Richard L. Currier > Quotes

“the tribal cultures that had evolved during the Upper Paleolithic with the emergence of symbolic communication enabled people who might have been strangers to feel a collective sense of belonging and solidarity. It was the formation of tribes and ethnicities that enabled the strangers of the large Neolithic towns to trust each other and interact comfortably with each other, even if they were not all personally acquainted.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Whether our species is capable of a final act of fusion—in which all living people achieve a shared identity as members of a single global culture and civilization—is a question that will determine the future not only of our own species but also of most forms of life on Earth. This is, in fact, the question that lies at the heart of this book.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink

“And while our bodies are no longer capable of climbing trees to dizzying heights with the ease of apes and monkeys, we still find a singular pleasure in being perched in high places with commanding views.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“But the Stone Age was not a distinct period or age at all, since it includes the entire evolutionary history of the hominids, from their earliest appearance several million years ago to the fully modern humans of today’s world. This immense period of time encompasses many of the technologies described in this book, including the domestication of fire, the invention of clothing and dwellings, the development of symbolism, the adoption of agriculture, and the beginnings of urban civilization. In fact, the Stone Age technically began to end only when the techniques of metallurgy were first developed a few thousand years ago.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Each of the four metamorphoses that had already taken place had transformed the biology of our ancestors in significant ways. The technology of spears and digging sticks transformed us from quadrupedal into bipedal animals. The technology of fire and cooking resulted in the loss of our body hair, a massive expansion in the size of our brains, and the disappearance of our tree-climbing anatomy. The technology of clothing and shelter enabled us to migrate out of the tropics and made it possible for our “premature” newborns to survive in cold climates. And the technology of symbolic communication involved significant changes in our brains, freeing us from the slow pace of biological evolution and enabling us to take advantage of the speed and flexibility of cultural evolution.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“It is not surprising, therefore, that the maternal bond is central in the social life of all species of primates, while the paternal bond varies, depending on the species, from great importance to complete irrelevance.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“There is a limit to the amount of material goods that nomads can accumulate, because people who are perpetually on the move cannot keep more material goods than they can carry with them from place to place. And since the members of a nomadic group typically cooperate in many aspects of hunting and gathering—and they have limited opportunities to store food for long periods—they tend to share most of their food with their kinfolk on a daily basis.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“As a general rule, the larger and the more permanent the agricultural settlements became, they more devastating was their practice of warfare.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“But what that information is, and how it was translated into symbolic form, remains a secret that the best minds of modern paleontology have been utterly unable to unlock. If the written word—which includes both simple forms like cuneiform or the Roman alphabet and complex forms like Egyptian hieroglyphics and Mayan glyphs—is the symbolic representation of information expressed in human speech, the petroglyphs of the Paleolithic rank as the earliest and most ancient forms of human writing ever found. Furthermore, they are the best evidence imaginable that the people who created these petroglyphs were using language.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Modern people rarely marry to enhance the economic relationship between their families, and since the ancient custom of arranged marriage is effectively obsolete, the expectations of married life have changed profoundly.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“In this way, the human family became an effective way of distributing the resources and channeling the energies of a hunting and gathering species. Since sexual access was no longer a scarce resource, this arrangement also minimized conflict and competition among males, allowing them to form stable, cooperative alliances with other males that would increase their power and effectiveness as hunters and warriors.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Like the contemporary hunter-gatherers studied by anthropologists, however, prehistoric hominids did use one type of material in their daily lives—stone—that could not decay or disappear from prehistoric archeological sites.2 And for this reason, the survival of countless thousands of stone objects from prehistoric times has created an exaggerated impression of the importance of stone in the technologies used by prehistoric people.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“One evening in 1976, two scientists went out for a stroll after a day’s work in a paleontological site 3.6 million years old near the African village of Laetoli in present-day Tanzania. The scientists were amusing themselves by throwing chunks of elephant dung at each other, when one of them slipped and fell face down on a layer of rock that had begun as volcanic mud millions of years ago but that had long since hardened into a kind of natural cement. There, inches from his face, was the unmistakable impression of fossilized raindrops. Further investigation revealed that the volcanic mud also bore the imprint of numerous fossilized animal tracks. Careful excavation of this volcanic layer over many months revealed the tracks of numerous prehistoric animals ranging in size from elephants to mice. Finally, after two years of painstaking excavations and the discovery of hundreds of animal tracks, the archeologists at Laetoli discovered one of the most important finds in the history of human paleontology: an eighty-foot trail of footprints, made by two individuals, an adult and a child, walking together across the volcanic mud more than three million years ago (see Figure 2.1”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“valleys”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“2014, Intel announced the 15-Core Xeon E7 v2, an integrated circuit with more than 4.3 billion transistors on a single microchip roughly the size of a soda cracker. The”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“In fact, the traditional institution of marriage that we inherited from ancient societies was never designed to provide intimacy, companionship, mutual attraction, or sexual satisfaction. Traditional marriage evolved in agricultural societies as a way to create lifelong partnerships, establish mutually beneficial economic relationships between families, and maximize the stability of land ownership in agricultural society. These goals were achieved by a set of customs that made both men and women socially, economically, and psychologically dependent on each other. And it was these customs—not lasting affection or mutual attraction—that ensured the permanence of marriage.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The number 150, which came to be called “Dunbar’s number,” turns out to be approximately the maximum number of full-fledged relationships a normal human being can maintain at any given time.9”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The construction of the nuclear doomsday machine—and its continued maintenance and development since the mid-twentieth century—is surely one of the most astounding acts of collective insanity in the history of the human species.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human, Transformed Society, and Brought Our World to the Brink

