And therein is the crux of our entire way of life. Civilization arose once we developed methods of food production that were efficient enough that some people in the group didn’t have to spend all their time acquiring food. That opened the door to ever increasing task specialization, which in turn leads to even more efficiencies. That’s still the path we’re on to day.
I used to love PT, but actually stopped for the reasons another commenter mentioned. I always assumed he was in a forward trajectory, but it appears he isn’t. He just goes in circles around the minutiae of different kiln and hut designs.
This makes sense, honestly, because you can’t “just do” copper, bronze, and Iron Age stuff by yourself on an arbitrary piece of land. You need mines with good ore, and a whole lot more people to extract it, smelt it, refine it, forge it, sharpen it, etc. To forge metals, you need coal, coke, and people to extract and refine those. You need mechanical bellows which requires lumber and leather, which in turn require logging, lumber mills, carpentry, animal husbandry, tanning, and nails. The nails require blacksmithing, which is a whole other can of worms. The efficiencies and specialization I talked about above are not just a nice side effect. They are necessary. The labor demands increase exponentially with technology and you quickly reach a point where you can’t create the whole supply chain by yourself in a single lifetime.
