Yeah but maybe if that someone hadn’t been as much of an arsehole as Columbus things would have work out differently.
Admittedly it’s a big maybe, as Columbus was a product of European society of that era, and it’s not like he stood out as more of an arsehole to than the conquistadors that came after him, plus much of the changes wrought were by the exchange of organisms that had nothing to with humans directly.
But just maybe if the original “discoverer” had set a precedent of “hey let’s not be an arsehole” the subsequent centuries would have worked out differently
– people looking for definitions of “human” that exclude all other species keep running into problems. For a while, humans were supposed to be the only ones who use tools; then the harder we looked, the more other species we found using them. Well, but they don’t make tools, we said. Then we found other species making tools. Well, but they don’t make compound tools, we said. That one doesn’t work either.
Personally, I’m inclined to define us as the species that gets into conversations of the sort in which we try to define humans. I’m not ruling out that some other species might turn out to do this also; but I think at that point we ought to declare them also humans, and find another term for our exact species.
Also referred to as composite or complex tools depending on the article. Think stone tip on long stick creating the spear, the axe, so on. Also connected is tools designed to create tools. Exploiting abstract thinking capacity.
Not sure this specific thread is asking what made us unique; rather what was most significant on impacting the direction of human history.
Examples of compound tool use in crows, or in other human species even, doesn’t change that in this species it turned into game changer, possibly also driving language into greater complexity. Language, if they had it, didn’t end up driving as much change in Neanderthals as it did in H sapiens. Why not? Who knows? Some other something not present or aspect of it not there?
I still like sewing though. It allowed range expansion and a very different set of tools.
It’s not really “rather than”. The parts of our brain that handle language are much more developed than in any other mammal species (birds have sufficiently-different brain structures that it’s hard to compare). There had to have been cultural changes and biological changes happening in tandem, to result in language use.
Swiss Army knives have multiple parts. They have a knife that unfolds from one end, a fish scaler that unfolds from the other end. A toothpick in the outer shell, & even a tool that makes a “woosh” sound.
Though in answer to the OP. Surely the Trinity Test (the first atomic bomb) has to be the most significant event.
It’s momentous from a purely cultural and political point of view but it also permanently changed the make up of the Earth by producing isotopes that did not previously exist on this planet (technically not permanently but for many millions of years until they all decay)
So if an alien race came to earth millions of years after we became extinct and had no record of humans, they could still measure the date of the Trinity Test by looking for those isotopes in sedimentary rock.
Though they won’t last geological times though, they are just a different combination of carbon molecules. The isotopes created by the atomic tests are unique on earth and will last much longer.
I agree with you about agriculture. It’s not just the development of agriculture itself, it’s the fact that the development of agriculture allowed a lot of other things to develop because many people no longer had the daily and time consuming chore of obtaining their own food. It allowed people to settle in one place and develop complex systems of social interaction.
I’ll go with tool use (fire included as a tool). Our opposable thumbs and relatively large brains are the killer app that has allowed us to inhabit comfortably, and explore extensively, nearly every environment on the surface of the planet, and exploit all the resources necessary to thrive and dominate nearly everywhere we go.
Geosynchronous satellites will stick around for timespans comparable to the isotopic signatures of nuclear explosions, and will be easier to interpret.
Which brings us to the Voyager probes. Throwing something beyond the influence of our own star has to be an (eventual) accomplishment more significant than any earthbound journeys.