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.
The fleshlight
A large obsidian slab standing perfectly vertically.
one of those fleshlight vibrators that suck your dick
Neanderthal goes extinct.
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.
The idea that nobody understood the concept of zero until long after the Greeks is just something I can never understand.
Just… how? I don’t remember having to be taught what zero was, I’m pretty sure I grokked it instantly.
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.
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
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.
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.
That singing fish animatronic. Convinced people it’s a god. Wait for the battery to die and the eventual religious crisis.
They would be deeply concerned as it appears to get slowly possessed by a demon when the batteries are low
A single glass coca-cola bottle
You must be crazy. ;)
Aye yi yi yi yi
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.
Partially we are. They found Neanderthal DNA in modern humans, meaning our ancestors found them nice enough…
Okay, yes, so technically we are a bit, at least for humans with ancestry outside of Africa. Touche.
But, they weren’t an earlier version of humans like (still) gets implied in pop culture sometimes. More of an alternate modern group that went extinct.
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 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.
