TecC 09 - Kindling Change: The Primal Catalyst
The first sparks of technological progress: taming the flame
If you haven’t read the last 8 articles that lead up to this one, of course I’d exhort you to do so, for therein lies the path to the greatest enjoyment of this series; at the very least, it might help to take a quick glance at the last one to get a sense of where we are. In any case, I intend to ensure each article can be savored on its own without necessarily hopping to other ones, and so be it known that this episode marks the beginning of the real technocentric1 journey.
Hop on board as we’re gonna get cracking right away!
Picture this scene on what we can call Day One of the Stone Age.2 Steve, our stone-age hero we met in TecC 03!, has been rubbing a hand-grippable piece of rock against a bigger rock and having sharpened it and put it to good use in hunting an animal bigger and stronger than him, has invented a tool, the handaxe - yes it was literally cutting-edge technology! So with great excitement he runs towards his cave to show it to his fellow hominids, and one of them3 says “Steve, that’s brilliant, you’re on fire!”
Well, of course that’s not how it went.4 As I mentioned when I covered the story of how the only-in-retrospect-so-called Stone Age began, and as I’ve hinted elsewhere, it’s easy for us to look at a certain what-seemed-at-the-time-nothing-too-great event and be misled by shall we say the eureka fallacy!
Breakthrough’s Backstory
It’s easy for us, in retrospect, to accord to such incidents the consequential importance they turned out to have. But that’s not how it works. My point is that innovation is ultimately what matters rather than invention5 - it’s a long-drawn-out incremental process, rather than a sudden moment we associate with Archimedes’s bathwater-splashing revelation story!
The other point I want to make is about hindsight. Of course when we look back at certain innovations such as this one, even where we recognize that they were baby steps and part of a larger series of incremental accretions that culminated in something substantial enough to be labeled a breakthrough, we still have the benefit of hindsight. And it’s hard for us in many cases to even imagine how life was before a certain new innovation – an artefact – came to be that became part of our life.
I belabor these points for a few reasons. If we want to, as is my goal in this technocentric journey, chart the course of human progress in a rewarding manner, it helps if we don’t take such things for granted. And if we want to not only understand the world as it is today, but make an educated foray into considering what the near future might look like, also the goal here, it helps to understand both the mindset of the people before they stumbled upon any such specific example of innovation (being examined) and the general circumstances even the zeitgeist that prevailed around then.
Beyond Rubbing Stones
So all that said now that we’re that much wiser, the other strong reason the above reaction by Steve’s friends was very unlikely was that fire hadn’t been invented yet! Well, more seriously, the story of how the Stone Age began, which I have chronicled6 as being when the first sharpened stone implement used to hunt animals for food, is somewhat incomplete. Because, as I said later in TecC 04, there was also the bit about cooking the meat of the hunted-down animal and the consequences thereof on hominid species diet, brain growth and lifestyle chances, which are what together changed everything.
It in fact led not just to the birth of technology, as I proclaimed previously, but it’s what accelerated the evolution of early hominid species away from our primate cousins: to become us! So let’s complete the rest of this story: fire.
Element of Awe
Fire is a magical thing - even today it’s a thing of awe.7 Fire has been celebrated across cultures, and still is. The Rig-Vedic Aryans8 sang some of the loftiest praise to fire, it’s indeed the very first word uttered in their elaborately comprehensive compendium of eloquently poetic praise, the Rig-Veda: agni.9 The same word, in its cognate Latin form, we have adopted to power our automobiles: ignition.10
The Zoroastrians, descended from close cousins and near neighbors of the Vedic praisers, who were indeed fellow-Aryans themselves11 decide later never to let the fire that lit their shrine be extinguished,12 somewhat comparable to sacred fire continuously preserved by the Vestal Virgins of Ancient Rome, and perhaps also to what we still observe, in a different more time-limited way, with the Olympic torch!
So yes, much can be said of fire in poetry, in ritual, and in romance. It can be said to be the king of the elements. It represents energy, power, perhaps life itself. But all this is maybe ultimately because it has extreme practical value - which I will go into much greater depth when in my Polymathon stream I introduce the ergocentric paradigm, where there's a lot more to say about it.
From Fear to Flame
For now let’s get back to aspects of it relevant to our technocentric paradigm: it’s not so much fire in the abstract, romantic or wild sense that matters here; indeed it’s not so much fire per se, but the control of fire, that’s key.
Since the earliest time, man had known fire, humans had seen forests burn, perhaps when thunder struck. Early hominid or primate species mostly harbored fear of fire: it was dangerous, it was threatening, it was unpleasant - we preserve this connotation to this day in the expression ‘burn my fingers’. It must have taken some time, and a fair amount of effort, and indeed some daring, to tame this element; not to mention potential disasters. So yes, no more eureka fallacy, this must have happened by incremental innovative steps rather than in a flash!
And as I was also saying above, it’s easy to take such a thing for granted, but let’s take a moment to appreciate what a milestone it was to achieve13 practical controlled fire!
So… what’s for dinner tonight? 🔥
A term much broader than ‘technology’
Is that analogous to the first episode of The Flintstones?
A rare non-Luddite, no doubt!
If nothing else, perhaps they were all Luddites back then!
Matt Ridley (@mwridley) puts it rather well in his book about the topic
Yes, that’s right, it can still fire our imagination!
The Indic offshoot of the Indo-Iranian peoples, Aryan or ā́rya being their endonym
agním īḷe puróhitaṃ
yajñásya devám r̥tvíjam
hótāraṃ ratnadhā́tamam
Agni I praise, [the one] placed to the fore,
god and priest of the sacrifice,
the Sacrificient, most richly wealth-conferring
(Translation modified and adapted from The Rigveda, Jamison & Brereton, 2014)
Proto-Indo-European *h₁n̥gʷnís, also the source of Lithuanian ugni̇̀s, and Slavic ognĭ
The land they inhabited is still called the ‘land of the Aryans’: Iran
The Fire Temple of Yazd, also known as Atashkadeh or Yazd Atash Behram, located in Yazd, Iran, houses a sacred fire that is believed to have been burning continuously for over 1,500 years, dating back to the 5th century
How many of us modern humans can actually create fire without using a matchstick or a lighter or another artificial means?!
For a self educated person like myself, who has combed through many of these topics throughout my learning journey; Ash you do an amazing job of threading them together—past to present, and I look forward to this continued journey reading your articles, as always….Great piece!
Gonna save this one because at some point this might be a useful post to link to in a future decision making piece. That piece would focus on the difference between a priori or prospective decisions we make about how things are going to play out (which bet to make) and how that might look very different than applying a post-hoc or hindsight lens to it. And we see this all the time - whether in technology, business, or any other industry where past success/failure is dissected. They make things sound to "obvious" but the reality is they actually weren't obvious in an a priori sense.
Anyway, I'll stop there. Nice post, Ash.