Examples of scientific knowledge moving backwards?

[Enopoletus]

A curious fact about Western epidemiology between the early twentieth century and 2020 is that it appears to have moved backwards in understanding. Read the description of how the Manchurian plague of 1911 was fought here:

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Thirty_Years_in_Moukden_1883_1913/wW5CAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=&pg=PA234&printsec=frontcover

https://archive.org/details/reportofinternatinte/page/251/mode/1up

In 1911, railway traffic from Shenyang to Beijing was stopped to prevent pulmonary plague (a disease much deadlier than COVID, but much less infectious) from spreading with the full support of the British experts in China. In 2020, "experts [were] fairly unanimous that [shutting down international travel] would be damaging and ineffective. Every time there's a new infection, people revisit this, and "adults" (experts) need to once again talk the children in charge out of doing it.". China's decision to restrict outbound travel from Wuhan due to it being the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the country was declared by Western experts as something they would never consider doing.

https://twitter.com/RokoMijicUK/status/1221566557320634369

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/unprecedented-chinese-quarantine-could-backfire-experts-say/2020/01/24/db073f3c-3ea4-11ea-8872-5df698785a4e_story.html

In 1911, British doctors in China set up isolation facilities guarded by a military cordon to isolate plague victims and their contacts. In 2020, China set up isolation facilities throughout the country to prevent coronavirus patients and their contacts from spreading the infection, but doctors both in Britain and throughout Europe seem to have completely forgotten the concept, and still have not reinvented it despite its obvious utility in combating the spread of infection.

In 1911, in order to close any gaps in contact tracing, British doctors in China devised a system of house-to-house inspections throughout the city of Shenyang to check for plague cases. Today, China mass tests the populations of whole cities whenever it finds even a few coronavirus cases. In the West, the idea seems to be either forgotten or dismissed as logistically impossible.

Are there any other instances of the state of scientific knowledge moving tremendously backward over the course of decades? The major other instance I'm aware of is vitamins and scurvy, but I'm sure there are others. Scott Sumner notes a similar regression of knowledge over an even shorter period of time in the economic sciences, but I would like to focus on the physical sciences for this thread.

https://www.econlib.org/a-meta-theory-of-money-macro/

[zerodivisor]

The question is, which experts?

[rocoulm]

I do recall some experts (who? no idea) way back in January insisting that China's internal lockdown was the wrong move, but the only reason I heard explained was that by the time things are severe enough for the powers that be to catch on and implement one, the disease has already escaped containment. For COVID at least, this seems to be true but it may be a case of broken clocks, etc.

The mantra for all current lockdowns, though, isn't "stop the spread", it's "slow the spread", a strategy against which that argument doesn't quite work.

[Well...]

This topic could probably be expanded to something like "Stuff we used to be better at", with childhood education as a good candidate for discussion.

[Bugmaster]

I think I can muster a few legitimate counter-arguments. In no particular order:

* As you said, the 1911 plague was less infectious than COVID-19 (and was possibly bacterial rather than viral ?), which means that lockdown measures would be much more effective against it.

* Population density and frequency and distance of travel were significantly lower in 1911 than they are today. This makes lockdowns easier to implement; all you have to do is lock down a few railroad switches, and boom, all significant travel is stopped. In today's world, everyone has a car, and people might already be in the air, flying halfway across the world, before you can even lock down an airport.

* On the other hand, China in 2019/2020 had indeed been much more effective than the West at managing COVID-19; but it managed to achieve this because it was already basically a police state even before the pandemic. They did not have to invent contact tracing, mass testing, and city-wide lockdowns; they already had that capability, only it was aimed at controlling dissent rather than the pandemic. This was a capability that they'd built up over decades, and even assuming we want to turn the US into a similar police state, doing so would take at least as much time.

[This ungainly fowl]

Should we debate the question posed in the thread title, or the actual OP? Because the OP is a terrible example of the alleged problem. Epidemiological knowledge has not gone backwards. Show me where they sequenced the plague in days in 1911. At worst, public policy arguably has, but there are many reasons why policy responses will differ across times and places, including different circumstances meaning different tradeoffs and populations more or less willing to make them.


As far as the actual question posed by the thread title goes, I think the use of limes to prevent scurvy is a good example, and the abolition of that practice in the mid-late 19th century.

