Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

by Richard L. Currier

Early hominids, emerging humans, and modern humans were thus the three dominant populations during each of the major phases in the evolution of humanity. The early hominids survived for well over four million years, the emerging humans for nearly two million years. We modern humans, with our “superior” brains, have inhabited this earth for at most a quarter of a million years—one-eighth as long as the emerging humans and one-sixteenth as long as the early hominids. Modern humans have a long way to go before equaling the longevity of our most ancient ancestors.

That's actually insane, only an eighth!

Absence of Evidence Is Not Evidence of Absence

prominent brow ridges,

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When female hominids abandoned the estrus cycle to form permanent sexual relationships with individual males, a powerful new sexual bond was added to the ancient primate bond between mother and offspring. For the first time, a group-living primate species began to practice monogamy, and nuclear families became clearly defined structures within the larger social structure of the group.18

When the ancestors of the hominids began to make, carry, and use spears and digging sticks in their daily lives, they set in motion a cascade of events that culminated in the evolution of an animal with a radically new physical form, an adaptation to the environment that required unprecedented cooperation between males and females, a huge expansion of sexual behavior, and the emergence of family ties that would provide the building blocks for the larger and more advanced societies of modern humans.

Fending off large predators from a distance had a much higher survival rating than doing so within close proximity where death was usually certain. Because of this weaponized advantage, we began to lose our powerful canines.

Melatonin—a hormone secreted by the tiny pineal gland, which is located at the base of the brain—is released when the level of light in the environment begins to drop with the approach of sunset.9 The higher the concentration of melatonin in the bloodstream, the sleepier the individual becomes. Conversely, when the sun rises and the environment becomes flooded with light, the production of melatonin by the pineal gland drops off, and the melatonin remaining in the blood is removed from the body by the kidneys. When the emerging humans began to use fire to ward off predators after sunset, they created an artificial source of light that had the effect of suppressing the production of melatonin and delaying the onset of sleep.

The human brain weighs about three pounds—about 2 percent of the average adult’s total body weight. Yet when it is active, the human brain can consume as much as 20 percent of the body’s available energy—roughly ten times as much energy, pound for pound, as is consumed by the human body as a whole. Furthermore, the brain is not the only “expensive tissue” in the body. Other tissues with similarly high energy demands include the heart, liver, kidneys, and digestive organs. Taken together, the brain and these vital organs make up less than 7 percent of the body’s weight, yet, when the body is in a resting state, they consume an astounding 60 to 70 percent of its available energy.

The ability to cook through the use of fire allowed us to spend less time eating/digesting raw food, which in turn helped us conserve much needed energy to be applied elsewhere. These other endeavors ultimately freed us from the restraints of a long hunter/gatherer past.

The fuel that powers the activities of the brain is a large sugar molecule known as glycogen, and the body’s supply of available glycogen is manufactured in the liver.

The evolutionary solution to this problem turned out to be that as the size of the brain increased, hominid babies began to be born before their brains were fully developed. In fact, if you apply the normal rules of mammalian fetal development to humans, the “normal” gestation period for humans would be at least twelve months, not nine. But at twelve months the average infant brain would simply be too large to pass through the average human birth canal, making human birth mechanically impossible.

Females pelvic structure, even with anatomical evolutionary help, were not fit to give birth to a fully "mature" baby without the risk of dying. This was primarily due to the increased size of the brain but a interesting behavioral trait was lacking within the womb that our early ancestors and most primate species rely on to this day - as the birthing process is underway, infant apes will instinctively turn their heads to the side to ease the process... an instinct that no longer was passed down.

Without the technologies of fire, dwellings, and clothing, the size of the hominid brain would have been unable to expand much beyond the 650 cc size of the brain of Homo ergaster, the likely ancestor of Homo erectus—and humanity would have remained, to this day, little more than a very intelligent, meat-eating, tool-making, weapons-carrying, two-legged ape.

