It was with these tools and our deepened understanding of material that we moved to the next step in our evolution, we became settlers and thus, gave birth to the age of agriculture, instead of hunting and gathering, we started fencing our homes, we dug irrigation canals to water the agricultural fields, we developed more complex tools to grow and cultivate plants and then to cook them, we built vessels and containers to store that food, casted swords and arrowheads to fight, to protect and see who is the strongest…
Created to Create The idea to create something new came with the advent of tools, but how could tools have come into being in the first place. It all started with evolution’s gift to the humankind the opposable thumb. The most influential component in the advancement of mankind. It made humans surpass the apes on the societal scale. Not convinced? Try immobilizing your thumbs for twenty minutes (just twenty minutes). Go about doing your daily activities (writing, preparing food, scrolling your mobile phones, driving, etc.) thumb-less, for those twenty, long, agonizing minutes, you will ask yourself, “Where would humankind be today without fully mobile thumbs?” Even in the most primitive of societies, activities like handling an axe, shooting arrows or ploughing the agricultural fields would be impossible to fathom without this trait, a development that was originally useful for climbing trees but ended up being really important when early humans started to make tools and for that very reason in our evolution as human kind. One would ask, if we never had an opposable thumb, the world around us would have been designed differently, I would say, however, that one would not even be at a stage where this question would be common thought. We would not know the world as it is without the advent of the trait. The opposable thumb has historically made all the difference.
The ingenuity in us, the power to create the new to capture the imagination and move beyond is what makes us human- insignificant on a universal scale but powerful in our journey “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield”. Drawing from this we could also ask why other primates did not develop this feature like we, sapiens did especially since they also climb trees and have similar cranial capacities. This is one question I have pondered on for a while and on researching I found that “the other Hominidae don’t have three muscles, namely Flexor pollicis brevis(deep head), 1st volar interosseous of Henle and Flexor pollicis longus and these muscles have proved to be the reasons for this evolution.” Furthermore, the cognitive revolution began with the thought of a Homo Sapien asking himself, “how can I shape the world around me”, “what do I do to mould it in the way I want to?” and it is with these thoughts that the development of the very basic tools and weapons that initially sustained human life came into being. These early tools were most likely used to help humans butcher animals (not always ones hunted but also likely scavenged), cut up plants, and even for basic woodwork. It is likely that a whole range of different materials spanning from animal hide to tree barks were used to create storage items; wood was used to create digging sticks, spears or clubs; and other digging tools were made out of horn or bones; all of these worked as an essential survival tool kit in the savannas of Africa. Primitive societies also used simple methods to turn materials such as volcanic lava, quartz, and quartzite into tools using “hard hammer percussion and bipolar technique”.
The bigger question that I eventually want to reach at is that,”Is there a single way to reach to an Intelligent Life, the way we did, or if there is an extraterrestrial life out there that evolved to be this intelligent taking a different pathway, well thats all upto a speculation because we possibly can’t know this in our lifetime ?!” The new James Webb Telescope has been out in space for couple of weeks now and if everything goes well, we will be able to see and know far beyond unlike its predecessors. We wait !!