Science and Technology in World History (3rd Edition) PDF

Science and Technology in World History Science and Technology in World History AN INTRODUCTION Third Edition James E. McClellan III and Harold Dorn © 2015 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2015 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 987654321 Johns Hopkins University Press 2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363 www.press.jhu.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McClellan, James E., III (James Edward), 1946– Science and technology in world history : an introduction / James E. McClellan III and Harold Dorn. — Third edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4214-1774-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214- 1775-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1776-9 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-1774-X (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1775-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-1776-6 (electronic) 1. Science—History. 2. Technology—History. 3. Tool and die makers—History. I. Dorn, Harold, 1928–2011 II. Title. Q125.M414 2015 509—dc23 2014047474 A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Special discounts are available for bulk purchases of this book. For more information, please contact Special Sales at 410-516-6936 or [email protected]. Johns Hopkins University Press uses environmentally friendly book materials, including recycled text paper that is composed of at least 30 percent post-consumer waste, whenever possible. Contents Preface INTRODUCTION The Guiding Themes Part I. Origins to the End of Antiquity CHAPTER 1 Humankind Emerges: Tools and Toolmakers CHAPTER 2 The Reign of the Farmer CHAPTER 3 Pharaohs and Engineers CHAPTER 4 Greeks Bearing Gifts CHAPTER 5 Alexandria and After Part II. Thinking and Doing among the World’s Peoples CHAPTER 6 The Enduring East CHAPTER 7 The Middle Kingdom CHAPTER 8 Indus, Ganges, and Beyond CHAPTER 9 The New World Part III. Europe and the Solar System CHAPTER 10 Plows, Stirrups, Guns, and Plagues CHAPTER 11 Copernicus Incites a Revolution CHAPTER 12 The Crime and Punishment of Galileo Galilei CHAPTER 13 “God said, ‘Let Newton be!’” Part IV. Science, Technology, and Industrial Civilization CHAPTER 14 Textiles, Timber, Coal, and Steam CHAPTER 15 Legacies of Revolution: From Newton to Einstein CHAPTER 16 Life Itself CHAPTER 17 Toolmakers Take Command CHAPTER 18 The New Aristotelians CHAPTER 19 The Bomb, the Internet, and the Genome CHAPTER 20 Under Today’s Pharaohs AFTERWORD The Medium of History Guide to Resources Illustration Credits Index Preface This book was initially written as an introduction for general readers and students to provide the “big picture” that an educated person might wish to have of the history of science and technology. It was not written for scholars or experts, and its character as a textbook is self-evident. The style and format grew out of our extensive experience in engaging undergraduates in these matters, and the hard knocks of the classroom have suggested both the essential lessons and what materials and examples work well in conveying those lessons. The first edition of this book appeared in 1999, the second in 2006. In approaching this work for the third time, we think that perhaps we wrote a more serious book than we realized. The book at hand examines the history of science and technology from prehistory to the present, and from this overarching point of view it has fundamental things to say about the history of science and technology across that sweep of time that escape attention or are harder to see in more fine-grained scholarly works. In the introduction that follows (“The Guiding Themes”), we enumerate these things and the thematics of science and technology in society as we see them playing out over the millennia of history. Because of this reappraisal the introduction has been substantially revised from previous editions. The success of the earlier editions of this work exceeded our expectations and hopes. The book has been widely adopted at the college level in history of science and technology courses, and also in courses devoted to world civilization and modernization. To judge from correspondence sent to us, this book has been well received by a lay public beyond the walls of the university, evidently attracted by its broad subject. And, a surprise to us, it has also been translated into Chinese, German, Turkish, and Korean. Undoubtedly, what appeals to foreign publishers and readers was foreshadowed in the title and in our vision for this book: “Science and Technology in World History,” and we still take pride that the first edition of this work earned laurels from the World History Association. We are gratified by the reception our work has received, and we are glad for the opportunity to craft an improved-upon third edition. We have corrected several small errors that crept into earlier editions, and we have introduced a few stylistic changes that we hope improve the clarity of our presentation and prose. We have likewise sought to provide updated facts and figures where called for in our later chapters. In addition to reworking the above-mentioned thematic introduction, the major change to this edition concerns chapter 17 (“Toolmakers Take Command”). Already in the second edition we rewrote this chapter to reflect a more encompassing view of the major technological systems that make up industrial civilization today. We might have otherwise just tweaked the chapter for this edition, except for one horrible particular: Superstorm Sandy and the 19-foot storm surge that slammed into the New York–New Jersey region on the night of October 29–30, 2012. Across the Hudson River from midtown Manhattan, Superstorm Sandy flooded Hoboken, New Jersey, where one of us (McClellan) lives, cutting off electricity, cell phone and Internet service, and so much else, just as it cut off whole communities in the New York Metropolitan region from the rest of civilization. We were on TV, but we couldn’t get TV. McClellan was fortunate that at Stevens Institute of Technology, where he teaches and which was likewise cut off in Hoboken, a vigorous discussion took place regarding the effects of Superstorm Sandy and what the event has to tell us about technology and the modern world. In the ten dark and cold days before power was restored and in conferences and panels afterward, a stricken community of flood victims and those otherwise affected grappled intellectually, not just physically, with what was occurring around them: residents, involved students, Stevens professors and research scientists, other professionals, community activists, and local politicians struggled to make sense of what had happened. McClellan’s good fortune extended to having Professors Andrew L. Russell, Lee Jared Vinsel, and John Horgan as his specialist colleagues in STS (science and technology studies). Their discussions converged on the notion of a technological supersystem undergirding industrial civilization today. The fragility and vulnerabilities of this supersystem and our utter dependence on it became abundantly plain in Superstorm Sandy. The idea that not all technological systems are equal became clear, too, with electricity being the foundational system that makes industrial civilization possible. How this thinking works itself out can be seen further in the revised chapter 17. Previous editions acknowledged the people and institutions that aided us, and it is unnecessary to repeat those thanks at this remove. For this edition we have especially and as warmly as possible to thank Professor Joseph November, historian of science at the University of South Carolina. Joe November and his colleagues have taught using previous editions of this book, and to help us in preparing this edition Joe took the time to reread and annotate the second edition carefully. We owe Joe November a great deal for his willingness to do this and for his many critical suggestions for improvements. We can only hope that we have responded adequately to his input. We owe an additional word of thanks to the aforementioned Stevens colleagues, Andrew Russell, Lee Vinsel, and John Horgan for having read and commented on drafts of the new material presented here. Our colleague in the Physics Department at Stevens, Professor Edward A. Whittaker, saved us from more than one gaffe in dealing with modern physics. Our students at Stevens Institute of Technology were once again helpful, and we acknowledge their many suggestions for enhancing the presentation. Bits and pieces of several student research projects have found their way into the present work, and in particular, we thank Jovanna Manzari, Muhammad Abd Malik, and Emanuel Rodriguez. We thank Alex McClellan and Julian McClellan for their insights into smartphones and social media. Tamar Boodaghians did good work and graciously aided us in updating the Web resources presented at the end of this book. Our Stevens colleague Professor Andrew Rubenfeld prepared the index, and we thank Andrew warmly for his friendship, effort, and skills. Jackie McClellan again earns heartfelt praise and thanks for her lifelong companionship and her editorial expertise. We are especially grateful to Dr. Robert J. Brugger and his associates at Johns Hopkins University Press. Bob initiated this whole enterprise over a lunch with Dorn and McClellan in Baltimore over two decades ago, and in many ways this is his book as well as ours. The professionalism and effectiveness of everyone at the Press are once again manifest in the book at hand. We have particularly to thank Juliana McCarthy, Kathryn Marguy, Hilary Jacqmin, and especially Mary Lou Kenney whose many touches as a real editor substantially improved this work. Regrettably, Harold Dorn passed away in 2011. His imprint on this book, particularly through his chef-d’œuvre, The Geography of Science (1991), remains substantial, and this third edition is no less a complete collaboration as before. Science and Technology in World History INTRODUCTION The Guiding Themes This book surveys a history of science and technology from the Old Stone Age—or Paleolithic era, stretching back tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years—to the present. One of its special concerns is with the relations between science and technology over this long period, but before we can broach our subject we first need to address what we mean by science and technology. Defining science and technology is not a straightforward matter. Simple dictionary definitions will not do. Part of the problem is that the way we use the terms today is relatively new. The word science derives from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge. It is used in English from the Middle Ages onward to cover a variety of meanings broadly concerned with knowledge, often bordering on philosophy, or a formalized skill, and only in the nineteenth century did the word science come to have its more restricted modern meaning of or pertaining to the natural or physical sciences, such as physics, chemistry, biology, and so forth. Famously and tellingly in this context, the English word scientist was coined only in 1840. Is that to say that scientists did not exist before 1840? Obviously not, but caution is clearly called for in using the labels science or scientists in reference to ancient Greece or medieval China, for example. Similarly, the word technology derives from the Greek techné (τέχνη) having to do with the practical arts, craftsmanship, and technique. Much of that sense is preserved in our word technology, but the word in English does not appear before the seventeenth century, and the more modern meaning of technology as the scientific study and systematic pursuit of the practical arts and their improvements does not enter our vocabularies again until the middle of the nineteenth century. Knowledge and know-how have a history, but given how their meanings have shifted over time, it becomes harder to use the terms science or technology uncritically, especially in diverse historical contexts. The danger of anachronism or projecting our notions back onto the past looms large in such a work as this one. In always placing ourselves in the context of the times and in trying to think as contemporaries thought, however, we