I’d give laser pointers to Neanderthals. Even if they did figure out some useful application for them (maybe hunting?) they’d run out of batteries eventually.
I always thought it would be funny to take aluminum foil back in time to see the reaction. I mean, imagine if a time traveler showed you a roll of platinum that they use to bake cookies. That’s basically what aluminum was for almost all of history.
Furbies. Just to see if we end up with a furby based religion.
Let’s give some ancient peoples a couple books on modern maths and calculus. Really fuck with the development of tech.
Fuck yeah, just give the ancient Greeks hindu-arabic numerals and watch them lose their minds. Teach Zeno calculus and watch him try to prove it wrong.
Pretty sure the greeks knew about the hindu number system, they were neighbours for centuries. They just thought zero was of the devil and geometry was better that algebra and never adopted it.
A coke bottle
Drop it from an airplane. Bet they would then say among themselves:
God Must Be Crazy!
If we’re including eras where people are able to read and write, a history book. They will see their future and will attempt to change it, for better or for worse.
Antibiotics
Talk about butterfly effect lol. I wonder where we would be today if antibiotics were readily available before plagues became plagues.
Me, too. That’s why I wanna do it!
After further consideration, I would also give them a Solar-Powered TV that plays nothing but a Video of Hatsune Miku doing Fortnite Dances
Those little Roman devices nobody can figure out.
Imma come out and say it: they’re old timey versions of copper coils or orgonite pyramids. Gnosticism got kinda big for a while and people were buying curses and prayers and stuff from people to write on little bits of broken pottery like little curses you’d write on scraps of paper in middle school. Somebody out there figured out how to weld little metal sacred geometry figurines and people were buying them because they look cool and some of them probably thought they’d resonate with the vibrations of the universe to cure dysentery or whatever.
I figured it was a game
Antikythera mechanism?
That’s Greek and we have a pretty good understanding of them.
I think the person you’re replying to is referring to these odd little dodecahedrons that we keep finding in former Roman provinces, but for which we’ve found no documentation as to what they were for, if anything.
It’s how the Greeks played Minecraft.
No, those little dice things nobody can figure out at all. They’re octagonal with a little ball on each corner.
Cool Ranch Doritos
aluminum bars, they won’t be able to work it into things like with iron. even if they do, they can’t make more
Nuclear bombs
Sharpies. Think off all the confused scientist that have to explain sharpie marks under acient paintings.
Steam engines, clockwork and balloons. Hopefully they turn into a steampunk society.
If it’s a civilization that hasn’t yet had a writing system, a writing system.
However, I will teach them a (semi-)featural alphabet, kinda like if the Hangeul jamo were its own alphabet. It’d be fun how long the orthography will diverge from the spoken sounds, and how fossilized the orthography can be–and more interestingly, how they might evolve the writing system.
If it’s a civilization that already is using a writing system, emojis that they can use alongside their writing system. It’d be interesting to see if they’d eventually turn into ideograms for human feelings and thoughts.
A polaroid camera so they can steal each other’s soul
