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Carrion Luggage #1104258 added December 23, 2025 at 8:48am
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Who Invented Inventing?
Here's an interesting article from the BBC which, despite having a few reservations, I thought I'd share.
The very first humans millions of years ago may have been inventors, according to a discovery in northwest Kenya.
Like I said, reservations.
Let's start with the definition of "human." The Latin binomial homo sapiens translates to "wise person" or "knowledgeable person," but that's just a matter of labeling, and besides, there's a big difference between "wise" and "knowledgeable."
To the extent of my understanding, evolution is generally a gradual process. Each generation broadly resembles the one before, but distant generations do not necessarily resemble each other. It's like... if you look in the mirror today, you will see the same face as you did yesterday, when you saw the same face as the day before. (Barring injury or hangover or the like, of course). Take any two consecutive days from your life, and neither you nor facial recognition software would be able to distinguish them. And yet, you look markedly different from 10-year-old you, who looked markedly different from 20-year-old you, etc.
Point is, I think it's really, really hard to point to one particular generation, especially millions of years in the past where the fossil record is sparse, and say, "These were the first humans."
But if pressed, I'd say there's one philosophical hump our ancestors had to go through. It wasn't tool use; lots of animals, as we now know, use tools. Some other animals even crudely make tools. But what probably distinguishes "sapiens" from other animals is: using tools to make other tools. That's a huge leap, in my opinion.
My point is: "the very first humans were inventors" is, philosophically at least, a tautology.
Second quibble: humans and other animals display a wide range of what we call "intelligence" within a species. In other words, there are geniuses, average specimens, and dummies. But what the vast majority of us have in common is that we're very, very good at mimicry. There's a reason "to ape" is a verb: the actual distinguishing mental characteristic of an ape is its ability to copy what others do (though other animals have this ability as well; parrots, e.g.)
So, no, I don't believe that "the very first humans were inventors." Just as we had luminaries like Nikola Tesla and whatever genius figured out how to make beer, all it takes is one human to make a mental leap, invent something truly new and useful, and next thing you know, the other humans have followed that lead. Some certainly improve on the invention, like how once someone created an incandescent bulb (I don't believe for a moment that it was Edison himself, but it could have been), almost anyone with the right equipment could create it, and someone else standardized the sockets, and another added frosted glass, etc.
And my point there is that, millions of years ago, the very first inventor invented inventing, and the rest of our ancestors just kept the momentum going: slowly at first, but eventually building on previous work until we could send robots to Mars and argue on the internet.
And, finally: like I said, the fossil/archaeological record is sparse. I don't see how they can definitively claim that they found the first invention. Plus, early humans seem to have been scattered in tribal or clan groups, just as we are today, but didn't have the internet—so it's entirely possible that inventing was invented in more than one place, separately, much as Newton and Liebniz both invented (or discovered, depending on your point of view) calculus.
Researchers have found that the primitive humans who lived 2.75 million years ago at an archaeological site called Namorotukunan used stone tools continuously for 300,000 years.
Quibbles aside, though, I'm not saying the article isn't worth reading. For instance: 2.75 million years? I can't remember hearing about any evidence of tool use that's that old. It also predates the generally accepted advent of what they call "anatomically modern" humans by, like, a shitload.
I've droned on enough; the article is there if you're interested. I'll just quote one more passage, from the end:
"We have probably vastly underestimated these early humans and human ancestors. We can actually trace the roots of our ability to adapt to change by using technology much earlier than we thought, all the way to 2.75 million years ago, and probably much earlier."
"And probably much earlier." That just supports my points above. |
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