At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

It is tempting to think of this as a kind of global lightbulb moment, but that is really stretching things. Most of the developments actually involved vast periods of trial, error, and adjustment, often over the course of thousands of years. Agriculture started 11,500 years ago in the Levant, but 8,000 years ago in China and only a little over 5,000 years ago in most of the Americas. People had been living with domesticated animals for 4,000 years before it occurred to anyone to put the bigger of them to work pulling plows; Westerners used a clumsy, heavy, exceedingly inefficient straight-bladed plow for a further 2,000 years before someone introduced them to the simple curved plow the Chinese had been using since time immemorial. Mesopotamians invented and used the wheel, but neighboring Egypt waited 2,000 years before adopting it. In Central America, the Maya also independently invented the wheel but couldn’t think of any practical applications for it and so reserved it exclusively for children’s toys. The Incas didn’t have wheels at all, or money or iron or writing. The march of progress, in short, has been anything but predictable and rhythmic.