All this stuff about when things were discovered really gets me. I know we have to stay uncontroversial but it's beyond my understanding why anyone would doubt why these highly intelligent modern people, who worked with wood and stone and ropes all the time wouldn't know exactly what could be done with levers and ropes. Wheels and pullies and complex gearing, fair enough they may have needed inventing and for knowledge of them to spread, but the rest would just be obvious to them. Homo habilis was "the handyman" 2.5 million years earlier and he had stone tools!

Didn't know about the Spanish Windlass? I guess that would mean they never noticed their ropes got shorter as they made them, and they never braided their hair.

Pscha! A good spell in the army is what some of these archaeos need.

OK, pills taken, rant over.