The history of innovation: good, bad — or both?

Queues outside the Apple Store whenever a new iPhone version is launched demonstrate society’s enthusiasm for innovation. We have lived through the transformative impact of the personal computer and the smartphone, while still trying to assess what changes AI will bring to our personal, social, working and political worlds. Every major innovation has impacts well beyond the obvious and immediate.

We tend to think of innovation as inevitably positive, and that our own time and culture represent the pinnacle of human development. And indeed, we can find online plenty of change to be proud of.

The perspectives offered by history and archaeology, however, provide a more nuanced view of innovation. Through much of civilization, new ideas and movements have been less than welcome to political elites and religious leaders.

Arguably, the idea of innovation as a “good thing” goes no further back than the industrial revolution. New technologies have certainly brought benefits to humankind, although the energies that stimulate and expenditures that fund development are often greatest when fulfilling military goals: the better the ability to kill the enemy. While history as a scholarly discipline lives within the humanities, it devotes much of its effort to studying inhumanities.

In my recent book Five Innovations That Changed Human History,  I examined five major developments in the deep history of humankind. These were:

• the taming and control of fire
• the domestication of the horse (and its later association with the wheeled vehicle)
• the invention of writing in early civilisations
• the creation of the printing press and the printed book
•  the revolution of wireless communication with the harnessing of radio waves.

It helps to think of the importance of each of these, if we strip them out of our images of subsequent history. That makes us aware that a single invention or discovery of a new process can have many more results than the immediately apparent: revolutionising the way we live, think and interact.

The taming & control of fire

Fire derived from natural causes – primarily vegetation burning after lightning strikes – can be found occasionally in settlements of our early hominin ancestors as far back as 1.5 million years and much later in occasional Neanderthal sites.  But the knowledge of how to make fire whenever required, and to transport it, was a skill associated with anatomically modern humans as they spread out of Africa to colonise the earth. They could now create fire anywhere, using friction or striking a flint.

Before the introduction of gas and then electricity in the 19^th century, we relied on fire to give us heat (and settle in cold climates), and to extend the light of day. It transformed food with cooking, with impacts on our own biology; it gave us protection, and more.

The domestication of the horse

While the other innovations such as those my book describes remain part of our daily life, the horse has largely left it, although the wheeled vehicle certainly has not. But for so many societies in so much of human history, the horse provided movement beyond the limits of human pace, and transport of goods and people. The horse was first tamed in the Eurasian steppe of the 4^th millennium BCE, where it was a major hunted prey. Once foals were captured, corralled and their breeding controlled, the horse could provide provided meat and also milk. When ridden it would aid in hunting, and as the idea of domestication spread along and beyond the steppe the horse served in herding and trade too.

The wheeled vehicle developed elsewhere, found between northern Europe and the Middle East in the 4^th millennium, with haulage by oxen or donkey. But once combined with the horse, first as chariots and later in wagons for haulage, a new power was created.

The invention of writing

The developing urban civilisations of the ancient Middle East, with increasingly complex economic arrangements, used records on clay (then baked for permanence) to record transactions and ownership of land and goods. Geometric patterns developed into pictorial images alongside signs for numerals.

By 3000 BCE symbols were adapted to represent not just objects but (to those trained in the new literacy) sounds. Within centuries the symbols were reduced to readily impressed wedge-shaped marks – cuneiform – adaptable to multiple languages of western Asia. The cuneiform clay tablet is the direct ancestor of the medieval manuscript, the printed book and the personal computer.

Pharaonic Egypt took up the idea of symbols as sounds, with pictorial images of hieroglyphic for formal inscriptions and the quicker hieratic script for daily use.

Writing gave the state a tool for administration and propaganda., while literature and religious narratives moved beyond the oral.

Creation of the printing press

When the printing press and its revolutionary technology was developed in Germany in the mid-15^th century, its transformative nature could hardly be anticipated.  Johann Gutenberg adapted the block printing used on fabrics to print on paper and vellum, using his knowledge of metal cutting to create movable type, with an economy of production not known to the earlier styles of printing in East Asia.

Once limited to manually copied manuscripts in the libraries of monasteries and a small percentage of the elite population, books could now spread rapidly to an expanding audience, and in turn change the nature of science, education, literature and religion, as well as create homogenised languages.

The revolution of wireless communication

An incentive to use the new understanding of electromagnetic waves to develop wireless communication, lay in maritime and especially naval priorities at the turn of the 19^th century, including British, Russian and American research contributions. Now for the first time mariners had a means of communication beyond the line of sight, aiding them in safety, navigation, instructions from land, weather forecasts and more.

In another two decades consumer radio, beginning in the USA, would harness radio waves to provide entertainment, news, education and weather to vastly dispersed audiences.

Negatives – and positives.

Some might identify negative impacts of the innovations I have listed. Created heat could assist Homo sapiens to settle into areas of Eurasia where they replaced other human species. Horses enabled the Mongols to spread terror through much of Asia and Europe and exterminate millions; the horse as much as the gun gave Europeans the ability to conquer and defeat the people of the New World. Writing separated a privileged literate class from the common people. The rapid spread of Protestantism enabled by the printing revolution would lead soon to religious conflicts and wars. Radio was a key factor in the First World War soon after the first wireless communication and would develop as a tool for political propaganda.

History and archaeology help us raise questions about the nature and impact of innovations when we consider our own era and try to anticipate what may change in the future. Topics like those in my book serve as parallels in our past for the revolutionary changes to human lives being brought about by technology today.

Awareness of the deep past can free us from the limits of “presentism” and remind us that we are just part of a long and varied sweep of changes in the human story.

Dr Robin Derricourt is an Honorary Professor of History at UNSW. His books include Five Innovations That Changed Human History (2024), Creating God: the birth and growth of major religions (2021), Unearthing Childhood: young lives in prehistory (2018), Antiquity Imagined: the remarkable legacy of Egypt and the Ancient Near East (2015) and Inventing Africa: history, archaeology and ideas (2011).

Innovation: sophisticated fire technology used by ancient humans in the Ice Age