The technology of spears and digging sticks transformed us from quadrupedal into bipedal animals. The technology of fire and cooking resulted in the loss of our body hair, a massive expansion in the size of our brains, and the disappearance of our tree-climbing anatomy. The technology of clothing and shelter enabled us to migrate out of the tropics and made it possible for our “premature” newborns to survive in cold climates. And the technology of symbolic communication involved significant changes in our brains, freeing us from the slow pace of biological evolution and enabling us to take advantage of the speed and flexibility of cultural evolution.

This "premature" birthing period is the reason why infants are insanely vulnerable compared to the rest of the animal kingdom. Other mammals are able to walk, run, swim... develop a sense of their surroundings within HOURS of being born, while we barely master crawling before the year is through.

The Fertile Crescent, which stretches from the Nile River in the west to the Persian Gulf in the east, is where the earliest evidence of agriculture appeared.

The two earliest recorded civilizations came from the crescent, Mesopotamia being the first as well as Egypt.

Why did such a fundamental change in the relationship between humanity and the natural environment take place all over the world between eleven and four thousand years ago? Why did agriculture appear almost simultaneously in so many different locations throughout the world? And why did agriculture begin in each region with a different mix of plants and animals from those that were domesticated in the Fertile Crescent, rather than spreading from a single point of origin in the Middle East? So the question remains: What was new or different about the humans of the Neolithic? What abilities did they have that enabled them to invent a radically different way of life, abilities that the hominids of the earlier periods did not possess?

With Europe being the only continent to not jump on the agricultural bandwagon.

The fiercely warlike Cheyenne, for example, had a sexually repressive culture when they were studied by anthropologists in the early twentieth century. The Cheyenne believed that sex robbed a man of his power in war and hunting, and some Cheyenne men were known to refrain from sex for years at a time, believing that by doing so they would eventually father powerful, warlike offspring.

As a general rule, the larger and the more permanent the agricultural settlements became, they more devastating was their practice of warfare.

The Great Wall of China needs little introduction. It is actually a series of walls, together measuring more than five thousand miles in length, built at different times by different Chinese emperors, beginning at approximately 700 BC and continuing intermittently to approximately the year 1600 AD. The Great Wall was constructed for the purpose of repelling the Mongols and other warlike tribes who lived in the mountains and deserts north of the Chinese heartland. It was built and rebuilt many times over the course of Chinese history, but it was decisively breached in 1644 by the armies of the Manchu warlords, who established the Qing Dynasty and ruled China until modern times.

Cairo

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But sometime around 4000 BC, the coppersmiths of the Middle East discovered that by mixing copper with small amounts of arsenic—a poisonous metallic crystal—and later with small amounts of tin—a non-toxic metal—they could make bronze, a metal that proved far superior to copper.

In 1992 the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar studied the relationship between brain size and group size in numerous primate species. He found that the species with the largest brains were able to maintain the largest cohesive social groups while those with the smallest brains were able to maintain only the smallest cohesive social groups. His mathematical model predicted that, given the size of the human brain, human groups would retain their cohesiveness up to approximately the size of only 150 individuals. The number 150, which came to be called “Dunbar’s number,” turns out to be approximately the maximum number of full-fledged relationships a normal human being can maintain at any given time.9

Although no one at the time could have foreseen it, a common problem that affected most coal mines remained unsolved until the invention of the steam engine, one of the most transformative of all precision machines, and the device that, more than any other, gave birth to the industrial revolution.

In fact, the traditional institution of marriage that we inherited from ancient societies was never designed to provide intimacy, companionship, mutual attraction, or sexual satisfaction. Traditional marriage evolved in agricultural societies as a way to create lifelong partnerships, establish mutually beneficial economic relationships between families, and maximize the stability of land ownership in agricultural society.

It is surely one of the great paradoxes of human history that the evolution of modern life, with all of its safety, security, comfort, and diversions, has been plagued by an epidemic of eating disorders, heart disease, insomnia, drug addiction, neurosis, psychosis, and pathological discontent that is unprecedented in the history of the human species.

If 3200 BC is remembered as the time when humanity first crossed the horizon of written history, 2000 AD will be remembered as the time when humanity first crossed the horizon of digital history.

