Technology Timeline: Possible improvements

[stevebowers]

I think I have found a cite for the 2500BC date;

One of the earliest smelted iron artifacts, a dagger with an iron blade found in a Hattic tomb in Anatolia, dated from 2500 BC.

This is at least a thousand years earlier than other possible smelted artifacts, but it may be correct. Remember that the Encyclopedia Galactica is a work of reference that is imagined to exist more than 10,000 years in the future, at a time when archaeology on Earth can no longer be carried out. Any dates in the EG will be derived from the preserved data carried away from Earth during and before the Great Expulsion, and some of this would be debatable. Of course the completeists on Ken Ferjik would almost certainly keep a record of how 'reliable' any such historical data might be.