There’s a number of well-known candidates of course, starting with the proverbial wheel. There’s agriculture, animal domestication, weaponry, weaving…all kinds of stuff depending on how wide or narrow you wanna go. But the fundamental question is: what category of invention or single invention was the one thing without which our civilization could never have arisen?
I think I have the hands down answer, but I’m not gonna put it out until others weigh in.
I’ll go with paper. Mass produced paper (not scribbling on the occasional cave wall or animal skin).
It allowed knowledge to be easily passed forward.
Might be a silly question, but have we even invented it yet? - I suppose it’s obvious that our civilisation has arisen, but have we faced our most mission-critical challenge yet?
We can only ever know that in hindsight.
I’m going with writing.
I agree but at its base it needs…paper.
We have plenty of evidence that it does not. Yes, paper is great, but writing was a going thing before the invention of paper.
Yeah, writing and paper are two different things - writing (on clay tablets, for example) allows information to persist, perhaps beyond the lifetime of an individual.
Mass-produced paper allows information to be widely distributed.
Both important in slightly different ways.
I guess there is little use for paper if there is no writing.
But I think I’d go with agriculture - if (as I understand it) it’s the factor that allowed humans to no longer be directly responsible for their own individual sustenance and thus have the free time/resources to specialise and develop other aspects of civilisation.
Agriculture was restricted in the OP (I agree with you…the OP knocked out all the obvious answers).
Paper is and was useful for sharing art.
I have believed for years that the single most impactful invention in human history is the story. The ability to organize events into a linear situation-change-consequence chain, a cause-and-effect narrative, and then to relate that sequence to others, is what enabled us to understand our surroundings and organize ourselves in pursuit of large-scale and long-term collective projects far beyond the capabilities of our pre-human ancestors.
It’s fundamental to our wiring. We constantly look for stories. We remember — we want — stories. If I say to you, “let me give you some information,” maybe you’ll be somewhat engaged or maybe you won’t. But if I say, “let me tell you a story,” your brain stops everything to listen.
This is as much a cognitive weakness as it is a strength, of course. If you hear a complicated story without clear and satisfying cause-and-effect chains, you will have difficulty processing it quickly, and you will preferentially remember a simpler version when offered, even if it’s wrong. The storytelling framework underpins everything, encompassing both religion (“once, there were two kings, Brahmadatta and Dighiti…”) and science (“once, there was a single continent, Pangaea…”). Whatever lends itself to the story format sticks in our brains; that which doesn’t, slips through.
Regardless, this, in my opinion, is where we turned a corner, developmentally. When we were able to encode causal sequences into memorable blocks of narrative, that’s when we took off as a species.
That certainly came to pass but I suspect it started as a means to write things down and record stuff rather than decorate their hovel. Were cave paintings art or a means to leave a record for the future…or people just bored at night sitting in a cave looking for something to do? I think “art” was a later invention.
I have no idea though. Can we do better than guess at this?
Is it? That’s not especially clear to me.
I suppose this is the critical part of the question - and I suppose to answer it we have to have an idea about what it is about our civilisation that makes it fundamentally and essentially ‘our civilisation’ - without agriculture, a civilisation could arise, but it would not be the same as ours in scale or probably material wealth; without printing/writing, a civilisation could arise that had a much stronger and more essential oral tradition, but it wouldn’t be our civilisation in capability or flexibility.
But even some (comparatively) minor thing like the invention of bread would, without it, be a different civilisation, because there would be no sandwiches or toast.
It’s hard to know where the line would be drawn between factors that are essential and those that are not.
The OP specifically mentioned ‘weaponry’. Would we have a civilization — not a different one, but a civilization at all — without weaponry? Or would we be the animals who routinely got torn apart by other animals instead of hunting them?
I’m a little surprised nobody’s mentioned fire. You can have a civilization without paper but I’m hard pressed to imagine one without the ability to create fire when and where its needed. Nobody tell Prometheus we’ve forgotten his wonderful gift.
I suppose without weapons, there might be a civilisation that was descended from some other ancestor that had the weapons built in (in the form of teeth, claws, etc)
I think it’s a great question because, given the plethora of negatives surrounding human existence at this time, the survival of our civilization is in doubt. None of the inventions thus far will mean a darn thing if “Revelations” becomes a documentary instead of a totally off the wall prediction.