Sometimes, the earliest technologies in the tech tree confuse me. The book 1000 Inventions and Discoveries, written by a partnership of Roger Bridgman and the Smithsonian Institution, dates pottery to have existed 15,000 years, not 9,000. The book also dates agriculture to have existed for around 11,000 years. So, in Civ5, Pottery should lead to Agriculture, not the other way around.
I am willing to forgive Mining and Animal Husbandry following from Agriculture. Mining was first invented around 40,000 years ago, although the mining of practical resources such as flint (rather than cosmetics like red ochre) only dates 10,000 years back. Again, animal husbandry technically dates back 13,000 years with dogs, but in the sense of domesticating livestock, e.g. pigs and cattle, Kevin Desmond's A Timetable of Inventions and Discoveries: From Pre-history to the Present Day puts the domestication of pigs and cattle about 10,000 years ago as well.
But Archery and Pottery are very confusing for me. Pottery dates back fifteen thousand years, that is, four thousand years before agriculture. Bows and arrows date back around 30,000 years, about twenty thousand years before agriculture. Although some sources put the date of the invention of archery around -8000 (10,000 years ago), they ignore the cave paintings dating before then which depict Cro-Magnon archers. Could someody please explain this for me? If I were designing the tech tree, I would remove these two technologies, make archers available from the start, make granaries available with agriculture, have mathematics come from the wheel and writing (rather than wheel and archery), calendar come from writing, and have sailing and writing come directly from agriculture, seeing as we want a "common descent" of all technologies.
Could somebody please address my questions? The Heidelberg Kid 19:49, December 20, 2011 (UTC)