Stardate 20021209.1949

(Captain's log): In the previous article I tossed off a comment about "the four most important inventions in history" and since I know my readers, I thought I'd go ahead and say what I think they are and explain why (before everyone asks).

In my opinion, the four most important inventions in human history are spoken language, writing, movable type printing and digital electronic information processing (computers and networks). Each represented a massive improvement in our ability to distribute information and to preserve it for later use, and this is the foundation of all other human knowledge activities. There are many other inventions which can be cited as being important (agriculture, boats, metal, money, ceramic pottery, postmodernist literary theory) but those have less pervasive overall affects.

It's arguable that the single most important specific invention in history was paper and that its lone inventor (by tradition, Ts'ai Lun in 105 AD) may have had more direct effect on the course of human history than any other single person. It came from China and appears to only have been invented one time. Everyone else learned how to make paper from that original source, and in a real sense our modern society is built out of paper. Movable type printing could never have become important without it; other substrates for books were too expensive and couldn't be produced in sufficient quantity.

Before the era of rapid and easy world communication, many major inventions happened multiple times. It's difficult to say whether spoken language developed multiple times, since it happened so far back that there's no way to know, but such evidence as there is suggests at least three origins of major language groups, but that could represent an extremely early branching rather than true independent invention.

However, writing was developed independently between three and five times (China, Central America, and one to three times in the area of south-central Asia and north-east Africa, a number subject to considerable debate). Canines may have been domesticated independently as many as five times, but certainly more than once. (At the very least, it's clear that African Wild Dogs and Wolves were both domesticated independently.) Agriculture and the development of domesticated plants seems to have happened spontaneously all over the world where conditions permitted it.

Printing as such was invented several times (movable type printing was the most important, but wood-block printing was used in China and in Europe much earlier). The technology of refining metals from ores definitely happened many times. That one seems to be "easy"; and usually copper was the first. Stones with high copper content are easily identified by their intense green or blue color, and if you put such stones in a fire it also makes the flames change color (especially if you've ground up those stones first, which is easy to do because they're soft), so it may have been something that early shamans did to impress the crowd. But when the fire went out, eventually someone would notice the pretty shiny blob that had formed in the fire pit, and it didn't take long to figure out where it came from. Since copper is ductile, it could be cold-worked into useful shapes, and unlike gold it's sufficiently hard to be useful. It's also easily melted using wood fires. (Gold could often be found in metallic form, but though it was pretty and considered valuable, it was also too soft to be used for tools.)

The bow and spear were invented many times. The idea of using wooden vessels to cross water certainly has happened a lot of places. But paper only happened once, and for an invention as important and influential as paper which appeared as early as it did, that's quite amazing.

With regard to my big four, what we see from history very clearly is that every major advance which makes transportation and communication easier, cheaper, and more efficient has always had explosive effect on cultural progress and change, which makes those kinds of basic advances far more influential than any others. That's why such things as the Roman Roads, "modern" sailing ships (i.e. at least a hundred tons with lateen sails, sternpost rudders and compasses, capable of sailing for extended periods out of sight of land), transportation canals in Europe, the steamship, the railroad, the electric telegraph, the camera, the telephone, radio and aircraft were so valuable, but their effects are nothing like as great as those four. Speech, writing and printing each ended up explosively revolutionizing human life and drastically affected everyone in every place they've been used. That's because each one radically improved our ability to spread useful ideas in space and time. The body of human knowledge is the result of a huge collaboration, and each of these four have represented a substantial stairstep in improving that process of collaboration. Communication is the foundation of everything else we do.

It's not completely clear that it's correct to refer to speech as an "invention", given that it appears to be in part the result of evolution and may well have taken tens of thousands of years to truly develop. We have sections of our brains adapted to deal with speech, and there are other adaptations in our throats and tongues which may have been necessary to make speech easy and flexible.

But I'm erring on the side of caution here, so I'll include speech in the list of great inventions, because in every other way it is the same as the other three. Absen