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.
One of those 3D printed non-round gear toys. They could immediately appreciate both the impressive technology that went into designing and manufacturing it, and that it has no use whatsoever. Which would be a trip.
An LED light bulb.
a slot machine and a battery to keep it running
A bicycle.
Anything mechanical, even someone in 5000bc would be able to figure out how it works.
I think the problem would be recreation. Can’t really make an effective chain out of wood I assume.
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You actually can,, although I don’t know how rugged the result is. You probably could make a heavy, one speed bike out of wood with like, wheels that are just big disks. I’m not sure if it would beat walking, especially before purpose built roads were common. That being said, they might at least think going down a hill at speed is fun, which is what the first bikes were made for.
For a modern-style bike, the wheels are more of an engineering challenge, as is centering the various parts and ensuring a tight fit. Modern machine parts are made with micrometric precision, which involves surprisingly simple tools, but a whole lot of science and technique.
If it was a few thousand years later after horses were introduced, they could copy the concept of tension wheels for their chariots.
A Roman dodecahedron, it fucks with modern people as well.
Ha ha, that’s my one too - tell us what these bloody things are for!!
A monolith
That still trips up some people today. That metal monolith that was propped up in the desert a year or two ago comes to mind.
A Nintendo Switch running Animal Crossing. Assume it has some kind of perpetual battery, and they can figure out how to operate it/play the game, and read our modern English.
I’m thinking they figure modern civilisation is about (or back to) fishing and farming… and that animals are intelligent. Like validating TF outta the Egyptian pantheon. You’re a human but you have a dog for a neighbor, here’s a koala, a gorilla, an eagle… and they all talk and wear clothes.
(Of course, if we wanna blow their minds with a game AND we can assume they can play it, why not just go straight to Cyberpunk?)
one of those fleshlight vibrators that suck your dick
Neanderthal goes extinct.
A single glass coca-cola bottle
You must be crazy. ;)
Aye yi yi yi yi
Condoms
Something with gears. Like a cranked egg whisk. Huge amounts of science went into this, but all of it should be replicable in a few generations of experiment with even bronze working. And it should inspire inventors of the age too
Or wood. Mills used wooden peg gears to great effect for a long time.
The bigger challenge is to have enough jobs worth doing with gears to keep craftsmen trained, since making a smooth turning gear by hand is a thing. If this is Rome, there will be, but they already had some knowledge of gears. If it’s cavemen there’s not a chance.
I’d just give a LGM-118A Peacekeeper MIRV to the Aztecs and say nothing more. I wonder if they would eventually manage to do something with it.
A screw
A large obsidian slab standing perfectly vertically.
I would take a portable CD player, place a CD with Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up on it playing backwards, hook up solar panels, remove the ability to shut it on/off, and set it up a circuit that will:
- As the device solar charges, keep it off until some voltage threshold is exceeded
- Once the voltage is high enough, start a random timer (8 - 100 hours), so that it is not immediately obvious that the sun activated the device
- When the timer ends, turn the music on on repeat mode
- Sometimes turn the music off at random, and then turn it on again at random after a long delay, so that in some cases you can have turn ‘ON’ events without the device being exposed to the sun
- When the voltage drops below a low threshold, turn the device off until it is charged again
Imagine how crazy it would be as tech advanced through the ages and people create their own artificial sound and eventually realise that that sounds from the mysterious artifact from the future was playing music BACKWARDS and there’s discernible lyrics.
Hopefully the English language is developed and Rick Astley gets to make his song before anyone figures it out!