[Paracompact]

Should we debate the question posed in the thread title, or the actual OP? Because the OP is a terrible example of the alleged problem. Epidemiological knowledge has not gone backwards. Show me where they sequenced the plague in days in 1911. At worst, public policy arguably has, but there are many reasons why policy responses will differ across times and places, including different circumstances meaning different tradeoffs and populations more or less willing to make them.

Indeed. As well, if we are to include effectiveness of public policy, this will almost surely be CW.

[Bugmaster]

As far as the actual question posed by the thread title goes, I think the use of limes to prevent scurvy is a good example, and the abolition of that practice in the mid-late 19th century.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what's the deal with the limes ? I was under the impression that limes (or whatever other citrus fruit) became a global SOP in order to fight scurvy, and stayed that way -- but maybe I was wrong ?

[zerodivisor]

As far as the actual question posed by the thread title goes, I think the use of limes to prevent scurvy is a good example, and the abolition of that practice in the mid-late 19th century.

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what's the deal with the limes ? I was under the impression that limes (or whatever other citrus fruit) became a global SOP in order to fight scurvy, and stayed that way -- but maybe I was wrong ?

https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

[jasklologist]

Should we debate the question posed in the thread title, or the actual OP?

Seconded. The title says "scientific knowledge," but the body is about "institutional capability."

[emiliobumachar]

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what's the deal with the limes ? I was under the impression that limes (or whatever other citrus fruit) became a global SOP in order to fight scurvy, and stayed that way -- but maybe I was wrong ?

https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

That's a great summary of the history of the scurvy cure. I highly recommend reading it in full.

For the hasty, here's the quote most relevant for the question:

[quote link=topic=1760.msg45296#msg45296 date=1606937111]
Scurvy had been the leading killer of sailors on long ocean voyages; some ships experienced losses as high as 90% of their men. With the introduction of lemon juice, the British suddenly held a massive strategic advantage over their rivals, one they put to good use in the Napoleonic wars. British ships could now stay out on blockade duty for two years at a time, strangling French ports even as the merchantmen who ferried citrus to the blockading ships continued to die of scurvy, prohibited from touching the curative themselves.

The success of lemon juice was so total that much of Sicily was soon transformed into a lemon orchard for the British fleet. Scurvy continued to be a vexing problem in other navies, who were slow to adopt citrus as a cure, as well as in the Merchant Marine, but for the Royal Navy it had become a disease of the past.

By the middle of the 19th century, however, advances in technology were reducing the need for any kind of scurvy preventative. Steam power had shortened travel times considerably from the age of sail, so that it was rare for sailors other than whalers to be months at sea without fresh food. Citrus juice was a legal requirement on all British vessels by 1867, but in practical terms it was becoming superfluous.

So when the Admiralty began to replace lemon juice with an ineffective substitute in 1860, it took a long time for anyone to notice. In that year, naval authorities switched procurement from Mediterranean lemons to West Indian limes. The motives for this were mainly colonial - it was better to buy from British plantations than to continue importing lemons from Europe. Confusion in naming didn't help matters. Both "lemon" and "lime" were in use as a collective term for citrus, and though European lemons and sour limes are quite different fruits, their Latin names (citrus medica, var. limonica and citrus medica, var. acida) suggested that they were as closely related as green and red apples. Moreover, as there was a widespread belief that the antiscorbutic properties of lemons were due to their acidity, it made sense that the more acidic Caribbean limes would be even better at fighting the disease.

In this, the Navy was deceived. Tests on animals would later show that fresh lime juice has a quarter of the scurvy-fighting power of fresh lemon juice. And the lime juice being served to sailors was not fresh, but had spent long periods of time in settling tanks open to the air, and had been pumped through copper tubing. A 1918 animal experiment using representative samples of lime juice from the navy and merchant marine showed that the 'preventative' often lacked any antiscorbutic power at all.

By the 1870s, therefore, most British ships were sailing without protection against scurvy. Only speed and improved nutrition on land were preventing sailors from getting sick.
[/quote]

[Alexander Turok]

* On the other hand, China in 2019/2020 had indeed been much more effective than the West at managing COVID-19; but it managed to achieve this because it was already basically a police state even before the pandemic. They did not have to invent contact tracing, mass testing, and city-wide lockdowns; they already had that capability, only it was aimed at controlling dissent rather than the pandemic. This was a capability that they'd built up over decades, and even assuming we want to turn the US into a similar police state, doing so would take at least as much time.