BC/AD is now commonly referred to as BCE/CE, in attempts to remove religious connotation. Before Common Era/Common Era are gaining worldwide popularity as alternatives but for the sake of general knowledge, most books and courses still use the latter. Similar to how the word Hominid no longer strictly encompasses the human species, there is now a new scientific term (Hominin) that hasn't gotten enough traction to replace what's familiar.

Who would have guessed that the development of precision machinery by medieval clockmakers—driven by the simple desire to produce more accurate clocks—would lead before long to the invention of the modern printing press, an explosion of knowledge, and a Renaissance in the arts and sciences throughout the Western world? Or that when the forests of Europe were being consumed by the clockmakers’ rising demand for iron and steel, the civilized world would begin mining coal, which would lead before long to the invention of the steam engine with all of its multiple effects on the nature of manufacturing, travel, and trade? Or that the success of the steam engine would spawn an industrial revolution that would, within the course of a single century, produce the internal combustion engine, the automobile, the airplane, and the widespread use of electric power?

Clocks had been used for centuries prior through alternate and ancient methods, what caused precision machinery to boom was the need for very specific sized gears and components within the more modern and compact clocks of the middle ages.

Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus—the “gas giants” of our solar system—are composed of cores of ice and rock larger than Earth that are covered with thick atmospheres of hydrogen and helium and buried under immense oceans of liquefied hydrogen and helium thousands of miles deep. None of these planets have any real “surfaces” in the normal sense of the word—only mushy regions where gases become compressed into liquids and where liquids become compressed into solids, all of which are hidden in total and perpetual darkness.

While we are justly concerned about the dangers of global warming and the destructive effect it would have on our contemporary societies, we should also recognize that another period of severe global cooling—and the return of another ice age—would actually pose a much greater threat to human civilization. In fact, it is entirely possible that the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by industrial societies will actually prevent the return of another ice age that might have otherwise returned in the near future. And because higher levels of carbon dioxide bring about significant changes in the chemistry of the oceans, the effects of global warming could persist almost indefinitely and might prevent the return of more ice ages for hundreds of thousands of years into the future.21

We are currently due for another Ice Age. One where polar ice sheets in North America (hundreds of feet high) would completely wipe out Canada and bury the entire northern half of the US. The landscape around the world would be altered drastically, making most of it inhabitable. Deserts will span unimaginable distances, the Sahara alone would engulf half of Africa. Yet all of this would come to pass over the course of thousands of years.

The customs and traditions surrounding the preparation of food—considered by anthropologists to be one of the most distinctive expressions of ethnic and cultural identity—have been undergoing an unprecedented process of fusion.

The Paleolithic is usually subdivided into three eras based on tool types: 1) the Lower Paleolithic, which begins roughly three million years ago with the manufacture of the first crude Oldowan pebble tools by the early hominids and continues throughout the 1.5-million-year period during which the emerging humans such as Homo erectus made their more finely worked Acheulean hand axes; 2) the Middle Paleolithic, which begins approximately 250,000 years ago and is generally associated with the Neandertals and their Mousterian flake tools; and 3) the Upper Paleolithic, which begins roughly fifty thousand years ago and corresponds to the time of the anatomically modern humans such as the Cro-Magnons, who made the finest and most varied stone tools from long, thin blades of fine-grained stone such as flint and obsidian.

*This is roughly where the book ended and continued on with listing; sources, an extensive glossary and index.*

Biosphere 2 was intended to demonstrate how humans could live on other planets, but instead it showed that life cannot be sustained once contact with the earth’s natural ecosystems is severed.

This was intended to be a 2 year project with no intervention from the outside world where scientists would study a small group and the environment. This didn't happen. With high levels of carbon dioxide and other compounds dangerously collecting in the air, oxygen had to be routinely pumped into the enclosure. Most of the animal and plant life died off within, or shortly after, the first year - causing the band to split in two where each member was already experiencing symptoms of starvation. Because of this, nourishment had to be provided months prior to the end of the experiment for the safety of the participants.