The long run

Part 1: Technological progress and the history of mankind

By and large, we all know how humans evolved in prehistory. If you had asked me, I would have said something like this:

1. We descended from apes and began to walk upright.
2. Archaic humans started using stone tools.
3. The first anatomical humans appeared.
4. We became farmers.
5. We began to live in cities and invented writing.

When we look at the timeline of these events:

1. ~7 millions years ago (Diverging from apes)
2. ~3,3 million years ago (Stone tools)
3. ~300.000 years ago (Homo sapiens)
4. ~12000 years ago (Farming)
5. ~6000 years ago (First cities/writing)

You will see that the development was very slow at first until it became very fast over time. So throughout most of the Stone Age, advances in technology would have been imperceptible, and innovation was not actively and consciously pursued.

Still every new invention in the early and middle Stone Age made a big impact. Changes that gave us certain survival advantages. Eventually humans spread all over the world and developed at an increasing faster pace.

Technological progress

When we are visualizing such growth in human development, it’s mostly depicted as an exponential growth curve. A good example is the exponential growth of world’s population:

A few things to note in this graph, namely

1. The Old Stone Age (2.5 million years) counts for only 10% of the graph and the last 10,000 years for the other 90%.
2. Real fast growth of world’s population, over billions, starts in the last 10% of the graph.

These kinds of graphs, with their focus on modern times, can blur our vision of how progress has really been made. It almost makes you think that nothing happened before 10,000 years ago…

How is human progress really made?

Let’s take the following simplified graph by the American writer Tim Urban:

The point that he wants to make is that technological progress is still in its early stages before it will accelerate exponentially. Where we are now may be just before the singularity point. A theoretical point where rapid technological innovation leads to the creation of an uncontrollable superintelligence that changes civilization as we know it.

Considering how things actually are going, I think this graph leads to a couple of questions:

1. Where do we place ‘the human’ on the graph?
2. What time scale do we use on the X-axis?
3. What is the scale we are using for the Y-axis?

The human on the timeline represents humanity at our current point in time. I think it’s arguable that we place this human much higher on the graph. That we are actually already in the middle of exponential growth. The growth of population and the growth of technological progress cannot be seen completely independently of each other.

The timescale may start at the moment we invented agriculture, writing, book printing, computers or AI, but in my opinion it should start at the very beginning. At the moment we consciously made the first stone tools, which as we saw, was already 3.3 million years ago. The last 10,000 years, when agriculture and other modern inventions arrive, is only 0.3% within that timescale.

Yes, the emergence of agriculture is a very important point in our history, but it doesn’t mean that nothing happened in the 3,3 million years before that. On the contrary, there were so many small and crucial advances that without them this tipping point would never have occurred.

The real timescale

A similar tendency you can see in some of the other graphs of technological progress, the timescale often contains only a fraction of the technological development:

This absence of prehistoric times led the scientist Max Roser to create a different kind of visualization:

This visualization already shows technological progress on a longer time scale, and it also shows the history of technology in the long run by folding the timeline. However, it doesn’t show the slow and steady and crucial progress made during the Stone Age.

The interesting moments

It’s clear that progress from the Stone Age is a process. A long, steady process that is slow at first, but then gets faster and faster. But during the slow phase, a lot of things actually happen. The more we know about the Stone Age, the more it’s broken down into smaller time periods. For example, the Stone Age is further divided into the Old Stone Age, the Middle Stone Age, and the Late Stone Age. In science, these three periods are called the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), and Neolithic (New Stone Age).

The most interesting and crucial moments happened already in the Paleolithic. The term “Paleolithic” is derived from the Greek words “palaios,” meaning “old,” and “lithos,” meaning “stone.” It specifically refers to the earliest period of the Stone Age, characterized by the use of rudimentary chipped stone tools. A lot happened during this Old Stone Age, so the paleolithic is often further divided in:

• Lower Paleolithic: Early phase with the first stone tools, used by hominins such as Homo habilis and Homo erectus.
• Middle Paleolithic: Period associated with Neanderthals and early modern humans.
• Upper Paleolithic: Later phase with significant advancements in tool technology, art, and culture, associated with fully modern Homo sapiens.

If you look at the exponential growth of technology. The lower and middle Paleolithic feels like a slow, gradual evolution of tools. In the Upper Paleolithic the curves start to bend, while in the Mesolithic and Neolithic we can see a period of disruption.

In this series we will look at the different Ages and see what role each has played on the timeline. We will also see how each new age builds on the previous one. We will also see that although technological progress was slow, the inventions were significant. Of particular interest are the periods that bend the curve, the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic, the era of disruption. All different phases of the Stone Age together define who we are today.

The roots of our technology