Can you give a specific example of something they could easily do on the fly that we couldn't? Was it complex spyware, or just locking people up?

Americans have lost far more liberty during this pandemic than the Chinese. Change my mind.

[Alexander Turok]

Should we debate the question posed in the thread title, or the actual OP? Because the OP is a terrible example of the alleged problem. Epidemiological knowledge has not gone backwards. Show me where they sequenced the plague in days in 1911. At worst, public policy arguably has, but there are many reasons why policy responses will differ across times and places, including different circumstances meaning different tradeoffs and populations more or less willing to make them.

Who informed public policy? This was not a case where the scientists said one thing and the politicians did another.

[Enopoletus]

Should we debate the question posed in the thread title, or the actual OP?

Seconded. The title says "scientific knowledge," but the body is about "institutional capability."

Nope. Only the last part is possibly about institutional capability, but if it is, where are the experts suggesting the policy?

[This ungainly fowl]

Americans have lost far more liberty during this pandemic than the Chinese. Change my mind.

The only way this makes sense is if you mean the Chinese didn't "lose" liberty because they never had it in the first place. In the case of the surveillance state, I guess that's true. In China, government spyware is routine. Noone bats an eye at lists of people who rode trains together with an infected person being published online.

But at the height of the crisis, they were literally welding doors shut to keep people in their homes. Nothing in the US has ever come remotely close to that, so it's difficult to see how you can say something like this in good faith.

[Alexander Turok]

Americans have lost far more liberty during this pandemic than the Chinese. Change my mind.

The only way this makes sense is if you mean the Chinese didn't "lose" liberty because they never had it in the first place. In the case of the surveillance state, I guess that's true. In China, government spyware is routine. Noone bats an eye at lists of people who rode trains together with an infected person being published online.

But at the height of the crisis, they were literally welding doors shut to keep people in their homes. Nothing in the US has ever come remotely close to that, so it's difficult to see how you can say something like this in good faith.

I am saying it in good faith. Which would you rather have, a 1/1000 chance of getting your doors welded shut for two weeks or a certainty of having to deal with the half-assed lockdown in America for a whole year? Plus paying for all those work disincentives and corporate welfare?

[rocoulm]

Americans have lost far more liberty during this pandemic than the Chinese. Change my mind.

The only way this makes sense is if you mean the Chinese didn't "lose" liberty because they never had it in the first place. In the case of the surveillance state, I guess that's true. In China, government spyware is routine. Noone bats an eye at lists of people who rode trains together with an infected person being published online.

But at the height of the crisis, they were literally welding doors shut to keep people in their homes. Nothing in the US has ever come remotely close to that, so it's difficult to see how you can say something like this in good faith.

I am saying it in good faith. Which would you rather have, a 1/1000 chance of getting your doors welded shut for two weeks or a certainty of having to deal with the half-assed lockdown in America for a whole year? Plus paying for all those work disincentives and corporate welfare?

I mean, it's not like the Chinese only had to deal with a 1/1000 chance of getting your doors welded shut - they had lockdowns, too, and I'm pretty sure they were whole-assed lockdowns to boot.

[Bugmaster]

Can you give a specific example of something they could easily do on the fly that we couldn't? Was it complex spyware, or just locking people up?

It's a combination of complex spyware, ubiquitous AI-backed video surveillance, and a large number of enforcement personnel with very little accountability. In China, you could throw the population of entire small town into jail/concentration camp, and no one would bat an eye.

Americans have lost far more liberty during this pandemic than the Chinese. Change my mind.

Well yeah, you're absolutely correct, and that was kind of my point. China was very effective at fighting the pandemic precisely because they didn't have all those pesky civil liberties getting in the way in the first place. Ultimately, a totalitarian police state is always going to outperform a liberal democracy in terms of lockdowns.

[Enopoletus]

Guys, get back to the topic. What are some other examples of previously well-established scientific knowledge moving backwards over decades?

Bugmaster, 1911 China was not totalitarian, or even close to it. Despite (on paper) having a lot more state capacity than it, 2020 Britain seemingly forgot everything its doctors taught the Chinese about pandemic prevention over a century ago. That's knowledge going backwards.

[Alexander Turok]

Americans have lost far more liberty during this pandemic than the Chinese. Change my mind.

The only way this makes sense is if you mean the Chinese didn't "lose" liberty because they never had it in the first place. In the case of the surveillance state, I guess that's true. In China, government spyware is routine. Noone bats an eye at lists of people who rode trains together with an infected person being published online.