“metamorphosis, however, describes a sweeping change in every aspect of culture and society: diet, habitat, social relationships, economic behavior, group size, technology, evolutionary pressures, and even human anatomy itself. There have been thousands of revolutions in the course of humanity’s evolution and history, but there have been only a few genuine metamorphoses.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“I have used the word “technology” in its widest and most inclusive sense, meaning the deliberate modification of any natural object or substance with forethought to achieve a specific end or serve a specific purpose.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“For the first time in human history, a human society has emerged in which only a small fraction of the population is engaged in producing food, while a majority of the population pursues work that has nothing to do with either finding or producing food.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“And only humans are able to transmit these invented symbols to their offspring—and to other members of the group—entirely through the processes of teaching, learning, and imitation.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The independence and personal freedom that accompanied the arrival of the automobile and the anonymity of urban life provided young people with unprecedented opportunities for privacy, and the traditional practice of providing a chaperone for every interpersonal contact between young men and women has been largely abandoned.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Many of the behaviors that were once considered unique to humans have eventually been found to exist—although often in rudimentary form—among other animal species. These include, in addition to the ability to make and use tools, the ability to communicate complex information and the ability of group-living species to adopt new behaviors and pass them down to succeeding generations as cultural traditions.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“The potent combination of the new ideals of marrying for love, the new standards of social and sexual freedom for unmarried couples, and the development of truly reliable contraceptives triggered a transformation in sexual values in modern society, as the ancient human sexual instincts, themselves the product of millions of years of evolution, have reasserted themselves.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Yet the human family survives and will continue to survive. Men and women will continue to form sexual partnerships, and they will continue to have children. Those who are not inclined to procreate will contribute neither their inherited biological predispositions nor their learned cultural preferences to future generations. While the “traditional family” has become obsolete, the human family has not. Our innate human natures, the product of millions of years of human evolution, ensure that the human family will survive as long as our species endures.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“In the final analysis, the technology of precision machinery—and the urbanization of human society that that technology made possible—has rendered the so-called traditional family, with its assumption of lifelong permanence, essentially obsolete. The arranged marriage has become a thing of the past. The economic benefits of having children have been replaced by significant economic costs. The economic and social interdependence between men and women has weakened considerably. And not only virginity in adolescence but also the traditional prohibitions against premarital and extramarital sex have lost most or all of their former social stigma.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Without the technologies of fire, dwellings, and clothing, the size of the hominid brain would have been unable to expand much beyond the 650 cc size of the brain of Homo ergaster, the likely ancestor of Homo erectus—and humanity would have remained, to this day, little more than a very intelligent, meat-eating, tool-making, weapons-carrying, two-legged ape.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“Since the children of modern urban society have become a net economic burden to their families, it is not surprising that families have become smaller with each generation of urbanization, and that many married couples have chosen to have no children at all.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink

“No known human society, however primitive or technologically unsophisticated, has ever found to subsist entirely on a diet of raw food. In fact, people in modern society who have adopted a raw food diet must spend an extraordinary amount of time chewing their food, they have less energy, lose weight, and are hungry virtually all the time.”
― Richard L. Currier, Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made Us Human and Brought Our World to the Brink