When admiring the cultural relics of our country, in addition to lamenting the exquisite shape of those gorgeous and complex ornaments, I also feel extremely sorry in my heart. Because when you really understand the history of our country, you will understand that the ancients created so many technologies that are ahead of their time.
There is actually no difference between the physiological structure of our modern and ancient people, but we have a more scientific learning environment. And if the ancients created high-tech, first of all, "secret transmission", and then only for the royal family, the magnate service, and then with natural disasters and wars and other reasons, the last one is lost. If ancient craftsmen could get a good environment to summarize, share, and pass on these technologies, it might be a completely different historical trend.
One: Stone Age neurosurgery
In 2001, Han Kangxin, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, when sorting out a skull specimen at the Dawenkou Cultural Site, found that the posterior part of the right parietal bone had a skull defect with a diameter of 31 mm × 25 mm.
what? This is the Neolithic age more than 5,000 years ago, and the ancients who were still drinking blood could perform such a complex operation? Could it be some kind of religious ritual that opens a hole in the head of a living person? Subsequently, the college invited a number of medical experts to verify, and the results proved that the skull owner had suffered head trauma before his death, and the original medical staff performed a complete "craniotomy and de-decompression surgery" for him.
According to the overall observation and imaging evidence, the original medical staff confirmed the location of the contusion by craniotomy, periosteal bone along the edge of the defect, crawled to replace the outer and inner plates of the skull, and surrounded the plate barrier bone repair, which can be called "tongue-like articulation healing", and the hematoma will be cleaned up while removing the bone flap. In the end, the operation was very successful, and the skull owner survived at least 5 months after surgery, and the specific survival period is unknown.
Coupled with archaeological evidence, this person was excavated with rich burials, noble status, and did not die, so it can be proved that neurosurgery did exist in the Stone Age. Hua Tuo was about to cry when he heard it, and Cao Cao did not dare to do the operation, but the primitive man actually did it, and it was successful.
Two: Longshan culture eggshell black pottery cup
Let's talk about the Neolithic cultural relics, this eggshell black pottery cup was excavated from the Longshan Cultural Site in Shandong Province, with a height of 22.6 cm and a caliber of 9 cm, made of clay black pottery. The reason why it has the name "eggshell" is because its total weight is only about 40 grams, and the thinnest place is only 0.2 to 0.3 mm! Thin as paper, as hard as porcelain, as bright as lacquer, after four or five thousand years, it is still intact, and it is the peak of pottery production in the entire history of mankind.
So the question is, pottery is fired with clay raw materials, clay particles are generally 0.2 mm to 0.5 mm in diameter, no mesh ancients used what tools to filter? If it is purely manpower to screen over and over again, then Shandong unearthed a lot of eggshell black pottery cups, proving that this thing has been mass-produced, how did such productivity come from?
Thousands of years ago, there was no such thing as a bearing, and what kind of equipment did the ancients use to pull the blank shape and make such a thin vessel? And the firing temperature of pottery should be above 900 ° C, what kind of refractory materials were used by the ancients, and its firing type can remain unchanged for thousands of years? All these experts can only use the four words "unexplainable" to explain.
In the processing of utensils, the old ancestors have reached a unique level beyond the cognition of the times in temperature control, carving and processing, modeling ability, and material technology. As a scholar once said: The Stone Age is not as ru mao drinks blood as people understand, and the discovery of many sites in China proves that thousands or even tens of thousands of years ago, human beings already had a highly developed social system and level of handicraft manufacturing, but for various reasons they have not been handed down.
Three: Shang Zhou Sun God Bird Gold Ornament
I wanted to list the Warring States Crystal Cup, but this article aims to show different techniques for each artifact. This sun god bird gold ornament should be very familiar to everyone, can be said to be one of the representative totems of Chinese culture, it was excavated from the Chengdu Jinsha site, weighing 20 grams, the outer diameter of 12.5 cm, the inner diameter of 5.29 cm, the thickness of 0.2 mm, the gold content of up to 94.2%.
During the Shang and Zhou Dynasties, craftsmen had at least mastered a variety of techniques such as hot forging, hammering, shearing, polishing, and hollowing. First, it is forged into a circle with natural gold heat, and then repeatedly hammered to make the thickness of the gold leaf basically the same, and then cut off the uneven appearance, and finally draw the entire figure (including the sun and the light and four birds) on the surface of the circular gold leaf, and repeatedly cut it to form a hollow.
This "treasure of the town and the country" is not only highly skilled, but also reaches a new height in art. Although it is made of gold, it is more like a modern paper-cut work, the lines are concise and smooth, extremely rhythmic, full of strong dynamics, the central pattern is very similar to a sun that sprays out 12 rays of light, and the outer 4 birds are very similar to the mythical and legendary "negative sun golden wu", all related to the worship of the sun god in the ancient Shu period.
This cultural relic also contains the calendar and other scientific knowledge in the Jinsha culture, 4 birds represent the cycle of the four seasons, 12 rays of light symbolize the recurrence of the year and 12 months, and then linked to the mystery of the Sanxingdui culture, the ancient Shu period culture has just discovered the tip of the iceberg.
Four: Marquis Yizun of the Warring States
The world's major civilizations have entered the magnificent Bronze Age, marking the flexible use of metal tools by human beings. However, if we want to talk about the most exquisite, most complex, and most outstanding representative cultural relics of bronze, then it is this Zenghou Yizun disk. It has a height of 42 cm, a diameter of 58 cm and a weight of about 30 kg.
Just by looking at the pictures, you can feel how complex the details of this artifact are, and once the academic community agreed that it was cast as a whole using the "lost wax method", but now it proves that this is almost impossible. If such a large artifact is cast in its entirety by the lost-wax method, then the surrounding body will definitely leave dense copper bubbles and flaws, and even deformed, and it will not be so neat and clear.
