I think that’s pretty clearly Cervaise’s answer.
Other animals communicate. We might be the only storytellers.
— although every time somebody comes up with a nice clear distinction, we find other creatures doing it too.
It was the woolly mammoth dish washer, especially the model that sighed and said “It’s a living.”
There was that university test where the researchers wore masks and captured local crows to tag them.
Years later they would still "dive bomb” anyone wearing that mask. Just them…loads of others people walking around were not bothered by the crows.
Did the older crows tell the story of the creepy humans that would capture them? How else did the young crows know?
I’ll go with the needle. I forget where I first heard that argument made but it makes sense. The needle allowed for clothing which allowed for exploration and colonization of formerly inhospitable environments: migration.
OK thank you all for playing… And people are coming closer to my thinking on it and I think there might actually be a bit of debate.
But first I’m definitely in the camp that says there’s a big difference between the evolution of a characteristic and an invention. Language was the evolution of a characteristic, writing was an invention.
Are you ready? Drumroll please…fasteners. Fastening.
The invention of fastening things to other things… If you removed all of civilizations fasteners in the blink of a magical eye, we would all be naked standing on a giant pile of trash. Take away the strings the tie things… Probably the very first fasteners and all the rest in the modern world: tape, glue, nails, stapler, zippers, thread, needle and thread, and so forth.
Our ability to stick things together with chemicals, tie things together, melt things together, bang things together with hard pieces of other things… Fasteners. Fastening is the foundation of human civilization without which absolutely nothing else could exist.
You’re welcome.
Dude! High-five!
You could make a hat, or a brooch, or a pterodactyl…
You do have a good point there @Stoid.
There are darn few animals that do toolmaking at all. But of those that do, it amounts to subtractive manufacturing: taking a found object and removing or reshaping some of it so what’s left is more useful for the task.
Fastening is the watershed change to additive manufacturing; connecting two or more disparate parts.
So I’ll argue that that’s a darn good candidate for a fundamental invention separating us from mere animals. Unlike language that’s at least arguably not an “invention”.
I’ll say right here though that “different from animals” is a very different idea than “supports civilization at its very roots”.
Personally, I feel that fastening things together is too broad a concept to call it an invention.
The invention of buttons doesn’t mean you have zippers, much less glue, scotch tape, nails, or welding. These are all different inventions on different development trees..
Fastening, and needles particularly, are subsets of toolmaking. Being able to use hands for fine motion is a requires the availability of the opposable thumb and of being upright so that the hands are free.
Where to draw the lines?
Is a bird nest or a beaver dam not also an example of “fastening things together?”
That is a really good one, Stoid. And it’s generally overlooked.
However — birds and spiders fasten things together all the time.
( And I think I’ve read of at least one other mammal making compound tools — but I can’t find it now and it’s possible I was thinking of the New Calendonian Crow, which does make compound tools but apparently not with the use of fasteners.)
You remind me of the Illustrated Guide to Law’s description of the Greek Dark Age: After the fall of Mycenean civilization, Greeks forgot how to sew, and their only garment was “a plain woolen blanket pinned at the shoulders.” Here the pins (fibulae) were everything. Time-traveling Myceneans are flabbergasted at how all their arts of civilization were lost. Time-traveling Neolithic people say Dark Age Greek life is familiar enough, but “Still… they forgot how to sew? Seriously?”
I would argue not. It is usually just one extended family with no fixed location or habitation. There may be a head of the family who is considered the chief, but once you have agriculture with fixed habitation, you start seeing rulers and an administrative class. It is the fixed location that–IMHO–makes the difference. You are free to disagree of course, but this is my HO.
The earliest needles include a point from a suspected bone needle 61,000 years old and a full Denisovan one from about 50,000 years old. Way too late to separate Homo from animals. Needles came after clothing and that was an important difference itself.
IMO, that would point then to fire first, I remember reading that some caves, where prehistoric tribes kept the fires going in the same location, so much so that eventually some had to be abandoned as the ash accumulated on the bottom of those after hundreds of thousands of years!
Now, Fire being an item that hominids had some control millions of years ago points to then to be a factor of not only the start of civilization, but that we essentially domesticated ourselves thanks to the control of it.
I think that’s a debate/discussion of what is civilization?
By saying the world we live in is the civilized world I mean that the human race has collectively radically altered materials (that we got from the natural world because there’s no place else to get them!) in ways that no other animal can even imagine.
The human-created world is a world of stuff. The lives that the vast majority of us lead, virtually all of us, would not be livable without that stuff, because that stuff does everything that we want and need to be done: it educates us. It protects us. It feeds us. It entertains us. It moves us, heals us, carries us… and because of that stuff, and all the things it does for us, we are free to pursue art, literature, philosophy… also important parts of civilization, but they had to come after the stuff.
And all that stuff could never have come into existence had we not invented ways to fasten, attach, join, connect, affix, tie, bolt, bind and otherwise unite things.
I think it’s futile to try to come up with a single answer as opposed to a list, and in this spirit I’ll make a very broad generalization. In the list of items mission-critical to human civilization, among the most important is, in the broadest sense, the means to record and widely disseminate knowledge.
This affects everything from news about current events that shape our system of government to the dissemination of scientific knowledge that shape the quality of our lives through technological and medical advances. There’s a lot of stuff in this category, and it includes the printing press, books, newspapers, and eventually, radio and television.
And then came the internet, which at first was wonderful, but then came social media, which, by turning the knowledge paradigm upside down, is doing its best to return us to the stone age.
Needles need thread. Cordage FTW.
I’m afraid that’s rubbish. Sure, the culture changed and in some ways degraded radically post-Bronze Age Collapse, but they never “forgot how to sew”. Plenty of finds of hemmed and pieced garments even though they favoured pinned rectangles, bone and metal sewing needles, possible evidence of embroidery even.