can identify institutions, individuals, and activities that touch on the investigation of the natural world (science) or that sought practical mastery of that world (technology). For simplicity’s sake, in what follows we do speak about science and technology in ancient Egypt, Greece, China, and elsewhere. Occasionally we use the unavoidable term scientist, but always keeping in mind the precise context. Our definitional problem is compounded because science and technology clearly aren’t single, unitary things easily identified as such, even today, much less in changing historical contexts. Are we to conflate Aristotle’s science with what happens at CERN (the European Center for Nuclear Research) or the National Science Foundation today? Is the technology of the Roman chariot to be thought of on par with a sleek new car? More than that, what we know as science and technology have grown over time and have accreted meanings as the fields have developed, so any static notion of the nature of science or technology has to be abandoned at the outset. But this dilemma offers its own solutions, as we can define science and technology— the subjects of this history—by how the activities we find variously associated with each (inquiry into nature/craft activities) have developed and accrued over time. Once we have done that we will ask the further question about applied science and the historical connections of science and technology. What Is Science? The long view offered by the sweep of history incorporated into this book can help us articulate what we mean by science. Plainly, “science” has never been a single thing. That’s easy to say, but at least three different kinds of considerations are wrapped up in such a statement: the first concerns science as a body of knowledge about the natural world around us; another concerns science as a social institution and the place of science in society; and the third concerns the scientific enterprise itself and what its practitioners do. Let’s take these up in turn. In terms of content, science has considerable cultural and intellectual prestige in providing our modern scientific worldview. Science tells amazing and amazingly detailed stories about the cosmos and the world around us. The details are esoteric and reserved for experts; who gets to define the boundaries of science is a question unto itself, and there are competing bodies of knowledge, as in certain fundamentalisms or many New Age beliefs. That said, basic scientific understandings still generally frame people’s view of the world: That we live on planet Earth that spins on its axis and circles the Sun, that things fall down due to gravity, that salt on the table consists of molecules of sodium and chlorine, that egg and sperm make babies, not to mention the further reaches of Big Bang cosmology, black holes, and evolutionary perspectives on life. Along with priests and theologians since antiquity, scientists and natural philosophers have long provided and still provide basic ideas about nature and the physical world around us. Where are we? What is the world made up of? Who are we? What is going on? Our ideas about nature have a dynamic history of their own, of course, and one of the purposes of this book is to provide an overview of how it is that we arrive at the stories we tell about nature today. In so doing we quickly realize that an intellectual history of science is punctuated by radical shifts in worldviews and reinterpretations of fundamental features of nature, such as in moving from a geocentric to a heliocentric system. We want to be attuned to scientific revolutions in general and sensitive to how worldviews have radically shifted over time. The second consideration concerns the place of science in society, and it shows up in the different social settings where we can identify activities that seem scientific in nature. It’s one thing, for example, to think about a state- supported astrologer or astronomer contemplating the heavens; it’s another to consider a freelance Greek natural philosopher perambulating with adepts, or yet again a modern scientist in a lab coat involved in large-scale, complex research. “Science” is found in varied social and institutional contexts, not to mention in diverse social roles exercised by individuals. This insight into the varied and changing social circumstances of science holds true for scientific practice today and is visible, say, in the different loci where we find science, such as in universities, government, or corporations. But this diversity of social circumstances is even more apparent in larger historical and cultural frames, as we move from the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, through the city- states of ancient Greece, or courts in the Islamic world or in India, China, or Renaissance Italy. A more narrowly focused sociology of science likewise fits into seeing science as an enterprise of one sort or another unfolding in a larger social context. And so, asking what science is, our chapters trace out this dynamic social history down to the advent of the modern scientist and the scientific enterprise today. But, if science is not a single or static entity either as an intellectual enterprise or social institution, science is likewise not a unitary activity in terms of what its practitioners (scientists) do. At its heart science has to do with understanding the natural world around us, but what individuals and communities have done to pursue that end has varied considerably over time and varies considerably today. That is, scientists do different things in doing science: empirical work, theoretical ruminating, puzzle-solving, philosophical inquiry, experimental research using instruments, more solitary research versus being part of a large team of scientists doing Big Science work, applied research and development, secret / military / “homeland security” work, entrepreneurial activity, and so forth, not to mention teaching. It makes a difference whether you’re a graduate student, postdoc, professor or research scientist of one sort or another, or hunkered down in a start-up somewhere. And here, the sociology of science illuminates the practice of science. There’s also wide variety between and among the different scientific disciplines, their different traditions, and how they are practiced (think physics versus botany, for example). The long sweep of history allows us to see how these different activities and methodologies arose to give us science as we know it today. That is, different notions emerged over time of how and what it means to pursue inquiry into nature. Thus, subsequent chapters outline novelties as they arose from simple observation of nature to recordkeeping, mastering the regularities of the heavens, research guided—or not—by theory, mathematics in natural philosophy, changing methods for producing knowledge, and so forth. Scientific instruments, like the telescope or the barometer, for example, appeared only in the seventeenth century as an agreed-upon element of scientific research. This growing complexity regarding the scientific enterprise and its tools and methodologies is especially clear in historical context, as more and more becomes included in various scientific traditions over time. And so, in asking what science is, we can answer by pointing to a history of how science came to be understood and practiced at different times and in different contexts including down to the scientific enterprise today. But we also need to emphasize here that if, at its most basic, we think of science as simply knowledge of nature, then we are led back to the first humans and the knowledge they had of the natural world around them. And so, against the grain of most histories of science, we begin with the Paleolithic era and place the origins of science, as well as human technology, there. A Word about Technology Take a look around you. Look at the various things you see. They are largely all manufactured, aren’t they? Think about where you live. Think about houses generally, our offices, our roads, and our GPS- and otherwise equipped vehicles we and things move around in. Think about the Internet and your phone. Think about TV, streaming video, and social media. Think about the thousands of airplanes in the air and ships at sea right now as you read this. Think about flipping a switch and all kinds of things getting powered, including the lights. Think about the food you’ll eat today or the least thing in your environment … a toothpick … the penny in your pocket. Stopping to think about these things reveals unequivocally our utter dependence on our supporting technologies and technological systems of industrial civilization and just what a complicated, amazing world we live in today. All these things we see and experience are not natural or part of nature, but are manmade, artificial technologies that we have created to sustain ourselves. Humankind has always sheltered itself in a cocoon of technologies, as we will see, but today especially the cascade of interlocking technologies that make up contemporary industrial civilization underscores the centrality and overarching importance of technology in structuring today’s world. How did we come to live this way? This is the largest question this book seeks to answer. There are different ways to think about technologies. We most often think of technology as artifacts: The light bulb in the socket, the flat tire on my car, an X-ray, your computer or smartphone, and so forth. However, historians and students of technology for decades now have conceptualized technology more in terms of technological systems, that is, technologies as more complex assemblages of components that function to some end, such as lighting the room. This style of systems thinking informs our treatment of technology and its history here, and we will have a richer and clearer understanding of technologies only if we conceptualize them as systems. As we will see in chapter 17 (“Toolmakers Take Command”), electric lighting, for example, incorporates a complex and interacting set of parts that runs from the generating plant and includes the light bulb and so much more, from the electrons that run through the wires to the stockholders invested in the power company. A corollary of this point is that even the earliest and simplest technologies, such as stone tools or the control of fire, also need to be conceived of in terms of technological systems. For making a fire, for example, we might ask where the flint comes from and how it gets to the user. What is the tinder, and how is it collected, processed, and stored? How does one acquire the skill to knap stone or spark a fire? And what about fuel? No, a simple, but integrated system of elements allowed primitive man to organize the production of fire. We also have to recognize that intangible technique and know-how are to be considered part of what we mean by technology. The blacksmith and the computer programmer have sophisticated skill sets; they know how to do things, and the practical—even nonverbal or motor—techniques of doing have also to be folded into our understanding of technology. Beyond all that, we need to remember that technologies do not exist on some abstract plane but are always situated in historical and cultural context. Cultures and societies always developed technologies that seemed appropriate for their economies, lifestyles, and circumstances, and it is from this vantage point that particular technologies—as artifacts or as systems—need to be considered. Technology has several other features that distinguish it from science in particular. One is geographical locale. Technology is found everywhere: Not only in bustling cities or ports, but more tellingly in rural and even remote areas because humans can’t survive without their technologies. Science, on the other hand, is not similarly or so universally diffused. There have been minor exceptions and although research is sometimes carried out in faraway places, overwhelmingly organized science resides not in the countryside but in urban settings. Another distinction is that traditional technologies are in a sense more egalitarian because at least until comparatively recently untold legions of artisans and craft specialists plied their trades in decentralized, local venues. Throughout