Even if modern times use 3D printing to assist in the manufacture of wax molds, I am afraid that it will not be able to achieve one-piece shaping. There was only one explanation, and the ancients thought of a way to first cast the parts separately, and then weld them little by little to assemble them into a whole. Don't think it's simple, ancient times were all handmade, how to maintain a high degree of consistency of the parts, and then through high-temperature welding to assemble them perfectly, this is simply incredible technology in the past.
Ancient craftsmen did not have intelligent welding stations, nor tools such as magnifying glasses, and completely achieved "chip-level maintenance" based on feelings. You can see how the clerk repairs the chip in the mobile phone store, and then imagine that the ancients made such a magnificent bronze with only their hands, saying that "against the sky" is not too much, right?
Five: Qin Shi Huang copper carriage horse
The last peak of bronze, that is naturally our first emperor of the ages, Qin Shi Huang. In 1980, in the funeral pit of the Mausoleum of the First Emperor of Qin in Lintong, Shaanxi, two large painted copper carriages and horses were found, and many top restoration experts in China took 8 years to complete the restoration, and then everyone found that these high-tech applications to the "funerary products" were how "wasteful" it was.
These two royal carriages adopt the world's earliest rust prevention technology, wire drawing process, micro welding process, inlay process, pouring molding process, casting and forging combination process, hollow casting process, loose leaf connection process and more than a dozen processes. Don't understand? If you give a few examples, you will know how cattle the gang under Qin Shi Huang was.
Like the tassel worn on the head of this copper horse, it is welded by the two ends of the copper wire, and the tight seam, while the copper wire is only 0.5 mm, in the absence of modern welding assistance, how did the ancients weld? There is also the turtle-back shaped roof of the No. 2 copper carriage horse, which is minted in one piece, and the thinnest place is 1 mm, which is thinner than the modern 1 yuan coin, which is enough to prove that the disposable copper liquid watering technology at that time did not know how many years it exceeded the era.
There are also a lot of tiny holes in the windows of the carriage, and I don't know what the principle is, so that the windows and doors of the car are warm when they are open, and the closed ones are cool, which has the effect of "air-conditioned cars", presumably the carriage that Qin Shi Huang sat in before his death also used this technology. There is also the umbrella on the no. 1 carriage, using mature gear technology, which can be freely rotated 180 degrees with the rotation of the body and the sun, and can be disassembled at any time to become a defensive weapon!
VI. Han Jian's Book of Arithmetic
As we all know, mathematics is the foundation of all sciences, and the development of mathematics in our country is also very long. As far as the physical excavation is concerned, the earliest known mathematical work "Arithmetic Book" was unearthed in a tomb in the early Han Dynasty of Zhangjiashan in Jiangling, Hubei Province, with about 200 bamboo jian more than 7,000 words, which caused a sensation in the global academic community like a spring thunder.
After 17 years of deciphering and annotation, the content of the Arithmetic Book can be roughly divided into several categories: integers, fractions, proportions, surpluses and deficiencies, geometric parts, and volumes. The mathematical ideas of ancient civilizations such as ancient Egypt, Babylon, and ancient India are not backward in comparison, and even win.
If you zoom in on the entire history of China, you will find that the achievements of ancient arithmetic in our country are enough to become a monument. The Shang Dynasty already had a complete decimal system of notation, the Bagua method in the Zhou Yi was the origin of the world's earliest binary system of thought, the Ink Classic of Mo Zhai in the Warring States period was the origin of geometric thought, the Western Zhou Shang Gao invented the Pythagorean theorem, the earliest record of the "magic square" was the "Analects" and the "Book of Books" in the Spring and Autumn Period, the complete fractional arithmetic, decimals and negative numbers appeared, and the most accurate pi "ancestral rate" later annotated by Liu Hui, and so on.
However, ancient Chinese mathematics lacked an axiomatic system, which was also the bottleneck in the development of mathematics from elementary mathematics to higher mathematics. Looking at all the above "anti-heaven cultural relics", you will find that the wisdom of the ancient Chinese can be said to be ahead of the world, whether it is mathematics, physics, astronomy, medicine, craftsmanship, philosophy, art and compass, gunpowder and other four major inventions, they constitute the pride of Chinese civilization.
There is only one thing missing, that is, a scientific and mature learning system, which allows those who invent new technologies to summarize and improve their ideological experience, and then pass it on to future generations and apply it to actual life.
Since the Han Dynasty, although there have also been many highly skilled cultural relics, they are no longer too few to the "innovation" ability of the pre-Qin period or even the Stone Age, most of which are imitations and reinforcements of the ancestors, and there is no systematic scientific theory, and finally it has become the "plaything" of the royal family and nobility.
Imagine how powerful the development of ancient medicine would have been if Stone Age surgery had been passed down? If the gorgeous bronze ware of the pre-Qin period were applied to the war tools of the manufacturing organs, what kind of murderous weapons would it be? If mathematics can develop systematically in various periods, how many years in advance will science and technology "explode"? If the compass and gunpowder can be applied to the great discovery of the ocean, then what about the modern European and American countries?
Unfortunately, history does not have if, these cultural relics have the "limitations" of the feudal era, but technically beyond the cognitive limitations of the times, behind which is also the Great Ren behind the great wisdom of Chinese culture. Successive rulers of China have always ruled the world with benevolence and righteousness, and they did not expect that after the Age of Discovery, the "law of the jungle" determined how terrible the predatory nature of "beasts" was. The cultural relics we see now are not only "playthings", but also the crystallization of the well-deserved benevolence, wisdom and courage of the Chinese nation.