Part I: Human history:

Despite modern scientific effort, human history remains largely unknown. It’s true that human artifacts and bones date back 28,000 years or more; and the fossil record shows evidence of hominid-like creatures going back over millions of years. But actual recorded history, written or preserved by those who lived it, reveals a scant 6000 years at most and accounts for a mere fraction of time humans have spent on Earth.

First hand records of human history prior to 6000 years ago are non-existent, save a thread of story here or there, but with the millennia of unaccounted time, it seems probable that important cultures and technologies arose prior to what is known today.

Archeological evidence shows similar pottery and metal objects found across the expanse of Europe and Asia, implying organized manufacture and trade took place long before written history. However, since precise accounts of this activity are lost, we can only extrapolate what happened by comparing ancient discoveries to how we live today.

The possibility of lost civilizations and technology appeals to the historian inside us all, and gives wonder to how man first discovered things like farming. How did man discover the seed? Or that seeds require water? Was farming invented in one locale and passed around the globe? Or did humans themselves spread around the globe because they knew how to farm?

What about manufacturing and trade among people? Is it instinctual to barter and trade? And who was the first person to invent manufacturing? It wasn’t Henry Ford. Was organized trade established before the first cities? Or was trade and manufacturing the viable basis for people to gather in cities?

Don’t you wish there was a book that documented the ‘history of manufacturing,’ complete with pictures of the earliest inventers, their tools, the things they made, how they made them, and what they traded for? That would be a quintessential Smithsonian exhibit wouldn’t it?

What about the wheel? Wouldn’t it be amazing to read the full history of the wheel, from invention to widespread use? Was it invented simultaneously in different parts of the globe, or did a single genius named ‘El-Edison’ invent it in his shop down by the river, and from there, it spread outward from the ‘father of the wheel?’

Just imagine the wheel changing production and energizing trade across the world, it probably revolutionized culture wherever it went.

If today’s model of the world mimics earlier cultures, then the wheel probably sparked vicious confrontation as cultural purists tried to stop the inevitable social upheaval caused by changing the rituals of asset production. Conservative versus progressive is no-doubt an age-old fight, but we’ll never know because the fight was never as important as the wheel itself.

And what about the fence? Did the first fence arise because men and women, fearing invasion, piled stones around themselves for safety? Or did Lores-Picasso climb out of a tree and abstractly tie long sticks together into a mat, then stand them upright into a circle? Can you imagine the gawks and hoots from his treemates until 20 years later somebody discovered you could sleep prone and protected on the ground using Lores’ invention.

Most questions in history will never have an answer, and the knowledge of exactly how and when and who is gone forever. There are no monuments for mama and papa Jonel for inventing the rock fence, or El-Edison for his revolutionary wheel. The only monument to this ancient human history is the continued use of their inventions today.

Somehow man invented ways to manipulate his environment to advantage, and those who did it best in their time, lived best… and those who adopted successes from the past and remembered the lessons of history were better able to meet the future. Using history is what people do to survive; after all farming is taught from one generation to the next, and if nobody remembered Lores Picasso’s stick circle, they wouldn’t have reaped the benefits throughout all these years.

So the real measure of human history is the contribution the present makes to the future. And so the natural question follows: what contribution will we make: Sewers, concrete, glass, plastic, rubber, airplanes, electricity? Will our contributions pass forward like the wheel, or be lost 20,000 years from now? Certainly it’s possible our technology could become culturally unimportant, and fall into disuse just like the sustained knowledge it took to precisely fit twenty-ton stones together in Pharaoh Egypt.

All things stand in their own time, and the inevitable march of time causes language and culture to change quickly. As evidence of this, only a scant two hundred generations of people have passed since the Sun God ordered hieroglyphs carved inside his tomb. You’ve seen more than 200 people standing in a theatre line and know it’s a tiny number, yet the entire Egyptian language and culture was lost in less than those 200 generations and would’ve remained so except for the chance discovery of the Rosetta stone and the persistent work of one linguist.

The fate of ancient Egypt shows how rapidly knowledge and invention can be lost, and it sparks the question if our technology was known before by men and somehow lost? Are electricity and glass lost and found from millennia to millennia? The answer is: not likely, despite Earth’s abundant supply of ingredients for both. 

Complex and sustained social activity was required to invent modern technology. The invention of electricity didn’t happen because one man tinkered in his shop. Electricity required cooperation between laboratories staffed with motivated people supported by stable governments and economies. Electricity was developed incrementally. It took years of work by thousands of people, each building on prior scientific discoveries while using simultaneous advances in the fields of mathematics, metallurgy and glass production. It took thousands of man hours over multiple generations to produce electricity and it takes thousands, maybe a million people each day to sustain electric production. The likelihood of this happening before is remote.

The delicate chain of events needed to make useful electricity today could have been interrupted at any time. If famine or disease had engulfed the world’s population at the end of the 18th century, the ensuing chaos might have ended our technological triumph over human despair. 

It’s important to note that contributions to the history of man come from times of economic stability and prosperity, and this is precisely because men who are fighting to survive will eat the bird instead of studying its wings to learn how to fly.

Invention requires stability and cooperation between the people and their government. While war helps create lasers and radar, the real contribution from these technologies comes when the war ends and those inventions are used to explore space and map the globe. Sustained warfare for the sake of warfare contributes nothing and is destined to be forgotten by history.

It’s a mistake to view history as a chronicle of war and conflict, when we know Somalia, a country that epitomizes piracy and street squabble, will never invent or contribute anything to mankind; no technology, no cure for disease, nothing. What the endless warfare of Somalia teaches us is how technologies are lost when people refuse to cooperate or trust.

The real history of man is not about who conquered who, instead it’s the contribution people make to the future of other men. We know this because the only memories we have of pre- written history are the successes they passed forward.

The point of this chapter is: Our furthest ancestors can’t tell their stories, and there is no handbook to research endless questions about their lives, yet we have a direct connection because we use the most enduring technologies they created, like the wheel and fence, and farming and trade, and brick making and twine. These things were passed forward to us and they make transparent the history of man, so when we ask how and why these things exist today, we can see history and see what was done to provide for us. Technological contributions from the past are the model for our aspiration as a people.


Gene Haynes