A Short History of Progress

Culture allows humanity to adapt to its challenges more quickly than evolution, but our intense speed of innovation and communication also leads to progress traps. Two early examples are Old Stone Age (3mya-12kya) hunting and the later transition to agriculture that brought about modern civilization.

The first civilizations emerged in Sumer and Egypt c. 3000 BC, followed by many more around the world in the next few millennia. Hardly a sign of moral progress since prehistoric times, complex societies are responsible for all recorded wars and genocides. This may be due to the fact that since the Stone Age, we have not had as much time to evolve mentally as we have had the cultural space to evolve technologically. Today, “we are running twenty-first-century software [the human mind] on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago” (35).

As mentioned in the first chapter, the first major technological success of man was the taming of fire by homo erectus. Next was the perfection of hunting by Cro-Magnons. Due to food surplus brought about by improved hunting, new symbolic capacities became more common, as shown in burials, human ornamentation, and cave art. By 15,000 years ago, humans had spread across the Earth and contributed, with climatic change, to the extinction of each of their new habitat’s megafauna.