But at the height of the crisis, they were literally welding doors shut to keep people in their homes. Nothing in the US has ever come remotely close to that, so it's difficult to see how you can say something like this in good faith.

I am saying it in good faith. Which would you rather have, a 1/1000 chance of getting your doors welded shut for two weeks or a certainty of having to deal with the half-assed lockdown in America for a whole year? Plus paying for all those work disincentives and corporate welfare?

I mean, it's not like the Chinese only had to deal with a 1/1000 chance of getting your doors welded shut - they had lockdowns, too, and I'm pretty sure they were whole-assed lockdowns to boot.

Yeah and they worked, and now they're free of them. And they're free of corona.

I consider it a bigger violation of liberty to subject someone to something if there is no benefit to doing so. We have a large group of people who are immune to the virus who are still forced to wear masks and social distance. Our government could easily identify them, issue them with verifying documents, and allow them to be free of the restrictions. It isn't doing that because it's run by morons.

[Evan Þ]

I would gladly choose Chinese-style lockdown for two or four weeks over American-style lockdowns for a year.

However, I would gladly choose a year of American-style lockdowns over a lifetime of Chinese-style totalitarian dictatorship.

The question is whether you can have Chinese-style lockdown (and have it work quickly) without Chinese-style totalitarian dictatorship.

[Enopoletus]

The question is whether you can have Chinese-style lockdown (and have it work quickly) without Chinese-style totalitarian dictatorship.

Did you not read the introductory post? The British taught the Chinese the methods they use today even before the CCP was founded. Australia uses some of them (travel restrictions) today, but has still (to my knowledge) forgotten centralized quarantine (except for international arrivals) and true mass inspections. Now can anyone come up with other examples of scientific knowledge going backwards?

[Evan Þ]

It is of course physically possible to have a non-totalitarian government implement a Chinese-style lockdown, though even the 1911 British were not a democratic government of China, and contemporary regimes were mostly much more lenient to their own people.  But, I was mostly talking about political possibility of doing it sharply enough that it works with COVID, which can spread much more easily than bubonic plague.

[rocoulm]

Americans have lost far more liberty during this pandemic than the Chinese. Change my mind.

Is this worth spinning off into a new thread?

[Alexander Turok]

Americans have lost far more liberty during this pandemic than the Chinese. Change my mind.

Is this worth spinning off into a new thread?

Yeah, spun off to: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,1765.new.html#new

[albatross11]

One example I think is right (but I'm not an expert in the field):  There was an idea about T cells playing a role in shutting down some immune responses--these were called suppressor T cells.  Later on, the idea fell out of favor--I'm not sure why.  Still later, new evidence came out and people started talking about regulatory T cells.  So there was a period where the knowledge jumped a bit, then dropped back, then recovered. 

[bean]

As far as the actual question posed by the thread title goes, I think the use of limes to prevent scurvy is a good example, and the abolition of that practice in the mid-late 19th century.

Others beat me to the punch on this one, but there's one more aspect to this, which is the change in operating procedures with the end of the Napoleonic Wars.  Simply put, nobody was staying at sea nearly as long as they used to, so scurvy just wasn't such a big problem. 

Oh, and part of the problem with the later lime juice was processing, which used (IIRC) copper tubing that would destroy a lot of the Vitamin C.

[Bugmaster]

@emiliobumachar, @bean:

Thanks, I had no idea about the problems with lime juice. I guess, the real problem was that people did not know why lemon juice staved off scurvy -- they just empirically figured out that it worked, and stopped there ?

[bean]

@emiliobumachar, @bean:

Thanks, I had no idea about the problems with lime juice. I guess, the real problem was that people did not know why lemon juice staved off scurvy -- they just empirically figured out that it worked, and stopped there ?

Correct.  The modern understanding of vitamins was a century or so away at that point.  I think they were generally still in humors and essences, as most fresh food contains enough Vitamin C to ward off scurvy, and it was widely used by the blockading forces off France.  The big advantage with lemon juice was that it let them store the stuff for long voyages.

[Evan Þ]

@emiliobumachar, @bean:

Thanks, I had no idea about the problems with lime juice. I guess, the real problem was that people did not know why lemon juice staved off scurvy -- they just empirically figured out that it worked, and stopped there ?

