Tools for thought: the first 300,000 years
Tools for thought: the first 300,000 years
Researchers have discovered 300,000 year-old use of symbols.
Homo naledi, an archaic human species, carved symbols onto the cave walls where they buried their dead, 100,000 years before the first modern humans did.
Here we present the first known example of abstract patterns and shapes engraved within the Dinaledi subsystem of the Rising Star Cave in South Africa. We identified markings incised into the dolomitic limestone walls of the cave. The engravings described here are deeply impressed cross-hatchings and other geometric shapes.
(Berger et al, 2023. 241,000 to 335,000 Years Old Rock Engravings Made by Homo naledi in the Rising Star Cave system, South Africa.)
The first Tool for Thought.
For millennia after millennia, the game of life was reset each time we died. Every mistake made, lesson learned, idea, discovery, breakthrough, lost when you were lost. The only thing carried forward between were genes and living memory.
Then, 300,000 years ago, we carved a symbol into a rock.
In rock, and clay, and ochre, our thoughts could live outside of us, could outlive us. We could pass messages down through generations.
A slow, grinding process of cumulative cultural adaptation was beginning. Through stone, gesture, and spoken word, bit by bit, culture, tradition, folkways built up.
Humanity was building a shared brain.
300,000 years, of living, loving, fighting, and partying on the savanna, tundra, and in caves. We scratched out small scraps of compounding knowledge with each generation.
Occasionally, we discovered a new tool for thinking:
Learning to speak (150,000y ago)
Learning to make jewelry (115,000y ago, Neanderthals)
Creating figurative art (52,000y ago)
Learning to sew (50,000y ago, Denisovans)
Learning to make musical instruments (42,000y ago)
The last Ice Age begins (31,000y ago).
Learning to make pottery (29,000y ago)
Learning to make rope and twine (28,000y ago)
Learning to make woven baby carriers, bags, baskets, and nets (26,000y ago)
Learning to settle down in villages (25,000y ago)
The climate warms, glaciers recede (13,000 years ago).
Learning to weave baskets (12,000y ago)
Learning to build temples and cities (11,500y ago)
Proto-writing (8,000y ago)
Learning to make wheels, first for pottery, then vehicles (6,000y ago)
Then…
Writing, math, money, organized religion all burst into consciousness (5,000y ago).
The beginning of recorded history.
With writing comes scrolls. They offer enormous storage capacity for externalized thought. They are also editable. (5,000y ago)
Libraries create backup drives for human knowledge (4,600y ago)
The abacus, a beaded calculator, and the quipu, a knotted rope calculator and writing tool, scale our capacity for calculation (4,600y ago)
Democracy constructs feedback loops from edge to center, generating societies that sense and respond to their environment (2,500y ago)
Books enable random access memory (1st century CE)
The printing press (1234 CE, China / 1440 CE Europe)
“In its printed form, thought is more imperishable than ever… In the days of architecture it made a mountain of itself, and took powerful possession of a century and a place. Now it converts itself into a flock of birds, scatters itself to the four winds, and occupies all points of air and space at once.” (Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris)
The scientific method develops, constructing a cache of composable, replicable knowledge, the scientific record (1020 CE, onward)
The mechanical clock segments time, allowing for the orchestration of new forms of complex coordination (around 1275 CE)
Double-entry bookkeeping scales banking and trade (1494 CE)
The first stock exchange, a kind of distributed social computer for calculating partial solutions to the allocation problem (1531)
The microscope extends our sight to worlds within worlds (1590)
The telescope extends our sight to the cosmos (1608)
Binary logic transforms logical statements into math (Leibniz, 1689)
The telegraph connects us across vast distances (1830)
Broadcast media projects ideas and ideology at new speed and scale (1895 onward)
Then, software begins to think with us.
Software, the beginnings of a universal machine (Lovelace and Babbage, 1850)
Principia Mathematica revolutionizes formal logic (Russel, Whitehead, 1910)
Turing machines define a mathematical model of computation (Turing, 1936)
Cellular automata birth new mathematical universes (1940s)
McCulluch and Pitts define a mathematical model for the neuron (1943)
The Memex imagines hypertext for the first time. (Bush, 1945)
The Perceptron, the first artificial neural network (Rosenblatt, 1957)
Lisp invents functional programming, garbage collection, macros (McCarthy, 1959)
The Mother of All Demos gives us, in one fell swoop, GUIs, windowing, the mouse, hypertext, word processing, version control, real-time collaborative editing, and video conferencing. (Engelbart, 1968)
Email (Tomlinson, 1969)
Smalltalk, the first object-oriented programming language, and a dynamically-editable operating system (Kay, 1972)
Spreadsheets. Before long, they become the fabric of our economy. (1979)
Knowledge graphs enable automated reasoning (1980s)
The Internet (1983)
The Web (Berners-Lee, 1989)
Search engines organize the world’s information (1990)
Social media wires us up, like a bunch of neurons in a global social brain. It isn’t doing much helpful thinking just yet, but it’s young. (2004, onward)
Now, software begins to think back…
AI, after several successive winters, makes enormous breakthroughs in deep learning (2006), and large language models (2017)
In the beginning, our shared brain doesn’t look like much. For a very long time, it looks like nothing at all. But each bit of knowledge we collect creates new stepping stones, and each stepping stone exponentially increases our possibility space.
Engelbart's law: the intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential
An exponential process will stay flat for a long time, and then,
Humanity is bootstrapping. Our shared brain is getting better at getting better.
Knowledge production is a group-activity, not an individual one. Computers most radically and usefully extend our capabilities when they extend our ability to collaborate to solve problems beyond the compass of any single human mind. (Doug Engelbart)
Just in time. We have planetary challenges ahead: climate change, global pandemics, mass extinctions, increasing geopolitical tension… We need to learn how to think together, with our planet, as a whole planet.
The first 300,000 years.
