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November 5 - December 21, 2019
unbound
Over the course of the last five million years, eight key technologies have profoundly altered the relationship of our species with the natural environment, liberating us from the natural forces that restrain the populations of all other living things.
Five million years ago,
fabricated spears and digging sticks
One hundred thousand years ago or more,
verbal and visual symbols to communicate,
Ten thousand years ago,
agriculture
Five thousand years ago,
technologies of
transportation and comm...
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large seagoin...
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wagons pulled by beasts ...
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forms of ...
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technologies of interaction
Five hundred years ago,
precision instruments of clocks, sextants, compasses, microscopes, and telescopes
two hundred ye...
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reciprocating...
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An eighth metamorphosis is now under way, triggered by the key technology of digital information, which has made it possible for all human beings to visit and communicate with each other, anywhere on Earth.
four essential concepts
These concepts are 1) the nature of technology in the broadest sense of the word; 2) my decision to use the term “hominids” instead of the currently more fashionable “hominins”; 3) the three distinct phases of human evolution as they unfolded over the past five million years; and 4) the essential difference between a revolution and a metamorphosis.
technology—in
the deliberate modification of any natural object or substance with forethought to achieve a specific end or serve a specific purpose.
bow and arrow,
For the past 250 years, all of the fully upright bipedal primates in the human family tree were called hominids—a
“hominid” to refer to all of the species, both prehistoric
and modern, who walked and ran fully upright and whose arms and hands were free, uniquely among the higher animals, to make and carry things.
“hominid”
all prehistoric and modern bipedal species in the human
f...
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t...
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“early hominids,”
“emerging humans,”
“modern h...
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several milli...
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ago,
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a population of prehistoric apes gradually evolved the ability to stand, walk...
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Australopithecus afarensis,
flourished for about four million years—a
eight hundred
times longer than t...
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history of urban civilization that began in ancient Mesopotamia...
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ago.
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sometime after two million...
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more highly evolved ...
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African con...
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Ache...
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By approximately one million years ago, all evidence of the early hominids had disappeared from the fossil record.
extinct.