Correct.  The modern understanding of vitamins was a century or so away at that point.  I think they were generally still in humors and essences, as most fresh food contains enough Vitamin C to ward off scurvy, and it was widely used by the blockading forces off France.  The big advantage with lemon juice was that it let them store the stuff for long voyages.

The other complicating factor was that pretty much all animals produce their own Vitamin C, so it was almost impossible to get an animal model of the disease.  Eventually, some researchers noticed lab guinea pigs getting it, and things progressed by leaps and bounds from there.

[clutzy]

I disagree with most of the premise of the op, except in the narrow context of this:

*Experts* may occasionally move backwards. This is clearly the point of the OP. We know much much more about diseases, but don't have the right people in the right places. The actual experts are marginalized in many instances.

[bean]

To expand on the scurvy issue a bit more, I talk about the British blockade efforts here.

[Enopoletus]

*Experts* may occasionally move backwards. This is clearly the point of the OP. We know much much more about diseases, but don't have the right people in the right places. The actual experts are marginalized in many instances.

I don't see much of a distinction; people hold knowledge; knowledge does not exist outside of people. What are some other examples of experts losing key bits of knowledge in a hard science field over time? Only albatross11 has tried his hand at this.

[incurian]

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
All mortals are Socrates.

[Enopoletus]

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
All mortals are Socrates.

?

[albatross11]

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
All mortals are Socrates.

?

There's a difference between p -> q and p = q.

[Enopoletus]

All men are mortal.
Socrates is a man.
All mortals are Socrates.

?

There's a difference between p -> q and p = q.

I'm aware of that, but what relevance does that have to anything I said?

[obiter dictum]

What are some other examples of experts losing key bits of knowledge in a hard science field over time?

For hard science this I wouldn't know any. For technologies it's easier: The loss of bow and arrow (replaced by an unknown genius with the boomerang). Greek Fire. The suspended, later spring-mounted, carriage.

[albatross11]

That brass sliderule/astronomical calculator they found on the ship that sank in 100 AD.

[Enopoletus]

That brass sliderule/astronomical calculator they found on the ship that sank in 100 AD.

I would prefer something post-1600; losses with the decay of the Roman Empire are numerous.

[Stilicho]

The loss of bow and arrow (replaced by an unknown genius with the boomerang).

Out of interest, where did this occur? I'm not aware of anything to suggest bows were used by aboriginal Australians, although boomerangs were in other areas.

[obiter dictum]

The loss of bow and arrow (replaced by an unknown genius with the boomerang).

Out of interest, where did this occur? I'm not aware of anything to suggest bows were used by aboriginal Australians, although boomerangs were in other areas.

They never were, afaik. The loss must have happened before, during the migration to Australia.
ETA: I, in turn, have never heard of boomerangs outside Australia before modern man globalized everything.

[Russel]

I think it's hard to find examples of scientific knowledge genuinely moving backwards in modernish times (where information is not often lost).  There are plenty of wrong avenues, like Lorentz ether theory, but these aren't going backwards; even in the scurvy example one could argue that the "advance" was wrong because they clearly didn't understand why the lemons cured it.

That said, the closest similar example I can think of would be retinopathy of prematurity, where an advance in one area of medicine (administering oxygen to prevent hypoxia) caused serious harm (infant blindness).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinopathy_of_prematurity
http://www.neonatology.org/classics/parable/preface.html

Ignaz Semmelweis is another close, better known, example.  Although not quite backwards, the fact that his hand-washing wasn't taken up by other doctors was surely a major missed opportunity.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/12/375663920/the-doctor-who-championed-hand-washing-and-saved-women-s-lives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

[Stilicho]

The loss of bow and arrow (replaced by an unknown genius with the boomerang).

Out of interest, where did this occur? I'm not aware of anything to suggest bows were used by aboriginal Australians, although boomerangs were in other areas.

They never were, afaik. The loss must have happened before, during the migration to Australia.
ETA: I, in turn, have never heard of boomerangs outside Australia before modern man globalized everything.

Do we know whether their ancestors had the bow and arrow before they left Africa? I think their invention has been placed before the migration, but I don't know if we have any evidence for how widespread it was.

Similar carved throwing sticks were used in quite a few different places. Boomerangs seem to have been used for hunting in ancient Egypt - including some from Tutankhamun's tomb which have been shown to do the whole returning-to-the-thrower thing. I suppose that raises the question of when boomerangs were invented, and whether there was a common origin.

