Shells or coral could serve as early tools, but (just my opinion) I feel it's a little human-centric to assume fire and metallurgy are required to progress. Just because we did it that way, doesn't mean another species would have to.

[–] spankmonkey 16 points 2 days ago

Fire and tools were what we needed to become the dominant species, as they gave us power to take down the larger megafauna.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this exact subject, and I dunno. As much as I consider it, as abstractly as possible, I have considerable difficulty finding an alternate route to significant human-like dominance. Fire and metallurgy are just so incredibly useful across so many domains. I challenge you to present a reasonable alternative route.

[–] eronth 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah, but we did all of our discoveries as a land-based species. It's totally possible some water-based species would find other crazy useful early techniques, then eventually discover stuff like "fire" much further down the line with access to more robust technologies. Their scientific roadmap would look very different from ours, but there are so many weird tricks and techniques that would eventually lead towards some of the dominating processes we have.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

It's totally possible some water-based species would find other crazy useful early techniques

Such as?

Even then, they are still short-lived, non-social animals who don't raise their young. How do individual discoveries compound into robust technologies?