Yeah, I've seen the graph, i just don't think their method of counting inventions is reasonable. For example: Are the plants and animals humans bred into form "inventions" ?
What you're talking about now are more than inventions. They are technologies. Agriculture is the key technology that ended the Mesolithic Era and ushered in the Neolithic Era. It required humans to build permanent settlements, which forced us to learn how to live in harmony and cooperation with people outside our own extended family, which had been the norm going millions of years back to our chimp- and gorilla-like ancestors, whose other descendants still live that way. It also allowed us to create more things than we could carry with us as nomadic hunter-gatherers, which gave rise to the first surpluses, including enormously important surplus food to weather hard times. Agriculture was the first step on the path to civilization. Of course it can be seen as two distinct technologies that were invented at different times: farming and animal husbandry. The point is that agriculture was invented by more than one people in more than one time and place. At least six, since six widespread independent civilizations arose on Earth, but perhaps more, since there may have been other people who never made the next step to civilization or who were assimilated by somebody else with a head start before they got the chance. We speak of agriculture as
a technology, without regard to the number of different instances of its invention. In no case was it invented by a single person, since it obviously takes several generations to get it all right.
So if the Mayans invent a script, and the Romans invent a script, is that two inventions or one, worldwide?
Same thing. Written language is a technology, not really a single invention. At least in the Middle East where our own civilization arose, it started out as tick marks in clay to record business transactions: who got how many sheep, who owed whom how many jugs of olive oil. Like agriculture, it didn't manifest all at once as a system for recording spoken language, that evolved slowly. Like agriculture, it arose independently in multiple places. I'm not sure about the Incas, but each of the other five civilizations invented their own writing systems. So we speak of written language as
a technology, not a gadget that was invented over and over again.
Also like agriculture, written language is one of the key technologies that got us here, since it allows knowledge to be passed on in more or less exactly its original form, without being memorized and recited with incremental errors over the generations. It's interesting to speculate at what stage civilization would have stalled without written records. As noted in another thread, astronomy is a bone fide science and it predates writing and perhaps even civilization. But it's hard to imagine Euclid, much less Newton, without writing.
If you look around, most of what you are looking at - most everything except for plastic material and electronic gear - dates back more than 10% of recorded history in some form.
Yes, I think that ten percent assertion was originally made by someone who wants to prove that we're superior to our ancestors. It does not take into account the importance of the inventions. Energy conversion, FTA (faster than animal) travel, mass production, the germ theory of medicine, electronics, there's no question that we have a lot to be proud of in the last half millennium. But spoken language, boats, farming, animal husbandry, government, metallurgy, written language, sewers... we wouldn't be here without these entire technologies, all of which came first. Note that most of them even occurred before the
start of recorded history.
