Just have that one crazy hermit guy that you stumble across who has figured out how to irrigate in a new terrain. Or who figured out how to turn iron into steel.
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Iām very fond of random events creating progress. Crusader Kings always had a very advanced system in which tens, or even hundreds of different variables, would decide not only IF an event would fire, but also WHEN it would fire. I guess @DonBerkelear has something like that in mind?
For example: for your tribe to independently discover some new tool or a better technique related to fishing, one of the absolute demands, would of course be that your villagers are actually fishing, and doing stuff in the water. If they are, then there is a very low probability every day or so, that they would discover a new technique, a new tool, or improve a method, or something like that. But there would also be a whole set of modifiers, that would make it twice as probable, half as probable, and so forth. If more of your villagers are working in the water, that should normally increase the chance that a new technique or tool is discovered. If itās winter, and your villagers just want to get out of the waterā¦ it could decrease the probability, I guess? Summer would increase it slightly? Lots of fish thatās easy to catch means less need for inventionsā¦ but too little would mean less need tooā¦ and so forth.
And so if the player leads his people to the shores of a lake, and the villagers spend most of their time fishing from land and from small boats, with nets and with spears, maybe even diving a bitā¦ chances are that some day an event pops up: āGreat discovery! Your villager, X, has come up with a great new way of Y!ā. Hopefully X will spread this knowledge, and all of the village will prosper 
Or he drowns right after, and itās gone foreverā¦ or until next time itās discovered 
Another example, connected to that of @martin8 the answer from @UncasualGames:
- An event pops: āA villager has made a discovery! Young Ugga-bugga was playing in the forest and discovered a strange new rockā. Turns out there is a small amount of natural occurring native gold (āpureā gold, visible with the naked eye) near the village, and a kid stumbled upon it.
- Some time later a new event: āA villager has made a discovery!ā. Someone accidentally, or purposely, put some of the native gold in the fire, and it turned liquidā¦ but then became hard again when cooled. Metallurgy! A miracle!
- Then, someday if youāre extremely lucky, and thereās native copper nearby, a new event will pop: āA villager has made a discovery!ā, and youāve discovered copper.
- Since your villagers already know of melting one strange stone, they might try it with copper. Of course, it would take a very long time till copper became tool rather than luxuryā¦
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I read a book on African history, boy was that bad idea, and the book suggested that the reason Roman and Greece and the surrounding area grew faster then Africa was because of the war and trading.
I am so disappointed in myself for not having joined this conversation sooner haha. I have some more ideas for the tech tree in the game. Quite honestly, I do not think having a visible tech tree is a good idea. In most games you have this tech tree which you can see what prerequisites are required to meet before you can access the next skill or tool. Additionally, you may be able to see what the next technique will be or even be able to see the whole tree itself. I think this game does not need a tech tree at all. Let me explain:
A tech tree often times shows the player what else he or she should aim for, like improve fishing abilities or construction skills. That way they will go out of their way to send their villagers into the water to get the next level of fishing skill to earn that āadvanced fishing rodā or to continuously make clothing to achieve the āclothing masteryā skill. I think the player should be as blind to the possibilities of advancement as the villagers. I think the player should be as surprised to have made a new discovery as the villagers would have been. Neolithic peoples didnāt know how to improve their lifestyles or their skills unless they experimented with things or stumbled upon things by accident. That is why I think the tech trees shouldnāt show the potential that the villagers have, but instead should show tech previously discovered (and, perhaps at some point, lost) and then you will no longer see that specific skill or tech on the tree anymore, as it will now have to be rediscovered.
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You nailed it 
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Letās think controversially - maybe a player never directly targets neoliticism?
By attacking a neighboring village (already in Neolithic times), he gains all the knowledge that this people has explored for generations.
Remains to clarify what the people of the player dealt with during this time ā¦ (?)
On this occasion - is the timeline for players and AI always the same?
As knowledge belongs to characters, just attacking a village will not provide all the knowledge of that village.
Yes
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mmmh, the attack / raid must of course be successful and relatively bloodless. Through the achievements, buildings, tools and the prisoners could already take place a significant āknowledge transferā. Or?
Keep in mind that much of the technology these people would know requires significant tutelage, such as Flint knapping techniques or weaving skills. Iām not sure that someone would be so willing to teach their captors, or that the captors would even know about special skills to explicitly ask. I couldnāt see some prisoners, such as captured women, giving up such knowledge to ensure their saftey. I believe several mass graves from the LBK showed a disproportionate ratio of male to female bodies, suggesting females may have been taken as captives.
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However, thereās also to take into account accommodation to their new situation, be they women, children or men.
We often slavery as one of the worst things possible for human beings ā thatās in every newspaper since a few weeks. But there are also very numerous cases were being a slave, in ancient societies, was not worse than anything else for most of the time.
Looking at Ancient Greece, thereās the famous case of those helots; but thereās also the case of those slaves being used to police the very citizens at the Assembly. If they had been mistreated, Iām not sure the citizens would have left them any form of power over their own, volunteer masters.
And finally thereās also to take into account those cases when e.g. women, but probably also children and men could be taken as prisoners, with their families being either killed, having fled when facing an attack, etc.
If held as captive but being offered the position of a married woman, of being adopted as the children of a warrior, what would be their reaction? Probably in most case there would not be any at all ā like that was apparently the case amongst some Native tribes in Northern America.
Then, they clearly would not held for themselves the use of a new, more efficient grindstone, or would refrain to tell that their own families back in their former village had found a greet way to keep food intact or to catch more fishes ā even less so if the live of their newborn children or people they had learned to live with or even appreciate were in danger.
But like for religion, the place of women, governance, etcā¦ thatās one of those cases where we should be able to have a role on the shaping of our society.
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Not necessarily. There are technologies which have been invented independently. Like the pyramids in America, Africa and Asia. I presume there are some core technologies, which have to be spread, but branch technologies could be developed multiple times independently.
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This is already in the basic of how knowledge works in game. The same technological jump can happen in different places at different times.
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so if you wish to be an isolationist - you stagnate and never grow and never advance
yet another tribe was found in the Amazonā¦it happens
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