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

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Nonfiction
What we humans do to ourselves

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 technology has been widely applied to human effort since then. In Currier’s book it is used to describe events that in some cases occurred millions of years ago and to eight different eras of human development critical to human progress.

In his first section the author describes the primate baseline and how unique monogamy is in humans occurring in only three percent of mammals. He finds that monogamy while not perfect promotes “social stability.”

Then 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.

Making clever use of words the next Chapter is entitled “Hats, Huts, Togas and Tents” as humans protect themselves and move into more hostile environments around the globe. Unfortunately, in addition to providing protection from the elements especially cold, clothing allows three distinct human lice species to develop and hitch a ride adapting to our head, body and pubic region.

Next according to Currier 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.

Permanent villages eventually formed, largely replacing nomadic tribes. For the first time this also allowed 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,” Currier writes.

The most famous example, of course, is the well-known 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 was the next technological leap, which of course involved the use of horses, ships, and the wheel for chariots, carts, wagons and trains. I’ve always been perplexed that the Anasazi peoples of the American Southwest had long, wide straight roads, and their children had toys with wheels, but they never developed wheeled vehicles. 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 Currier turns to clocks, engines and industrial society beginning in medieval Europe, it struck me that Unbound recapitulates the four years of a liberal arts education as first proposed by John Henry Newman. In the penultimate chapter Currier reports the dissolution of seven of empires from the British to the Soviet and he looks forward to a global society. Currently, I see a variety of tensions between the European Union, America and especially China keeping this globalization from being achieved.

He worries that deforestation – for example with the Cedars of Lebanon – along with global pollution, and climate change pose major challenges. Thirty thousand life forms become extinct 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 the history of technology that any thoughtful person can learn from.