I’m going to go with the era when humans began augmenting their minds with their own inventions, and thus emerged into an entirely new form of intelligence, incomprehensibly greater than anything that had gone before. Or rather, the era when that happened twice. In other words, the pre-history - 4500 BCE era.
We’ve made some amazing advances since then, of course, but nothing else so far matches up to the inventions, first of language, and then of writing.
And to those saying that person-years aren’t a perfect way of measuring eras, well, of course they’re not. But do you have any better suggestions? Person-years are certainly far better than just years, at least.
Don’t forget that planes went from this to this. The development of aviation in the inter-war period was truly breathtaking. One of my favorite museum exhibits was at the Museum of Air and Space where they take you though just how much of a step change the planes of late WWII were compared to the janky planes of early WWI.
According to Wikipedia, writing was developed in ~3000 BCE.
Although I would argue that literacy had a far bigger impact than writing. It wasn’t the writing per se that was important, it was the entire social system that developed to make writing useful.
Hm, I thought it was older. In that case, it makes it a tougher choice, but I’d still definitely go with one of those two.
Widespread literacy was certainly also big, but even when literacy was restricted to a handful of scholars (or priests or magi or whatever they would be called), it still meant that those scholars could exchange ideas across expanses of time and space. And by and large, the people with the biggest ideas would have been disproportionately the literate ones, anyway.
That’s a good candidate, though as I keep saying, there are always more dramatic ones over shorter periods in more recent times. But, yes, it’s a good one. Other animals have languages, too, but what is uniquely human is the development of a fictive language: a language with which to tell stories. With this tool we can build mythologies, build the foundations of common cultures, religions, and unifying social values. These uniting threads of common fiction are what allowed early humans to work and fight together as unnaturally large united social groups, and it persists to this day, both for better and for worse, in nations, religions, and cultures.
I’d not use it at all. The correlations it introduces are at best circumstantial and mostly misleading.
Anyway, my main point is that people’s everyday lives were completely transformed in ways they hadn’t been for thousands of years by the developments of this period. No other period matches it, IMO.
Why the love for these “Dark Age” periods:
1100 - 1350
700 - 1100
250 - 700
There was interesting history during those 11 centuries, but were the people of 1350 more “advanced” than the people of 250 ?
1910-1955. The pace of change was far greater than ever before and since the we have mostly been honing the changes developed in that time period. It includes the dawn of nuclear power and nuclear weapons, the creation of transistors, the beginning of space exploration, two World Wars, the rise of Communism, the end of the colonialism, the age of automobiles, the jet age, the information age, this list could go on for a long time. The current time period may win the award in the long run though because the pace of change is rapidly increasing once again.
Another vote for 1910-1955. I feel this is the era when the world really became one global society. It’s also the era when modern technology became a necessary part of most people’s lives.
I can make a bit of an argument for that era - it contains the late bronze age collapse.
Prior to the collapse, there were 8 major civilisations in the eastern mediterrean area. They covered a large area, were very advanced for the time and had complex international relationships of all kinds, especially trade. They built on a large scale, were highly literate, had complex advanced manufacturing, etc, etc. 7 of them disappeared in less than a lifetime (and the 8th was greatly reduced). The civilisations collapsed to such an extent that literacy disappeared completely. Imagine how thoroughly a civilisation must collapse in order for literacy to completely disappear. Cities were destroyed. Not just abandoned because the society needed to support them no longer existed and not enough people survived to populate the city anyway (though that must also have happened), but destroyed. Excavations have found destruction layers a couple of meters deep over the low remains of buildings. All this in less than a lifetime. We don’t even really know how. There’s evidence of pretty much everything - climate change, famine, invasion, revolution, you name it.
That changed the world dramatically, directly and indirectly (by the effect it had on later periods, particularly Greek and Roman).
So I think an argument could be made for every period in your list, including that one.
Take someone from 1840 and put them in 1910. Then take someone from 1910 and put them in 1955. Which one will be more unused to his new world? They guy from 1910 knows about planes and automobiles and telephones and phonographs and electric lights. The guy from 1840 knows nothing of these things.
For the most people there was little difference in life between 1840 and 1910. In 1840 someone would be aware of electricity and trains and industrial machines. By 1910 they would have been aware of planes and automobiles and telephones but except for perhaps telephones and the wireless telegraph unaffected by the existence of most changes, aware of many things but not having seen them or had their lives affected by them. By 1955 those things had gone from awareness to becoming part of and affecting their everyday lives, in addition to so many things that could not be imagined in 1910.
I do agree the time periods are arbitrary, but it seems to me the 20th century accelerated the rate of change tremendously and just the first decade of it is not representative of what would follow.
I think it’s too early to say for sure, but it’s possible that the internet will turn out to be a change on a par with fire, writing or the wheel. We don’t have enough distance yet to say for sure, but if so it makes whatever period contains the 1990s one of the most important.
I’d say the 1910-1955 transplant would have a larger sense of culture shock because their lifestyle will have changed to incorporate these. The guy transported to 1910 will hear of these completely new things but does not have to live with them. Sort of like the Internet was in the 1990s. Someone transported from 1955 to 1995 would be shocked at the mere existence of the Internet but the culture shock would be less than someone transported from 1980 to 2018 because while the Internet was in existence back then and wouldn’t seem really weird even to people who hadn’t heard of it, it would take some time to get used to how much it penetrates the lives of everyone today.
WTF is an atomic bomb? * It’s a really big bomb.*
WTF is penicillin? It’s a pill you take to get better when you’re sick. Like the other ones you are familiar with.
WTF is a computer? *It’s a really fancy adding machine. *