most of history the cobbler, the mason, the butcher, and their like served and sustained local communities everywhere. By contrast, only a comparatively few people have ever become involved in scientific pursuits, and they have pursued their science in restricted centers. Yet at the same time, unlike traditional artisans, those interested in science formed part of extended communities spread across space and time. One might contrast restricted local and even private knowledge (in guilds, say) of traditional technologies with the universalist claims of extended communities in science. And finally in this connection, how technologies have typically been transmitted from one generation to another also differs in important ways from how the scientific enterprise reproduces itself. Literacy and schooling, as mentioned, are the major differentiators here. Historically, technological practitioners were at least largely unlettered and learned their trades through apprenticeships and hands-on experience, their practice largely bereft of theory. Entry into the world of science requires its own apprenticeship, but seemingly of a different sort because of schooling, literacy, and the role of theory and research in science. Social divisions and occupational gradations fragment the world of technology. In this connection one thinks of class or caste distinctions and a scale separating the peasant farmer, a highly specialized artisan who might craft an inlaid table, a master builder employed by a town to build a cathedral, or the engineers and project managers who built the pyramids for the pharaoh. And at this last level the world of technology meets up with science in history and the application of expert knowledge to practical problems. At the top of this sociological pyramid stands an exclusive set of literate engineers and architects, such as the Roman engineer and architect Vitruvius (who died in 15 CE) or the Roman Senator Frontinus (40–130 CE), who wrote expertly on aqueducts and water supply. These men approached and wrote about architecture and civil and military engineering in much the same manner and social circumstances as contemporary natural philosophers. These literary engineers are certainly noteworthy, but they remain exceptions compared to the great mass of individuals engaged in traditional trades and craft practice that sustained humanity for so many centuries prior to the nineteenth century. The coming of industrial civilization reshaped the sociology and practice in the world of technology and forged new connections between science and technology. Today, engineers, architects, and technological innovators are trained in a manner akin to scientists, and they are not sociologically that distinct from scientific or other professionals. New technologies come into being quickly; they usually result from complicated planning and team efforts; they are much more closely connected today to industry and centers of money and power than ever before; and in one way or another they often entail the application of scientific knowledge. A sense of traditional technologies and how they became transformed in the modern world is an underlying theme that finds expression throughout. Is Technology Applied Science? Science is generally considered to be the fount from which today’s technological marvels spring. Not to mention the classical examples of the atomic bomb or the computer chip, many of the most exciting technologies of our time—the Internet, advances in medicine, or the latest hot app or electronic gadget—seem to connect to science somehow, and so we commonly think that technology is (simply) applied science. Indeed, science has become so identified with practical benefits that the dependence of technology on science is commonly assumed to be a timeless relationship and a single enterprise. Science and technology, research and development— these are assumed to be almost inseparable twins, and they rank among the sacred phrases of our time. The belief in the coupling of science and technology is now enshrined in the dictionary definition of technology as applied science, and journalistic reports under the rubric of “science news” are, in fact, often accounts of engineering rather than scientific achievements. One need hardly mention the scientific training that engineers and others at the cutting edge of new technologies receive to reinforce the sense that technology is indeed applied science. Certainly in today’s world, surrounded and supported as we are by a host of amazing technologies that seem self- evidently to involve science in some way or another, it’s not hard to think that, yes, technology has to be applied science. The predominant guiding theme of this work indeed concerns the historical relations between science and technology. Our initial motivation in writing this book, in fact, was to break down the cliché that “technology is applied science.” We wanted to show this belief to be an artifact of today’s cultural attitudes superimposed without warrant on the historical record. The historical record does show that in the earliest civilizations under the patronage of pharaohs and kings, and in general whenever centralized states arose, knowledge of nature was applied in some fashion or another and exploited for useful purposes. But it cannot be said that science and technology were systemically and closely related throughout most of history. In ancient Greece (where theoretical science had its beginning), among the scholastics of the Middle Ages, in the time of Galileo and Newton, and even for Darwin and his contemporaries in the nineteenth century, science constituted a learned calling whose results were recorded in scientific publications, while technology was understood as the crafts practiced by unschooled artisans. Until the second half of the nineteenth century few artisans or engineers attended a university or, in many cases, received any formal schooling at all. Conversely, the science curriculum of the university centered largely on pure mathematics (not to mention Greek and Latin) and what was often termed natural philosophy—the philosophy of nature—and was written in technical terms (and often a language) foreign to artisans and engineers. Particularly since the nineteenth century, science has undoubtedly bestowed genuine benefits on humankind, and it has fostered the hope that research can be channeled in the direction of improving the human condition. But a more secure understanding of science, one less bound by the cultural biases of our time, can be gained by viewing it through the lens of history. Seen thus, with its splendid achievements but also with its blemishes and social constraints, the enterprise of science becomes a multidimensional reality rather than a culture-bound misconception. At the same time, a more accurate historical appreciation of technology places proper emphasis on independent traditions of skilled artisans whose talents crafted everyday necessities and amenities throughout the millennia of human existence. Such a historical reappraisal will also show that in many instances technology directed the development of science, rather than the other way around—the telescope and the steam engine providing classic examples. In order to develop the argument that the relationship between enterprises we might label science and technology has been a historical process and not an inherent identity, we trace the joint and separate histories of science and technology from the prehistoric era to the present. We intend first and foremost to review the common assumption that technology is applied science and show, instead, that in most historical situations prior to the nineteenth century, science and technology have progressed in either partial or full isolation from each other—both intellectually and sociologically. In the end, an understanding of the historical process will shed light on the circumstances under which science and technology have indeed merged over the past two hundred years. Even if technology has been or is in some fashion applied science in many cases today, the question remains about how science actually becomes applied in various technologies. Might there be varieties of applied science? Scientific knowledge taken from the cutting edge of new research is one thing, for example; an engineer consulting a table is another. How and in what precise contexts did and does science become “applied”? This issue is addressed more particularly in chapter 19. The Babylonian, Hellenic, and Hellenistic in Science History A key to understanding the history of science (and technology as applied science) lies in the recognition that science has not always been situated or has not functioned the same way in societies. We mentioned above the social history of science and the necessity of keeping in mind local circumstances in following science and technology in history, but we have something more in mind in the present observation: we can identify at least three and now possibly four general ways in which science has been structured socially and has functioned in particular societies. Identifying these patterns helps us analytically as it opens the door to cross-cultural comparisons and provides deeper insight into the Western tradition in science. That’s why they deserve attention here at the outset. The first of these types we are labeling the Babylonian model. If the enterprises of science and technology were largely separate throughout most of history, that truth does not mean that they were (or were always) entirely separate. We shouldn’t go overboard and think that technology becomes applied science in the nineteenth century and not at all before. Thus, in what follows we want to show what the connection between science and technology was not, but also to show what it was over time. The real story of the historical connections between social, technical, and intellectual enterprises we call science and technology is more nuanced, more interesting, and more revealing. The general historical separation of science and technology must not obscure key instances where science or expert knowledge was applied in a technology to serve some practical end. This crucial strand in the historical intersection of science and technology goes back much further than the nineteenth century. It goes back to the third millennium BCE (before the common era), in fact, and the dawn of civilization, and it arises coincident with the coming of the state and the requirements of reckoning, recordkeeping, and governance. The pattern we repeatedly see for this kind of applied science dates from ancient Babylonia and Egypt and involves state patronage for and institutionalization of expert knowledge for the purposes of governance. Literacy is a defining trait here, and the object of such state patronage was to produce experts of all sorts, including ones that we would see as scientist-like: scribes, tax collectors and accountants, physicians and healers, astronomers/astrologers, alchemists and chemists, engineers, bureaucrats and administrators of one sort or another, lawyers, priests, and so on. In this sense scientific expertise (whatever that might mean in a particular context) is a subset of a larger panoply of expertise needed to run a state. The pharaoh could not rule Egypt alone, so to speak, and ever after in history across a variety of cultural contexts we find subsidized experts who were literate, schooled, and employed in institutions of one sort or another, often anonymously, applying their specialized knowledge to support the ends and interests of governing and patronizing authority. This “Babylonian model” of state-supported applied science appears repeatedly in this account whenever we find centralized authority in need of experts to run governments and armies, keep track of the calendar, and otherwise manage polities. Civilizations that arose in the ancient Near East, India, China, the Americas, and elsewhere incorporated this kind of applied science again and again into ruling regimes. This key strand in the history of science, and technology as applied science, weaves its way through this account. But the Babylonian model aside, until recently the wider world of technology was under the masterful control of artisans and the unlettered. In addition to the “Babylonian,” two other revealing modes for the organization and pursuit of science present themselves: the Hellenic and the Hellenistic. The term Hellenic, of course, harks back to the apogee of classical Greece, the “Greek miracle” of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, and the birth of philosophy and scientific theory. The era of the Presocratics, as well as Plato or Aristotle, as we will see further in chapter 4, is famous for the invention of what we usually call pure science or the disinterested pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself. More than that, Hellenic natural philosophers repudiated the practical application of knowledge and proposed that science should have nothing to do with technology, the crafts, or the improvement of the human condition. Helping to run the affairs of state, as in Babylonia, similarly was not part of the ideology of scientific inquiry in the Hellenic era. Whereas the Babylonian model for science arose independently many times over, the Hellenic model of knowledge for its own sake unsupported by institutions or patrons seems to have been a unique historical event that emerged coincident with city-states and economies of classical fifth- and fourth-century Greece down to the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. The phenomenon of pure science pursued by disinterested inquirers into nature untrammeled by any considerations of applying knowledge for some practical end only spread among scientific intellectuals in periods following the Hellenic. But the Hellenic tradition continued mostly on an individual basis and largely privately among like-minded but usually scattered scientific intellectuals forming spatially and temporally extended communities. Except for isolated instances otherwise, this disinterested “pure science,” theory-oriented tradition floated in non-institutionalized and nonpatronized settings, sociologically detached from the heart of society or the supporting economy. Our third model, the Hellenistic, combines features of both the Babylonian model and the Hellenic model for the organization and pursuit of science. The Hellenistic era immediately followed the Hellenic and the conquests of Alexander the Great (356–23 BCE). As seen best in the Museum and Library at Alexandria, detailed in chapter 5, the Hellenistic model for science combines Babylonian state support for the practical and subsidies for Hellenic-style, pure science pursuits. In this way the disinterested, theoretical pursuit of inquiry into nature for the sake of knowledge and insight alone found a niche alongside the practical and applied science in societies that succeeded the Hellenistic in the Near East. These three different historical styles for the organization, practice, and patronage of science play themselves out in different and revealing ways over time. At the least, these distinctions provide useful entrées for thinking about science or science-like activities in a variety of social and chronological contexts. More than that, separating out these three alternatives this way, however crudely, enables a comparative history of science in world cultures. That is, again, we repeatedly find the Babylonian model worldwide whenever state- or near-state-level societies appear. We’ll see this in our chapters devoted to the earliest civilizations, and further concerning medieval China, India, and the Americas. We focus on the marginal but telling case of Anasazi Indian settlements in and around Chaco Canyon in the American Southwest as a test of this very proposition. Of these three archetypes, the Hellenistic combination of patronage for nonutilitarian as well as useful knowledge is especially valuable analytically. Unlike the Hellenic, whose influence was vague and which was largely detached from society, the Hellenistic model did formally repeat itself in a limited set of societies that followed in the ancient world, as we will see in chapter 6. What we usually label as Western civilization and Western scientific traditions trace themselves back to Egypt and Mesopotamia, not to mention the birth of theory in the Hellenic. Nevertheless, the Hellenistic tradition of external support for pure and applied science came to characterize the history of science in the West. That is, with its dual roots in theory and utility, the Hellenistic-style science passed to subsequent Near-Eastern civilizations, Islam, and eventually the European West, whereas the pattern in civilizations not deeply impacted by Hellenistic-style science remained largely Babylonian in nature. Following our Hellenistic model in this way helps clarify what we mean when we speak of the Western tradition and the history of Western science. Observing the continuations of the Hellenistic model over time similarly helps us better understand the multifaceted character of science and applied science today. The fourth possibility emerges only recently, where the Hellenistic model centered on government support for science and its experts has evolved into a drastically new mode of science embedded in industry and production as well as married to government. The Problem of Europe From the point of view of an overarching world history, historians have had to grapple with two related, sometimes uncomfortable questions: Why European powers became so impactful on a world scale from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and why the Scientific Revolution and the modern heliocentric worldview originated in Europe. Metaphorically, how do we explain Columbus (1492) and Copernicus (1543)? This “problem of Europe” is sometimes paired with the related “problem of China,” which asks why the Scientific Revolution did not arise in China, which was more developed than Europe prior to the sixteenth century. The latter is a false question, however, as we take up in chapter 7, because science and technology functioned well in medieval China. Historians are called on to explain what happened in Europe, not what didn’t happen in China. The discomfort stems from not wanting to somehow favor Europe, yet at the same time needing to explain these two great world-historical phenomena of the coming of modern science and European expansion. That is, during a thousand years of a medieval era lasting on a world-scale from roughly 500 to 1500 CE, a jostling, but relative balance maintained itself among most of the world’s cultures. (We examine several of the most important of these and their scientific traditions in part II of this volume.) Then, dramatically, after 1500 Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England transformed the direction of world history through European colonization and later imperial expansion. Not coincidentally, at the same time Copernicus proposed a sun- centered universe and the Scientific Revolution and modern science followed through Newton’s Principia (1687) and beyond. Part III of this book (“Europe and the Solar System”) focuses on the Scientific Revolution and the technological wherewithal of European expansion. Chapter 10 provides an account, although not a wholly original one, of how Europe could move from being a cultural and technological backwater to the forefront of the world historical stage, and how a select group of nations in Europe with their ships and cannons became poised to break out on a world scale and so shift the course of history. The other chapters in part III offer an account of the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the coming into being of our modern worldview. We also examine the Scientific Revolution as the proto-typical revolution in science and as a model for how science changes in general. In considering these developments we try to provide explanations that do not somehow privilege Europe in any intrinsic fashion, but only as the lucky beneficiary of geography, technology, and specific historical circumstances. By the same token, as much as European expansion and the origination of modern science and the modern scientific enterprise in Europe were key features of modern world history since 1500, we argue at the end of this work that we can no longer think of science as particularly or distinctively European or Western, except for its historical roots, because science and the scientific enterprise have institutionally expanded to the world level today. World science has succeeded Western science. Industrial Civilization and Capitalism From a global perspective three great socio-technological revolutions in their turn utterly transformed how humans lived: the Neolithic revolution (beginning circa 10,000 BCE), the Urban Bronze Age revolution (circa 3500 BCE), and the Industrial Revolution (from circa 1750 or so of our era). As we will see in subsequent chapters, each of these revolutions radically shifted the course of human history and ushered in fundamental changes in lifestyle and economy. The Neolithic revolution separates the eons of migratory Paleolithic food-collecting (hunting and gathering) from settled Neolithic villages and food-producing (horticulture and animal husbandry with domesticated plants and animals). The Urban Bronze Age revolution brought cities and civilization, true agriculture, a significant surplus, specialization and social stratification, monumental building, and the advent of kings and rulers, state violence, and governing power. We are all more familiar with the Industrial Revolution and industrial civilization of much more recent days, with the mechanization of production in factories, new classes of workers to work in them, new transportation systems, increased urbanization, changing market structures, and extraordinary new technologies (think the telegraph, railroad, telephone, or radio) leading to industrial civilization full blown as we know it today with its smartphones, social media, and instantaneous global communications and connections. Two important conclusions are to be drawn from this bird’s-eye view of human history. One, the revolutions that gave rise to the Neolithic, Bronze Age, or our industrial age were all fundamentally technological revolutions. They involved radically new technologies of production (horticulture, field agriculture, or industrial production, for example), and they led to radically new forms of social organization (villages, cities and polities, the modern nation-state or corporation). How and why these three fundamental socio- technological transformations occurred call out for explanation by historians, and we suggest possibilities and parameters as we proceed. But indisputably, the three historical turning points of the Neolithic, Urban Bronze Age, and contemporary industrial civilization are the three most important chapters in any history of technology. The other observation to be made in this connection is that, comparatively speaking, the Industrial Revolution occurred just yesterday, beginning in the middle of the eighteenth century. Two hundred or three hundred years might seem like a long time ago, given the history that is usually taught, but not compared to the 5,000 years that separates us from the beginning of the Urban Bronze Age, or 12,000 years since the origins of the Neolithic, or the tens of thousands of years that separate us from people living in the Paleolithic era. It’s a blink of the eye to get from eighteenth-century England to today. Thus, industrialization is presented here as a relatively recent and still unfolding process that has a unitary history and is not a series of distinct revolutions (the first, second, third Industrial Revolution, etc.) leading to the computer revolution and the new digital world of the Internet and Information Age. Accordingly, we devote the last part of this volume (part IV: “Science, Technology, and Industrial Civilization”) to the Industrial Revolution and the unfolding of industrial civilization today. It seems we have entered a new phase in human history where nations and peoples are knitted together into one global system with science and technology essential in providing the infrastructure. A related theme in earlier editions and continued here is globalization with modern science and technology presented as distinctive elements of our connected world. In earlier editions of this book, we did not make an explicit link between industrial civilization and capitalism. In retrospect we should have woven the history of capitalism and business history more closely into our text. We now see more clearly that lurking behind our anodyne term, industrial civilization, is the story of capitalism and of economic systems and ideologies that arose to invest in science and technology—research and development (R&D) and profit. Here and there in what follows we have altered our wording to be more suggestive of the links between our story of the history of science and technology and the history of capitalism. We address this point a little in our section in chapter 20, “Science as a Mode of Production,” but otherwise we leave it to readers to fill in the blanks. Linking industrial civilization to capitalism aids in understanding why industrial civilization is likely not sustainable. The Way Ahead So, we end up with a textbook for students and the general reader, after all. Part I (“Origins to the End of Antiquity”) traces the history of science and technology from the Paleolithic era though 500 CE and the end of antiquity. Part II (“Thinking and Doing among the World’s Peoples”) offers a world tour of science and technology in major world civilizations across a medieval millennium lasting from 500 to 1500. Part III (“Europe and the Solar System”) focuses on the above-mentioned “Problem of Europe” and the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Finally, part IV (“Science, Technology, and Industrial Civilization”) examines the Industrial Revolution and the further evolution of science, technology, and industrial civilization that has given us the amazing but challenging world we live in today. Nevertheless, as outlined here, we hope this volume offers something more substantial than a mere survey, a mini-encyclopedia, or a watered-down guide to a more extensive literature. Part I Origins to the End of Antiquity The origin of technology is rooted in biology. Not to mention tools and techniques observed in the animal world, technology in the form of stone tools originated literally hand in hand with humankind. Two million years ago a species of primate evolved which anthropologists have labeled Homo habilis, or “handy man,” in recognition of its ability, far beyond that of any other primate to that point, to fashion tools. Over the next two million years our ancestors were food collectors—hunters and gathers—and they used a toolkit that slowly became more elaborate and complex. A conservative estimate would have people like us—modern Homo sapiens sapiens—on the scene by 100,000 years ago using these advanced toolkits. We lived by our technologies then and now. History is often said to begin with the first written records at the dawn of the first civilizations roughly 5,000 years ago. The long eons prior to that date thus are characterized as human prehistory, long more the province of the archeologist and paleontologist than the historian. The history/pre- history division is too artificial, but it helps orient us chronologically, and plainly the scale of human prehistory is enormous, approximately 95 percent of human existence counting back only to 100,000 BCE (before the common era). At the end of that long old stone age epoch human technologies and human societies underwent two revolutionary transformations in prehistory and the cusp of the historical era and those written records in the fourth millennium BCE. In the Neolithic Revolution a few communities gave up the foraging way of life, around 12,000 years ago, in favor of horticulture and herding and developed radically new tools and techniques for earning their literal bread. The Urban Bronze Age Revolution began to unfold circa 3500 BCE in the ancient Near East and wrote a new chapter in the history of technology with field agriculture, a large surplus, and the advent of state- level societies with kings and rulers. Many other important technological novelties arose in the ancient world: domestication of the horse, the invention of the potter’s wheel, the use of cement, and a myriad of other technological developments in specialized trades and crafts. But the Urban Bronze Age Revolution of 3500 BCE set an enduring pattern of human social, economic, and technical existence with by far most people being peasants directly involved in agricultural production and with a surplus siphoned off to support a thin slice of the population that governed or served as military or priests. This pattern remained in place for roughly five thousand years until the third great technological revolution, the Industrial Revolution, began to bring about its changes in more recent times. The history of science through the end of antiquity is clearly not congruent with the history of technology. Only toward the end of the long prehistoric era did peoples begin to observe and record the natural world systematically in ways that appear akin to science. Even when they established settled Neolithic societies only limited evidence is seen of investigating nature or patronizing research. Only with the onset of the historical era, when civilized —city-based—empires emerged in the ancient Near East did monarchs come to value higher learning for its applications in the management of complex societies and found institutions for those ends—what we are calling the Babylonian model for organization and pursuit of science. The ancient Greeks—the Hellenic Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE—then added natural philosophy; abstract theoretical science thereby took its place as a component of knowledge. This different pattern for the social organization of science we are labeling the Hellenic model. In the period following the Hellenic—the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman eras—we find a blending of state patronage for pure and applied science, a historical novelty we lump under the aegis of a Hellenistic model for how science can be organized and practiced. These models help us better grasp the history of science in antiquity and thereafter. By the end of antiquity and the ancient world at roughly 500 of the common era (CE), both technology and science had enjoyed significant, but remarkably different, histories. Little overlap unites these two stories or their historical trajectories, but what little overlap there is was nontrivial and of further historical importance. An account of science and technology from prehistory through the end of antiquity forms the subject matter of part I. CHAPTER 1 Humankind Emerges: Tools and Toolmakers Scholars customarily draw a sharp distinction between prehistory and history. Prehistory is taken to be the long era from the biological beginnings of humankind over 2 million years ago to the origins of civilization about 5,000 years ago in the first urban centers of the Near East. The transition to civilization and written records at that point traditionally mark the commencement of history proper. History begins at Sumer. Everything before that is prehistory. Prehistory, because of the exclusively material nature of its artifacts, mainly in the form of stone, bone, or ceramic products, has inescapably become the province of the archaeologist, while the historical era, with its documentary records, is the commonly assigned domain of the historian. The pre-history / history distinction has its problems, but it helps situate us in time as we start out. More than that, however, the single label “prehistory” obscures two distinctly different substages in prehistory: the Paleolithic, or Old Stone Age, which held sway for around 2 million years, is marked by rudimentary stone tools designed for collecting and processing wild food sources, while the succeeding Neolithic, or New Stone Age, which first took hold in the Near East around 12,000 years ago, entailed substantially more complex stone implements adapted to the requirements of an economy of low-intensity food production in the form of gardening or herding. The immense scale of prehistory and especially the Paleolithic era needs emphasis. The two million years since the genus Homo appeared on earth is 400 times longer than the mere five thousand years of history that have elapsed since the Egyptian pyramids and written records. Using the narrower scale of 100,000 years that anatomically modern humans roamed the world, the ratio of prehistory to history as we know it is more than twenty to one. Even on this scale, reduced to a 24-hour day, history with its written records begins at 10:45 PM. One can only be struck by the immensity of the thousands and tens of thousands of years of the Paleolithic era in particular. Such unimaginable continuity over such unfathomable stretches of time, one wonders what our Paleolithic ancestors may have imagined of themselves and their own place in time. Fig. 1.1. Human evolution. Modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) evolved from earlier, now extinct, human and prehuman ancestors. (Plants and animals are classified according to the binomial nomenclature of genus and species: genus being general groups of related species, and species being specific interbreeding populations of individuals. Thus, Homo is the genus, and sapiens the species; the third name indicates a subspecies.) In general, brain size and technological sophistication increased over time, but there is no strict correlation between species and technologies. For example, Paranthropus and Homo habilis may both have used simple choppers; H. erectus and archaic H. sapiens cannot be distinguished by their respective fine-blade toolkits. Aspects of this picture are matters of debate, notably the relationship of Neanderthals to modern humans. New findings regularly shed light on the details of human biological and cultural evolution. The technologies of both the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras have left a rich legacy of material artifacts. In contrast, only a feeble record exists of any scientific interests in these preliterate societies, mainly in the form of astronomically oriented structures. Thus, at the very outset, the evidence indicates that science and technology followed separate trajectories during the eons of prehistory. Technology—the crafts—formed an essential element of both the nomadic food-collecting economy of Paleolithic societies and the food-producing activities in Neolithic villages, while science, as an abstract and systematic interest in nature, was essentially nonexistent, or, at any rate, has left little trace. The Arrival of Handy Man By most accounts human beings appeared on Earth only recently, as measured on the scales of cosmic, geologic, or evolutionary time. As scientists now believe, the cosmos itself originated with the “Big Bang” some 13.8 billion years ago. Around 4.5 billion years ago the earth took shape as the third in a string of companion planets to an ordinary star near the edge of an ordinary galaxy; soon the self-replicating chemistry of life began. Biological evolution then unfolded over the next millions and billions of years. In the popular imagination the age of the dinosaurs exemplifies the fantastic history of life in past ages, and the catastrophic event—probably a comet or an asteroid colliding with the earth—that ended the dinosaur age 65 million years ago illustrates the vicissitudes life suffered in its tortuous evolution. The period that followed is known as the age of mammals because these animals flourished and diversified in the niches vacated by the dinosaurian reptiles. By about 4 million years ago a line of “ape-men” arose in Africa—the australopithecines—our now-extinct ancestral stock. Figure 1.1 depicts the several sorts of human and prehuman species that have arisen over the last 4 million years. Experts debate the precise evolutionary paths that join them, and each new fossil discovery readjusts the details of the story. Yet its broad outlines are not in dispute. The figure shows that anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, or the “wise” variety of “wise Man,” evolved from a series of human and prehuman ancestors. Archaic versions of modern humans made their appearance around 200,000 years ago. They migrated out of Africa in several waves, the latest occurring at around 60,000 years ago, and by that time anatomically modern humans—people physically like you and me— wandered the world. The Neanderthals were an extinct race of humans that existed mainly in the cold of Europe from about 200,000 to 40,000 years ago. Experts differ over the modernity of Neanderthals and whether one would or would not stand out in a crowd or in a supermarket. Many scientists look upon them as so similar to ourselves as to form only an extinct variety or race of our own species, and so label them, as we do here Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Others thought Neanderthals more “brutish” than anatomically modern humans and therefore regarded them as a separate species, Homo neanderthalensis. Neanderthals and modern humans interacted culturally and interbred. Recent DNA evidence indicates that about 5 percent of genes non- African people carry are inherited from Neanderthal ancestors. Preceding Homo sapiens, the highly successful species known as Homo erectus arose around 2 million years ago and spread throughout the Old World (the continents of Africa, Europe, and Asia). Before that, the first species of human being, Homo habilis, coexisted with at least two other species of upright hominids, the robust and the gracile forms of the genus Paranthropus. At the beginning of the sequence stood the ancestral genus Australopithecus (or “Southern Ape”) that includes Australopithecus afarensis—represented by the fossil “Lucy.” This sequence highlights several points of note. First is the fact of human evolution—that we arose from more primitive forebears. Among the more significant indicators of this evolution is a progression in brain size, from around 450 cubic centimeters (cc) in the case of prehuman Lucy, only slightly larger than the brain of a modern chimpanzee, through an average of 750 cc for Homo habilis, 1000 cc for Homo erectus, to around 1400 cc for humanity today. An as-yet-unexplained irony of this “progression” is that Neanderthals had slightly larger brains than today’s humans. Bipedality—or upright walking on two feet—represents another defining feature of this evolutionary sequence. Experts debate whether Lucy and her kin were fully bipedal, but her successors certainly were. An upright stance allows the hand and arm to become a multipurpose utensil for grasping and carrying items. Lucy and her type had probably adopted male-female cooperation, at least temporary pair-bonding, and a “family” structure for raising offspring. From the point of view of the history of technology, however, the most important lesson to be drawn from figure 1.1 concerns tool use among our ancestors. It used to be thought that tool use—technology—is an exclusively human characteristic; the oldest fossil of the human genus, Homo habilis, received its name (“handy man”) both because of its “human” skeletal features and because it was discovered along with simple stone choppers. However, the older notion can no longer be maintained. Indeed, the origin of technology is rooted in biology. Some nonhuman animals create and use tools, and technology as a cultural process transmitted from generation to generation arises occasionally among monkey and ape communities. Chimpanzees in the wild sometimes “fish” for termites by carefully preparing a twig, inserting it into a termite nest, and licking off the insects that cling to it. Since the activity is not instinctive but is instead taught to juveniles by their mothers, it must be regarded as cultural, unlike, say, the instinct of bees to build hives. Reportedly, chimpanzees have also culturally transmitted knowledge of medicinal plants, so it may be possible to identify the origins of medical technology outside of the human genus, too. Perhaps the best documented feats of technical innovation and cultural transmission in the animal world concern a single female, Imo, the “monkey genius” of a colony of Japanese macaques. Incredibly, Imo made two separate technical discoveries. First she discovered that to remove sand from potatoes thrown on the beach she could wash them in the sea rather than pick off the sand with her fingers. Then, in an even more remarkable display of ingenuity, Imo found that to separate rice from sand she did not have to pick out the individual grains; the mixture can be dropped into water where the sand will sink, and the rice will float and can be easily recovered. Both techniques were adopted by younger members of the troop as well as by older females and passed on to the next generation. Recent discoveries have shown that stone tools antedate Homo habilis by 700,000 years, and a species of Paranthropus may have used fire. Furthermore, little correlation exists between species type and different types of tool-kits. For example, Neanderthal tools varied little from the precedents set by Homo erectus. The record reveals only a weak correlation between biological species and the toolkit used. That said, however, making and using tools and the cultural transmission of technology became essential to the human mode of existence and was practiced in all human societies. Moreover, humans seem to be the only creatures who fashion tools to make other tools. Without tools humans are a fairly frail species, and no human society has ever existed without technology. Humankind owes its evolutionary success in large measure to mastery and transmission of tool-making and -using, and thus human evolutionary history is grounded in the history of technology. Control of fire represented a key new technology for humankind. Fire provided warmth. Fire made human migration into colder climes possible, opening up huge and otherwise inhospitable areas of the globe for human habitation. The technology of fire also supplied artificial light, thus extending human activity after dark and into dark places, such as caves. Fire offered protection against wild animals. Fire permitted foods to be cooked, which lessened the time and effort required to eat and digest meals. Fire-hardened wooden tools became possible. And fire no doubt served as a hearth and a hub for human social and cultural relations for a million years. Their practical knowledge of fire gave early humans a greater degree of control over nature. Homo erectus was an exceptionally successful animal, at least as measured by its spread across the Old World from Africa to Europe, Asia, Southeast Asia, and archipelagoes beyond. That success in large measure depended on mastering fire. Fig. 1.2. “H. erectus Utilizing a Prairie Fire,” by Jay H. Matternes. Control of fire became a fundamental technology in the human odyssey. Undoubtedly, members of the genus Homo first used wildfires before learning to control them. The grasping hand constitutes one human “tool” that evolved through natural selection; speech is another. Speech seems to be a relatively recent acquisition, although paleontologists have not yet reached agreement on how or when it first appeared. Speech may have evolved from animal songs or calls; novel brain wiring may have been involved. But, once acquired, the ability to convey information and communicate in words and sentences must have been an empowering technology that produced dramatic social and cultural consequences for humanity. A turning point occurred around 40,000 years ago. Previously, Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans had coexisted for tens of thousands of years in the Middle East and in Europe. Around 35,000 years ago Neanderthals became extinct, possibly exterminated through conflict with a new population, or they may have interbred and become absorbed into the modern human gene pool. A cultural discontinuity manifested itself around the same time. Whereas Neanderthals had produced simple, generalized, multipurpose tools from local materials, we—Homo sapiens sapiens—began to produce a great assortment of tools, many of which were specialized, from stone, bone, and antler: needles and sewn clothing, rope and nets, lamps, musical instruments, barbed weapons, bows and arrows, fish hooks, spear throwers, and more elaborate houses and shelters with fireplaces. Humans began to conduct long-distance trade of shells and flints through exchange over hundreds of miles, and they produced art, tracked the moon, and buried their dead. And yet, in terms of their basic social and economic way of life, they continued along the same path—they remained nomadic food-collectors. Foraging for a Living Prehistorians classify the period from 2 million years ago to the end of the last Ice Age at about 12,000 years ago as a single era. They label it the Paleolithic (from the Greek, paleo, “ancient”; lithos, “stone”) or Old Stone Age. Food-collecting is its essential attribute, codified in the term hunter- gatherer society. Paleolithic tools aided in hunting or scavenging animals and for collecting and processing plant and animal food, and it is now understood that Paleolithic technology developed in the service of a basic food-collecting economy. Paleolithic food-collecting bespeaks a subsistence economy and a communal society. Seasonal and migratory food-collecting produced little surplus and thus permitted little social ranking or dominance and no coercive institutions (or, indeed, any institutions) of the kind needed in stratified societies to store, tax, and redistribute surplus food. The record indicates that Paleolithic societies were essentially egalitarian, although grades of power and status may have existed within groups. People lived in small bands or groups of families, generally numbering fewer than 100. Much circumstantial evidence suggests that a division of labor based on gender governed the pattern of food collection. Although one has to allow for sexually ambiguous roles and individual exceptions, males generally attended to hunting and scavenging animals, while females most likely went about gleaning plants, seeds, and eggs as food and medicines. Men and women together contributed to the survival of the group, with women’s work often providing the majority of calories. Homo sapiens sapiens lived longer than Neanderthals, it would seem; more true elders thus added experience and knowledge in those groups. Paleolithic bands may have converged seasonally into larger clans or macrobands for celebrations, acquiring mates, or other collective activities, and they probably ingested hallucinatory plants. Except as located in a handful of favored spots where year-round hunting or fishing might have been possible, Paleolithic food-collectors were nomadic, following the migrations of animals and the seasonal growth of plants. In some instances Paleolithic groups engaged in great seasonal moves to the sea or mountains. In the Upper Paleolithic (around 30,000 years ago) spear-throwers and the bow and arrow entered the weapons arsenal, and the dog (wolf) became domesticated, the first domesticated animal possibly as an aid in hunting. Ice Age art is the most heralded example of the cultural flowering produced after anatomically modern humans appeared on the scene. Earlier human groups may have made beautified objects of perishable materials, but several late Upper Paleolithic cultures in Europe (30,000 to 10,000 years ago) produced enduring and justly renowned paintings and sculptures in hundreds of sites, often in hard-to-reach galleries and recesses of caves. Artists and artisans also created jewelry and portable adornments, and decorated small objects with animal motifs and other embellishments. No one has yet fully decoded what purposes cave paintings fulfilled; anthropologists have suggested hunting rituals, initiation rites, magical beliefs, and sexual symbolism. The many “Venus” statuettes with exaggerated feminine features, characteristic of the Paleolithic, have been interpreted in terms of fertility rituals and divination of one sort or another. By the same token, they may represent ideals of feminine beauty. Beyond the many uncertainties remaining, Ice Age art shows that human communities evoked symbolic representation in their dealings with the world. And then, we should not overlook the technical dimension of Ice Age art, from pigments and painting techniques to ladders and scaffolding. The great cave paintings of Europe are the better known, but literally and figuratively Paleolithic peoples the world over left their artistic handprints. Neanderthals had already begun to care for their old and invalid, and by 100,000 years ago they ceremonially buried some of their dead. Centers of mortuary and burial activity may have existed, and one can speak of a “cult of the dead” beginning in the Middle Paleolithic (100,000 to 50,000 years ago). Intentionally burying the dead is a distinctly human activity, and burials represent a major cultural landmark in human prehistory. They bespeak self- consciousness and effective social and group cohesion, and they suggest the beginning of symbolic thought. It may be enlightening to speculate about the mental or spiritual world of Paleolithic peoples. What we have already seen and said of Paleolithic burials and cave art strongly suggests that Paleolithic populations, at least toward the end of the era, developed what we would call religious or spiritual attitudes. They may well have believed the natural world was filled with various gods or deities or that objects and places, such as stones or groves, were themselves alive. Religious beliefs and practices—however we might conceive them—formed a social technology, as it were, that knitted communities together and strengthened their effectiveness. For anatomically modern humans the Paleolithic way of life continued unabated and essentially unchanged for 30,000 years, a phenomenally long and stable cultural era, especially compared to the rapid pace of change in the periods that followed. Paleolithic peoples doubtless lived relatively unchanging lives involving great continuity with their own past. Well fed on a varied diet that included significant amounts of meat, not having to work too hard, cozy in fur and hide, comfortable by a warm fire, who can deny that our Paleolithic ancestors often enjoyed the good life? Fig. 1.3. Paleolithic art. In the late Paleolithic era food-collecting populations of Homo sapiens began to create art in many parts of the world. In southwestern Europe they adorned the walls of caves with naturalistic representations of animals. Over the entire 2 million years of the Paleolithic, beginning with the first species of Homo, population density remained astonishingly low, perhaps no more than one person per square mile, and the rate of population increase, even in the late (or Upper) Paleolithic, may have been only one five- hundredth of what it has been for modern populations over the past few centuries. The very low rate of population increase derives from several factors acting singly or in combination to restrict fertility rates: late weaning of infants (since nursing has somewhat of a contraceptive effect), low body fat, a mobile lifestyle, and infanticide. Nevertheless, humankind slowly but surely fanned out over the earth and, as long as suitable food-collecting habitats could be found, humanity had no need to alter its basic lifestyle. Food-collecting groups simply budded off from parent populations and founded new communities. Paleolithic peoples spread through Africa, Asia, Europe, and Australia, while waves of hunters and gatherers reached North America by at least 12,000 years ago, if not well before, ultimately spreading the Paleolithic mode of existence to the southernmost tip of South America. After many millennia of slow expansion, Paleolithic humans “filled up” the world with food-collectors. Only then, it seems, did population pressure against collectible resources trigger a revolutionary change from food- collecting to food-producing in the form of horticulture or herding. Is Knowledge Science? The extraordinary endurance of Paleolithic society and mode of existence depended on human mastery of an interlocked set of technologies and practices. It is sometimes said that Paleolithic peoples needed and possessed “science” as a source of the knowledge that underpinned their practical activities. It is all too easy to assume that in making and using fire, for example, Stone Age peoples practiced at least a rude form of “chemistry.” In fact, however, while both science and technology involve “knowledge systems,” the knowledge possessed by food-collectors cannot reasonably be considered theoretical or derivative of science or theories of nature. Although evidence of something akin to science appears in late Paleolithic “astronomy,” there was no call for systematic experimentation or directed inquiry into nature beyond accumulated experience in the practice of Paleolithic crafts. To discover the origins and character of that science we need to understand why it did not impact technology. Knowledge comes in many forms. Practical knowledge embodied in the crafts is different from knowledge deriving from some abstract understanding of a phenomenon. To change a car tire, for example, one needs direct instruction or hands-on experience, not any special knowledge of mechanics or the strength of materials. By rubbing sticks together or sparking flint into dry kindling, a scout can build a fire without knowing the oxygen theory (or any other theory) of combustion. And conversely, knowledge of theory alone does not enable one to change a tire or make a fire. It seems fair to say that Paleolithic peoples applied practical skills and practical knowledge rather than any theoretical or systematized knowledge to practice their crafts. More than that, Paleolithic peoples may have had explanations for fire without it being meaningful to speak about Paleolithic “chemistry”—for example, if they somehow thought they were invoking a fire god or a spirit of fire in their actions. A major conclusion about Paleolithic technology follows from all this: to whatever small extent we may be able to speak about “science” in the Paleolithic, Paleolithic technologies clearly were prior to and independent of any such knowledge. The record (or rather the absence of one) indicates that Paleolithic peoples did not self-consciously pursue “science” or deliberate inquiries into nature. Does the Paleolithic period nevertheless offer anything of note for the history of science? On the most rudimentary level we must recognize the extensive “knowledge of nature” possessed by Paleolithic peoples and gained directly from experience. They had to be keen observers since their very existence depended on what they knew of the plant and animal worlds around them. And, like surviving food-collectors observed by anthropologists, they probably developed taxonomies and natural histories to categorize and rationalize what they found in nature. The history of science plainly finds its origins here. Fig. 1.4. Paleolithic lunar observations. (a) An engraved mammoth tusk from Gontzi, Ukraine, that has been interpreted as a record of lunar cycles. Thousands of these artifacts have been found stretching back 30,000 years. This one dates from approximately 15,000 years ago. (b) A diagrammatic rendition of the artifact showing cycles of four lunar months aligned with the engraved markings. Even more noteworthy, the archaeological record for the late Paleolithic era, beginning around 40,000 years ago, offers striking evidence of activities that look a lot like science. That evidence appears in the form of thousands of engraved fragments of reindeer and mammoth bones that seem to have recorded observations of the moon. An “unbroken line” of such artifacts stretches over tens of thousands of years. The engraved mammoth tusk from Gontzi in Ukraine is an example of such lunar records, which may have been kept at all major habitation sites. Pictured in figure 1.4, it dates from around 15,000 years ago. We can only speculate, of course, but as Paleolithic peoples lived close to nature, the waxing and waning moon would naturally present itself as a significant object of interest with its obvious rhythms and periods. One can easily imagine our intelligent forebears following those rhythms and beginning to record in one fashion or another the sequence and intervals of full and new moon. Moreover, the Gontzi bone and others like it could have served as a means of reckoning time. Although we cannot go so far as to say that Paleolithic peoples possessed a calendar, we can surmise that knowledge of the moon’s periods would be useful in time-reckoning. For example, dispersed groups might have come together seasonally and would have needed to keep track of the intervening months. We need not envision a continuous tradition of such lunar records, for the process may have been invented and reinvented hundreds of times over: a simple counter fashioned over the course of a few months and discarded. The artifacts in question evidence the active observation and recording of natural phenomena over time. That activity indicates only a rudimentary approach to theoretical knowledge, but its results seem more abstract than knowledge gained from direct experience and different from what Paleolithic peoples otherwise embodied in their crafts. Leaving the Garden This picture of life in the Paleolithic period, which has emerged from the research of archaeologists, paleoanthropologists, and prehistorians, raises several puzzling questions about the dynamics of social change. How can we explain the steadfast durability of a food-collecting social system for 2 million years including more than 200,000 years populated by our own species? How can the relative lack of technological innovation be accounted for? Why, after anatomically modern humans flourished culturally in the Paleolithic 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, did they continue to live as food- collectors, making stone tools and following a nomadic way of life? And why did the pace of change accelerate 12,000 years ago, as food-collecting finally gave way to food-producing, first in the form of gardening (horticulture) and animal husbandry in the Neolithic era and later, after another technological revolution in the form of intensified farming (agriculture) under the control and management of the political state? Different accounts have been offered to explain the social and economic transformations that occurred at the end of the Paleolithic. Changes may have been set in motion by the retreat of the glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age about 10,000–12,000 years ago. The extinction of many large-bodied animals occurred then, restricting the food supply, and other animal-migration patterns shifted northward, probably leaving some human groups behind. Humans themselves probably overhunted large game, self-destructively changing their living conditions. Another line of argument that has recently gained credibility postulates that the food-collecting mode of life persisted as long as the population of hunters and gatherers remained small enough to exploit the resources of their habitats with reasonable ease. Since population increased slowly and since suitable habitats were numerous on a global scale, 2 million years passed before hunter-gatherers reached the “carrying capacities” of accessible environments through the increase of their own numbers and a resulting broadening of foraging activity. This account also explains the low rate of technological innovation prior to the late Paleolithic era: small populations blessed with ample resources were served well by their techniques and refined skills. Although Paleolithic peoples would have known that seeds grow and that gardening is possible (and it is likely they occasionally practiced it), they had no compelling incentive to revolutionize their way of life. Only when increasing population density could no longer be readily relieved by migration was the balance between needs and resources finally upset and plant and animal husbandry taken up as a new way of life. Our ancestors did not give up their Paleolithic existence willingly. By abandoning, under pressure of ecological degradation, a nomadic lifestyle of food-collecting and adopting a mode of food-producing—by “progressing” from hunting and gathering to gardening and stock-raising—only then did humankind reluctantly fall out of a Garden of Eden and into the Neolithic era. CHAPTER 2 The Reign of the Farmer At the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,000 years ago, the Neolithic Revolution began to unfold. This revolution, first and foremost a socioeconomic and technological transformation, involved a shift from food- gathering to food-producing. It originated in a few regions before eventually spreading around the globe. In habitats suitable only as pasture it led to pastoral nomadism or herding animal flocks; in others it led to farming and settled