of nowhere, not depending on any previous technology
The inconsistent definition and the pretty large gaps leads to a lot of oddness. Just look at how sparse anything related to textiles is. "Clothing" just gets one "invention" in 168k B.P., even though a t-shirt and an arctic jacket are obviously very different technologies. New world agriculture is similarly strange. Nodes appear from nowhere and lead nowhere, presumably because there are implicit "nature" edges they didn't want to represent as technology.
[1] https://www.hopefulmons.com/p/what-counts-as-a-technology
Maybe then you get into arguments about whether the dependencies were "required", but there it's more or less resolvable by relying on what "actually" happened rather than the minimal tree (which is its own exercise)
Still, great project and I'd have loved to see it crowdsourced like wikipedia.
This is an interesting example. It's a technology that's very important for staying alive, but not one that you'd expect to contribute to any kind of progress. It's just something you have to do to corn before eating it.
There are obvious exceptions, such as Math, Philosophy (insert all links lead to philosophy here). But even Math is seeing progress in materials science as a component now (computer derived proofs for instance).
Making a really good tech tree is a stupendously hard problem. I once started working on one for a game but gave up once I realized that doing this properly is probably going to take a lifetime or two and there are other things I can do that are more immediately useful.
It's an interesting question. Why couldn't the Romans have invented $X? And the answer is mostly the tech tree. There are probably exceptions around things like germ theory of disease and so forth but it's mostly true.
https://www.historicaltechtree.com/about#contributing
How would one determine what is sufficiently different to deserve a node?
But 100% agree, incremental improvements are the vast majority of advances.
Dead Comment
Historical Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44104243 - May 2025 (1 comment)
Edit: oops!
The Universal Tech Tree - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44161607 - June 2025 (65 comments)
(A link to an article about how it's made, with 65 comments)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw-cutting_lathe
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNRnrn5DE58
What "folks at Wikipedia"? Can't you just edit the date yourself?
I wonder what the trajectory (no pun intended) of the development of melee spears would be, without throwing spears.
The spear being a wildly popular a successful weapon for almost all of history, any changes to spears would, I guess, make a big difference.
Also zoom in/out would be super useful!
Great idea though!
Additionally I've always wanted institutions to be part of the timeline of technology. Corporations, Nation-states, Universities, Guilds, International Organizations - the ways people innovatively organize make things possible that otherwise wouldn't be.
The higgs boson experiments, for example wouldn't have been possible without the complex international institutions that orchestrated it. Manhattan project, Moon landing, the internet ... the iphone ...
why are they separate?
Found a minor nit — the entry for “shoe” is at 3500 BCE and links to the Wikipedia article for “sandal”. But the Wikipedia article for “shoe” [1] indicates that the earliest shoes (apparently not sandals) were worn around 7000-8000 BCE.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe