At the risk of sounding stupid, I just found out how long the stone age lasted. In my head it's about as long as other historical time periods, a couple thousand years before ancient egypt, and conceptually looks like a bad car insurance commercial. Nope! Dead wrong! The stone age lasted for 3.4 MILLION YEARS.
Okay wow i would not have guessed millions. Maybe in like the tens of thousands? But definitely would have way undershot.
I told my wife and they said "Yeah, modernity is a recent and strange invention"
Oh yes! Hello I am wife. And these are the oldowan tools:
The first image is my favorite, the iconic oldowan hand axe, but you'll note there's a wide range of other tools crafted for everything from crushing nuts and stones, to awls and engraving devices. There is some evidence, albeit hotly debated, that these tools MIGHT have been used in ancient burials. Maybe. This is up for debate because these tools are THREE MILLION YEARS OLD. They pre date homo sapiens and homo erectus. They pre date the ice age. Hell, they pre date the fucking ice caps. We don't think humans were burying their dead as we understand it today, but maybe?? These were made by homo habilis, or the "handyman", so named for their invention of tools.
It makes me feel very small to look at these, like looking up at a starry sky.
here's a thing never fails to make me feel the Feels and think the Thoughts:
it's about technology and human tools and where we are and where we started:
see up there where it says "They pre date homo sapiens and homo erectus"?
For MOST of the time humans have been using stone tools, the design and shape of those tools changed more slowly than the shape of our skeleton has changed.
from about 2.9 million years to about 1.7 million years ago, our tools remained the same while we went from Homo Habilis (or a similar realative) to Homo Erectus (or a similar relative) all while our stone tools remained basically the same as the images above, in the Oldowan style
and then, after about a million years of that, we had a technological revolution and the world moved on to the Acheulean stone tools, which looked like this
that classic flaked tear-drop shape. And then those stayed essentially the same for another million years while our bones took us from Homo Erectus through growth with our sister species Neanderthal and Denisovan all the way to Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
Our tools used to evolve slower than our bones. For a couple million years.
only in the last few generations have our tools and technology evolved so crazy fast
My grandmother was born when there were still horses in the streets. Her first job they washed the cast iron cookware in the creek out behind the restaurant. She went from radio and telephone switchboards being high tech, to watching literal robots in space. Right around the time she died they were developing a prototype car that you could wear a hat full of sensors and control things like the windshield wipers by thinking about it.
not kidding
think about that, from horses in the streets to a car you can drive with your thoughts.
even just a couple hundred years ago, people were living a life that was in many ways not terribly different from how it has always been, with most people, for example, still heating their water and doing their cooking over an open fire in their home.
And these last few generations have gone from inventing TV to investigating pieces of atoms and exploring space and also btw inventing the EATR robot which is basically a robot that can eat plants (and animals, specifically "chicken fat") as fuel to power itself
Again not kidding, wish i was, how long do you think it will be before somebody downloads something like grok onto an EATR? like whaaaaat are we doing omg
anyway, the point is, technology used to be slow, giving us many generations to get used to it and oversee changes to it. For 3 million years our technology has had slow advances, and then in just the last few hundred years technological development went berserk.
Every tool and technology and scientific breakthrough that has been invented or discovered in the last one thousand years ... has happened in just 0.03% of the time since we started making stone tools.
Now? Now while we are alive you and me right now, is a truly unprecedented time in human existence. All this new discovery and new tech that keeps happening is not normal. Like most things, it is both great and awful, but it certainly isn't what we've been doing.
Humanity is no longer changing faster than our tools -- our tools are changing so fast they are starting to be the thing that is changing us.
"Humanity is no longer changing faster than our tools -- our tools are changing so fast they are starting to be the thing that is changing us."
