UNBOUND: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought the World to the Brink

Nonfiction

Challenges for Mother Earth

UNBOUND:
How Eight Technologies Made Us Human,
Transformed Society, and Brought the World to the Brink
By Richard Currier
376 pp. Arcade Publishing  

Reviewed by David E. Hoekenga, M.D.

While used occasionally before the last two hundred years the term technologyhas been widely applied to human effort since then. Currier uses it to describe events that in feels were critical to human progress.

The author describes the primate baseline and how unusual monogamy is, occurring in only three percent of mammals, including humans. He writes that monogamy, while not perfect, promotes “social stability.”

Drawing on very early man out of Africa such as “Lucy,” Currier describes how standing fully upright, forging fire hardening sticks, and especially a bigger brain benefitted the early hominids in their ascent.

In the cleverly titled chapter “Hats, Huts, Togas and Tents,” s humans protect themselves and move into more hostile environments around the globe. Unfortunately, in addition to providing protection from the elements, clothing allows three distinct human lice species to develop and hitch rides on our heads, bodies and pubic regions.

Currier writes that humans developed symbolic communication in the form of music, art, language and ethnicity. I believe painting from caves in Altamira, Niaux and Chauvet from eighteen thousand years ago are as beautiful in color and design as anything ever done by the hand of man anywhere.

He describes the formation of permanent villages rather than nomadic tribes, for the first time allowing the accumulation of wealth. “Between twelve thousand and four thousand years ago, a number of different human societies, living in widely separate regions, abandoned their former hunting and gathering lifestyle and began growing their own food,” he writes. The most famous example, of course, is the Fertile Crescent, stretching between Egypt and Iraq. However, the author identifies ten other areas, including eastern North America, where domestication of plants and animals developed at the same time.

The development of transportation is the next technological leap – horses, ships, and wheels for chariots, carts, wagons and trains. Transportation also allowed the formation of societal groups studied by evolutionary anthropologists such as Robin Dunbar. Dunbar found that brain size and group size were related in primates, and humans with the largest brains could maintain a full-fledged relationship with 150 individuals at any given time.

When the book turns to clocks, engines and industrial society beginning in medieval Europe, Unbound recapitulates the four years of a liberal arts education as first proposed by John Henry Newman. Then Currier describes the dissolution of seven empires from Great Britain to the Soviet Union, and he looks forward to a global society that may be hampered by tensions between the European Union, America and especially China.

Deforestation, global pollution, and climate change pose major challenges. The loss of the Cedars of Lebanon and the failure of Biosphere 2 do not bode well for the planet. Thirty thousand life forms disappear every year in the sixth mass extinction to strike Mother Earth.

While signs aren’t good, the author remains hopeful. This is a well written review of our history which any thoughtful person can learn from.