21 - Epilogue

Summary

Technology has been at the heart of our species since the dawn of mankind. The genus homo, to which we all belong, split from a common hominin ancestor about 7 million years ago. This means ‘yesterday’ in geological time: if life on Earth were a 24-hour day, the genus homo would have inhabited this planet for only a couple of minutes. This recency is attested by our genetic heritage as our DNA is 98.8% identical to that of chimpanzees. In this relatively short time, our species and our species’ proximal ancestors established a dynamic and creative relationship with their environment. In particular, they developed the ability to modify their environment with the goal of developing technological tools by means of which they could, in turn, further modify that environment in a more radical and transformative way and thereby even modify themselves. We call ‘technology’ any product of human (and also, in principle, other species’) labor resulting in physical systems that would not be present in the natural environment in the absence of such labor. It has been estimated that as early as 3.4 million years ago, our remote ancestor Australopithecus afarensis, a small-brained early hominin species, used stone tools to separate meat from the bones of large mammals.