[obiter dictum]

The loss of bow and arrow (replaced by an unknown genius with the boomerang).

Out of interest, where did this occur? I'm not aware of anything to suggest bows were used by aboriginal Australians, although boomerangs were in other areas.

They never were, afaik. The loss must have happened before, during the migration to Australia.
ETA: I, in turn, have never heard of boomerangs outside Australia before modern man globalized everything.

Do we know whether their ancestors had the bow and arrow before they left Africa? I think their invention has been placed before the migration, but I don't know if we have any evidence for how widespread it was.

<...spends some time www-ing...>
Even if the bow was invented after the expansion of homo sapiens had started, the spread of a powerful hunting and fighting weapon technology would have caught up with the front of the human wave. The oldest remains of bow and arrow are from 60,000–70,000 years ago (in South Africa) and 48,000 years ago (Sri Lanka). Australians could have been in contact with the rest of humanity between 65,000  - 11,700 years ago. That gives a minimum of some 50k years for the bow to spread from Africa to Australia. Huge uncertainties for the numbers, but the principle should hold. Bow and arrow materials are available almost everywhere along the way to Australia, and it did arrive in the neighbourhood before modern man (Wikipedia citing Aboriginal Weapons and Tools):

Captain Cook saw the bow and arrow being used on an island close to the mainland at Cape York, as it was in the Torres Strait islands and New Guinea.

On the other hand, a redditor paraphrases Guns, Germ & Steel (underlining mine):

…the mystery of bows & arrows being present in modern New Guinea but absent in Australia might be compounded: perhaps bows & arrows actually were adopted for awhile then abandoned, across the Australian continent. The resistance to New Guinea influence is astonishing. Across the island dotted, narrow ribbon of water known as the Torres Straight, New Guinea farmers had pigs, pottery, bows & arrows and faced Australian hunter-gathers who lacked the same. There is also no evidence of any new technology or introduction reaching Australia from Indonesia after Australia's initial colonisation 40,000 years ago, until the dingo arrived around 1,500BC.

If the bow arrived later, that would mean an isolation from a technology and not its loss. But then again, it's possible that the bow arrived in Australia, with the first humans or later, but could not be rebuilt due to lack of suitable material. An educator (?) at Quora wrote

However the one of the few Australian timber reckoned by modern bowyers to be worth using, Eucalyptus astringens, grows 2000 km away, the other side of a desert from where bow technology is likely to have arrived in Australia. Other possibly-suitable timbers grow even further away. [ … ]

Although we cannot be sure the route by which the first people arrived in Australia, they probably arrived before the bow had been devised elsewhere. However the emigration of people who brought the dingo about 6000 years ago appear to have come in through the Kimberley region of north-western Australia.

The idea of a bow would not have travelled far without its being useful where it was first introduced. With timbers in that region reckoned to have around half the performance of good bowmaking timbers, a bow could not match the performance of the woomera and spear in use at the time.

Without its being useful straight off, the idea would quickly have been forgotten. That meant that the idea could not travel to the other side of the country, where suitable timber might be found with a lot of searching and testing. It also meant that the technological improvements that led to more-powerful bows elsewhere could not happen and the bow could not evolve to a level that it was actually superior to the spear and woomera.

Doing it today you might laminate kangaroo tendon to the front of staves of a suitable hardwood but that requires the development of the concept of laminating, chancing on the right material and learning to process it in a way that makes it work, developing suitably- strong glues, and having the workspace to do that level of work.

Without the first simple bows working adequately the idea simply cannot survive long enough for people to get around to developing each of those other steps.

That does not answer if the first Australians had the bow, but would be a plausible mechanism to explain how the technology arrived and died soon after every landfall.

Seems hard to give a definite answer, if even the far more recent introduction of the Dingo seems to be rather unclear.

Similar carved throwing sticks were used in quite a few different places. Boomerangs seem to have been used for hunting in ancient Egypt - including some from Tutankhamun's tomb which have been shown to do the whole returning-to-the-thrower thing. I suppose that raises the question of when boomerangs were invented, and whether there was a common origin.

TIL. Thank you.

[emiliobumachar]

The actual experts are marginalized in many instances.

Seems like a No True Scotsman to me. Explicitely: No Actual Experts would know less than their predecessors.

[Enopoletus]

Seems like a No True Scotsman to me. Explicitely: No Actual Experts would know less than their predecessors.

Agreed, emiliobumachar.