Unbound Quotes

“the tribal cultures that had evolved during the Upper Paleolithic with the emergence of symbolic communication enabled people who might have been strangers to feel a collective sense of belonging and solidarity. It was the formation of tribes and ethnicities that enabled the strangers of the large Neolithic towns to trust each other and interact comfortably with each other, even if they were not all personally acquainted.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“But the Stone Age was not a distinct period or age at all, since it includes the entire evolutionary history of the hominids, from their earliest appearance several million years ago to the fully modern humans of today’s world. This immense period of time encompasses many of the technologies described in this book, including the domestication of fire, the invention of clothing and dwellings, the development of symbolism, the adoption of agriculture, and the beginnings of urban civilization. In fact, the Stone Age technically began to end only when the techniques of metallurgy were first developed a few thousand years ago.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“And while our bodies are no longer capable of climbing trees to dizzying heights with the ease of apes and monkeys, we still find a singular pleasure in being perched in high places with commanding views.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Each of the four metamorphoses that had already taken place had transformed the biology of our ancestors in significant ways. 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.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Whether our species is capable of a final act of fusion—in which all living people achieve a shared identity as members of a single global culture and civilization—is a question that will determine the future not only of our own species but also of most forms of life on Earth. This is, in fact, the question that lies at the heart of this book.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Over time, the cuneiform writing of the Sumerians was adopted as a standard “alphabet” by many other ancient cultures, and cuneiform became the standard way of writing in ancient Babylonian, Assyrian, Hittite, Elamite, Hurrian, Urartian, Ugaritic, and Persian cultures. But while they may have all used the same system of writing, the people who spoke these different languages were not able to read each other’s cuneiform script. Similarly, people who understand only English can read only what is written in English and cannot read Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Flemish, Italian, French, or German, even though all of these languages use essentially the same alphabet.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“But what that information is, and how it was translated into symbolic form, remains a secret that the best minds of modern paleontology have been utterly unable to unlock. If the written word—which includes both simple forms like cuneiform or the Roman alphabet and complex forms like Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan glyphs—is the symbolic representation of information expressed in human speech, the petroglyphs of the Paleolithic rank as the earliest and most ancient forms of human writing ever found. Furthermore, they are the best evidence imaginable that the people who created these petroglyphs were using language.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

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― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“For all of its technological prowess, our species is still motivated by ancient animal instincts, including the drive to expand and multiply to the limits of the possible.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The current threats to the biosphere are more than the consequences of human technologies. They are also the expression of Homo sapiens' animal nature.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“In the modern world, the threat to human life and safety now comes almost exclusively from other human beings.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The typical wage earner spends the major part of every working day performing tasks under the scrutiny of an employer. Often, these tasks have little or no relevance to the wage earner's personal interests or relationship with others.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The use of pictures, designs, words, and music to communicate thoughts and ideas is surely one of the most unique of all human behaviors.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The caveman is not extinct but is alive and well and living today in the houses and apartments of the modern world.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“No known human society, however primitive or technologically unsophisticated, has ever found to subsist entirely on a diet of raw food. In fact, people in modern society who have adopted a raw food diet must spend an extraordinary amount of time chewing their food, they have less energy, lose weight, and are hungry virtually all the time.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Many domesticated animals, including dogs, cats, horses, pigs, parrots and geese, are capable of forming strong attachments with other species -including human beings- sometimes for reasons that defy logic.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The tribal clans and royal dynasties that gave structure and stability to hunter-gatherer and civilized societies alike throughout most of human history could never have existed were it not for the deep emotional bonds forged in the crucible of family.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“In the final analysis, the technology of precision machinery—and the urbanization of human society that that technology made possible—has rendered the so-called traditional family, with its assumption of lifelong permanence, essentially obsolete. The arranged marriage has become a thing of the past. The economic benefits of having children have been replaced by significant economic costs. The economic and social interdependence between men and women has weakened considerably. And not only virginity in adolescence but also the traditional prohibitions against premarital and extramarital sex have lost most or all of their former social stigma.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“It is therefore not surprising that the people of modern society are plagued by levels of anxiety, depression, and self-doubt far beyond anything that was observed by the anthropologists who studied the preindustrial cultures of either hunters and gatherers or agriculturalists. 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.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“but the fact remains that a society composed almost entirely of people who work under the direction of other people—who in turn provide them with a regular supply of money—is an entirely new phenomenon in human history.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Perhaps the most profound change in human life that has occurred with the transformation into an industrial society is the general disappearance of the ancient human activity of finding or producing food and its nearly total replacement by employment for monetary gain.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“For the first time in human history, a human society has emerged in which only a small fraction of the population is engaged in producing food, while a majority of the population pursues work that has nothing to do with either finding or producing food.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Yet the human family survives and will continue to survive. Men and women will continue to form sexual partnerships, and they will continue to have children. Those who are not inclined to procreate will contribute neither their inherited biological predispositions nor their learned cultural preferences to future generations. While the “traditional family” has become obsolete, the human family has not. Our innate human natures, the product of millions of years of human evolution, ensure that the human family will survive as long as our species endures.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“In the final analysis, the technology of precision machinery—and the urbanization of human society that that technology made possible—has rendered the so-called traditional family, with its assumption of lifelong permanence, essentially obsolete.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“ever since the idea of marrying for love became the norm in modern society, men and women expect the intimacy, companionship, mutual attraction, and sexual satisfaction that typically accompanies new partnerships to continue indefinitely, and there is much bitterness and disappointment when, as so often happens, these benefits tend to disappear as the years go by.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“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. These goals were achieved by a set of customs that made both men and women socially, economically, and psychologically dependent on each other. And it was these customs—not lasting affection or mutual attraction—that ensured the permanence of marriage.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The potent combination of the new ideals of marrying for love, the new standards of social and sexual freedom for unmarried couples, and the development of truly reliable contraceptives triggered a transformation in sexual values in modern society, as the ancient human sexual instincts, themselves the product of millions of years of evolution, have reasserted themselves.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The independence and personal freedom that accompanied the arrival of the automobile and the anonymity of urban life provided young people with unprecedented opportunities for privacy, and the traditional practice of providing a chaperone for every interpersonal contact between young men and women has been largely abandoned.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Since the children of modern urban society have become a net economic burden to their families, it is not surprising that families have become smaller with each generation of urbanization, and that many married couples have chosen to have no children at all.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“And as financial support in old age has gradually become an obligation of government throughout the industrialized world, children have lost their importance even as a source of security for the parents in their old age.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink