Cooking with fire may have helped make humans brainier
Charles Darwin ranked the discovery of fire as perhaps humanity's greatest. People have used it continuously for at least 1.5 million years, and cooking made food easier to digest and more nutritious. One theory, the cooking hypothesis, holds that this extra nourishment helped hominid brains grow larger, though some researchers find the evidence unconvincing.
The word technology dates from the early 17th century, when it meant systematic treatment, built from the Greek tekhne, craft or art. In the 19th century Germans and French used Technik or technique for any way of doing things, from dancing to navigation, and Technologie for the academic study of crafts. English collapsed both into one word, which long referred mainly to a field of study, as in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Only in the 20th century did it come to mean the practical use of knowledge in general.
The oldest technology is the stone tool. Around 2 million years ago hominids learned to knock flakes off a pebble to make a sharp hand axe, and about 75,000 years ago they refined this into pressure flaking for much finer edges. Hearths have been dated to 790,000 years ago, and gathering around fires may have intensified social life and even encouraged language.
Clothing and shelter followed, though their dates are debated: archaeologists have evidence of shelter about 450,000 years ago, wooden huts by 380,000 years ago, and clothing from 90,000 to 120,000 years ago. Garments made from animal hides helped people move into colder lands after they began leaving Africa around 200,000 years ago.
Farming sped everything up. The polished stone axe made large-scale forest clearance possible, and settled life allowed families to raise more children at once, since infants no longer had to be carried between camps and youngsters could help with crops. Later inventions such as the wheel, the printing press, the telephone and the Internet each lowered barriers to travel or communication. Technology also brings pollution, resource depletion and jobs lost to automation, fuelling ongoing debate about how to use it.
Source: Technology
