Since Stone Age, humans are tying knots
long ( sometimes dozens of
thousands of years ! ) before they bother to name or represent them. Perhaps this could had changed, if there was an automatic knot-tying machine ( something like a more complex sewing machine ), which would had tied all the possible simple knots discovered by mathematicians... I suppose that the bone-made awl and sewing-needle users
60.000 years ago were tying half-hitches and overhand knots all the time. So, if we are not believers in some extreme variation of medieval nominalism, where there are no real things, but only names ( Lat. "nomen", Gr. "ονομα" ), we should expect that there would be knots
discovered but not
named yet - or, if they have been named, their names would not appear in ABoK
or any other "
published source".
Moreover, I believe that what most users of the internet think as "
published sources", means, sadly, only "published sources in English"... I have not seen anybody to compile a "relational database" of the knots tied and named by other sea-faring people, that had used them in sailing ships even before English-speaking people : Greek, Chinese, Viking, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch... We have written references and descriptions of many knots in other languages, which do not appear in fast-knot ( like "fast-food" ) web sites and coffee table books, offering cheap
knot recipes - nowadays served with colourful / spectacular pictures and animations, to attract more customers.
Practical knots are tools, so the study of their origins and development belongs to the History of Technology. Now, technology is different from science in many ways, one of which is that it evolves very rapidly, and the many new inventions are comparable, and measurably better than the old ones. The result is that there is less public interest in the history of technology than in the history of science, and there are fewer scholars involved in it, fewer books, fewer articles, etc. So, I do not expect any extensive scientific work in the history of practical knots coming soon
... Also, most people are interested in tools as means to their ends, to "do the job" - the fact that there are other people, of other occupations or nationalities, that do the same job using other tools, named otherwise, seems only secondary to them. There are Japanese, Russian and American fishermen fishing the same fishes in the same seas - yet they use different knots for attaching their hooks on the fishing lines, for example, and, of course, even when they use the same knots, they call them differently.
In particular, the
Gleipnir was the greatest invention in practical knotting since the
Zeppelin bend, I believe - although it could had been invented before the
bowline ! ( it works based on the same mechanism, but it is more simple / primitive than the bowline, in that it does not uses the collar ). It was a matter of
luck, and a
privilege, for the participants in this Forum to learn this knot before the general public : this should not mean that people that do not participate in it should sense a "
feeling of exclusion" ! An old or new knot belongs to
everybody - after all, we like to imagine that it would had already been discovered by the intelligent inhabitants of many distant galaxies, because we do not believe that those long cylindrical flexible things we call "ropes" exist only on Earth !
Perhaps we should pay more attention to the correct information about knots in the web, indeed - most Wikipedia articles about knots, for example, are really lamentable, full of inaccuracies, mistakes, ignorance, myths, and even lies !