Greatest single circumstance that changed human life?

[Ophelia]

What is the greatest single circumstance that changed the course of human life and /or society, be it an invention, discovery, development or single event?


I've taken the idea of this question from a reader at amazon.
He wrote "human nature" and I'm not keen on this phrasing of the question, so I've written "human life" "human society".

I'm not thinking in terms of medical discoveries such as vaccinations or cures that have actually saved millions of lives, though this could be one of the answers.

I'll quote this reader at amazon:

"I still lean towards the printing press , but I may be biased because of my passion for reading to try to gain understanding. I always feel that my distant ancestors were so handicapped by their inability to have so many different views available, that it is my personal preference. (...)

Was farming or agriculture was perhaps the greatest development that ultimately set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom?
"I still lean towards the printing press , but I may be biased because of my passion for reading to try to gain understanding. I always feel that my distant ancestors were so handicapped by their inability to have so many different views available, that it is my personal preference. (...)

Was farming or agriculture was perhaps the greatest development that ultimately set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom?

These are some of the ideas I like best: the printed press, and farming, using domesticated animals.

At the moment I am reading a book by Swiss writer Anne Cuneo The Master of Garamond, which hasn't been translated into English as far as I can see. It's about a French printer, Antoine Augureau, a humanist who quarelled with the theologists of the Sorbonne and was therefore executed in 1534 in Paris.
The book brings alive the world of printing and the incredible enthusiasm of the sixteenth century for sharing knowledge and the printed world.

[Thomas Hood]

What is the greatest single circumstance that changed the course of human life and /or society, be it an invention, discovery, development or single event?

Language. Language is the cultural development that makes everything else possible. No language, no mind.

Tom

[Chris OConnor]

Rice Krispie Treats (TM). I love 'em.

I give the top credit to the discovery of electricity.

[My books]

Human society - global exploration/establishment of trade routes and, more recently, cell phones
Human life - penecillin and, more recently, the Human Genome Project
Human nature - gunpowder and, more recently, uranium

[Chris OConnor]

This is really a tough question because one accomplishment or discovery builds off of the previous one. It seems impossible to narrow the search down because no one discovery or advancement stands as alone.

But this is a pretty fun thread and worth thinking about.

[Penelope]

At the risk of sounding - trivial....but I know it is not trivial.

I think the 'sense of humour' is the greatest circumstance that changed human life....

If we can 'laugh' at ourselves....together....that is real communication....

I am thinking about one of my greatest human heroes...Captain Bruce Bairnsfather....who made cartoons about the First World War....

If you can Google...and retrieve and see some of his work....during the First World War.....It was a tragic war....

But the Germans and the English and the Americans and the Indians, and the Africans.....and it was the first war that involved the whole World....but they all laughed at Captain Bruce Bairnsfather's cartoons....together.........Oh if we could just recognise the absurdity of it all.......we can only laugh.....and then stop......blaming one another.

Perhaps.....Peut etre....

[Ophelia]

Chris wrote:

This is really a tough question because one accomplishment or discovery builds off of the previous one. It seems impossible to narrow the search down because no one discovery or advancement stands as alone.

Exactly. Tom is right to have gone back in evolutionary time and said "language". This is the thing that made everything else possible.

Then my next stages are:

2- writing.
3- printing
4- computers and internet.

3 and 4 made learning available to the many rather than the few. Since I've been using the internet I've heard of more books that I felt like reading. (In the old days my English teachers had to rely on "The (English) Times Literary Supplement" and for some reason this never appealed to me).

All four stages are a great leap. With stages 2, 3 and 4 in some cases the powers that be were very annoyed that some ideas could be propagated to others than their close circles of priests, rulers, dicatators...

Apes communicate by using sounds, but this does not constitute a language. Through some process I don't understand, our ancestors became able to use their now larger brains to create language rather than sounds. This in turn meant more ideas and concepts, etc...

Contrary to writing and printing, learning language has never been restricted to a few once it had been invented. I've read that children naturally learn to speak just from interaction with others, and even if they get no help. So much so that you had to resort to difficult tricks in order not to be understood by your inferiors: the Russian aristocracy under the Tsars beat everybody at this game I think by speaking Russian to the servants and only French to each other.

Learning how to write, however, does not happen naturally. There may be exceptions, I remember the narrator in To Kill a Mockingbird having problems with her schoolteacher because she had taught herself how to read by reading the newspaper over her father's shoulder. I wonder if such things do happen.
Anyway, learning how to speak can't be stopped from flowing from one person to another, but children have to toil at school for years to master reading skills. Which is more, even in a society like France where everybody goes to school, some children (10 % here ???) don't learn to read and are functionally illiterate after they leave school.

[Penelope]

Ophelia....I am very sorry to pursue/force the issue.....but I think at the top of your list......should come humour!!!

If we can just find a point of giggling........

Sorry...but I am famous/infamous in our village for getting all the po-faced old ladies in our parish church....giggling at the true images in the stained glass windows.....

And I am convinced that a SOH is a gift of the gods......

[Penelope]

After all....the Jewish people in the concentration camps.....actually found something to laugh at.......

That is Human....and that is where we discover ourselves......

It is very akin to spirituality......so I guess if you've got one...you've got the other...gift.

This is not my own idea....it has been noted by those who have suffered.

Humour should go at the top!!!!!

[Ophelia]

Penelope, you are correct that humour is an essential characteristic of human nature and the human experience.

Frans de Waal mentioned apes laughing and having fun a lot, but I don't know if he used the expression "sense of humour".

Now, this is an informal thread, and my starting question is to be used however one sees fit, but for me the word "change " is important.

There must have been a time when humans had no language or writing, and then they had them. Probably they always laughed, the way apes do (but, I imagine, less often) ?
And then at some point in evolution, a sense of humour appeared? That means, not only haughing when somebody slipped over a banana peel, but being able to put a distance, to laugh at yourself, to use irony... Would that come with language?
If we could envision such a change, yes it would be a defining moment in human experience.