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.
If you’re looking for the biggest change in our timeline for the littlest work I’d give a hindu-arabic numerals to early Greek mathematicians. Watching those guys try to wrap their heads around zero, that would fuck Pythagoras.
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.
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.
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 screw
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
I’d give Masada machine guns.
Bicycles. If we could have gotten bicycles a few centuries before cars, I don’t think modern cities would be so damn car centric.
If I may ask, where are you from? The city I live in is a nightmare for cars, the roads were made for horses and walking, narrow and winding cobblestone streets and the city tries its best to keep cars out of the center.
US. An utter hellscape. Where we ripped out world class trolleys so they wouldn’t inconvenience drivers.
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!!
Leaf blower. They are loud and the “breath” coming from them is pretty awesome.
A single glass coca-cola bottle
You must be crazy. ;)
Hey this might help us out. If Neanderthals learn how to sit for hrs a day we would get that evolutionary advantage.
I mean, we’re not descended from neanderthals. And you don’t need a chair to sit.
That singing fish animatronic. Convinced people it’s a god. Wait for the battery to die and the eventual religious crisis.
A Furby.
The mechanical Furk
Robotic animal recreations were actually very popular in the ancient world.
A solar panel with a light attached.
That one would actually make more sense if you’d never seen either part separately, but I like the spirit.
My thought process was, this produces light only when there is light outside making it effectively useless.
Exactly, although to a cave person that’s just an interesting device that redirects sunlight somehow. They’d have to understand it could have been stored up for night or used for something else, in order to feel ripped off.