village life. Thus arose the Neolithic or New Stone Age. Growing Your Own A surprising but grand fact of prehistory: Neolithic communities based on domesticated plants and animals arose independently several times in different parts of the world after 10,000 BCE—the Near East, India, Africa, North Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America. The physical separation of the world’s hemispheres—the Old World and the New World— decisively argues against simple diffusion of Neolithic techniques, as do the separate domestications of wheat, rice, corn, and potatoes in different regions. On the time scale of prehistory the transformation appears to have been relatively abrupt, but in fact the process occurred gradually. Nonetheless, the Neolithic revolution radically altered the lives of the peoples affected and, indirectly, the conditions of their habitats. Although different interpretations exist concerning the origin of the Neolithic, no one disputes its world- transforming effects. The Neolithic was the outcome of a cascading series of events and processes. In the case of gardening—low-intensity farming—we now know that in various locales around the world human groups settled down in permanent villages, yet continued to practice hunting, gathering, and a Paleolithic economy before the full transition to a Neolithic mode of production. These settled groups lived by complex foraging in limited territories, intensified plant collection, and exploitation of a broad spectrum of secondary or tertiary food sources, such as nuts and seafood. They also lived in houses, and in this sense early sedentary humans were themselves a domesticated species. (The English word “domestic” derives from the Latin word domus, meaning “house.” Humans thus domesticated themselves as they domesticated plants or animals!) But the inexorable pressure of population against dwindling collectible resources, along with the greater nutritional value of wild and domesticated cereal grains, ultimately led to increasing dependence on food-production and a more complete food- producing way of life. In most places in the world people continued a Paleolithic existence after the appearance of Neolithic settlements 12,000 years ago. They were blissfully unpressured to take up a new Neolithic mode of food-producing, and as a cultural and economic mode of existence even today a few surviving groups follow a Paleolithic lifestyle. As a period in prehistory, the Neolithic has an arc of its own that covers developments from the first simple horticulturists and pastoralists to complex late Neolithic groups living in “towns.” In retrospect, especially compared to the extreme length of the Paleolithic period, the Neolithic of prehistory lasted just a moment before civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt began to usher in further transformations around 5,000 years ago. But even in its diminished time frame the Neolithic spread geographically and persisted in particular locales over thousands of years from roughly 12,000 to 5,000 years ago, when the Neolithic first gave way to civilization in the Near East. To those experiencing it, Neolithic life must have proceeded over generations at a leisurely seasonal pace. Two alternative paths toward food production led out of the Paleolithic: one from gathering to cereal horticulture (gardening), and then to plow agriculture; the other from hunting to herding and pastoral nomadism. A distinct geography governed these Neolithic alternatives: In climates with sufficient atmospheric or surface water, horticulture and settled villages arose; in grasslands too arid for farming, nomadic people and herds of animals retained a nomadic way of life. Of these very different paths, one led historically to nomadic societies such as the Mongols and the Bedouins. The other, especially in the form that combined farming and domestication of animals, led to the great agrarian civilizations and eventually to industrialization. Opportunistic and even systematic hunting and gathering persisted alongside food-producing, but where Neolithic settlements arose the basic economy shifted to raising crops on small cleared plots. Gardening contrasts with intensified agriculture using irrigation, plows, and draft animals, which later developed in the first civilizations in the Near East. Early Neolithic peoples did not use the plow but, where necessary, cleared land using large stone axes and adzes; they cultivated their plots using hoes or digging sticks. In many areas of the world, especially tropical and subtropical ones, swidden, or “slash and burn,” agriculture developed where plots were cultivated for a few years and then abandoned to replenish themselves before being cultivated again. The Neolithic toolkit continued to contain small chipped stones, used in sickles, for example, but was augmented by larger, often polished implements such as axes, grinding stones, and mortars and pestles found at all Neolithic sites. Animal antlers also proved useful as picks and digging sticks. And grain had to be collected, threshed, winnowed, stored, and ground, all of which required an elaborate set of technologies and social practices. Fig. 2.1. Neolithic tools. Neolithic horticulture required larger tools for clearing and cultivating plots and for harvesting and processing grains. Human populations around the world independently domesticated and began cultivating a variety of plants: several wheats, barleys, rye, peas, lentils, and flax in Southwest Asia; millet and sorghum in Africa; millet and soybeans in North China; rice and beans in Southeast Asia; maize (corn) in Mesoamerica; potatoes, quinoa, manioc, and beans in South America. Domestication constitutes a process (not an act) that involves taming, breeding, genetic selection, and occasionally introducing plants into new ecological settings. In the case of wheat, for example, wild wheat is brittle, with seeds easily scattered by the wind and animals, a trait that enables the plant to survive under natural conditions. Domesticated wheat retains its seeds, which simplifies harvesting but leaves the plant dependent on the farmer for its propagation. Humans changed the plant’s genes; the plant changed humanity. And, with humans raising the grain, the rat, the mouse, and the house sparrow “self-domesticated” and joined the Neolithic ark. The domestication of animals developed out of intimate and longstanding human contact with wild species. Logically, at least, there is a clear succession from hunting and following herds to corralling, herding, taming, and breeding. The living example of the Sami (Lapp) people who follow and exploit semiwild reindeer herds illustrates how the shift from hunting to husbandry and pastoral nomadism may have occurred. As with plant culture, the domestication of animals involved human selection from wild types, selective slaughtering, selective breeding, and what Darwin later called “unconscious selection” from among flocks and herds. Humans in the Old World domesticated cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, and, later, horses. In the New World Andean communities domesticated only llamas and the guinea pig; peoples in the Americas thus experienced a comparative deficiency of animal protein in the diet. Animals are valuable to humans in diverse ways. Some of them convert inedible plants to meat, and meat contains more complex proteins than plants. Animals provide food on the hoof, food that keeps from spoiling until needed. Animals produce valuable secondary products that were increasingly exploited as the Neolithic unfolded in the Old World. Cattle, sheep, pigs, and the rest are “animal factories” that produce more cattle, sheep, and pigs. Chickens lay eggs, and cows, sheep, goats, and horses produce milk. Treated and storable milk products in yogurts, cheeses, and brewed beverages sustained the great herding societies of Asia and pastoralists everywhere. Manure became another valuable animal product as fertilizer and fuel. Animal hides provided raw material for leather and a variety of products, and sheep, of course, produced fleece. (Wool was first woven into fabric on Neolithic looms.) Animals provided traction and transportation. The Neolithic maintained the close dependence on plants and animals that humankind had developed over the previous 2 million years. But the technologies of exploiting them and the social system sustained by those technologies had changed radically. After a few thousand years of the Neolithic in the Near East, mixed economies that combined the technologies of horticulture and animal husbandry made their appearance. Late Neolithic groups in the Old World apparently kept animals for traction and used wheeled carts on roads and pathways that have been favorably compared to those of medieval Europe. The historical route to intensified agriculture and to civilization was through this mixed Neolithic farming. If biology and evolution were partly responsible for the character of our first mode of existence in the Paleolithic, then the Neolithic Revolution represents a change of historical direction initiated by humans themselves in response to their changing environment. Complementing the many techniques and skills involved in farming and husbandry, several ancillary technologies arose as part of the shift to the Neolithic. First among these novelties was textiles, an innovation independently arrived at in various parts of the Old and New Worlds. Recent findings show that some Paleolithic groups occasionally practiced techniques of weaving, perhaps in basketry, but only in the Neolithic did the need for cloth and storage vessels expand to the point where textile technologies flourished. The production of textiles involves several interconnected steps and technological practices: shearing sheep or growing and harvesting flax or cotton, processing the raw material, spinning thread (an ever-present part of women’s lives until the Industrial Revolution 10,000 years later), constructing looms, dyeing, and weaving the cloth. In considering the advent of textile production in the Neolithic, one cannot overlook design considerations and the symbolic and informational role of dress in all societies. Then, as now, how people dress conveys a lot of information about who they are and where they come from. Pottery, which also originated independently in multiple centers around the world, is another new technology that formed a key part of the Neolithic Revolution. If only inadvertently, Paleolithic peoples had produced fired-clay ceramics, but nothing in the Paleolithic economy called for a further development of the technique. Pottery almost certainly arose in response to the need for a storage technology: jars or vessels to store and carry the surplus products of the first agrarian societies. Neolithic communities used plasters and mortars in building construction, and pottery may have arisen out of plastering techniques applied to baskets. Eventually, “manufacturing centers” and small-scale transport of ceramics developed. Pottery is a “pyrotechnology,” for the secret of pottery is that chemically combined water is driven from the clay when it is fired, turning it into an artificial stone. Neolithic kilns produced temperatures upwards of 900°C. Later, in the Bronze and Iron Ages, the Neolithic pyrotechnology of pottery made metallurgy possible. In Neolithic settings, hundreds if not thousands of techniques and technologies large and small melded to produce the new mode of life. Neolithic peoples built permanent structures in wood, mud brick, and stone, all of which testify to expert craft skills. They twisted rope and practiced lapidary crafts, and Neolithic peoples even developed metallurgy of a sort, using naturally occurring raw copper. The technology of cold metalworking produced useful tools. The now-famous “Ice man,” the extraordinary frozen mummy exposed in 1991 by a retreating glacier in the Alps, was first thought to belong to a Bronze Age culture because of the fine copper axe he was carrying when he perished. As it turns out, he lived in Europe around 3300 BCE, evidently a prosperous Neolithic farmer with a superior cold-forged metal tool. The Neolithic was also a social revolution and produced a radical change in lifeways. Decen

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