In my recent meanderings through anthropology and human development, I stumbled on a book titled Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink by anthropologist Richard L. Currier. Currier’s thesis is that over roughly five million years, eight key technologies (broadly defined) gradually freed humans from the limitations of our animal origins. Those eight he defines as tools, fire, clothing/shelter, symbolic communication, agriculture, technologies of interaction (wheels, ships, travel), precision machinery, and digital information. He brings in lots of interesting tidbits of information, which I imagine are hidden in numerous anthropological dissertations, but which he connects the dots for us to understand. He argues that early technologies reshaped the body itself. Tools changed the way we walked and the shape of our feet and hands. Adoption of fire caused us to lose our body hair since primates with heavy hair tended to catch fire if they stood too close to it, whereas the hairless ones were able to harness and use fire more. Clothing and shelter literally got us out of the trees and out of the tropics (thank God). The fabrication of weapons, mastery of fire, and clothing/shelter radically restructured the human body, enabling upright walking, loss of body hair, and migration out of tropical Africa. Pretty compelling stuff.
Communication accelerated everything. Symbolic communication transformed human evolution from a slow biological process into a fast cultural one. That itself is pretty dramatic when you think about the differences between biological and cultural adaptation. It’s one thing to be able to walk upright and thereby enable the carrying of weapons in the hands and another to be able to communicate meaningfully to convince others to take down a wooly mammoth as a group. That mammoth was more than just food, it gave them massive bones and hides to be able to make family-sized and eventually community-sized shelters.
Agriculture and interaction built civilization. Agriculture revolutionized humanity’s relationship with the environment, while technologies of interaction led to the birth of civilization, and precision machinery later spawned the industrial revolution and the rise of nation-states to form our modern world as we know it. But the book also takes us to a cautionary arc. The same technological momentum that built modern life has also, per Currier, brought us to the edge of real danger, the danger faced by any species which proves that to be too successful in mastering ones environment and dominating life on the planet can end badly. Currier closes by arguing society must transform again to reach something sustainable. So maybe AI is the final nail in our coffin or perhaps the ninth technology that brings us that necessary redemption and salvation.
What I am finding particularly interesting is a rather minor, and not so new observation he makes when discussing the development of agriculture. He explains that it is our evolution from hunter/gatherers to agriculturalists that created the ability to focus on wealth accumulation. This is actually one of the oldest ideas in social anthropological theory, going back well over a century, though it’s been refined a lot since. When I took a course as a sophomore at Cornell in economic anthropology, I learned that the concept of limitless wants was not at all universal. There were some cultures that didn’t think that way, and they tended to be the more traditional cultures that were more nomadic and more of the hunting and gathering type. But when the technology of agriculture came about, people became more sedentary (in the sense of staying put) and were more able to accumulate wealth (broadly defined) by virtue of the efficiencies of agricultural production and staying in one place as opposed to having to lug their “stuff” from one place to another.
Friedrich Engels laid out an early version of this in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884, arguing that surplus production (starting with agriculture and animal husbandry) enabled private property, class division, and the state. In the context of the Gilded Age on the late Nineteenth Century and our new, current, version of that Gilded Age, that is a pretty meaningful transformation that is evident as impactful (for better or worse) to our society. In the 1930s, V. Gordon Childe’s concept of the “Neolithic Revolution” produced probably the most influential formal version of this theory. He argued that farming produced storable surplus, which allowed some people to accumulate more than others (by luck or skill), specialize away from food production, and eventually form hierarchies and classes. Mid-20th century anthropologists (e.g., Elman Service, Marshall Sahlins) built out refined models with band, tribe, chiefdom, and state forms with agricultural surplus as the engine of increasing inequality. More recent work has complicated the story rather than overturning it. James C. Scott’s Against the Grain (2017) argues the causal arrow runs more through grain’s specific properties (storable, taxable, visible) enabling state control, not just “surplus” in the abstract. Others (Bowles & Choi, and various archaeologists working with skeletal and settlement data) have shown inequality sometimes preceded full-blown agriculture, or that some early farming societies stayed remarkably egalitarian for centuries — so the link isn’t as automatic as Childe’s models implied. So Currier’s use of the theory in Unbound is drawing on a very well-established lineage of theory, not proposing something original. His contribution is more in how he sequences it alongside the other seven technologies, and in staying deliberately non-judgmental about whether the transition was “good” or “bad”.
It’s like thinking about the “taming” of the American wilderness (I went to go see Young Washington last night and the concept of “taming” and thereby owning the Ohio wilderness in 1755 was on full display). Is it good or bad that we tamed the wilderness and took it away from the Native Americans? We were the agriculturalists and they were the sustainable hunter/gatherers. We introduced class hierarchy and they were far more egalitarian…or were they? The honest answer is that it varied enormously across hundreds of distinct Native American societies spanning thousands of years. There were highly hierarchical societies among the natives. The Mississippian culture had a paramount chief, nobility, commoners, and possibly slaves and was a genuine class structure with monumental mound-building requiring organized labor. The Natchez had an unusually rigid caste system with a “Sun” ruling class, nobles, “Honored People,” and commoners, with strict marriage rules between classes. The Aztec, Maya, and Inca had elaborate stratified states with emperors, priestly classes, nobility, and commoners/slaves. And the Pacific Northwest peoples (Tlingit, Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw) had hereditary chiefs, nobles, commoners, and slaves, with wealth and status displayed through practices like the potlatch, or ceremonial feast. But there were also more egalitarian societies. Many Great Plains groups (pre- and post-horse) were largely egalitarian, with leadership based on achievement, generosity, or war record rather than inherited rank. Many Eastern Woodlands and Subarctic hunter-gatherer bands had minimal formal hierarchy, with leadership fluid and consensus-based. The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) had structured governance and clan matrons with real political power, but it wasn’t a rigid class system in the European or Mississippian sense.
The bigger point, tying back to Currier and his muse, Childe, is that the “agriculture → surplus → hierarchy” model isn’t a clean law. The Mississippians and Natchez were agricultural and highly stratified, fitting Childe’s model well. But Pacific Northwest peoples had no agriculture and they lived off salmon and marine resources, and yet they developed some of the most hierarchical, wealth-conscious societies in North America, complete with hereditary nobility and slavery. Meanwhile plenty of agricultural Eastern Woodlands groups stayed relatively egalitarian. Resource abundance and storability (salmon runs, maize) seem to matter more than agriculture per se, but agriculture sure seemed to drive a lot of wealth and hierarchy.
I’m not sure my egalitarian bent wants to suggest we go back to hunting and gathering, so I guess I’m hoping that that ninth technology of AI can be culturally and economically formulated to diffuse the wealth bomb our evolution has created for our species rather than further amplify it as it has at the moment…