Fifteen Eighty Four

We are well aware how dramatically and rapidly a single innovation can change our lives. The smartphone has rapidly altered communication, access to information, navigation, photography and more. We know how transformative has been the arrival of the personal computer. We are yet to assess how fully AI will impact our social, personal, commercial and governmental worlds.

The question of long-term impacts of change fascinates me, as a writer in history and archaeology. In my latest book Five Innovations That Changed Human History I chose five major transitions across the long timescale of humanity. These were the taming of fire, the domestication of the horse (and association with the wheeled vehicle), the invention of writing, the creation of the printing press and the printed book, and the harnessing of radio waves for communication.

Each of these brought about obvious changes in human life, but the more I considered the topic, I realised how broad were the numerous impacts both short term and long term that a single innovation could generate. A good way to think of those impacts is to consider in our imagination what the world might have looked like when we strip away a new skill or feature.

Until the end of the 19^th century mariners lacked the ability to communicate with other ships or with land beyond the line of sight. Wireless communication provided safety, instruction, weather information, and improved navigation. The taming of radio waves soon changed the nature of war at sea, on land, and in the new theatre of the air. The subsequent development of entertainment broadcasting brought us news, financial data, weather forecasts and even contributed to unify language and culture.

Half a millennium earlier the introduction of the printing press with movable type in Germany, later than the more limited and independent printing of East Asia, had similar impacts on the transmission of ideas, culture and language. The first 50 years of European printing before 1500 saw 1000 print shops issue 38,000 editions of books in maybe eight or nine million copies alongside pamphlets and flyers. How fast would the new ideas of the Protestant Revolution have spread if this were only by word of mouth? Scientific and educational worlds were transformed; written languages were standardised. The speed of the printing revolution remains one of the most remarkable events in European history.

The spread of printing and the control of radio waves extended the flow of information and communication beyond the oral and verbal. The tradition of manuscripts which they supplemented has its ancestry in the invention of writing in the Middle East five millennia ago: the ability to use written forms to represent sounds. Writing would serve administrative, propagandist, military, religious and personal purposes, but originated in the commercial needs of early urban civilizations in trade and ownership of goods and land. We can ask how much the early civilizations stimulated the emergence of writing, and how much writing itself stimulated changes in early urban life. Writing was both a tool and a catalyst in social change.

The historical sequence in which wireless technology, printing and writing emerged are relatively well established. By contrast archaeologists debate, sometimes vigorously, about the places and times relating to my two other topics. Horses survived well in the wild on the steppes of Eurasia, providing meat for successful hunts. Excavated sites give evidence for the domestication of the horse in that region during the 4^th millennium BCE, to be ridden, provide food including milk for human consumption, especially in fermented form. Riding a horse broke through the limits of human pace on speed and travel, helping in hunting, herding, trade and migration, and would continue to do so until the 19^th century.

The wheel had a separate origin in the mid-4^th millennium BCE with carts and wagons hauled by oxen (and later by donkeys) known from as far afield as northern Europe and Mesopotamia. Horses and wheeled vehicles were first brought together in the 2-wheeled chariot after about 2000 BCE, an innovation which probably spread south from the steppe to the urban civilizations of the Middle East. There it served as a status symbol in peace and a military machine in war; riding on horseback would continue to be of lower status until the Assyrians developed cavalry in the 9^th century BCE. Much later mounted archers from Central Asia would spread Mongol power to become the largest empire in the world, and the impact of the horse gave the Old World conquerors an unbeatable advantage in the Americas. If we think of the horse in any history or literature from before the 19^th century we see the remarkable achievement of this domesticated animal.

Perhaps the most significant of my topics is that of the taming of fire: the ability to generate fire at will, whenever and wherever required, rather than earlier opportunistic capture of fire when lit by a lightning strike. Fire gave us light to extend the day, it gave us heat, allowing our modern species to live further into the northern reaches of Eurasia and cross the Bering Strait into the Americas. Fire sits at the centre of domestic economic life, its control in prehistory allowing humans to cook and change their foodstuffs and thus affected their biology. From the discovery in our deep prehistory that fire could be created by friction or percussion, to the introduction of gas then electricity in the 19^th century, fire was at the centre of our worlds.

In addition to demonstrating how many and diverse are the impacts arising from a single innovation, my survey suggested some broader themes. Acquisition of an innovation brings greater power to those who possess it over those who do not. Then human world can become more interconnected with new forms of communication: the horseback rider bearing messages across an empire, the rapid spread of a single text in a written document or printed book, and the messages of news radio programmes.

We tend to be dominated by a sense that our own society is the natural and inevitable pinnacle of a linear sequence of historical development. Looking at history in the long run reminds us of the diversity of sources of innovation. The domestication of fire probably accompanied the spread of anatomically modern humans from Africa. The horse was domesticated in the steppes of Asia. The earliest writing was in western Asia and northeast Africa. Printing began in East Asia but developed its fullest spread in Europe. Radio waves were first controlled by scientists ranging from Russia to North America.

In my book I also briefly discuss the question of innovation as progress. Is change always to the advantage of humankind? Before the Industrial Revolution, the idea of innovation would often produce negative reactions, whether from religious authorities or political elites who would emphasise the value of tradition. Perhaps only recently have we come to believe that change is typically change for the good. And that raises the larger question of whether we are dominated by “presentism”, a sense that we are at the top of some historical trajectory. We have come to critique sexism and racism and other isms, but give little criticism of presentism. And given a current enthusiasm to rename a new geological era after ourselves as the Anthropocene, we seem dedicated to speciesism.

By considering the origins of some innovations in humankind’s deep history and the kind of varied impacts they brought about, I hope my survey helps us to take a critical look at our own era.