My sense is that creating a novel complex tool is something that occurs and is then passed on culturally. In our times we have little daily need for new tools of a physical nature for physical tasks. Our extant collected toolkit is wide enough.
At a more abstract level we do the same thing every day. The basic cognitive achievement is taking something and modifying it, especially by combining different elements together in novel ways.
Every new dish I create experimenting with things I haven’t combined before is that process.
More to the point, our current daily salient tasks are communicating information. Every novel paragraph is taking separate elements and combining them into a new object that achieves the task at hand. Every sentence is a compound/complex tool.
That is the point of putting tool making and language as intimately connected thought processes.
Yeah. The only thing I could think of was taping several canes together to try and reach a drone stuck in a tree, which is a pretty obvious thing to do. More common is repurposing an object, eg I used a large bolt with two nuts on as an improvised vice to hold a small object for gluing, but I didn’t modify it in any way.
On a more abstract level, I sometimes write scripts to perform specific tasks at work, which I guess is making a tool. It’s hard to generalise from that to physical toolmaking.
I see what you mean, but creating something like a hand axe would be more comparable in difficulty to inventing a new genre of literature, I’d say.
I was thinking about how cloth has been woven for tens of thousands of years, but knitting was only invented some time after 500AD, despite requiring much simpler technology. Just because something is relatively easy and would be useful doesn’t mean anyone is going to come up with it.
Well, most of my examples involve things like bent paperclips. But to pick the most elaborate one recently:
I’m working on making a class set of slide rules for my students. Most of this task can be done with the laser cutter in my school’s makerspace, but I was working on a design that called for some of the cuts to be tilted off-vertical. My solution for this was to put a beveled shim underneath the piece of wood to be cut, inside the laser cutter. And the way I made that beveled shim was on a 3D printer.
The computer, the 3D printer, and the laser cutter already existed. The concept for the slide rule existed, but not the specific design. The shim didn’t even exist in concept, and was only created for the purpose of helping to make the slide rule.
Or in other words, I used a calculational tool capable of 16 digits of precision to design a tool to be made with another tool with 4 digits of precision, to modify a tool with 6 digits of precision, to properly create a tool I had designed with another 16-digit tool, to result in a final calculational toon with 3 digits of precision.
At the abstract level once you have created the hand axe you’ve created the hammer, the mace, the spear, the shovel … they are all variations of what exactly is the handle portion and what is the head of the object. Then you add new things to it. It is a small spear but we can propel it fast and far with a string under tension…
Once you have a sentence, subject verb object, new sentences are just variations of each portion. Then new things added to it.
And as @Chronos describes for his slide rule project, combining existing tools with something slightly different to meet the new need.
Maybe a clearer example yet : programming. Taking various routines with newly assigned modifications and combining them in novel ways to create a new different specific tool.
Humans have a need to communicate with each other and wiring ready to develop into language, the solution to the problem. I don’t see complex tool building as being as hard wired. But once the stone attached to the handle idea is thought of, it is off to the races.
I did this with my children as well. Especially my daughter really got into baby signs and latched on to them quickly. They grew up in a trilingual environment and the signs helped her communicate quicker. My son wasn’t as fast with learning languages, including signs.
That’s a cool project. I think we were told about slide rules when we were learning trigonometry or logarithms in maths, but I’ve never seen one in real life. The teacher did pass around some old booklets that were used as look ups for these functions before calculators.
Most people today don’t have to make physical objects all that often, and as previously stated, we already have most of the tools we need, which I guess is why this need doesn’t come up very often.
True.
That is a large conceptual leap.
I think language and programming are mostly more similar to making variations on an existing tool, rather than inventing a completely new one. That’s why I believe language would develop within a generation, but complex tools would take multiple generations.
What about other aspects of human society? I’m pretty sure the cloned humans would have leaders. Do you think they would invent something like marriage? Religion?
Yes. In the former case because people like to formalize things with rituals. In the latter case because people would rather make up things and demand everyone else pretend they are true than look for the actual explanations. Especially when they can leverage that into power and status for themselves.
I agree with Der_Trihs about marriage. He may be right about religion, but I’d say “yes” for a different reason. I think humans have an innate spiritual urge. Like singing and dancing, different people have it to a different degree. But i think a large fraction of humans would invent proto-religion of they didn’t have one handy. I think my MIL, who was raised atheist (descended from Jews) did exactly that. She had all sorts of random superstitions and believed in the spiritual properties of a lot of common things
Huh. I’d give a confident yes about religion just because we have track record. Across the world early human societies developed some sort of religious systems. One can debate what function it fills most, folk science, basis for shared rules and behaviors, a need for spiritualism … but it appears to go back very very far.
Marriage? It doesn’t seem to have shown up until less than 5000 years ago.
Yeah, I agree. I was raised with no real religious beliefs - my family celebrated Christmas and Easter, but just the secular elements - until I went to school, and I remember believing that inanimate objects were in some sense ‘alive’, had feelings that could be hurt, etc.
As for marriage, I think the people would likely pair up and be recognised as couples by others, but I don’t see them developing any kind of ceremony to formalise it.
Some portion of my head is still convinced of that. I think that’s buried very deeply in there.
– as for marriage: I think the groups would fairly rapidly, within at most a few generations, develop some system for deciding who was allowed to have sex with whom; because humans, in general, seem to have such rules. The exact rules vary extremely widely; but the existence of some sort of rules is very much widespread. It would be really fascinating and quite surprising if they didn’t develop any such rules; but I don’t think we can predict what the rules would be like, and I think they’d be unlikely to look much like those of, say, 1950’s standard USA culture, though I suppose those are as possible as any other set. It’s just that there are so many other possible sets.
How often monogamous marriage in nature? Polyamory and other arrangements have all been arrangements in various cultures. I do however think that calling it “marriage” is having some ritual recognition of the bond by the group.
Anthropologically, I’d say the important components of marriage are that it’s long term, it’s sexual, and there’s some sort of group recognition. When everyone has known for a while that Og and Mog have been sleeping together, they’re “married”. Things like monogamy and ritualization are optional and relatively recent.
I expect a “feral” group of humans would quickly form sexual pair bonds, because humans naturally have sex and they naturally bond from that. Some amount of monogamy would happen naturally because jealousy happens, but strict enforcement of it is very dependent on culture. I’m not sure about how universal ritualization is; it doesn’t feel natural to me, yet many (or all?) cultures have it.
Might; but there are plenty of cultures that expect polygyny, and a few known that expect polyandry, and others that go in for variations in which there are accepted pair or other groupings but in specific circumstances having other sexual partners is also normal. It’s not just that strict enforcement is dependent on culture, it’s also that some cultures don’t enforce monogamy at all, even loosely.
To the best of my knowledge all known cultures have rituals. I don’t know what percentage of known cultures ritualize(d) some form of marriage; I suspect it’s pretty high.
Do you mean that no rituals feel natural to you, or that rituals about marriage don’t, or that specifically religious-based rituals don’t, or something else?
(And as we had to spin off a thread about what clothing is, do we now need to spin one off about what “ritual” is?)
You’re probably right. I’ll just say that to me “publicly declaring a couple”, if it happens repeatedly within the group in any sort of similar fashion, would be a ritual.
Yeah, I’d expect that at some point, people would start saying “You didn’t say it the same way that Xylp and Bulg did, so it doesn’t count!”, with the result that everyone would start saying it the same way that Xylp and Bulg did. Which is ritual.